C. E. Stevens – Page 3 – Lights In The Sky

How will it all end?

By C. E. Stevens | 28th June 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

How will it all end?
As usual I’m leaving it late to blog this month, possibly lulled into a false sense of security by managing to blog twice last month…
However we are getting to the crucial stage in the Lights in the sky series; the point when it all needs to pay off and the various hares I’ve set running needed to be hunted down…
The problem I face is that it’s all so complex…
There has been an ending to this series already (in the climax of the original trilogy, The Lost Colony), and I have to remain faithful to this but I can’t duplicate it. There needs to be a development of the narrative and development of the concept.
It is tempting to carry on regardless, just writing what comes into your head, and I often employ this approach, but this means that you miss out things (sometimes the bleedin’ obvious!), and so editing becomes important, add texture to the narrative, to correct mistakes and anachronisms, and to remain true to the overall concept.
And this necessitates lots of research…
So I’ve actually re-read the whole sextet this year, and because I can never just read the text, this had resulted in a complete re-edit of all six novels. I’m aided in this by a new feature helpfully introduced by Google, an enhanced spelling and grammar check (which I’m presuming is rather like Grammarly, but is free). This has proved invaluable and has pointed out lots of errors that my manual editing had managed to miss.
When you read bumpf from Agents and online luminaries offering advice (such as the ubiquitous Neil Gaiman), they always talk about the first and second edit (and presumably the third and the fourth…).
Well, I don’t work like that…
I don’t sit down one day and say to myself, ‘…today, I’m going to do the second edit of this or that novel’, my editing is constant. Every time I write a new section of whichever novel I’m working on, I review and edit the preceding chapters. Every time I re-read previous novels (and do this a lot!), I end up editing them.
I’ve nearly finished re-editing The leftover girl, and I rediscovered various speculations on the ethics of the Alpha Mission and the whole notion of maya, from the POV of Helen Choi, the architect of Mission AI, who at the end of her life now regrets the decisions she has made in her life, in the pursuit and what she now regards as false scientific gods, and now regards herself as being in error. In fact, she sees the whole notion of scientific progress (which underlies Western philosophy) as being ‘in error’ in religious terms (Helen is a Catholic), and an example of maya in philosophical terms, a concept she has imbibed from her late husband, Alex, who was a Buddhist in life.
This puts Helen in the same camp as Tata, albeit that they have reached this conclusion from completely different starting points (and by radically different routes).
This will inform the crucial last three chapters of the series, and currently the stakes are very high (getting higher), as I negotiate the last few miles in this epic adventure…
We’ll see how it all turns out…
The Author June 2019

A secondary world?

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

A secondary world?

I viewed a rather ancient, but nevertheless interesting, documentary on JRR Tolkien on YouTube recently. The documentary was made well before Peter Jackson’s filming of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and concentrated on the books, with keynote contributions from Tolkien’s youngest son, Christopher…
Christopher Tolkien discussed his father’s concept of Middle Earth as a ‘secondary world’, that is to say an alternate reality that works by different rules, a notion that (amazingly) I was unfamiliar with; and the more he talked, the more it occurred to me that Lights in the sky, is in many regards, an example of this.
So I did some research on the concept and concluded that, although I’ve tended to think of myself as a writer of ‘realistic SF’, there are many of the elements of a secondary world in the series, particularly in the three novels set on Alpha 5. So without knowing it, I have (in some ways) been writing a work of high fantasy.
Now it’s important to keep a sense of proportion here. I have taken considerable care to make LITS as plausible and scientifically credible as possible, and what I have just said in no way invalidates any of that. But the series is many things not just one, and incorporates various literary tropes. At the end of the day it is also a work of the imagination.
Different books within the sextet are fantastic to a greater or lesser degree; After the Flood is definitely the volume with the most tenuous connexion to high fantasy, but both the books that feature Marta Camacho have long passages that dive headlong into the genre. In particular Ms Camacho’s journey down the Amazon River on her raft, following her departure from the riverboat Fitzcarraldo, which is deliberately presented in dreamlike terms.
But it’s the original trilogy that cleaves most closely to the idea of a secondary world. We have a series of novels that takes the form of a bildungsroman. The protagonist is a child when the action opens, but grows into adulthood, and comes into powers and skills beyond those of ordinary person back on Earth, although in my world these have a technological source. Marta Fernandes is also to all intents and purposes an orphan. The theme of good versus is central to the series, but the question of who is good? and who who is evil? is often indeterminate, and is left unresolved until the end of the series. This is where I mostly part company with most fantasy writers, as in my world relativism is part of the underlying philosophy. Thus the Alphanians are presented at different times (and in different ways) as both an apparent threat to the eventual triumph of good, and as its most effective proponents. The same can be said (to a lesser degree) about the Artificial Intelligence fronted by Nurse Six Gee.
The World of the series is revealed to be illusory, in the sense that the World is not as it appears to be, by a series paradigm shifts in the first three novels. A similar process is now taking place in the denouement of Maya, which I am currently writing. And at the end of the day there are beings within this cosmos whose powers are to all intents and purposes Godlike, and therefore (as far as the human actors are concerned) magical…
The Author May 2019

