Blog – Page 3 – Lights In The Sky

A new and terrible world

By C. E. Stevens | 8th May 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

A few days ago a friend of mine sent me an image of a notice in a bookshop which had (presumably) been altered to read, Please note: the post apocalyptical [sic] fiction section has been moved to Current Affairs. I replied to her as follows: Unfortunately, my literary output has been somewhat prescient, sorry…
This brought home to me how much our lives and our country has been transformed in the month since my last post. I don’t recall the exact death toll as of April 6th, but consulting a linear graph of total deaths online reveals it to have been roughly 5,000. This is bad enough, but I’m sure that nobody (least of all the UK Government) anticipated that it would be more than 30,000 at the start of May, and that we would have the highest total in Europe, and second only to the United States worldwide. An article I read in today’s Guardian described the death of so many elderly care home residents as ‘a harvest’, and argued it was the result of Government’s short-lived policy of seeking herd immunity, which was undertaken (and then abandoned) without the necessary safeguarding measures being implemented to protect this vulnerable group. All of which suggests, if not actual callousness, a cavalier disregard for public safety, and will ensure that the Public Enquiry which is bound to follow will be keenly anticipated, if not by ministers in the present government.
It is not a comfortable experience to find that events and consequences that you had fondly imagined were confined to the pages of your latest novel have now turned up on the front pages of the newspapers and are suffusing daily life. All of which makes me more wary about actively seeking publication for this series, given that there are probably enough lunatics out there for whom the boundary between fiction and real life is sufficiently blurred for them to want to seek revenge against those who they somehow deem guilty of bringing the apocalypse about by anticipating it. If people can attack mobile phone masts, then what price a poor old novelist.
And while I did not reference infectious disease as one of the drivers of my literary apocalypse, preferring the rather more visual combination of fire, flood and civil disorder, neither did Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
In my defence, I will say that my breakdown of civilization does eventually lead to a kinder and more rational world, not that this would be of any consolation to the paper billions I consign to a brutal and premature death.
Anyway, it is what it is…
My speculations were based on future threats to our biosphere and our civilization set out by a whole host of scientists and cultural commentators, and set within a long literary tradition. It’s rather unfortunate that at least one of them has chosen to arrive rather sooner than anyone anticipated.
Lights in the sky continues to take shape, blissfully unaware that life has now decided to imitate art. I’ve decided to just write until I finish the story, which may mean a final novel approaching eight hundred pages, which I would then divide into two volumes.
Which all leads to the inevitable question; which comes first? The end of the series or the end of the world?
On that cheery note…
The Author May 2020

The Rise of Unreason revisited

By C. E. Stevens | 6th April 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Back in less alarming times, I wrote a blog entry entitled The Rise of Unreason derived from a minor key blues song I wrote back in the eighties. The blog entry (and later versions of the song) referenced the rise of irrational belief systems in contemporary culture, arguing that this tendency, reflected in the popularity of fundamentalist religious views, had now been augmented by irrational behaviour not linked to specific belief systems, but based purely on rumour and conspiracy theories spread online.
There was a time when these were relatively harmless; refusing to accept that NASA landed astronauts on the Moon, or believing that the World is flat, are (in practical terms) harmless eccentricities, and not something that threatens the well-being of society as a whole.
However, the campaign against vaccination which claims, without evidence, that vaccines are linked to autism is a different matter. It constitutes a threat to public health, which has allowed diseases that were under control (such as measles) to become prevalent again. It is also anachronistic and risible to even see this as an issue given the number of highly-talented people who lie on the autism spectrum. Of course, the proponents of these wacky ideas never let facts get in the way of their irrational beliefs.
I was interested to read that the latest unhinged theory, spreading like a virtual plague through cyberspace, namely the belief that 5G phone masts are spreading (or causing, take your pick) COVID-19, is linked to ideas promulgated by the anti-vaccination brigade. The attacks on supposed 5G masts that have followed are reminiscent of the waves of mass hysteria that characterised the late-Middle Ages (which is apt given we have our very own version of plague), and with a side order of Don Quixote, phone masts now standing in for windmills.
With the sort of doublethink that is beyond satire, these people are presumably using their mobile phones to coordinate their attacks on the very infrastructure that makes this possible. Presumably, once a vaccine finally does become, these people will refuse to take it.
Words sometimes fail me

Life during wartime

By C. E. Stevens | 18th March 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

There’s a particular art rock song from the late nineteen seventies that’s now running through my brain, it’s insistent, driving sub-disco beat has become (pro tem) the soundtrack to my existence. It’s called Life During Wartime and was recorded by the Talking Heads in 1979; going on YouTube I notice a number of other people have already made the connexion. And it is entirely appropriate because this is a war, but against an unseen enemy, one that hides in plain sight and infiltrates all of our lives by stealth, and the song’s mood of incipient paranoia speaks perfectly to our times.
I notice that every page I visit online features automated adverts for events that have been cancelled, shops that will soon close, products that no-one will be buying in the near future.
They now seem (to me) to be relics of a time that has passed, and at some point in the future they will just cease…
OK, we don’t know how this is going to play out, however, the assumptions made by Governments, business and national and international institutions are constantly being undermined by events and it seems certain that the World that emerges will not be the one we have now.
In that case, we are really entering a period of mourning for the World as it was and the lives we once had…
It occurs to me that my generation (i.e. the baby boomers) and the generations that have followed, have never really been tested, unlike our parents’ generation who had to live through the Second World War and an existential threat to our way of life (if not our very existence).
So this (finally) is our test, and we need to rise to the challenge…
The Author March 2020

