A hiatus

Well, it’s taken a while, but allumination is now officially in hiatus. This is largely because my laptop has blown up, and while my groovy little Asus EEE is fantastic for emails etc, it’s become a bit too wearing to think exclusively onto a 7.4 inch screen. So, for a week or so only (because theoretically my new laptop is arriving next week) I leave you with pictures of my brother reaching Paris here, and ((apart from that) possibly the single coolest thing I’ve seen in a long while here:

A bientot!

No ideas but in THINGS

Well, for various reasons a slight hiatus here at Allumination; most recently because I am shattered, having been enjoying an epic cycle commute between Clapham Junction, Acton, Stoke Newington, Acton, Oxford Circus and at last Clapham Junction again over the last couple of days! Very satisfying. So this is going to be more of a roundup post than anything else.

That’s not to say that there’s not been – as ever – much Weird Pondering going on at Allumination Central; most recently about H P Lovecraft, and in fact even as I type I’m about to get into the bath and carry on re-reading a key HPL masterpiece, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (which rocks, as they say, like an out of control battleship).

As a true HPL geek, I’m typing this while listening to psychedelic 60s rock loons H.P. Lovecraft play their mind altering classic, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ – key lyric, ‘no, my friend, you’re not toooo hiiiiiiggghhhh… you beloooooong… aaaat the moooooouuuunnnntains ooooooooooooof maaaaaaddddneeeeesssss….’ (which is perhaps missing the point somewhat – but hey, it was the 60s - and in fact that album saw me safely through many a Glastonbury back in the 90s, so they must have been doing something right); and much other HPL related stuff has synchronously popped up over the last couple of days.

First of all, there’s this, recorded in Summer ‘97 by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration, somewhere in the Pacific – perhaps the sound of Cthulhu himself, RISING FROM UNKNOWN R’YLEH?!?!?!?!?!? I certainly hope it’s not him; the Bloop is actually a rather unimpressive sound, and in fact my sanity is scarcely blasted despite repeated listenings. A disappointment.

This is rather less disappointing. It’s Charles Stross’ most excellent novelette, ‘A Colder War’, which is both a superb alternate history, refracting the Cthulhu Mythos through cold war paranoia and beyond, and a ferociously pointed warning about where the innate destructiveness and paranoia of those we too often let lead us might take us all.

It’s also very interesting in the light of Farah Mendlesohn’s comment that Lovecraft was in fact writing ‘the epic poetry of the age of corruption’ in her (very enjoyable and just released) ‘Rhetorics of Fantasy’. That’s something I’m going to ponder further and return to, so I’ll leave you with the thought unrambled on for now. And on RoF - I’m about halfway through it, so more on that too when I’ve finished it; for the moment, well worth picking up a copy.

And finally, much pondering of HPL’s relationship with modern art, and in fact Modernism in general. Many debates to be had there, for sure, but for now - Unknown R’yleh as Cubist as it gets? For sure – and is it not spooky just how well Ezra Pound’s Imagist diktat ‘no ideas but in things’ fits the thing-ridden New Englander? Ho yes… but for now, my plush Cthulhu and I wish you good night, as once again the bath has run, and it’s almost Kadath-o-clock…

Quatermass, science and absurdity

A friend’s engaging with Nigel Kneale at the moment, which has left me thinking about him too. If you’ve seen any of his film or TV pieces – the Quatermass movies / TV series, ‘The Stone Tapes’, ‘Beasts’, and so on – he won’t need any introduction. If you haven’t, you’re in for a treat; he’s one of the finest screen dramatists that Britain ever produced, using the fantastic to both comment directly on both contemporary social realities and consider the broader issues implicit in being human in a scientific age.

First of all, let’s take Kneale the social realist. That’s an odd thing to call a man who filled scripts with live broadcasts from prehistoric Martian hive wars, ghost dolphins haunting abandoned sea parks, Westminster Abbey invading alien / spaceman hybrids and ghost hunts derailed by washing machine obsessed scientists; but it’s entirely accurate. Kneale consistently used the unreal to talk about the real, reflecting the public obsessions of the world that surrounded him through the lens of the fantastic.

That sense of commentary is most obvious in his masterpiece, ‘Quatermass and the Pit’. Ostensibly a tale of what happens when a spaceship full of long-dead Martians is discovered beneath a London tube station, it was in fact written out of the 1958 Notting Hill race riots and the social and cultural tensions that surrounded them.

Kneale sees racism as something alien to the values of tolerance and empathy that are fundamental to humanity at its best; he takes that perception and literalises it, defining racism as a Martian implanted value that has simultaneously infected us all and that – being alien to our original natures – can be overcome, if only inconsistently. That kind of incisive social commentary occurs again and again in his work.