Saying goodbye

By C. E. Stevens | 4th May 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Saying goodbye

I left the majestic world of Alpha 5 once again, half an hour ago…
Perhaps I should explain; I have just finished the latest edit of the original Lights in the sky trilogy, and this gave me a chance to reassess my magnum opus. Each book has its strong points, its favourite moments, but I was reminded that the last volume, The Lost Colony, is the best of all. The last two chapters in particular are both gut-wrenching and unbelievably sad, as I say goodbye to the characters (both human and non-human) that I’ve lived with and loved. Of course, I will read these books again, but each time I return I will know that the story is complete, the lives of the characters have run their course, their entry on the slate of probability decided.
The reason for doing this edit was threefold: I had reached a natural pause in my writing of the last book in the series, Maya, secondly I knew that I would need to ensure that the ending of the series as a whole was consistent with the conclusion of the original trilogy, and this required me to re-read this (and re-reading naturally leads to re-editing!), and a third reason has emerged, I now realise that I will need to up my game if the series as a whole is to get the finale it deserves.
The appeal of the series is not merely emotional. The final chapters of the original trilogy contain a great of cosmological and philosophical speculation, and the task in finishing Maya is to be true to what has been revealed so far, and (if possible) build on these revelations. Each volume of the original series ends with a paradigm shift, where the nature of the world is shown to be at variance with what the protagonists (and the reader) had previously believed.
My challenge in finishing the series will be to pull off a similar trick at the close of the sextet as a whole. I know this will be difficult and so far the new paradigm has not emerged. But I have faith; in writing the series so far I have often felt the unseen hand on my shoulder guiding me towards the direction I need to go.
This is not intended to be a mystical explanation for the roots of my creativity, merely a restatement of the commonplace that a work of art (and this is especially true of an extended work of fiction) takes on a life of its own, and eventually starts to make its own demands.
I need now to listen and be in a position respond when these manifest themselves…
The Author May 2019

Island: analogy and its uses

By C. E. Stevens | 28th March 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Island: analogy and its uses
I came up with a neat and (I think) apposite analogy recently while writing chapter fifteen of Maya, imagining the Edgbaston campus of the University of Birmingham (a future version features as a setting) as an island in a sea of ordinary concerns.
I thought further and applied the analogy (on a larger scale) to an England, ‘…separated geographically, politically and culturally from its European neighbours and the wider world,’ post-Brexit. It then occurred to me that the same analogy applied to my writing (and this blog), given that I am largely talking to myself here.
The analogy continues to gather force and gobble up more territory as I’m currently suffering from a painful and debilitating ailment which makes the ordinary tasks of daily life challenging, makes it harder for me to leave the house, and has the effect of isolating me from the rest of the world (on my own island).
If this is beginning to sound like an extract from one of Kafka’s famous Blue Notebooks (recently brought back to my attention by the music of Hans Richter), then this is apt as I claim him as an influence.
On that cheery note
The Author March 2019

