C. E. Stevens – Page 2 – Lights In The Sky

Your place on the curve

By C. E. Stevens | 10th January 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Timing, as they say, is everything…
To be ahead of the curve, in that curious English phrase, is never good; early adopters of new technology (and new products in general) tend to pay a premium for their feeling of exclusivity, and may also be plagued by performance and reliability issues in their role as (unpaid) market testers.
But to be ahead of the curve in the arts is worse…
I recently purchased the DVD of Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy, a film which, while praised by most contemporary critics, was ignored by the cinema-going public and lost money, to the extent that the director considered giving up making motion pictures altogether.
From the standpoint of 2020 (the film was originally released in 1982) it looks prescient in its forensic examination of the relationship between celebrity and its often deluded fanbase. The film also explores the notion that any schmuck can be ‘King for a day’ providing they are sufficiently opportunistic, amoral and ruthless, something which the rise of social media in the decades following the film’s release has served to reinforce.
Re-viewing after a gap of probably thirty years, I found the film an uncomfortable watch, as it was all too easy to identify with frustration felt by de Niro’s protagonist, and with the hostility he feels not only towards those who are successful, but also to the army of facilitators who (to his mind) work to keep the successful in place, mainly by frustrating the attempts of new talent to gain a foothold.
Without labouring the point, anyone who is trying to break into an insanely competitive creative arts field probably feels like this, which doesn’t make them (necessarily) a bad person. It’s the nature of the beast. We have two consolations; at least we didn’t stoop to morally-reprehensible actions to achieve success (or end up in gaol!), and we are unlikely ever to be on the receiving end of the attentions of the Rupert Pupkins of this world.
Returning to the original theme of this piece, two years ago I completed a novel called After the Flood, set in London, twenty five years into the future, in which rising sea levels and a perfect storm of unfavourable circumstances combine to inundate London.
Back then, this seemed like a good original idea for a book, but now it appears everyone is writing (and publishing) this novel. There’s even one set in Birmingham, however unlikely this would appear, geographically speaking…
The Author January 2020
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‘The Roaring Twenties’

By C. E. Stevens | 4th January 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

It’s New Year’s Day and what’s that sound filling the air? Well, if you’re in the Antipodes it’s probably the roar of bushfires as they consume your neighbourhood. A former friend moved to Australia with her husband a while back, and lives in Sydney, I’m wondering how she regards that decision today. I’m also wondering how much longer the television series Wanted Down under will continue to be made (or even shown), and I’m thinking that this may turn out to be a post-Brexit windfall for Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers, with a steady stream of skilled expatriates returning from the Southern Hemisphere to take the jobs recently vacated by those EU citizens heading back across the Channel. My niece is already here, and her parents may not be too far behind.
As ever, I feel like I’m in some way inextricably-linked to unfolding events, as no sooner do I write about something than life starts to imitate art. In a passage from my current novel …when you wish upon a star, I write about an Australia being consumed by flames, with a scene set in a gridlocked traffic queue inching its way to hope-for safety, beset on all sides by fire. This has now become a reality for thousands of unfortunate Australians in New South Wales and Victoria.
Although it’s gratifying on one level to be part of the zeitgeist, it’s not something I expected to be happening this soon. It all adds to the feeling of apprehension as we contemplate the 2020’s, a feeling that it may already be too late and climate change has become inevitable. In …when you wish upon a star I write about a world consumed by fire and flood, but I set the worst consequences of this comfortably in the future. But it seems that the future is only too eager to start early, like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse trying to crash your New Year’s Eve party, and guess what? They’ve brought a couple of extra friends, Fire and Flood, along with them.
In short, the coming decade is not filling me with a great sense of anticipation. Many people (I imagine) will be too lost in their personal orgy of unnecessary and conspicuous consumption to notice, and it may take something really ‘significant’ happening (like the World Cup or the Olympics being cancelled) before it registers.
However we have (very nearly) the worst possible set of political leaders in place at this moment, whose ‘strategy’ would appear to be denial, closely followed by lies and excuses. One can only hope that a new generation emerges, before it is too late.
Happy New Year
The Author January 2020

