C Stevens – Page 2 – Lights In The Sky

Having your mind made up for you

By C Stevens | 26th February 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

I don’t normally blog twice in any one month, but this time my hand has been forced. Reading the Guardian online yesterday I noticed that a novelist I have read (and have a certain regard for) Kazuo Ishiguro, has a new book out. All well and good, but the problem lies in the title, as his new book is called Klara and the Sun. I read the article and noted that, sure enough, Klara is some kind of robot!

Now at this point I need to point out that my Klara is a character originally introduced in my fourth Lights in the sky novel, The leftover girl, which makes her roughly five years old. While it’s entirely possible that Mr Ishiguro was already writing his recently-published novel five years ago, the chances are that I got there first. I originally took the name ‘Klara’ from another science fiction novel, Gateway, by the late Fred Pohl. In this novel Klara is the protagonist’s dead lover, and (if my memory serves me correctly) serves a similar narrative function to Kris Kelvin’s dead wife in Stanislaw Lem’s best known work, Solaris.

However, I’m unknown and unpublished, Kazuo Ishiguro is internationally famous, so I’m going to have to change the title of the eighth Lights in the sky novel. This is fine as Klara was only a placeholder until something better came along. So, I’ve decided that the novel will now be called Finding your place. Needless to say, this title is also currently provisional. What I won’t change is the name of my character.

The chances of this coincidence ever coming to Mr Ishiguro’s attention are remote, but if they do, I’m quite ready to defend myself against any charges of plagiarism. I would point out that I have been writing about self-aware vaguely-humanoid robots in the Lights in the sky series for roughly eight years now (I submitted the short story that kicked off the series to Analog SF magazine in April 2013, in fact).

It would also be a source of amusement to me that anyone would ever compare us as novelists, as we couldn’t be more different. I have read one of Ishiguro’s novels (The Remains of the Day, which I enjoyed), I started Never let me go but got bored halfway through. Mr Ishiguro comes across to me as a miniaturist, with the action of his books seeming to take place mainly in airless rooms, while mine range through time and space. We both may have postmodern elements in our work, but make use of vastly-different source materials for very different purposes.

Nevertheless, I have the man to thank for finally forcing me to make a decision…

The Author February 2021

A different kind of story

By C Stevens | 15th February 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

Recent entries have rather strayed from the original intention of this blog, which was to serve as a commentary on the various novels within the Lights in the sky series and a journal about the process of writing them.

Instead, I’ve tended increasingly to comment on recent political events and social and cultural trends. While this is worth doing in itself, and my need to do so a function of the desperate straits we find ourselves in, I have decided to focus on the novel I’m actually writing for this month’s entry.

Klara (still a working title until something more elegant and descriptive suggests itself), is the eighth entry in the series. There was no grand design behind its writing, I was merely telling the story of a character who has been important to the stories of other characters, but who I felt deserved a book to herself. As I said previously, there was no predetermined plot when I started the book. I don’t do this kind of tight plotting, regarding it as a strait jacket which crushes invention. Instead, I have some kind of end point which I need my character to eventually reach, but what happens in between is essentially improvised.

This approach to writing suits picaresques, a form I’ve used at least once before in this octology, but in the process of creating another of these, I have found myself writing a different kind of novel. The other function of Klara is to tell the story of the Camposetta movement from an alternative perspective. Hitherto, the Camposettas have been the villains of the piece, a point of view that naturally reflects the prejudices of the Alpha Mission and the characters associated with it. The character of Ester Almeida functions as villainess-in-chief in this world view.

However it struck me that the Camposettas would not regard themselves as villainous, and secondly, the ending of The Leftover Girl clearly signals that a rapprochement has been reached between former enemies, who have both taken refuge in as Comunidades Livres in the far west of the country.