Conspiracy theory

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

Blog entry supplemental twenty four: Conspiracy theory
The final part of Lights in the sky ( and hence of the whole series) centres around a conspiracy theory; the biggest conspiracy theory of all, in fact, that the world, and by extension the whole Universe may not be as we imagine it. That the whole world is actually much younger than we imagine it (in direct opposition to Rupert Giles’ theory that it is, in fact, much older!). That it was actually created by unknown beings for unknown purposes and that consequently we are all property and experimental subjects. If you are thinking so far, so Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s important to realise that Douglas Adams was drawing on an older tradition within SF. This is also a serious book rather than a lighthearted satirical comedy, and my intention is to explore the nature of faith (obviously I’m riffing on Creationism here!), and the psychology of believers.
To the vanishingly small number of people who have read the original Lights in the sky trilogy, this development comes as no surprise as it was already revealed to the Children on Alpha 5.
I started to think (dangerous, I know, in these times!) what if the old stories were actually in some sense true? Not literally, as they have been subject to imperfect transmission, distortion and reinterpretation over the centuries. But that they contain essential truths about the nature of existence that science has been missing.
Now I’m aware that there’s a danger that putative readers will also take what I have written literally, employing the same mindset that takes the Bible (essentially a series of creation myths, parables, and folk tales) literally.
If you think that’s unlikely you’re right, mainly because it’s unlikely that my stories will ever reach a wide enough audience. However the history of the twentieth century teaches us that the most bizarre and far-fetched of notions can become the subject and focus of fanatical belief.
So readers should remember that this is a work of fiction, set in an imaginary world, for the purposes of entertainment and to provoke philosophical debate.
The Author 5th March 2019

Irrational behaviour

By C. E. Stevens | 8th February 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental twenty three: Irrational behaviour
Apologies for not blogging last month, but I’ve been rather busy…
Maya, my seventh novel (the final part of the Lights in the sky sextet), is, amazingly, nearly half way through. Though an issue has arisen with the title of the previous volume. While doing the SEO on this website I found there were two very similar books; a Scandinavian novel whose title (when translated into English) is also After the Flood, plus a home-grown novel (also made into a film) called Flood, which has a very similar premise. How closely the two novels resemble mine I’m not sure, yet. However accidental plagiarism is an occupational hazard in creative writing as the zeitgeist tends to generate similar artistic responses to it.
What this has done is make me re-evaluate the title of my last novel, and I’m thinking I may return to the original title, The Great Flood, which would emphasis the historical echoes implicit in the work. Flood (on first glance) would appear to be a thriller set in very near future, and thus a different sort of animal. But more research is needed…
The SEO on my website is something I’ve been meaning to get around to for some time, and I’m enjoying the exercise, which fills in time between finishing chapter ten of my current book, and starting chapter eleven. Rob is currently in the process of revamping the website, which should soon boast a new landing page with a revolving gallery of images, and tabs giving easy access to my latest blog entries and excerpts from the books.
Out in the wider world things seem to go from bad to worse, as if the fates are determined to bring my fictional predictions to pass. The case of the man in India who is suing his parents for conceiving him without his permission is both completely barking, and an illustration of a philosophical tendency that I hadn’t previously been aware of, that of antinatalism.
Now, I’ll confess there are elements of this philosophy in the series, at least one of the protagonists characterises the human species as ‘a virus on the skin of the Planet!’ But these are individual points of view in what is essentially a pluralist work. Lights in the sky is at bottom both humanist and positive; humanity is tested and the biosphere threatened with extinction, as a result of our selfish actions. But both survive, and a better, more ethical (and non-Abrahamic) society emerges, with a little outside help, but then I’ve always been partial to a nice Deus ex machina!
Back in today’s grim reality it occurs to me that Trump may really be the Antichrist, and this probably accounts for all the support he receives from those US Fundamentalists, who see him (presumably) as a necessary precursor to the Last Days!
On that cheery apocalyptic note…
The Author February 2019