Last train to Woking

By C. E. Stevens | 2nd December 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

I have just completed watching War of the Worlds on television and I must say I’m somewhat disappointed. Having endured the cheesy 1953 movie, and the gargantuan Tom Cruise remake, I had hoped the BBC series would cleave more closely to the original novel. First signs were encouraging; the drama was actually set in England (in the original Home Counties and Metropolitan locations, in fact), and (roughly) in the right historical period.
However the cracks soon began to show…
The series makes use of CGI that manages both to be unconvincing and gargantuan (rather like the 2005 film), the action sequences contrived to be considerably less gripping than those in Wells’ novel (fer Christ’s sake!), and the scriptwriter made unnecessary and counterproductive changes to the plot, including introducing a new female lead played by someone previously best known for starring in Downton Abbey.
I could go on, pointing out that Wells’ references a huge variety of means of transport in the book, but everyone in this reimagining appears to either walk or ride on horseback, but what would be the point.
The point I really want to make is that in this new version the BBC seems to be pandering to modern identity politics, as it did with the most recent series of Dr Who. But the organisation would appear to be conflicted, because at the same time, its news division spends an awful lot of its time pandering to the arch-enemies of ‘wokeness’ (i.e. the Brexiteers, Farage, Johnson and the rest of that mendacious crew). Quite why, I can’t imagine! Does the Corporation seriously think it’s going to be rewarded for this craven servility? Farage is already calling for the end of the license fee in his party’s manifesto, and I wonder how long it will survive under a Johnson-led administration.
For once I actually agree with Nigel, although (I would imagine) for different reasons…
The license fee is a regressive tax; you pay the same whether you’re Richard Branson or a lone parent on Universal Credit in rented accommodation, also, the BBC has been operating (effectively) as a commercial broadcaster for most of my lifetime, and I think this subsidy of a private corporation should be withdrawn.
Instead, real public broadcasting following the American model should be funded from general taxation. By this means Radio’s 3, 4, 6 etc, plus regional broadcasting and BBC 4 could be saved while the BBC fulfils its destiny as the new NBC (or not).
But at the end of the day, the problem with identity politics is that it divides us. Divides us in the face of the super-rich (and their populist lackeys), divides us so we cannot muster a coherent response to climate change and all the other environmental threats that we face.
There’s an old proverb applied to political activism, ‘…you either all hang together or you all hang separately’, and with regards to the BBC, it may well turn out that the last train to Woking, will be seen in the future as a dying fall in its futile attempts to straddle various uncomfortable political and cultural fences.
Toodle-oo
The Author December 2019