So I find myself writing a novel about a revolutionary movement waging a guerilla war against (to them) an oppressive government. I looked to previous writing to act as source material for this new kind of novel, starting with my own bookshelves. My eyes fell immediately upon George Orwell’s famous memoir of his involvement on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. Another influence which can discerned, if you know where to look, is provided by Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy which (in its later volumes) is set in the Partisan struggle against Nazi Occupation in the old Yugoslavia during World War Two. It also occurs to me that the passage telling the story of the gunboat on Laguna Caceres and its sinking by the Camposettas owes something to my reading of historical accounts of the First World War Battle of Lake Tanganyika, later dramatised by CS Forester in his novel The African Queen.

This milieu has given me the opportunity to try all sorts of (to me) new things in the context of a novel and the adventure continues.

The Author February 2021

Modern unicorns part two: Nuclear Fusion

By C Stevens | 14th January 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

It’s a truism that nearly all the news about real life is bad these days. As if to compensate, the media seem to be turning in desperation to increasingly speculative subject matter, presumably in an attempt to boost morale and have something positive to talk about.

In my last post I referenced the stream of stories about Martian colonisation plans which currently infest the popular media. In this post I will cover the other ‘positive science news story’ that virtually every periodical (or at least, all the ones that feature in Google News) is now pushing, namely nuclear fusion.

The line that perennially introduces the subject of fusion power is that it is ‘thirty years away’, in fact it has been thirty years away for the whole of my adult life. It has also been the subject of constant reinterpretation and misinformation, a prime example being the fallacies perpetrated by the advocates of so-called cold fusion in the late 1980’s. Fusion has a tendency to lie low for decades, but like Dracula rising from his grave, will always return when least expected, or wanted.

One of those times is now…

The current attempts to develop nuclear fusion as a ‘reliable power source’, are characterised by the following; on the one hand, vast amounts of money spent by Governments who really ought to know better, building huge white elephant projects that suck in huge amounts of energy (as well as cash), without giving anything back. On the other, lone ‘geniuses’ working small-scale projects in obscure research institutions, making the same sort of extravagant claims as the proponents of cold fusion. The result is always the same; at best, fusion that lasts for nanoseconds and no prospect of anything approaching commercially-viable electricity generation.

One side side of me (the Romantic side) hopes that I’m wrong and one these lone geniuses will get it right, the rational side knows this a chimera, and the lone geniuses are in fact the modern equivalent of Medieval alchemists, doomed to spend their lives trying to transmute their base metal into gold.

The fact that any of this gets house room, let alone endless column inches promoting highly-speculative claims, tells us rather more about our current society than the credibility of the fusion lobby.

It tells us we have an obsession with the notion of genius, and of genius (sic) solutions. These are often promoted as hacks (or tricks), i.e. shortcuts that will enable us to solve difficult and intractable problems. As such, they appeal strongly to generations with limited patience and rather short attention spans.

Even a cursory reading of history tells us that these sorts of attitudes have prevailed in the past, usually in times of rapid technological change (the 1880’s and 90’s spring to mind), when even the highly-educated begin to lose track of the giddying pace of change and start to see science as a source of magical solutions. This particular zeitgeist is, of course, ripe for exploitation by charlatans.

There are however, underlying all of this, some even more fundamental notions:

1, that more tech is the solution to everything

2, that technology is always the solution to existing problems, never the cause of fresh ones

3, that endless economic growth is both possible and desirable

Recent history gives the lie to the first two; one only has to look at the intractable problem of storing the by-products of nuclear fission, waste that will remain deadly for thousands of years; at the non-biodegradable plastics filling our oceans; and to the dangerous climate change being unleashed by releasing millions of years of stored carbon through the burning of oil and gas.

The fallacies inherent in the last statement are nicely illustrated by the recent claim that ‘a population of trillions can be supported off-world by exploiting the resources of the Asteroid Belt!’

When it comes down to it, this guff is ideological and quasi-religious; advocated by people who propose spreading the Abrahamic notions of the Old Testament (‘…thou shalt have dominion over the Earth’, etc) throughout our Solar System and beyond.

As, like a plague of technological locusts, we seek to consume and destroy everything within our reach.

