Narcissus in space

A character in Stanislaw Lem’s novel ‘Solaris’ comments:

‘We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of the earth to the frontiers of the cosmos… we have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.’

‘Solaris’ is about an encounter with the truly alien;  a planet sized ocean that is apparently alive, but that is authentically incomprehensible. The human characters in the book experience the alien either through baffling, oceanic activities, or through human-like emanations; key figures in their past, created by the ocean to engage with them.

These emanations are fascinating, a very direct image for our quest for a cosmic mirror. Talking to the alien, we meet either the incomprehensible or our own, most deeply ingrained obsessions. We can see nothing else. Lem’s pessimism about humanity’s inability to step out of the confines of the self is a key driver for the book.

And that pessimism is reflected in a key plot point. Humanity notices that the Solaris ocean *lives* because the Solaris planet has an irregular orbit, designed to help it maintain an even climate as it orbits two binary stars. Such an orbit has to be a sign of a designing, controlling intelligence; and thus the quest to understand the Solaris ocean begins.

But such a drive to control is a very human trait. From the start, the Solaris ocean is tagged as something motivated by a very basic human driver – the need to thrive through environmental manipulation. At a base level, its actions can be read in entirely human terms.

But without that basic human behaviour there would be no book; the Solaris ocean would have gone unnoticed. In Lem’s terms, any attempt to show the fully alien is a contradiction in terms. Cosmic Narcissi, we’d never look up from the pool and see it.

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li! And a nice cup of tea…

Writing daily here’s been a very interesting exercise, if only because it’s made me ponder writers I’ve got a lot out of it and think about why I’ve found them so engaging. But I haven’t written about two of my great teenage obsessions – M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft.

MRJ’s ghost stories – and Edwardian ghost stories in general – fascinated me as a teenager. I think it was the combination of the profoundly comforting, secure world that most of them begin, and the subsequent destabilisation / revelation of the limits of that world.

I see MRJ as the great poet of threatened repression. Read from that point of view, so much of his imagery is so resonant – the menacing bedsheets in ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’, the terror implicit in people having fun together when you’re on your own in ‘Number 13’, and, perhaps most memorably, the mouth buried beneath a pillow in ‘Casting the Runes’ –

‘So he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being.’

Intimacy – or the prospect of intimacy – is deeply destructive to worldviews built on repression. The English are a famously repressed bunch; hence, I would suspect, the attractiveness and emotional power of MRJ’s haunted explorations of emotional frigidity at breaking point, as it’s exposed to the possibility of contact.

And what about HPL? My first reading of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ is one of the great book experiences of my life. I read it when I was about 14, on a skiing holiday – arctic wastes in prose, arctic wastes outside the window, mountains shadowing both.

HPL opened up whole worlds for me – worlds I found oddly attractive. Reading any one of the ‘real world’ stories (as opposed to the out and out fantasies), I was always falling for the locations – Boston, Arkham, Old New York, and so on. Notwithstanding the cosmic horror and sanity blasting reality of HPL’s world, these are places I’d love to live in.

Partially, that’s because HPL’s universe is such a beautiful place – the romantic sublime in all its awesome power made wildly successful pulp horror fiction. In HPL, terror often comes from enforced scale shifts, from a sudden, panicked realisation of the true place of humanity in the universe, and the consequent utter meaningless of our lives.

But once you’ve got over that, what mysteries and wonders to behold…! Even if, by implication, you have to lose your humanity to do so – becoming an ageless toad thing to swim to Unknown R’yleh, or a strange cone-like creature in a globe spanning prehistoric, pre-human civilisation, or a disembodied living brain in a glass jar carried between the planets by giant, cosmic insects.

And it’s worth remembering that humanity itself can be a source of the terror of difference for others – the implied experience of the resurrected alien characters in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ is fascinating, as is the protagonist’s changing response to them. He moves from terror to interest to respect to empathy, finally saluting the key characteristics that the profoundly alien and the profoundly human share.

‘Scientists to the last - what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn - whatever they had been, they were men!’

And of course to make the cosmic terrifying, it helps to have something cosy and homely to set it against. Hence also the appeal of Lovecraft’s earthbound locations – they need to be comforting and attractive, to make the rupture from them all the more upsetting. They’re nostalgia made stone; in literary terms, they function absolutely as idealised but artifical and eminently frangible Edens.

So that’s H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James; two writers that hypnotised me, both playing with innocence and experience and finding horror in the relationships and transitions between the two.

Norming, performing

Thomas More notes of the Utopians that ‘they believe that the dead mix freely with the living… the sense of their ancestors’ presence discourages any bad behaviour in private.’ Observation is control; bad behaviour here is deviance from social norms, rather than anything more fundamentally immoral - and the observing dead ensure that those social norms are adhered to, everywhere.

Which made me realise how a sense of being observed is key to social control; and why, in certain kinds of religion, it’s very important that the deity is known to be omniscient. And that leads to ‘1984’, and Orwell’s treatment of Big Brother. Can ‘1984’ be read as religious as much as political satire? Really, it’s taking on any kind of oppressive social structure, however it’s dressed - political, religious, cultural, etc.