The flight from current realities

By C. E. Stevens | 17th November 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Modern cultural and political discourse appears to embody not merely a retreat into various forms of irrationality, but also a retreat into solipsism (and for many narcissism!). I confess that I’m guilty of the sin of solipsism; what is Lights in the sky if not a retreat from the unpleasant realities of the world that we find ourselves in? and I’m obviously not alone in seeking a refuge from an alarming and increasingly dangerous world.
Part of the novel form’s appeal is the degree of control it gives to the writer; without a director or stage manager, or a cast of actors to interpret your work, you are effectively God. What you as the author decree goes in the world you have created. This is especially true of the fields of fantastic literature and science fiction, where you literally create a new world in many cases, and I’m sure it’s no accident that these genres attracted a whole host of extreme personalities (Edgar Rice Burroughs, HP Lovecraft and Philip K Dick spring to mind, but there are others).
However the solipsism previously on offer to the novelist, the poet and the fabled lonely artist working in their garrett is now on offer to everyone. The online world and smartphone culture enables people to conduct large parts of their everyday business without having to directly interact with other people. People can conduct elaborate ‘friendships’ with people they will never meet, and, in the case of online celebrities, who remain completely unaware of their existence. It is possible (via gaming) to escape into virtual worlds of mind-boggling complexity and become utterly divorced from the world outside. I was slightly alarmed (but not surprised) to learn of a strain of scientific and philosophical thought that advocates perpetuating the human species (or maybe just themselves, I’m not quite sure!) within conveniently-wrought AI, enabling these lucky people to inhabit their private worlds (presumably) for all eternity.
There are obviously cultish aspects to all of the above beliefs and practices (and, I would argue, aspects of the transcendentalist and monastic religious experience), but for the would-be solipsist they offer yet another series of alternative realities where the individual is in sole control.
Of course out in the ‘real world’, it also offers that other breed of narcissists, the populists of the New Right, carte blanche to continue to mould the physical world in their own image; safe in the knowledge that the fractured solipsism of contemporary culture makes it unlikely that a sufficient number of potential opponents will ever be able to effectively organise against them.
Of course, a lot of this is symptomatic of a current reality where things are now ‘looking so grim that you have to wear shades’ (to misquote a minor alt-pop hit of the 90’s), and I’m drawn to Douglas Adams’ wonderful notion that the renegade President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox, would sport sunglasses that automatically obscure his vision whenever danger threatens.
Strikes me we’ve now all been issued with this particularly-useful piece of kit,
‘…impending global catastrophe, what do I care? I’m going to lose myself in whichever role-playing and world-building online game is flavour of the month! See you on the other side, or not!’
So what about your latest novel? I hear you all ask…
Well, chapter six is now complete, and Marta da Guia is now on the cusp of adolescence. I have reintroduced a familiar character, Klara, the emotional automaton (and prototype of the nursemaids on Alpha five) invented by Dr Helen Choi. Klara’s role will be that of the Greek Chorus I talked about in previous blogs, commenting on the action, and on the changes taking place in the wider world.
However this volume is inevitably (with apologies to Gabriel Garcia-Marquez) a Chronicle of a Death Foretold, we know how this story is going to end, and it’s not good…
This narrative appears to me completely appropriate in our current times…
The Author November 2019

Cognitive distortions

By C. E. Stevens | 21st October 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Catching up with my reading recently, I have been investigating twentieth century psychological thinking and it struck how many of the explanations for irrational and negative thought processes in individuals contained in this body of work can be applied to institutions and to our current dysfunctional culture as a whole.
I’ll give you an example; Karen Horney in 1950 talked about the ‘tyranny of the shoulds’, the notion that things should magically be different from how they actually are. Put in contemporary terms, this neatly describes the notion that Britain should still be an empire and a great power (when it is clearly neither) that characterises the thinking of so much of the pro-Brexit lobby. As Albert Ellis pointed out, building on Horney’s ideas, ‘the struggle to reconcile these thoughts with reality is a painful and unending one’, and this particular psychodrama has consumed British politics for the last several years.
In 1980 David Burns defined a whole series of similar ‘cognitive distortions’, specifically: Jumping to Conclusions, All of Nothing Thinking, Always being Right, Over Generalising and Catastrophizing.
These modes of thought seem to aptly describe our current political discourse, and are particularly applicable to much of the tabloid press, for whom every space rock approaching the Earth is the asteroid that’s going to end all life, every passing storm is a catastrophe in waiting, and every coming Winter will be the worst in living memory.
The problem facing us is that although it’s possible to counsel and treat the individual to rid them of such negative, irrational and self-destructive thought processes, how do you treat an entire culture?
As with all of our present irrationalities, the internet is the medium by which they can spread and infect the body politic and our popular culture..
Not much to report on volume seven of Lights in the sky this month; however chapter five of …when you wish upon a star is very nearly complete and ideas for the rest of the novel and more supplementary short stories (which will eventually be gathered in a compendium to be entitled, Tales from the Collapse), continue to flow unabated.
Some of you may be tempted to the view that my writing is also a symptom (or an example) of cognitive distortion, and there is an argument for that. However, in my defence, I would say that I know that what I’m writing is fiction, and as an author I’m commenting on the culture I find myself in. In short, I am capable of a degree of objectivity and can distance myself from cultural, political and societal tendencies that I observe around me.
However, out in the real world, objectivity seems currently to be in short supply…
The Author October 2019