Secondly, there’s Kneale the scientific writer. In the above, I’ve been very careful to position him as a fantasist; I don’t believe that he can be described as a writer of science fiction, because although his narratives contain science the literal accuracy of that science is not a key concern.

Rather, Kneale talks about human relationships with science, and by extension the limits of science. Quatermass himself is the humane scientist par excellence; but all his knowledge can only offer at best temporary solutions to the problems that his scientific skills uncover.

For example, at the end of ‘Quatermass and the Pit’, the ghosts of Mars are defeated; but the problem of mankind’s implicit Martian-ness is left unresolved, and is in fact insoluble. Science can help us to see more clearly; but all that it shows us is our own fallibility and contingency. The cosmos remains vast and inscrutable, entirely unconcerned with the trivial construct that is modern humanity.

Which sense of vastness is an implicit comment on the humane values that Kneale endorses. To be human is not to be automatically moral or right; in fact, human-ness is a construct, a set of choices about how to most constructively and sensitively engage with those around us made in the teeth of an insignificance that is planetary in scale. At their best, Kneale’s heroes achieve such humanity despite enormous suffering, and with enormous sacrifice.

Sometimes, they fail to even get that far; the protagonists of ‘The Stone Tapes’, putting their faith in the innate rightness and power of scientific inquiry, end by condemning one of their number to a bizarre and in the end entirely unexplained life-in-death. Their faith that the operating system of the universe is fundamentally benevolent is revealed as both absurd and destructive. Their failure to recognise their limits is shown up as a failure of humanity; implicit in being human is understanding how difficult that humanity is to maintain, and how unnatural a position it can be to adopt.

That’s not to say that the struggle isn’t worth it; watch the shattering end of ‘The Quatermass Conclusion’ – a complex, despairing, but nonetheless absolute affirmation of the value of human relationships – and you’ll see what I mean, or rather what Kneale means. The very futility of being truly human in the face of the void is – for Kneale – what gives such moments their rare, deep, splendid value.

And that’s all for now. One worry, tho’ – I haven’t talked about just how entertaining Kneale is. A master of narrative, he tells stories that rock very hard indeed. All the above goes on in them, but it’s buried in gripping, unstoppable narratives that grab you hard and don’t let go.

And that’s why I’m always jealous of people who haven’t seen any of the Quatermass movies, or ‘Beasts’, or his ‘1984’, or ‘The Year of the Sex Olympics’, or ‘The Stone Tapes’, or anything else he wrote – because you’ve got some great nights in of watching and discovering ahead!

Show me the way

Outside my window, it’s science fiction. Network Rail are repairing the railway. Spotlights blast white light, and hard silhouette people move through the night. Sparks shower against the darkness where the welders work. It’s a view of industrial alienation.

Every day I travel to work, changing at Willesden Junction. Over from the platform, metal claws throw dead fridges from one great white goods pile to another. It’s like being trapped in a China Mieville out-take. Steps over the railway, leading down to nothing; an entry point to the un-written suburbs of Narnia, where the goat-hooved queue at the dole office and centaurs worry about next month’s mortgage.

So much of genre writing is atmosphere; a deliberate estrangement from what’s around us. But once you’ve stepped through the door there are still the broken fag packets and decayed Coke cans of the self. I can see the future from the window; but I’m in it, and so it’s no sort of escape or consolation.

Cities, alienation, spaceship design and fish

 

Space is so often seen as an open field that exists to support some form of vast, optimistic transcendence. But in fact, reality suggests that it will force an almost infinite claustrophobia on us. Surrounded by its empty hostility, we’ll travel it in tiny metal tubes, at best spending only years locked together with nowhere else to go. It’s going to be a surreal, alien experience; but that estrangement will come as we dive deep into ourselves and our fellow space travellers, rather than leap into brilliant externals.

The fish are key to this. Trust me on this.

Anyway… up until now, I’d have said that my favourite take on the oppressiveness of space travel came in A. E. Van Vogt’s ‘Voyage of the Space Beagle’ (or ‘Space Bagel’, as it’s known around these parts). Amongst other things a key inspiration for ‘Alien’, the novel spends a lot of time thinking about exactly how best to manage tight groups crushed together, for decades.

But that’s changed, as I’ve just finished James Tiptree Jr’s devastatingly brilliant ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’. In part a psychological inquest into a group of people who’ve come to know each far too well, it takes Van Vogt’s claustrophobia and runs with it in several magnificently psychedelic directions at once, generating a devastatingly effective combination of Lovecraftian existential horror and possible-end-of-the-human-race pathos as a group of advance colonists, fleeing an overcrowded Earth, seek a new planet for the human race to colonise.

