‘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.

Spontaneously effusing

Well, a lovely weekend in Paris – visiting friends, hanging out in the 6^e, and once again failing to get to the Sainte Chapelle, one of the finest pieces of Late Gothic architecture in Europe. Hey ho, one day I’ll get there, tho’ I’ll be cursing Dan Brown as I do so. He mentions it in the Da Vinci Code, so there are now permanent queues to get in. Hmmph.

Anyway, I’m whizzing around at high speed today, so it’s a very quick post. I’ve just been listening to a Neil Gaiman / Susanna Clarke interview courtesy of The Guardian, in which he defines a certain kind of short story as ‘miserable people having small epiphanies of misery’.

That’s a great comment, at once a definition and criticism of a certain kind of Modernist / more generally literary writing. When it’s well done (Katherine Mansfield!) it’s fantastic; when not, it’s turgid, depressing and futile. Minute, miserable subject matter becomes an end in itself – questions of quality of writing (‘how well is this done?’) are ignored.

Which raises a very interesting question. Why is subject matter rather than quality of writing so often seen as the only value needed in defining a book’s literary worth? For me, it’s because of a lack of understanding of the craft of writing.

And I’m not sure where that lack of understanding comes from. Perhaps one explanation is that, for all the talk of Modernism and Post Modernism, our approaches to judging writing remain trapped by the great Romantic pose of the spontaneous effusion.

By definition, spontaneous effusing (what an ugly word!) privileges content over form. ‘I was so moved that I had to write this…’ – so content is all and form is ignored, at best a neutral quality, at worst something profoundly restrictive. What matters is the quality of experience that drives the piece, not the quality of the piece itself.

Which throws critical negativity onto anything that’s not directly realist. Whether detective fiction, fantasy, romance or whatever else, such fiction comes not from direct observation of reality but rather from a much more mediated process of working out – of crafting. And, if you believe in spontaneous effusion, you mistrust crafting.

So, much as the Romantic pose is very attractive (‘bring me my opium, my catamite, my quill – I must compose!’) perhaps it’s time to step beyond it and acknowledge that direct observation and subsequent effusion is an aesthetic choice only, and has nothing to do with the qualitative.

Which, come to think of it, once you’ve been to a couple of poetry readings built around dodgy confessional poets is something you really don’t need to be told.

Solomon Kane 2007

It’s an odd thing, but when Robert E. Howard (yup, the Conan bloke) wrote his Solomon Kane stories, he provided an uncannily precise analysis of a certain kind of American exceptionalism.

Solomon Kane is a sixteenth century Puritan with a thirst for justice, who travels the world righting wrongs. He’s occasionally assisted by an aged Voodoo priest; he carries (the original) Solomon’s wand, introduced in a wonderfully offhand way; and he always fights evil, and he always wins out.

At one point, in ‘The Moon of Skulls’, Howard gives a very interesting description of Kane’s character and motivation. Here are the key elements:

‘He never sought to analyse his motives and he never wavered, once his mind was made up. Though he always acted on impulse, he firmly believed that all his actions were governed by cold and logical reasonings… A hunger in his soul drove him on and on, an urge to right all wrongs, protect all weaker things, and avenge all crimes against right and justice.’

The contrast between the universality of Kane’s goals and the limitations of his methods is fascinating. Implicit in his character is a lack of a need for knowledge, a sense that by just acting he’ll be right.

You can read that as an illustration of Nietzsche’s ‘noble morality’, whereby the strong perceive any action they make as being by-definition right – but it comes alive politically when you compare it with the famous ‘reality based community’ quote.

Journalist Ron Suskind, interviewing an unnamed White House insider in Autumn 2004, was told that:

‘guys like [Suskind] were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which [the insider] defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”’

Here, too, is a rejection of a judicious, empirical study of reality – ‘cold and logical reasonings’ – for something far more impulsive. It’s implicit in the rhetoric, which neatly separates thinking from doing: ‘we’re history’s actors… and you… will be left to just study’.

It’s the Solomon Kane ethos writ large, expressed at the level of empire rather than person. I’ve always felt that much US pulp fiction is America dreaming about itself – but who’d have thought that Robert E. Howard could ever have dreamt of the Neo-Cons with such force and precision?

A heart of darkness

Felt a bit bummed out yesterday, so that inevitably made me think of William Hope Hodgson’s ‘The Night Land’, the book that nearly gave me a nervous breakdown over New Year 1999 / 2000.