The Author January 2021

Modern unicorns part one: Martian Colonisation

By C Stevens | 5th January 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

Have you noticed how the Tech Billionaires (aka the Robber Barons de nos jours) have adopted some of the presentational strategies of the New Right Populists? Specifically, they overpromise, an example being SpaceX’s recent assertion that they will have a Martian colony (or at least the groundwork for such a thing) in place by 2024!

Further examination of other less hi-profile pronouncements reveals that the true timetable is sometime in the 2030’s, but the high-profile announcement has done its job by creating a buzz around the whole endeavour, attracting the attention of tabloid and social media, and making said Tech Billionaire look potent and sexy.

We may well be closer to having the technical capability for sending this kind of probe to Mars, however I did read that the sheer mass of the thing means that getting into orbit, and off to the Red Planet with the necessary velocity, is currently not possible.

Furthermore, the real problems come later: achieving re-entry for such a large vehicle (even though we’re only talking about a lander) through the virtually non-existent Martian atmosphere will be Hellishly-difficult. Remember, at least half of Martian landings of unmanned vehicles have been unsuccessful, we only recall the successes. Splattering a probe across the Martian landscape may be unfortunate if it’s unmanned, but if it contains 4-6 brave astro/cosmonauts, the fallout will be much more serious.

But the first challenging issue will be getting those 4-6 brave astronauts there alive and in any fit condition to do useful work. It takes (with current technology) six months to get to Mars, that’s six months in microgravity which is really harmful to human physiology, six months confined in a space no bigger than a long-wheelbase Ford Transit van, exposed to potentially deadly radiation (not just solar flares which are a low probability risk, but cosmic rays which are ever present!).

It’s estimated that the astronauts will receive 70% of their safe lifetime dosage just getting to Mars, not to mention all the other health problems they will arrive in Martian orbit with, and then they’ve got re-entry to face!

I recently read this online article with an accompanying promotional video about an award-winning design for a Martian city, cunningly cut into the walls of a suitable cliff, so that the human (and animal) inhabitants, and the various trees and shrubs, have access to Martian daylight, while being protected by the rock above them from all that nasty U/V radiation and pesky cosmic rays.

The settlement looked very swish, but the article glossed-over the whole issue of who’s going to construct it. Now in my SF saga, Lights in the sky, the Alpha Probe has all those convenient self-aware humanoid robots to do the heavy lifting, and Alpha 5 is a considerably less hostile analogue of the Red Planet. But building this putative Martian city will require the early colonists to leave the sanctuary of the subarean caverns and be out on the Martian surface. Now the Martian surface is a very hostile environment; the atmosphere is tenuous at best, contains no oxygen (and virtually no water vapour), the place is cold, and the thin atmosphere and lack of a magnetic field means anything (or anybody) out there is bombarded by harmful radiation. So human operators, directing and operating the digging and construction equipment, will be at considerable risk and only able to work for short periods of time.

As I read through the article, I clocked some of the small print. The people living in this city of the future would be obliged to pay 300,000 Euros for a one-way ticket to Mars, and would then need to give 60-80% of their time (during their waking hours, presumably) working for the colony.

I thought about it and I realised there’s a word for this, and a colonial precedent; it’s called indentured servitude, and it was used by the British in Jamaica and Virginia to recruit a workforce for their sugar and tobacco plantations. It worked like this; get a load of destitute people from England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales (not hard to find in seventeenth century Britain) and pack them off to the West Indies or to Virginia on twenty year contracts. Historical sidebar: this practice is the reason there are Welsh-speaking people in Jamaica to this day.

But this model, while initially effective, only really worked in the short term. Two things did for it:

much of the enormous profit made from sugar and tobacco was reinvested back in Britain, and the resultant industrial revolution provided enough work for the landless and destitute former peasants, who no longer had to risk twenty years in a mosquito-ridden Hellhole to avoid starvation.
word had got back from the New World about how bad conditions actually were, and how surviving five years was good going, while seeing out all twenty of your indenture highly unlikely.