No more detail about how JTJr does what she does; rather, buy her wonderful short story collection, ‘Her Smoke Rose Up Forever’, and go read. Instead, here’s a passage that caught my eye and made me realise how her understanding of the closeness of space is rooted in a very human sense of how we live with each other in communities of different sizes. Her protagonist, Aaron, is considering an earlier colonist ship – the ‘Pioneer’ – and thinking about lessons learned from its failed, decades long journey from Earth to Barnard’s Star:

‘The people of ‘Pioneer’ had suffered severely from the stress of too much social contact in every waking moment; the answer found for ‘Centaur’ was not larger spaces but an abundance of alternative routes that allow her people to enjoy privacy in their comings and goings about the ship, as they would in a village. Two persons in a two-meter corridor must confront each other, but in two one-meter corridors each is alone and free to be his private self. It has worked well, Aaron thinks; he has noticed that over the years, people have developed private “trails” through the ship.’

What intrigued me here was the implicit definition of a core feature of city life; the multiple ways that we move through cities, the multiple intersections possible as we do so. Implicit in Centaur-space is not just ‘avoidance of people’ but also ‘avoidance of seeing the same people every day’. Privacy in this context is not ‘not seeing anyone’ – rather, it’s ‘only seeing strangers’.

Aggressive estrangement is a key feature of big city life. Moving from Scotland, I was struck by how aggressively Londoners guarded their lack of relationship with each other. More recently H, coming from Seattle, has had the same experience. Of course, I’ve internalised the guarding and now – like any other Londoner – regard anyone I don’t know who tries to break through my shields and have some sort of personal engagement with me as at best dangerously insane. Anyway…

That estrangement is a key driver of surrealism. We don’t just see strangers; we see the strangeness they leave behind, the artefacts that no doubt make perfect sense to them but – shorn of context – become insoluble puzzles to us. Hence the picture of the fish; we found them on Sunday night, lying in the Waterloo Underpass. I’m sure there’s a very logical explanation for them being there, but deprived of that context they became a truly odd presence. A stranger had left them, and so they were strange.

And not just strange. Surreal; alienated from direct meaning; in fact, alien. But at the same time, entirely human; left by a human going about his or her business. Which reminds me of J. G. Ballard’s comment that ‘it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth’, and which helps me finally understand why I so admired ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’.

In the deepest sense, its characters encounter nothing that is not human, or intimately linked to the human. Its horrors at first appear to be profoundly other but – as the story progresses – are revealed to be anything but. At the story climax, we’re left to face a profound truth; the truest surrealism comes from our own hidden selves, and the only alien is us.

Unarius dove release

Well, I wasn’t going to post again before I went away, but sometimes you find things that the world really needs to see. And today is one of those days.

I like doves. I like UFOs. I like white suits. I like Aaron Copland’s ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’. But I never thought I’d see them brought together - never, that is, until now, and never with such nutty ceremonial aplomb.

So, thanks to the Fortean Times, some essential footage from the Unarius people, as they continue their ongoing quest to bring peace and understanding to the cosmos by releasing a flight of doves from a model UFO. Go - BEHOLD! - and stand in awe…

Space is Deep

A.R. Yngve’s comment below set me thinking about the deepness of space, and a writer who’s dealt with its profoundly dislocating emptiness more successfully than most – A. E. Van Vogt.

Van Vogt’s ‘Voyage of the Space Beagle’ (or ‘Space Bagel’, as it’s known round these parts) couldn’t really exist without that awareness. Its protagonist, Dr. Elliott Grosvenor, is a Nexialist. That is, he uses a variety of disciplines (psychology, hypnosis, etc) to maintain the sanity of a crew faced with an overwhelming external blankness.

The need for Nexialism is established partially by the action of the book itself; Elliott spends much effort managing relationships between different political factions on-board ship, eventually having to stave off disaster by taking it over entirely.

It’s also justified by some disarmingly bleak, off-hand comments about how many spaceships just disappear in the void. Their crews are assumed to have had collective nervous breakdowns, either crippling / destroying their ships as political battles get out of hand and turn into real conflicts, or just vanishing on crackpot, unachievable missions.

For Van Vogt, Nexialism is humanity’s response to the problem of the void. On exposure, he sees us as either dissolving into it or fleeing into cataclysmic claustrophobia. To my knowledge, he’s the only SF writer to not only acknowledge the void issue, but also make its solution a key plot component.

There’s also an interesting broader point to be made. Nexialism is a response to a very real existential shock – there’s nothing out there! It exists as a kind of conscious / subconscious protector and lubricant, forcing spaceship crews to work constructively together rather than collapse into anarchy.