And that leads on to a very different kind of ‘Big Brother’. On reality TV, ‘bad behaviour in private’ is actively encouraged – conflict is drama, after all. The purpose of observation here isn’t to enforce a set of pre-existing norms; it’s to encourage the extreme, for our viewing pleasure.

So we’ve inverted Utopia, Airstrip One, and arrived at a place where observation is for the creation of extreme entertainment. Or are these the new norms that we’re meant to embrace? Over-reaction, exhibitionism and a slow process of knock-out until only one of us wins…

Year’s Best Excitement

Oh and - after last week’s Arvon happiness, and the weekend’s Infinity Plus thrills, even more excitement at Allumination Central!

Heather Lindsley’s rather excellent short story ‘Just Do It’ is now out in ‘Year’s Best SF 12′, where she joins luminaries including Liz Williams, Alastair Reynolds, Cory Doctorow and Michael Swanwick. It’s in the shops now, go buy!

You can also read her online - here’s her elegant and evocative short story ‘Mayfly’, over at Strange Horizons.

Mirroring the Fifth Head

An image from Gene Wolfe’s ‘The Fifth Head of Cerberus’ popped into my head this morning. Number Five, the protagonist of the first section of the book, catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror and for a second doesn’t recognise himself.

The book is very concerned with people seeing and describing themselves when they don’t really know themselves. It plays with this in a variety of different ways; amongst others, there’s a shapeshifting alien narrator who’s assumed another’s identity so completely that he isn’t aware of the joins, a wealth of buried relationships between characters, and indeed Five’s own relationship with his mysterious patrimony.

Verrry interesting resonances in the novel, but (taken slightly out of context) it’s also an intriguing way of thinking about the process of writing; of reading back over and reflecting that writing. So often you find subjects and themes that seem to have been entirely spontaneously generated, connections within the text that seem to have come from nowhere.

Writing a first draft, looking back over it, gives us a mirror filled with distance from ourselves; an artefact to peer into and be genuinely surprised by. In this context, that makes many of the characters in ‘Fifth Head’ writer analogues – people trying to explain the world to themselves, and through that to us, and along the way finding both familiarity and deep newness in the narratives they create.

Virtually published, really knackered…

Much excitement on my return from Yorkshire to discover that my short story ‘Golden’ (first published a couple of years back in The Third Alternative) is now up on Infinity Plus, here. And of course the course in Yorkshire was just fantastic, more on that when I have reactivated my brain…

‘Cities are slow computers’

…is today’s thought from the day from Matt Jones, talking very interestingly at the Interesting Conference on Saturday - suspect much online content will be going up about it over the next week or so, starting with Charlie Frith here (with links to other attendees) - and thanks to Russell for sorting it out! Not strictly a literary event, so a bit out of the normal subject matter here, but very, very thought provoking indeed.

Anyway, more on that later… most immediate impression, in its blend of diversity and obsession, acute professionalism and inspired amateurism, it felt much like a physical manifestation of a really interesting (and slightly random) afternoon’s net surfing.

Which also made me realise that the web is built round a geography of interest – unlike the real world, when you’re online what’s closest to you is what obsesses you the most. And again, Saturday’s conference was very much a literalisation of that.

And today I’m writing in telegraphese! In half an hour or so, I’m off to Yorkshire for a week’s writing workshop with Liz Williams and Graham Joyce. Should be very enjoyable, and hopefully will also launch a very substantial sharpening up of the novel. Not sure if I’ll have any web access over the next few days, so – until next Monday – farewell!

Dystopia IS utopia

Flicking through the Ballard entry on Wikipedia just now, and I was interested to see that they describe him as a dystopian writer. On the surface, a not unreasonable judgement, but for me there’s something a little more complex going on there.

Ballard’s always explored – in a very engaged and fertile way – the destructive forces that make us who we are; our reckless engagements with technology, our roots in profoundly irrational drives that consistently overwhelm and make obsolete our more considered selves.

For Ballard, rationality is a convenient fiction, easily discarded. We love destruction, chaos, mayhem; otherwise we wouldn’t produce so much of them. Ultimately, our most creative response to partial, rationally driven structures - like, for example, classic utopias - can only be to break them. Being human means that dystopia IS utopia.

Ballard helps restore normal service

Good grief, what happened yesterday? Everything seems so much more relaxed today. Very strange. Anyway, a thought to help get things back to normal from J. G. Ballard, who reminds us that:

‘Most people do not even grasp the fact that they need information to keep their imagination up to par.’

A need for jumping off points - the more, the better. And of course the starting point determines the destination. It’s not so much look before you leap, as leap from many places at once.

Went to a reading Ballard did a couple of years back, btb - he comes across as an immensely clubbable, affable fellow, and you listen to him for a couple of minutes, and suddenly realise just how sharp and subversive a mind he has. I imagined an alien scalpel of uncertain origin and purpose, potentially lethal if mishandled, cunningly disguised as a double gin and tonic on a Surrey golf club bar.

‘A person’s obsessions are as close to reality as you can get.’

Words to live by.

Radio Lovecraft

Interesting looking Radio 3 documentary on H.P. Lovecraft here. Can be listened to until the 17th June, includes comments from Neil Gaiman, ST Joshi, Kelly Link, Peter Straub and China Mieville.