The next was entirely predictable in its awfulness; replace the reluctant indentured servant with African slaves who had no choice. I wonder who the Tech Billionaires will turn to when their supply of willing colonists dries up?

The Author January 2021

Happy Xmas (Hope is Over)

By C Stevens | 21st December 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

The end of the worst year I can remember (both personally and in general) fast approaches. The end of the old year is traditionally a time for reflection, for the learning of lessons and for resolutions to do better in the future. Resolution one is surely never ever to put our trust in the reassuring falsehoods of any politician described as a populist. The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is a step in the right direction but many traps, both those deliberately left and some that are entirely incidental, await the new administration, and then there’s the rest of the psychopathic crew…

The other really good thing about the past year has been the emergence (and my discovery) of the wonderful Phoebe Bridgers, a singer/songwriter who is absolutely plugged into the zeitgeist and somehow manages to confront the approach of the apocalypse with her winning Cheshire cat grin firmly in place. So resolution two is surely to cherish all the creative arts, rather than taking them (and the artists that produce them) for granted. Lockdown has given us a scary glimpse at what life could be like without them.

Set against the above, is the stubborn and suicidal course of action being pursued by the present UK Government, a ship of fools commanded by that ultimate in lazy, self-indulgent, indecisive and ignorant populists. You all know who I’m talking about! The ship of state is about to hit the rocks (judging by recent headlines this has already happened), as events unfold with the appalling inevitability of a slow-motion car crash.

In past blogs I have referenced the rise of unreason in contemporary life, harmless in most contexts but not so much when it begins to compromise public health or dictate voting intentions. The apparent loyalty shown by the majority of the Republican legislators to the current incumbent is a case in point. Partly this is out of fear of the electoral consequences of angering his fan base, but it’s also a conscious decision to exploit irrational beliefs for political advantage. As a recent article in one of the UK broadsheets pointed out, when the rational start to make use of irrationality in their political arguments alarm bells should start ringing; and it’s not just American politicians who are guilty of this, as it is (naturally) the stock in trade of the Brexit lobby in domestic politics.

This is another example of a djinn that once out of the bottle may prove next to impossible to get back in. The Brexiteers and the GOP legislators probably regard themselves (in some sense) as being revolutionaries (draining the swamp, or freeing Albion from the clutches of the European superstate etc etc), but it’s a truism that revolutions have a tendency to eat their children, and once irrationality takes hold it can become self-sustaining.

In the light of the above it seems almost irrelevant to announce that I have finally completed the seventh volume of Lights in the sky, which goes by the catchy title of …when you wish upon a star, but in dark times all creativity and any means of escape from grim realities is to be treasured.

In 1971 John Lennon was optimistic enough to wish for an end to war itself; we are not so hopeful (or possibly no longer so naive), but in the current climate within perfidious Albion it can sometimes appear that we have brought an end to hope…

The Author December 2020

I’d rather write a ‘cosy catastrophe!’

By C Stevens | 7th May 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental nineteen: I’d rather write a ‘cosy catastrophe!’
I finished my last post by asserting that irrationality is a virus, a contagion that spreads via the internet; nothing that I have read, seen or accessed online in the last month has dissuaded me from this view! What do Isis, and INCEL have in common? Well, they’re examples of amoral, anti-social lunatics who would previously have remained isolated, but have now formed online ‘communities’ with devastating results! Reinforcing and justifying each others appalling attitudes and fostering a culture of thwarted entitlement!

I recently viewed an art exhibition, part of which featured posters of tech billionaires talking with chilling smugness about the virtual ‘village squares’ their technologies had made possible. Now the village square (and the town hall meeting) have a cherished place in English and American folklore, but one has to remember that Salem was a small town! At least the madness there was confined to one place, via the internet it can grow and infect others…

So, when viewing this exhibition, Pandora’s box and the Law of Unintended Consequences came to mind. I’ve realised that what I’m actually writing in the Great Flood, and in Lights in the Sky generally, is (in the best traditions of English science fiction) a ‘cosy catastrophe’ which provides comforting escapism from the ‘real’ twenty first century which sometimes seems too terrible to contemplate!

