Sensawunda removal machine

The original ‘Star Trek’ remains a fascinating show, not least because of the wondrously strange vistas of the imagination it opens up. You want to meet Apollo? He’s there. You want to visit an earth where the Nazis will win World War II? Check. You want to find out how dead satellites become galaxy spanning AIs? They’ve got it. You want to see Spock turn on, tune in and drop out – and then SMILE, blissfully and self-consciously? It’s all there.

‘Star Trek’ has sensawunda, in spades, even if it does wander at times into the ludicrous. Even my jaw dropped when *echo effect* THEY STOLE SPOCK’S BRAIN… an episode only matched for inadvertent comedy by the utterly ludicrous *echo effect* THEY STOLE NYLIX’S LUNGS… episode of ‘Star Trek – Voyager’, or possibly by the enjoyably nutty ‘Riker at the pandimensional alien barbers’ incidents of ‘The Next Generation’.

But the crew of the Enterprise have a more complex relationship with sensawunda than would first appear. In episode after episode they encounter an external threat, feel overwhelmed by its inexplicable (if wondrous) threateningness, develop a rational understanding of it as a problem, in doing so reduce it to a human scale, and then go on to solve the problem and thus neutralise the wonder.

They rarely – if ever – stand back in amaze at the wonder itself; rather, they perceive it as a threat, and stop it dead. Seen from this point of view, the Enterprise is best described as a sensawunda removal machine; something that exists to support a particular kind of reductive impulse as it seeks to re-frame the cosmic in entirely human, profoundly limiting terms, imposing a simple, binary threat / no threat set of judgements on the vast, endless richnesses of alien space, and wiping out its complex wondrousness accordingly.

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!

Luke comes in colours

Just happened to turn on Blade the TV series, and there was a character who looked just like Hillary Clinton, in intensive care, which seemed oddly apt. Anyway, that’s enough reading American political commentary from random pulp gleanings; instead, I’m going to turn to reading the future from random SFnal conversations, which I suspect will be more rewarding.

Or rather, not so much reading the future as – having spent Saturday at the very stimulating and really most excellent PicoCon – pondering why science fiction’s utopian ways can actually be read as working against any sort of future (or at least, cultural survival) at all.

SF is a literature of ideas, granted – but those ideas are for the most part expressed in things. Scientific principle does not good drama make; but scientific principle expressed through giant shiny space ships, galaxy spanning comms technology, nifty hi-tech gizmos, groovy talking robots, astonishing weapons of all shapes and sizes, consciousness capturing silver tubes and so on rocks – I think many will agree – like an out of control battleship.

And that’s problematic, because it opens a profoundly consumerist trap which SF all too often falls into. Narrative advancement happens when things are acquired or used – so, characters go on an odd kind of galactic shopping trip to assemble the scientific-theory expressing things they need to advance to the next level.

Let’s take a random selection of different SF stories, and see how they look read in that way. Star Wars? Luke gets mature by acquiring his own spaceship, coming across like a suburban teenager spinning around in his first car (in that context, ‘reach out with your feelings’ becomes one of the greatest chat up lines in history, a precursor to the magnificent sperm-and-egg meeting sequence that is the torpedoing of the Death Star; Luke heading home afterwards bathed in a post-orgasm glow much like his suburban self after a fantastic snog at an all night party in someone else’s holidaying parents’ house – ‘I can’t remember her name, but MY GOD THE HEAVENS EXPLODED!’)

Or, at the more serious end of things – Olaf Stapledon’s ‘Last and First Men’. Unstoppably cosmic in both aim and execution, and the work of one of the very few dazzlingly authentic visionaries to grace either SF itself or (in fact) 20th Century fiction in general, it does however still define future versions of man largely in terms of the *things* they make and use, and the problems they have making and using those things.

Well, I’m not going to carry on, because it’s late and I’m tired. And, reading back over the Star Wars bit, staying up too late last night to watch ‘Conan The Destroyer’ until the Bit With The Animated Ghost Pteranodon has clearly done odd things to my understanding of SF. And, of course, two examples do not a thesis – or even a trend – make.

But nonetheless I think the argument’s an interesting one to ponder. Stated simply, it would be: Science Fiction is a literature of technology. Technology is incarnate in useful things, made to achieve certain clearly defined goals. So, the acquisition and manipulation of such things to achieve personal advantage will be key to the action of many SF plots.

That’s very close to the consumerist worldview – ‘buy this thing, and your world will improve through its agency’ – and it’s also the point that makes me wonder how constructive a role SF as it currently works can play in the great world saving debates of the years to come.

Beyond politics, we’re facing a species crisis; global warming. That crisis has come about largely because we like making and using things. Not content with an un-utilised world, we’ve instrumentalised everything we can lay our hands on and – a direct result of our great technological prowess – completely buggered up the world.

In this context, how useful is a fiction largely predicated on – er – making and using things? Not such a positive presence, I would suspect, but that very negativity opens up fascinating possibilities for the future of scientific fiction.