The strange death of Liberal Democracy

By C. E. Stevens | 1st March 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

It occurs to me that there are a couple of possible criticisms of the Lights in the sky series, if we consider it purely as futurology. The most pertinent currently, is the lack of any evidence of (or reference to) infectious disease during the breakdown of civilisation to which (in the novels) I give the name ‘The Collapse’. I talk about fire and flood, I reference civil war, species extinction and resource depletion, and I describe mass migration, the breakdown of law and order and war between States. I also depict whole countries being lost to the waves, and I do say (or rather Marta Camacho does in the sixth novel, Maya) that the human population of the Earth drops to a third of pre-Collapse levels. But nowhere do I mention the role pandemics play in this process. Nor do I specifically mention famine.
I’m not alone in this, at least as far as disease is concerned. Neil Gaiman, in his television adaptation of the Good Omens (the novel he wrote with the late Terry Pratchett) has bumped Pestilence from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and replaced him with Pollution, a more ‘up-to-date’ Horsewoman. Recent events should now be persuading him of the error of his ways.
My abiding impression viewing this series was that even though it was set in 2018, it now appears to be part of the more distant past. In fact, a lot of contemporary culture is beginning to look distinctly like it’s on borrowed time. It all has a fin de siecle feel about it twenty years too late), with everyone desperately trying to have their fun, make their point, push their interest group, consume to the nth degree, before it all gets too late. Before our globalised world economy and related global culture start to come apart at the seams as nation states retreat behind their borders, trading blocs break up, political alliances fracture.
The pressures bringing this change about are many and various. Some are progressive, some are reactionary, but all speak to a truth that our current way of doing things is unsustainable. We cannot (physically at any rate) be citizens of the world for much longer, the environmental costs of the mass transport of people around the world are becoming too high. The idea that your food should be grown on the far side of the globe and your clothes made there also, is now palpably absurd. There is (I think) a curious sort of unanimity across political divides, with people who loathe, despise and refuse to debate with each other reaching startling similar conclusions by completely different routes.
The populist right appears to dismiss the notion that an environmental crisis is upon us. However, if you examine much of the content of right-leaning social media and the reactionary populist press, so much of the talk is about looming catastrophe, expressed in terms of out of control weather, imminent asteroid strikes, super volcanoes erupting etc etc. To me this all has the appearance of metaphor, a bizarre process of transference whereby the truth they all know in their hearts but dare not admit (i.e. that our civilisation is headed for a fall) cannot be completely suppressed and comes out in an attachment to fringe catastrophe theories.
Opposing shades of political opinion appear to be moving inexorably towards the notion of smaller political units and a less integrated global economy, with the liberal democracy that promoted globalisation in danger of being sidelined somewhere in the middle.
I mentioned that there were two possible criticisms; the second relates to timescale, as I have my Collapse happening near the end of the century, far enough away in time to not be immediately threatening. As I concluded earlier in this blog, I am (in the great tradition of English science fiction) basically writing a ‘cosy’ catastrophe.
However, it looks like Armageddon isn’t prepared to wait, and, unlike the world of Lights in the sky, there doesn’t appear to be a benign deus ex-machina waiting in the wings to save us…

The Author March 2020

Life imitating art

By C. E. Stevens | 6th February 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

The fourth episode of Neil Gaiman’s television adaptation of the novel he wrote with the late Terry Pratchett, Good Omens. is appropriate, if hardly welcome, given that Good Omens is about the events leading up to the End of Days. It’s important to point out that not having seen the remainder of the series, nor read the book, I have no idea of the fictional outcome.
The form that Armageddon would take is only to be guessed at, but given that we face a whole suite of potential threats; everything from runaway climate change, pandemics, potential asteroids strikes, to the re-awakening of dormant super volcanoes (plus the old standby of nuclear annihilation), there would appear to be a lot of potential candidates.
Gaiman and Pratchett’s decision to replace one of Four Horseman, Pestilence, with Pollution, now comes across as complacent in current circumstances, an unnecessary nod to currently fashionable preoccupations, and lacking apocalyptic poetry of the original. There is also an element of Hubris, infectious diseases never really go away, they bide their time, waiting for an opportunity. The ease of travel in our interconnected world provides them with the opportunity to spread with frightening rapidity, and any form of social breakdown weakens the capacity of a population to resist.
Now, it’s important to point out that (unsurprisingly) I do not believe in the literal truth of the Bible. However, I do regard it as an important work of literature which can be seen as a series of metaphors and parables.
Whether metaphor in this case is a form of prophecy, I leave it for you to decide…
The Author February 2020

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

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