After the Flood

By C. E. Stevens | 21st December 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental twenty two: After the Flood
At last, it’s here!
After promising you the first chapter of my sixth novel, I’m finally in a position to deliver. After the Flood is (as regular readers will be aware) also the fifth novel in the Lights in the sky sextet.
The opening is very much in the tradition of ‘it was a dark and stormy night’, although we a very quickly plunged into the world of 2043. I wrote the four lines of verse that provide an epigraph for the chapter, and the novel is book-ended by a much longer poem which closes the narrative. The story is about the Great Flood of London of 2043, and was originally called ‘The Great Flood’, but the title changed (as they often do) to be replaced by the rather less matter of fact and rather more evocative present title, with its Biblical connotations (and indirect reference to Bob Dylan).
After the Flood is also more appropriate because almost the whole of the novel is about what happens next. We follow a group of people, most of whom we meet in this opening chapter, who survive the Deluge, and we see how they cope and how they attempt to repair or in most cases remake their lives in the chaos and the loss that follows the inundation of London.
In chapter one we see the arrival of the Great Wave which devastates London from the point of view of our diverse group of protagonists. All of whom survive (in one case miraculously), while others around them perish. These people are ordinary and flawed; they are not necessarily the right people (i.e. those that deserve to live), and all suffer from what you might term ‘survivor’s guilt’ at various times and to various degrees.
All are changed by their experiences (though some more than others), and most become better people.
Chapter one is necessarily episodic, as I try to portray the implacability and the sheer inevitability of the cataclysm as it unfolds (at times almost in slow motion). Thus we have a fractured narrative; unsurprising as the events are told from a variety of perspectives, but also because I want to put over how such an event would be experienced by those caught up in it, and convey the overwhelming feelings of shock and dislocation they would feel.
A friend who is reading the novel described it as ‘your disaster movie’, and (like all Lights in the sky novels), it is written with adaptation in mind. Dialogue is important, but it is balanced by the interior monologue of the main characters, the pace (initially at least) is frenetic, and I have tried to convey visually the impact of the Event on the ancient city of London.
And on re-reading this chapter I am convinced more than ever that I have succeeded in my aims. See if you agree…
The Author December 2018

Displacement activities

By C. E. Stevens | 15th December 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental twenty one: Displacement activities
So what happened to all those submissions you promised by the end of 2018, I hear you ask? Well, the honest answer is displacement activities have taken over, and rather than wait until the New Year I’ve already started the next novel, Maya, in fact I’ve already completed the first five chapters (and one hundred pages). And this is always the way; I love writing far more than promotion. There are a number of reasons for this; let’s be honest, I really don’t like being told what to do by other people, and the search for autonomy has been the keystone of my existence. By passing my work on to others (agents, publishers, a wider readership), it ceases to be wholly mine, and other people start to assume ownership and start to make demands. Professional demands come first, ‘…we don’t like this, could you change that etc etc, then if you do start selling to significant numbers of people, your new found readership starts to make its own demands!
Aren’t you being arrogant, I hear you say? Who says that your work is any good anyway? Well, I just went back on my website and re-read part of A Children’s Crusade, and I am convinced more than ever of its merit. You cannot be objective, people will say! Well not entirely, I will admit, but I’ve read an awful lot of literature and in my usual autodidactic fashion made an extensive study of SF, and I am dispassionate and I do know the difference between good writing and bad. What I would concede is that possibly my work is not fashionable (though I doubt this, as well), and I am probably not the average agent or publisher’s idea of a marketable modern author. But more fool them…
Anyway, Maya picks up the story of Marta Camacho, otherwise known as Tata, where we left it at the end of novel four. She is safely ensconced in the free communities in Amazonas close to the Peruvian border, behind the mysterious barrier that protects them from the outside world (if this all sounds a bit Harry Potter, I ask for your forbearance as scientific explanations will follow!).
However Tata is never happy anywhere for long, and her relationship with the other David (Rodrigues) has hit the rocks, and the forces of the provisional government of Novo Brasil know where she is and are now massing outside the Discontinuity that protects them…
Maya also introduces new characters, an earnest young Canadian citizen astronomer called Karl, and the other members of his online group, and a discredited Korean astrophysicist, ‘Nancy’ Park, who’s now working as an online ‘hostess’.
In Maya the world has recovered (to a certain extent) from the shock and dislocation of the Collapse, and some nations and their citizens are starting to look forward again, albeit tentatively…
Finally, the opening chapter of After the Flood will be hitting this website imminently, and I’ll blog again when that happen…
The Author December 2018