A private world

By C. E. Stevens | 6th October 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

I sometimes make the mistake of supposing other people think about and understand the world in the same way as me…
But, of course, most people don’t; most people don’t write novels, they read them, or increasingly these days listen to them as audiobooks. I recently tried to listen to an Arthur C. Clarke audiobook online, 2001: A Space Odyssey, as it happens. I lasted one chapter because the process is so slow! I can read the story so much more quickly than the voice droning on through the speaker is able to tell it, plus you have the freedom and time to insert your own thoughts and mental impressions (i.e. create the world of the novel in your head) rather than having to conform to the narrator’s pace. Needless to say I will not be investing in any audiobooks in the near future.
Another thing most people don’t do is write songs, or play musical instruments with a reasonable degree of proficiency. Since I didn’t learn myself until I was in my early twenties I can still remember (as an adult) being an outsider as far as music is concerned; not understanding how it’s put together, not being able to perform it, or create original music. But that now seems like a far off place…
Of course, most people have other concerns: raising children, placating spouses or partners, working for other people, while I have none of these things. I sometimes feel like a monk in some draughty monastery on the Northumbrian coast, sometime in the Dark Ages, working away at my equivalent of an illuminated manuscript. Except that the world is right outside my front window, not many leagues away, and (hopefully) Viking raiders aren’t making their way stealthily up a nearby river.
Since I succumbed and started writing volume seven of Lights in the sky, I’ve been making good progress and I’m now working on chapter four. I’m in that delicious phase, when the whole thing is in front of you and you can start to grasp the full extent of the territory that the novel will occupy (albeit, dimly at times), but you still have to go out and explore and traverse that territory.
The number of characters appears to be increasingly exponentially; some will be familiar, having featured in other novels in the series (usually at different points in their lives), others are invented specifically for this particular volume. I have a feeling that this book will be the longest yet, and once more I’m wondering how I’m going to be able to keep to my convention of twenty two chapters.
But it feels cosy and safe in my fictional world; whereas the world outside seems to be getting more and more hostile. My little suburban monastery is pleasant place to live at the moment, but the Barbarians are massing in the distance, and may be just over the next hill…
The Author October 2019