Normally, I love William Hope Hodgson. His berserk imagery, unhinged sense of space and time, and deep nautical experience (at times he comes across like the bad acid Joseph Conrad) combine every so often to produce utter pulp magnificence.

‘The House on the Borderland’ is an acknowledged classic, helped kickstart H. P. Lovecraft, and more recently has been namechecked by Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore and China Mieville, amongst others. ‘The Ghost Pirates’ is a genuinely haunted tale of subtle nautical mayhem, stuffed to the gills with memorable imagery and authentic sea-lore. The ‘Carnacki the Ghost Finder’ stories are just plain strange (and newly reprinted by Wordsworth Classics) – and so on.

But ‘The Night Land’ is in a different league. It’s set in the far future; and the sun has died. The remnants of humanity inhabit a giant, illuminated pyramid, the Last Redoubt. Everywhere else is darkness. Terrible creatures surround the pyramid, watching and waiting… And then, a signal from the last survivor of another, previously unknown redoubt is received. The narrator sets out to find her.

That’s really it for plot. You don’t read ‘The Night Land’ for seat of the pants narrative thrills; you read it for its crushing, strange, intense atmosphere, battling through its bizarrely contorted prose to do so. The conviction with which WHH images his dark, possessed future world, and the claustrophobic grimness of the creatures that hide in it, are remarkable.

I couldn’t finish it; it was too much for me. So I don’t know how it ends, and I haven’t formed a deep critical view of it, beyond awe at its atmospheric potency. So, here’s a quote from it, to give you a sense of its unique qualities:

‘And so, in a few minutes, I was at the South-Eastern wall, and looking out through The Great Embrasure towards the Three Silver-fire Holes, that shone before the Thing That Nods, away down, far in the South-East. Southward of this, but nearer, there rose the vast bulk of the South-East Watcher - The Watching Thing of the South-East. And to the right and to the left of the squat monster burned the Torches; maybe half-a-mile upon each side; yet sufficient light they threw to show the lumbered-forward head of the never-sleeping Brute.

To the East, as I stood there in the quietness of the Sleeping-Time on the One Thousandth Plateau, I heard a far, dreadful sound, down in the lightless East; and, presently, again - a strange, dreadful laughter, deep as a low thunder among the mountains. And because this sound came odd whiles from the Unknown Lands beyond the Valley of The Hounds, we had named that far and never-seen Place “The Country Whence Comes The Great Laughter.” And though I had heard the sound, many and oft a time, yet did I never hear it without a most strange thrilling of my heart, and a sense of my littleness, and of the utter terror which had beset the last millions of the world.’

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!

Storyville

Much excitement at allumination central, as Trevor Denyer over at Midnight Street has confirmed that my short story ‘Ghosts’ (dealing with the problems involved in exploring haunted orbital nuclear missile platforms solo) will be appearing therein in late ‘07 / early ‘08.

I’ve got a few other stories out there, looking for homes; my post- traumatic-stress-disorder fairy story ‘Changeling’, my Renaissance artist kidnapped by pirates story ‘Fishermen’, and my deep space hallucinated anima story ‘Lost’. More on them as and when they reach port.

And of course if you fancy an immediate read, there’s always ‘Golden’ over at Infinity Plus!

Lovecraft’s tentacles

In an introduction to a Lovecraft collection, China Mieville points out that H. P. Lovecraft introduced tentacles - and indeed the squamous in general - into horror fiction. That squamousness signifies a wider fascination with negotiable identities. One of the key tropes of Lovecraftian horror is that your place in the cosmos - indeed, the very flesh of what you are - is always very mutable.

Which makes me wonder if part of his ongoing relevance comes from the importance of identity politics in the 20th and 21st century. His writing dramatises the horror and joy implicit in identity definition and transformation. His apparent racism has been widely commented on - but perhaps it’s balanced by a more constructive awareness of the problems and processes of identity in general?

M. R. James the dramatist

And one more thing about M. R. James; he wrote his stories to be read out loud, and they still perform incredibly well. Come Halloween - or indeed any other cold, dark, spooky night - it’s well worth getting a few friends round, sitting down in front of the fire, and reading him to your (terrified) audience.

Quite apart from the spooky fun of it, it’s a fascinating insight into M. R. James the dramatist; his pacing, handling of tone, and character delineation and deployment are masterly.

Oh, and in a final chilling connection - while Provost at Eton, the aging MRJ taught the young Christopher Lee. The cold, bone white baton of spook was passed on to the next generation…

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.