A question of attribution

By C. E. Stevens | 8th October 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental twenty: a question of attribution
I’ve finally finished After the Flood, well almost. I’m still playing around with the ending, but it’s in a condition where I can now start submitting to agents.
However a new issue has arisen. After the Flood is a Lights in the Sky novel; although the fifth to be written, it’s actually the first chronologically, set in 2043 (i.e. twenty five years from the present). But I’ve used my mainstream pseudonym, Stephen Clare, whereas all the other LITS novels are under the pen name, C.E. Stevens.
So something has to give; I’m minded to abandon the C.E. Stevens moniker altogether. It has always sounded clumsy to me, whereas Stephen Clare sounds like an author. I imagine him living in a thatched cottage somewhere in the Cotswolds, or tramping the Yorkshire Moors in green wellies and a tweed jacket like a latter day Ted Hughes. Naturally he’ll have chiseled features and probably smoke a pipe, or at least he will have done until told to give up on doctor’s orders.
Anyway, Lights in the Sky started out as a humble trilogy, expanded to a tetralogy, but has now become a pentalogy, and there will be a sixth. The LITS novels are (in order of writing), A Children’s Crusade, The Fixed Stars, The Lost Colony, The Leftover Girl, plus the current volume. The final part of what will be a sextet has the provisional title Maya (or Illusion), and I’ll start this in the New Year.
After the Flood is set in the fictional world of LITS, but in form and subject matter it’s very much a mainstream novel, which just happens to be set a quarter of a century in the future. This continues the trend established with The Leftover Girl, which is mainstream science fiction as opposed to genre SF. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed the title has changed (formerly it was known as The Great Flood), but I prefer the new title, which is more elegant with its Biblical connotations.
I have made use of a number of literary sources, specifically High-Rise by J.G. Ballard, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, and Dickens’ last completed novel Our Mutual Friend.
These are deployed as thematic references rather than mined for plot or storyline, Every chapter (apart from the first) is prefaced by quotation which refers to the narrative or thematic content in some way. The majority of these quotations are taken from the four main sources, but I do quote other people (including Joe Strummer!).
There is an element of intertextuality at work here. Karen, a journalist, did her degree in English Literature at Birmingham, and the subject of her dissertation was Conrad. Mariyam is deeply affected by reading High-Rise while at University, and the literary interests of other characters impinge on the narrative.
So far, so postmodern, but After the Flood, as well as being a character-led drama is also an adventure story, or rather it’s a series of individual adventures. Some (but not all) intersect, but they are all set against the climate change wrought cataclysm that is the Great Flood of London 2043. In a case of real-life imitating (my) art, I recently read a number of recent articles talking about this very possibility, predicated on our not (as a species) doing anything effective to halt global warming, and sticking our collective heads in the sand rather than planning for the consequences of this.
After the Flood is also my London novel, and before you ask, I did live in London while studying for my first degree, and I also lived in Chelmsford in Essex (a London dormitory town) for a number of years beforehand. A lot of the action in the novel takes place in East London, from the City and the Tower of London, up to Stratford, Forest Gate and Ilford in the north, taking in Wanstead and Dagenham, and proceeding along the Essex side of the River as far as East Tilbury. But there are detours, to the Palace of Westminster, to Teddington Lock, south to Maidstone in Kent, and north to Milton Keynes. And the central part of the narrative is the voyage of the container vessel Ulysses from the Pool of London to Dover. So, a novel about the sea, the River, and London, based in part on first hand knowledge, but also relying on the imagination to conjure its fictional world…
I hope to include an extract on the website in the near future…
Stephen Clare October 2018

Welcome

By C. E. Stevens | 12th January 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

Lights in the sky is the website for a series of novels set roughly a century from now.
So far the series comprises two completed novels, A Children’s Crusade, and The Fixed Stars, another book is underway, and a fourth is planned.
On this site you can find out more about the world of the novels, the characters (human and otherwise!), and the author. You can read a serialised version of the first book on the site, posted in regular installments over the next year, and you can also post comments and ask questions via the discussion board.

Look forward to hearing from you…

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