Swimming against the tide of history

By C. E. Stevens | 12th September 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Discussing recent political developments as well as longer-term societal trends in my recent blogs has got me thinking, and my speculations have made me somewhat fatalistic.
I (and others of similar opinions and disposition), can hope, in the short term, for the amelioration of the current crises afflicting Western society. We can hope for a rational resolution of the Brexit issue domestically, we can hope that a Democrat is elected as US president in 2020, we can hope for a lot of things…
But there is such a thing as the tide of history, deeper and more fundamental changes that occur underneath short-term political developments. In my last blog I referenced a shift from what I referred to as a written culture to new culture mediated by artificial intelligence. Now I’m not arrogant (or ignorant) enough to suppose that I’ve come up with an original idea, but I think it’s likely that many cultural commentators and theorists writing on this matter will have a different standpoint to me. Many will welcome the change that appears to be happening, rather than regretting or fearing it.
But the point is that, irrespective of your standpoint, this is happening and the way people think, feel and act will change accordingly. People of my generation and way of thinking will rapidly become cut off, isolated in a culture that no longer understands them, and which they feel little or no affinity for. Small changes are straws in the wind; I still have a cheque book which I intend to use to pay some outstanding bills, pretty soon this won’t be an option; I like reading books and I spend some of my time writing them, but how long before a post-literate culture emerges where all books are audio books? Where people rely on virtual helpers such as Alexa to conduct all their transactions; I also like physical shops, but I fear for their survival.
All in all, I feel that pretty soon I’m going to be like an updated version of the protagonist of the 1960’s television series Adam Adamant Lives, an Edwardian adrift in contemporary society…
Of course, another trend, one that is proceeding quietly under all the sound and fury of contemporary politics, may put a stop to this ‘Brave New World’, at least for the majority.
I refer, of course, to the various elephants in the room, climate change, sea level rise, resource depletion, all the issues that drive the narrative in Lights in the sky. I note that in today’s press various scientific institutions, as well some obscenely-rich private citizens, are again discussing possible fall-back strategies should our actions make our planet uninhabitable. It’s the usual guff: NASA wants to colonise the Moon, Jeff Bezos wants to build vast environments orbiting the Earth, where the climate will be, ‘..like Maui, but every day!’, as last on seen the SF flick Interstellar, Elon Musk wants to nuke Mars etc…
I think it’s quite likely that at least some of these ideas will come to fruition, but on a strictly limited basis; probably consisting of a few scientists and military personnel living out barren lives underground on Mars or the Moon, while the rest of us left on Earth mostly die, and the unlucky survivors descend into savagery.
I recently bought the DVD (another soon to be obsolescent piece of tech) of Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Cold War satire Dr Strangelove, and I think that Kubrick was being prescient here, just not in any way he could have imagined!
But that’s the problem with futurology, things never turn out quite the way you anticipated…
Which, of course, may mean that I’m being unduly alarmist.
Time will tell…
The Author September 2019

New novel or displacement activity?

By C. E. Stevens | 10th September 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

As I intimated in my last blog, Lights in the sky is not over, as I’ve now started the seventh novel, with the title I trailed last time, …when you wish upon a star, which was just too good to pass up really!
The downside being I’m again putting off trying to market my growing ouvre to agents and publishers, in favour of doing what I really want to do, which is to write more fiction and spend more time in the comforting fictional world I’ve created, as opposed to an increasingly scary real world. There’s also an element of selfishness in this. While I remain obscure and largely unread, the world of Lights in the sky remains mine, and mine alone. I have no agent to make suggestions, no commissioning editor to suggest revisions, no readership to make demands. It gratified me, when reading the obituary of the great Toni Morrison, to learn that she’d kept the manuscript of her first novel, The Bluest Eye, for years before eventually submitting it, even though she worked in publishing. She subsequently explained that she’d wanted to keep the novel private, recognising that once it went out into the world it would no longer be entirely hers. And I can understand that; a fictional world is a precious and intensely personal thing, and being published (and acquiring a readership) entails letting go of part of yourself.
Anyway, back to the work in hand…
As usual, writing a new installment in the series entails a lot of research in order to develop new characters with convincing backstories, and develop tangible locations where the action of the novel can take place, what in cinema is referred to as mise en scene. Some of this research is via my usual sources (step forward and take a bow, Wikipedia, and Google Maps), but a lot of it consists of rereading and research within the existing books of the series. I find that although Marta da Guia is an established character who appears (at various points in her life) in at least three of the novels, there’s an awful lot that we don’t know about her. This is of course the reason for the book, she’s pivotal to Lights in the sky, without her neither of the other two Martas (the main characters in our series) would exist at all. But she has hitherto remained on the periphery, a supporting character, never the main event, bar the twelfth chapter of the first novel.
All this will now change…
I have also decided to incorporate the stories of the other two characters I referenced last month into this novel, rather than condemning them to short story purdah. It makes sense really: Ester Almeida will become a pivotal figure within the Camposetta movement that will eventually destroy the Alpha Mission and Miss da Guia’s world. She will do this via her position as the leader of the Camposetta’s political wing, Partido dos trabalhadores do campo. Clara will not be centre stage, in fact she will eventually go into hiding, but her purpose will be to dramatise how the developing crisis destabilises the lives of ordinary people, as the certainties that have underpinned their existence are steadily eroded.
Finally, I have decided to make Miss da Guia’s biological parents (who never actually meet their child, or each other) significant characters in their own right, more so than Marta’s Alpha Mission-appointed foster parents, and the various educationalists and functionaries that will surround her. By remaining detached, I hope they will be able to take on the role of a Greek chorus, commenting on the action as it proceeds with the grinding inevitability of all history.
So that’s the plan, but there’s so much more to be done, and so much more to come…
As a sidebar to the above, I’ve found a number of really good YouTube channels in the last couple of days, writing specifically about SF movies, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar, and my personal favourite, the peerless Arrival.
Their various analyses (especially those on the nature of language, presented in two programmes on Arrival) got me thinking, and I came up with the following notions, which may not be original, but aren’t based on anything I’ve ever read.
Around five and a half thousand years ago we went through a pivotal moment in the development of human society, specifically the jump from a purely oral culture to a written one. This gradually percolated downwards from a learned elite to eventually encompass the bulk of humanity, and in the process profoundly altered the way people think, effectively rewiring our brains.
And now I think this is happening again, with a jump from a written culture to one mediated by Artificial Intelligence. This has already significantly altered the way many of us behave, and the process of rewiring human consciousness appears to be happening all over again. But this time with frightening speed, and with profound and unknowable consequences for us all.
’til next time
The Author September 2019