It’s administered by someone who’s effectively an elite priest figure, synthesising all human knowledge for the benefit of the less enlightened. Van Vogt’s description of it points on one level to a politics that despairs of human nature; incapable of dealing constructively with the harsh truths of life, we need to be coerced into ignoring them in order to achieve anything at all by manipulative, all powerful leaders.

That’s unsettlingly close to the Straussian philosophy that – as I understand it – lies behind current Neo-Con thinking. I find that kind of worldview pretty repugnant, and I don’t know anything about Van Vogt’s politics, so perhaps after all I’m being unfair to him.

Maybe he wasn’t trying to do anything more complex than make that point that humanity evolved to live locally on planets – and that stepping out of that into space is such a huge change in scale that we can’t help but risk breakdown by doing it.

Oh, and today’s entry title is a nod to one of my favourite every song titles – ‘Space is Deep’, by the mighty Hawkwind. So, to help you go in search of space, here’s a link to the song, plus a niftily cosmic set of images to go with it.

 

La Planete Sauvage

Well, as promised here’s part 1 of ‘La Planete Sauvage’ from Youtube. Alas, it’s not subtitled or dubbed - but then again, who needs language when you have such trippy music and visuals? Oh, and the rest of it’s linked to from the Youtube page.

Nostalgia for an age yet to come

Been pondering what to write about today, as it’s been a pretty distracted day, and for some reason I feel the call of Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury… in fact, of Planetary Romances.

There’s a wonderful point of connection between the two writers. In one of ‘The Martian Chronicles’ stories, ‘Night Meeting’, the Human protagonist is travelling in the Martian wastes, amidst the ruins of Martian civilisation.

He encounters a ghostly, glamorous Martian, riding an equally ghostly machine. The Human sees ruins; the Martian sees a beautiful city. Each considers the other to be some sort of ghost; if I remember correctly (and I am very hungover) the story ends when the Martian vanishes.

This can be read as a comment on the fleeting nature of civilisation – we too shall pass – but I like to see in it Bradbury nodding to his Martian predecessors, and in particular the wonderful LB.

The ghostly Martian combines mystery and a kind of wistful obsolescence, emotions that suffuse Brackett’s tales of a senile Mars. In terms of plot, Brackett’s corrupted swords and techno-sorcery is far from Bradbury’s careful consideration of the inhumanity of man – but tonally, they match perfectly.

And that elegiac tone is a profoundly attractive one, literalising as it does the nostalgia that fuels so much of the pulpier parts of genre writing; nostalgia for a lost, entirely imagined golden age of moral simplicity and inevitable achievement.

Critiques of that kind of nostalgia inform much of the more interesting modern genre work, from M. John Harrison’s absolutely essential Viriconium sequence to Liz Williams’ blazingly original updatings of the planetary romance.

And now, having rambled for a bit, I’m off to enjoy my own bit of nostalgia – for a time of no hangover. Coffee and peace…

Oh, and if you haven’t read any Leigh Brackett, go here and pick this up (while also pausing to enjoy the Mike Moorcock plug) - one of the single funkiest collection names ever, and truly - the stories rock!

Bombing the alien

Continuing to ponder the alien, in the context of bombings. Recapping yesterday, Lem sees the alien as being inexplicable in common human terms; it happens without apparently comprehensible cause or effect. We can be physically proximate to it, but we can never approach it rationally or emotionally.

So what does this have to do with bombings? Well, it’s a question of motivation. Speaking after the recent failed attacks in Glasgow and London, PM Gordon Brown described this kind of terrorism as being perpetrated by ‘a few extremists who wish to practise violence and inflict maximum loss of life in the interests of a perversion of their religion.’ While in power, Tony Blair consistently used a comparable formulation, talking of an ‘extremism based on a perversion of Islam’.

According to both Brown and Blair, terrorist motivation is rooted in wrong headed faith. Key aspects of faith are that it’s spontaneous; it’s absolute; and it’s irrational. Made wrong-headed, ‘perverted’, it becomes even more so. Given this definition of terrorist motivation, terrorist activity becomes a force of nature – or more appositely, an act of god. It’s something that just happens.

That implied ‘it just happens’ is fascinating. It moves terrorist activity into the realm of the alien, making it something that can’t be understood or engaged with on rational terms.

It can’t be predicted – so sweeping action against anyone who might conceivably be / become a terrorist is justified. It has no clear context – so trying to understand it as a response to (say) the invasion and occupation of Iraq is rendered futile. And it will never go away – so substantial measures against it *have* to be taken, because it’s become a perpetual, ongoing threat.