Far from being a propaganda of triumphal instrumentalisation, an eco-conscious scientific fiction could come to embody a kind of instrumental minimalism, showing how we can create viable futures rooted in a use of less, rather than more, to achieve our ends – and with that could come a corresponding re-definition of what those ends could be.

‘Ghosts’ lives!

Well, much excitement here at Allumination Central as my short story, ‘Ghosts’ has hit the streets in the latest issue of ‘Midnight Street’ - and it’s the cover story! Which I didn’t know about at all until my copy popped through the postbox, so a lovely surprise.

Anyway… the story’s about the problems of exploring haunted, abandoned weapon satellites on your own, and the cover catches its atmosphere very nicely indeed. And of course there are many other great stories in there - particularly looking forward to sitting down with the Joel Lane, Stephen Gallagher and Andrew Humphrey ones - and an interview with Neil Gaiman. Anyway, enough rambling - check it out (and order a copy for yourself) here.

Oh, and if you came here having read the story, welcome to the blog! Hope you enjoyed the story, and have fun rooting round here…

*plumps the virtual cushions, puts on welcoming music, opens a bottle or two of wine, sets out bowls of dry roast peanuts and Kettle Chips*

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.

Science, the future and my Luddite superpowers

Well, it’s been a frustrating time for me technologically over the last week or so; I seem to have developed some kind of weird anti-modernity super power.

On return from America, I discovered that my boiler had stopped working; a plumber came and ‘repaired’ it last Friday, but it’s still not going. Last Thursday, my laptop blew itself up, losing the ability to open Windows. I spent the whole of tonight completely rebuilding it, which hasn’t really achieved very much; it’s moving with glacial slowness, and currently busy pretending it doesn’t have wireless. Even my phone has joined in the fun; today, its mail server started crashing. I didn’t even know my phone HAD a mail server.

Anyway… none of this has detracted from wildly pleasurable memories of last week’s convention. In particular, I’ve been pondering science fiction and realism, after a very interesting bar-side conversation with Ted Chiang.

As you’ll no doubt know, I’ve used this blog in part to mount an ongoing argument about the relationship between realist and genre (specifically science fiction and fantasy) fiction. I’ve argued that in some ways genre fiction is less deceived than more ‘literary’, realist fiction, given its deep honesty about its own unreal status. It’s the literature of things that never happen (to borrow from a phrase from M. John Harrison), and at its best it has fascinating fun with the metafictional status that that stance gives it.

This was the argument I was making to TC last weekend (imbetween ranting about Powell and Pressburger, themselves the most metafictional of filmmakers, and weaving to the bar to get more discussion lubricating pints in), and the one that he undercut. As he pointed out, the above falls down when confronted with the absolute literal mindedness that underpins science fiction.

At its purest, science fiction insists on a deep reality of response to the world. Far from escaping into fiction, it consistently grounds itself in the most current scientific thinking. The apparatus of science fiction might be speculative – space ships, AIs, aliens, etc – but that apparatus is hung on experimentally proven fact. Given this, science fiction can be read as more direct in its engagement with reality than even the most realist fiction, grounded as it is in an absolute, exclusive obsession with the root structures of the world.

So where does that leave my metafictional take on genre? For one, I think it helps create a way of distinguishing between fantasy and science fiction, rooted not so much in genre trappings (if the protagonist flies by space ship it must be sf, if by dragon fantasy) but rather in approaches to reality. Fiction steps into fantasy when it bends reality to its own ends; but it becomes science fiction when it refuses that consolation, instead taking an entirely rigorous approach to reality as a grounding base for the wildest narrative mayhem.

But if I had a time machine I might pop back to the bar and point out that on one very important level SF remains metafiction, insisting as it does on an extrapolation from, rather than a direct reflection of, current scientific thinking. It asks ‘given that the world is like this – what might we become?’ – stepping out of direct realism into the most self-aware, highly imaginative speculation as it does so.

Oh, and for the sake of comparison, here’s someone who refuses to extrapolate from science into tomorrow, finding meaning instead in its intersections with the directly lived world - the wonderful scientist-poet Rebecca Elson. Her single collection, ‘A Responsibility to Awe’, is magnificent, not so much for her poems (which are nonetheless excellent) but for the marvellous sequence of extracts from her notebooks, where the cosmic is interwoven with the quotidian to stunning effect. She died young; a major loss.

(Hello, Hello) It’s Good To Be Back

Well, hello all! I have returned from a truly fantastic two weeks in the States. We packed so much in, it feels like much longer - so where to begin when talking about it? Well, there were the wonders of Olympic National Park, the joys of Seattle, the sheer bounciness of meeting H’s various friends out there (hi all!), Halloween fuelled Queen / Elton John tribute acts, marvellous Northwestern booze’n'food, proper road tripping, New York haunted house mayhem, the nuttiness of Halloween (I have met Scrabble! And it wears very short skirts), much Met-ness, and of course World Fantasy Con, which was (unsurprisingly) just Fantastic.