Housekeeping

By C. E. Stevens | 29th August 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Housekeeping
Lights in the sky is many things: it’s a vast sprawling meta-novel of ideas and scientific, philosophical, societal, economic and theological speculations; its a series of picaresques; it’s a postmodernist tribute to my sources and influences; it’s a romance, an adventure story, a coming of age novel; it’s a mystery story with the author as detective; it’s all these things and more…
It’s also now finished…
Perhaps I should qualify this; the main narrative is complete, on both on Earth and on Alpha 5, we now know what happens to all of the protagonists, and have a fair idea of what comes next. We have followed our characters (for the most part) from birth to death, and the central enigma behind the world of the series has been laid bare.
However there are a number of other stories within this vast concept (six novels, 2314 pages, and nearly seven hundred thousand words) referenced or alluded to in passing, that I feel deserve to be told, either in short story form, or in additional novels. I’ve already started this process and written a number of short stories, which I intend to collect together at some point, perhaps under the title Tales from the Collapse.
But one or two of these stories would appear to merit a longer treatment. An obvious candidate is the story of the original Marta, Miss da Guia, from her strange conception as part of the breeding programme undertaken by the Alpha Mission, through her unusual childhood in Sao Paulo, her short-lived media stardom, and her brutal and untimely death…
I’ve just remembered that I have title for this putative novel, ‘When You Wish upon a Star’, which plays with various layers of meaning; The Journey to the Stars undertaken by the Alpha Mission carries the hopes of millions marooned on an apparently-dying world, Miss da Guia is a media star worshipped by those millions, and she is following her own star…
Given that the title I have arrived at neatly pitches the novel, I think it’s now highly likely that I will write it.
The other candidate a further volume is the fate of Clara and all the other automatons unlucky enough to have remained on Earth after the departure of the Probe in 2048. The leftover girl hints at the likely fate of such entities towards the end of the novel; Clara has been rejected by her creator Dr Helen Choi, who now sees the robot as the product of her pursuit of false scientific gods, of literally being in error, in Christian terms. By definition Clara is thus demonic, and shares the fate of the Creature rejected by his creator, Victor Frankenstein, in Mary Shelley’s famous novel.
We have also been given a glimpse of the forces of reaction ranged against the Alpha Mission and all its works in the person of the ‘Mayor of Ibara City’, the formidable Ester Almeida, and we know things aren’t going to end well.
I often think that the dichotomy within the series between ‘the scientific vision’ as exemplified by the Alpha Mission, and ‘the spiritual vision’ personified by the Camposettas and their adherents (including eventually Dr Choi), is essentially a dramatisation of a battle that I’ve fought within myself my whole life. A struggle between a belief in science (and its delinquent offspring, technology), and a countervailing attachment to the natural world, primitive socialism, and a non-specific form of spirituality, most akin to Buddhism.
Seen in these terms, Lights in the sky becomes an actualization of this inner debate…
The Author August 2019