On that cheery note

Stephen Clare May 2018

The midway point

By C Stevens | 5th April 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental eighteen: The midway point
I’m now roughly halfway through writing The Great Flood, having completed eleven chapters and one hundred and fifty pages. Following the convention I’ve established, each of my novels has twenty two chapters, although the actual length of each book has varied! Twenty two is the typical number of episodes in a season of US television drama (science fiction or otherwise), which is the source of the convention. All of my books are written in a format that would facilitate adaptation for this medium.

My general conclusion having reached this point is that I haven’t paid sufficient attention in my fictional future society to the virtual world and the tendency of a growing number of people to want to take refuge within it, pace Ready Player One and similar works. This is something I will need to address in part two of the book.

I have already identified which of the characters will be missing their virtual existence the most. Through her story I’ll explore the phenomenon, its seductions and its limitations, which (not unnaturally) have been brought home to her by the disaster.

At this point I would normally be banging on about the march of authoritarianism in modern politics, but I’ve decided to give it a rest for the moment. Of far more interest is the extremely partisan nature of modern identity politics, something which social media have exacerbated. This divides us as a species and is not good!

That social media is a two-edged sword is becoming more apparent by the day; as well dividing us into (mutually antagonistic!) tribes, it concedes far too much power and control over our lives to very rich men and they are usually men!) and unaccountable corporations! The Robber Barons of the late-nineteenth century would have envied the nabobs of Silicon Valley! Large tech corporations have gained (by a combination of stealth and flattery!) access to all of our lives and could use it against us, if they saw fit. They already exploit it for personal and corporate gain, something which has become apparent over the past few days!

Even more worrying is the extreme subjectivity inherent in social media’s hold over the dissemination of ‘news’ to huge numbers of people; this destabilises the very notion of objectivity, and thus of responsible independent journalism. That this is an existential threat to the notion of liberal democracy is also self-evident!

Rather naively, I had thought that future authoritarian regimes would make use of CGI (once it had become indistinguishable from real life!), and literally rewrite history! But the actual use of modern technology by authoritarian groups has been far more subtle.

These developments would appear to pose almost as much of a threat to our way of life (and possibly our continued existence as a species) as climate change, environmental degradation, and resource depletion, the threats I have previously identified and highlighted in my fictional world. My current novel needs to address this, and will do so in part two.

But it’s not just social media; the pioneers of our online world were by and large idealists, Tim Berners-Lee literally gave his idea of a world-wide web to all of us, free of charge, and this idealism is also reflected in things like Wikipedia and Linux! But the downside of all this had been the ready availability of so much information and free content! This has had profound economic, political, social, and psychological results, the consequences of which are only just beginning to become apparent!

If I wanted to sum up all of the above in one pithy phrase I would say that irrationality has become a contagion and it spreads via the internet!

Stephen Clare April 2018

More ‘interesting times!’

By C Stevens | 17th March 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental seventeen: More ‘interesting times!’
I’m now more than one hundred pages into writing The Great Flood, or roughly a third of the way through. I feel like I’m occupying two time zones simultaneously, experiencing the present while feeling it feed into my fictional future. Make that presumably and hopefully fictional! But I’m not so sure about this; from the standpoint of March 2018, the abiding feeling is of racing towards an unseen precipice.

I am reading the news online obsessively. To the point where I acknowledge that it’s no longer healthy. But this is a malign addiction (shared by many of us!) that I can’t shake! You know it’s only going to upset, enrage and alarm you, but you can’t stop!

I can’t remember the precise stories, but reading Google news last week I came to the conclusion that the world had actually gone mad! That irrationality has finally triumphed and reason has reluctantly left the battlefield! Not a difficult conclusion to come to when Russian exiles are being murdered on the streets of the United Kingdom with apparent impunity, and the so-called ‘Government’ appears powerless to do anything!