So this is really a coming soon post, as there’s much to blog about having conned over the weekend. Again, where to begin? Ted Chiang set me straight on the relationship between science fiction and reality… I talked fiction-as-implication with Steven Erickson… Hal Duncan ranted unstoppably on the absolute need to read both Alasdair Grey’s ‘Lanark’ and Edward Whittemore’s ‘Jerusalem Quartet’… Lisa Tuttle was fascinating on her fictionally challenged Great-Grandfather… and so on…

All that’s coming up over the next few posts (coming soon!) - oh, and of course I’ve got to report back on the great Stellas comeback gig (one of the odder but more rewarding gigs we’ve done, it turns out) - but for the moment a very last minute plug for the great Jean Herve Peron (Faust bassist and all around Art Errorist), playing tonight at the Luminaire. Go here for details - what with the chainsaws, the solo-ness and the ace support, it’s going to rock (my attendance attendant on jet lag, alas…)

Life with the Vaders

Well, a busy day at Allumination Central, so for your delectation – and following on from yesterday’s Star Wars referencing post – here’s the first of the magnificent online saga that is ‘Chad Vader – Day Shift Manager’.

It’s about Darth Vader’s somewhat less adequate little brother, and his daily battles as he manages a 24 hour convenience store somewhere in the States. Quite apart from being very funny, it’s entirely justified by the acoustic guitar version of the Imperial Theme that plays over the opening titles.

The rest of the episodes are here.

So – enjoy!

Aliens and the family unit

Well, according to Grim Reviews and Papers Falling from an Attic Window (hi guys!) I’ve become involved in the online Derleth / Lovecraft debate. To be honest, I didn’t know there was one, but it touches on some very serious issues – the integrity of an artist’s worldview, the limits of universe sharing, and so on.

Some of the genre debates are less serious (tho’, come to think of it, not necessarily to those taking part in them). My favourite such was one I found a couple of years back – a very involved conversation about who would win in a battle between the USS Enterprise and a Star Destroyer from Star Wars.

The debate scrolled on for pages, and got very technical. I gave up reading it when both participants started referencing blueprints, competing technologies, etc. In fact, I couldn’t help feeling that the answer was very easy – the USS Enterprise, every time, because they’re the good guys, and both the Star Trek and Star Wars narrative models would demand their victory.

That throws interesting light on good guy / bad guy spaceships. For me, the basic function of bad guy spaceships is to look utterly threatening and apparently terrifyingly all-powerful (‘This station is now the ultimate power in the universe’, etc), but in fact be a bit crap; the basic function of good guy spaceships is to look ramshackle, or at the very least fallible (‘the engines canna take it, captain!’, etc), but really be indestructible and all-defeating.

That’s a result of the narrative structure that these stories are built on. Without all powerful but ultimately frangible villains, and apparently weak but in fact all-powerful good guys, you don’t get high stakes, fear of failure, final victory and thus the dramatic tension and resolution that keeps people both watching and satisfied.

I’ve also been wondering if there’s a visual semantics of starships. What’s noticeable is the extent to which good guy spaceships are rounded and cuddly, and bad guy spaceships are spiky and alienating. Good guy spaceships are implicitly a home; bad guy spaceships are a threat to that home, tearing into it and breaking it up.

One condition of much of the alien / opponent activity we’re shown is a lack of emotional bonds, contrasting strongly with the close relationships between on-board good guys. Even Star Trek – most hierarchical of SF shows, making heroes of an entire military command structure – is predicated on close emotional rather than organisational ties between its leading characters.

And in Star Trek, antagonist space ship crews are notable for their lack of that emotionalism. From the Borg to the Klingons, the Ferengi to the Romulans, anyone who fires on the Enterprise is really a non-family unit firing on a family unit. One more narrative trick to ensure we empathise with the good guys…

So where does all this lead to? Well, what’s really interesting is what it exposes about popular science fiction’s envisioning and dramatisation of the alien. It’s not really alien at all; it exists to provide a fallible opposite to human good, an opposite that’s portrayed in terms that – by definition – we can’t empathise or engage with, except as an evil, disposable antagonist.

Crossing Lovecraft

Today as it turns out is looking very hectic, and I’m out and about tonight, so instead of a long typed-in-the-evening post about Hal Duncan (I’m going to a talk on Norse Gods, etc), here’s a short rant about H. P. Lovecraft.

Not so much about Lovecraft, in fact; more about August Derleth’s misappropriation of the Lovecraftian mythos. I’m currently ripping through his pulpily enjoyable ‘The Trail of Cthulhu’ and was - unsurprisingly - enjoying it in a pulpy kind of way until I came across this:

‘ …the striking parallel which forced itself upon me, a divinity student, a parallel which could not be overlooked, was plain - the similarity between the tale of the revolt of the Great Old Ones against the Elder Gods, and that other, more universally known tale of the revolt of Satan against the forces of the Lord.’

Well, where do I start? At a stroke, Derleth breaks the fundamental nihilism of Lovecraft’s vision, replacing his driven obsession with the minute insignificance of humanity with a narrative that rescales human morality as a fundamental operating principle of the entire cosmos.

I’m not sure what puts me out more - the arrogance of the change in scale, or the casualness with which HPL’s entire worldview is discarded. Both are equally disconcerting - and both make me wonder if this is a book I particularly feel like finishing, now.