Caught in the slipstream?

By C. E. Stevens | 5th July 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

I Have just come across a new literary genre, ‘slipstream’, of which I’d previously been unaware. I was guided to it by the work of Anna Kavan, a literary hero of mine, when I paid a tribute to the style and language of her most famous novel, Ice, by pastiching it at the beginning of chapter twenty of Maya. I’d previously always regarded Anna Kavan as a science fiction writer (albeit a very strange one), but when I looked up her Wikipedia article, I found out that apparently she’s now classified as part of the Slipstream movement, the term being coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in 1989.
This has led me to research the genre via Wikipedia in order to see if some of what I write falls within this classification…
If we look at the characteristics ascribed to slipstream genre fiction and compare it that which characterises my fiction we should be able to answer that question.
Firstly a health warning; Lights in the sky, as I’ve argued a number of times in this blog, shifts between genres in the course of each book (sometimes in the course of an individual chapter), which in itself is postmodernist.
Slipstream fiction is often seen as the ‘literature of strangeness’ and will employ epistemological and ontological questioning of the nature of reality. Epistemology interrogates the distinction between objective and subjective viewpoints; my fiction constantly (from chapter twelve of A Children’s Crusade onwards) contrasts these two modes. Ontology is essentially about the nature of being, which has become the principal concern of Lights in the sky.
James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, editors of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology argue slipstream makes use of cognitive dissonance (i.e. simultaneously holding two or more contradictory beliefs, values, or attitudes). I’m not sure I really do that in my fiction, if we disregard the truism that such contradictory thinking is a part of the human condition.
Kelly and Kessel go on to argue that slipstream disrupts the realist narrative, avoids the traditional fantasy tropes, and is essentially postmodernist in form.
I’d say probably one out of three on this count…
I embrace traditional fantasy tropes rather than avoiding them, what I tend to do is make creative use of the archetypes contained within them (mainly derived from folk tales and mythology), and refer to them to add depth to my prose.
I also think that I strive to make those parts of the narrative that sit in the real world realistic, although this is not (I think) literary realism in the nineteenth century sense. I’m not constantly disrupting this narrative, rather there are two narrative spaces within all of my recent novels, two narrative streams that run on parallel; one is the physical world, the other a liminal space which intrudes into the ‘real world’ in the form of dreams and visions, but sometimes supplants the everyday world. Tata’s stay amongst the Tupi people when she believes she exists outside of time, is an example of this.
What I do acknowledge are the various postmodernist elements to my writing…
I won’t go through all of the postmodernist aspects present in my ouvre as I’ve discussed these at length in previous blogs, but for the purposes of this blog I will focus on three of them.
I make use of an unreliable narrator on occasion (Nancy, in case you hadn’t noticed), my text embodies the use of paradox (a recent example being Joel’s contention at the start of chapter twenty, ‘…the paradox inherent in technology…is that it makes the world available to us (in an unprecedented way!) while simultaneously destroying it…’, and I frequently employ a fractured narrative…
So what’s my conclusion?
I don’t think that what I write is slipstream, I merely make use of some of the techniques that form the basis of this genre. But I also make use of techniques and narrative forms from multiple genres. If I were to characterise my fiction I would say it is mainstream science fiction with a postmodern sensibility…
’Til next time
The Author – July 2019

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