Over the pond Trump boasts openly about the lies he tells to other world leaders (for Christ’s sake!), adding these to the ones he tells routinely to the American people! Now I wasn’t a great fan of Ronald Reagan or either President Bush, but I thought at least that they were men of honour! We’ll draw a veil over Richard Nixon…

Even more worryingly the insidious rise of the far-right continues around the globe!

The Great Flood is set in the world that has been produced by these tendencies. So far the story has focussed on climate change and the dramatic consequences of this, but I feel that in the rest of the novel I need to up my game and dramatise the political, social, economic, and cultural changes more forcefully than I have thus far. The first draft is really about getting the story down (…the framework, if you like!), introducing and developing the characters by writing effective dialogue…

The next task is introduce depth into the prose by developing and manifesting the underlying themes, using symbolism, metaphor et al!

My themes are written out (although new ones may emerge!), I now need to weave them more fully into the fabric of the novel…

On that note…

Future history

By C Stevens | 31st January 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental sixteen: Future history
My plan to write a series of short stories filling the background of the Lights in the sky universe went awry (after three stories), when one of the stories decided to turn itself into a novel!

So I’m now writing my sixth piece of extended fiction with the current title The Great Flood. If this sounds like historical fiction then that’s the point; writing about a putative future as if it were history, a common approach in science fiction!

As ever the intention is to write something that will appeal to the general reader, to a mainstream readership, in fact!

We’re in recognisable world (a possible criticism is that it’s a bit too like our own!). I think this is inevitable and a commonplace in fictional works set in a supposed future! I’m not futurologist, nor do I have clairvoyant powers! Most futuristic fiction reaches an accommodation with its audience… It’s different from the present day, but not too different! This provides reference points for the reader…

The trick would appear to be to introduce a number of technological, cultural, and social changes while maintaining a recognisable milieu…

This is complicated in the current times by the sheer pace of technological and related social and cultural transformations, but nothing is worse than supposed future world filled with supposed ‘developments’ which prove laughably wide of the mark (personal jetpacks and flying cars anybody!).

Science fiction reflects the time that it is written, anyway; and mine reflects a suspicion of and an apprehension with unchecked technological advance and economic change which is a part of the current zeitgeist! Obviously, another strand within the same zeitgeist welcomes this change with open arms…

This schism forms part of the ideological and cultural wars that characterise our times. This is very much a work in progress and it will change, as I modify and customise the text through the writing and editing process…

As ‘historical’ fiction the past is very much present in the world of the novel, manifesting both in the preoccupations of the main characters, and in the thematic elements and symbolism I intend to employ…

Stephen Clare January 2018

Goodbye and good riddance!

By C Stevens | 31st December 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental fifteen: Goodbye and good riddance!
I find it difficult to remember a year that I’ve wanted to see the back of more than 2017, although 2018’s not looking too promising!

This year we’ve had the full horror of Donald Trump’s populism unleashed on the world, and the full implications of Brexit (as well as the sheer ineptitude of the current government!), have become clearer by the day…

Add to that the now widely accepted belief that the environmental cataclysm and the accompanying mass extinction event are underway and that there’s nothing we can do about it! Apologists are even now saying that this the way of the world and we should embrace the natural order of thing;, I would like to point out to these people that the species likely to disappear includes our own! Oh and President Trump thinks that some good old Global Warming would be good for his country! Maybe he should tell that to Californians…

Signs of optimism for next year include the possibility of a Democrat majority after the US midterms followed in short order by Trump’s impeachment, and a snap General Election that sweeps away the Maybot, and leads (at the very least) to more rational variety of Brexit… But I’m not convinced!

But hey, Birmingham’s got the 2022 Commonwealth Games!

My response to all this has been to take refuge once more in my fictional futures; Lights in the sky is finished, but Tales of the Collapse is well under way…

So far this consists of four short stories, with another one, The Great Flood, well underway!

Worrying, this last piece seems to want to grow beyond a mere short story and is threatening to become a novella (or maybe even a novel!)…

Happy New Year

C.E. Stevens December 2017

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