imaginative literature – Page 2

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

Blog entry supplemental fourteen: Symbolism and the unseen guiding hand

By C Stevens | 21st November 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

At many points during the writing of Lights in the sky I have thought I was being guided in some way; but before you reach for the straitjacket I’m not claiming divine revelation or anything along those lines. I am merely repeating the commonplace that a novel (and especially a series of novels) at some stage takes on a life of its own and starts to make its own demands. At this point the ‘author’ becomes its servant rather its master.

At many points during the four year writing period I have wondered where this or that idea came from, and marvelled that something I wrote should fit so perfectly with what had been written previously without me consciously aware of this.

A rational explanation would be that on an unconscious level I knew what was required and framed my prose accordingly; naturally as a Romantic I prefer a more mystical explanation.

Anyway, the reason I’m banging on about this now is that, during one of many revisions of the text, I decided to investigate the symbolism lying behind the references to the natural world that pepper the series. Specifically, I looked up the symbolic meanings of hummingbirds, hibiscus blooms, macaws, monkeys, and jaguars.

I’ll confess I did look up the symbolic meaning of dolphins when I decided that one would play a significant role in the journey of my protagonist, Tata. I was heartened to learn that in Greek Mythology the dolphin carries the spirits of the dead to a new reality. Tata, of course, in symbolic terms dies and is reborn during her journey down the River on her raft, a point I make explicitly at the end of the chapter. It was therefore wholly appropriate that a dolphin should be her ferryman from one mode of being to another. But the point is, I didn’t know any of this (at least on a conscious level) when I made the decision to cast a river dolphin in this role.

I will confess that I did do a similar exercise when I researched the symbolic meanings of rivers, and this has influenced the text of The leftover girl, which (of course) has a journey up the Amazon River at its heart.

Thinking about this later, and noticing that similar references to the natural world recur in the four books, I decided to check out the symbolic meaning of these, and see how well I have done in choosing appropriate symbolic referents elsewhere in the text.

There are a number of references to hummingbirds and red hibiscus flowers dotted throughout the tetralogy, usually the two occurring together!

Hummingbirds represent (and I’m being selective here!), hope, eternity, continuity, and infinity among other things, which would appear to fit with the overall mood and philosophical thrust of the series.

In North America Hibiscus often symbolises the perfect wife or woman (so obviously I’m using it ironically here!), but in China its meaning is different, where it symbolises the fleeting nature of fame, beauty and personal glory! So no exact fit here, but I would argue all of these notions are aspects of the series!

Macaw is more promising territory as the Bororo people (who live close to where the action of The leftover girl takes place) believe they are reincarnated as macaws during the complex of transmigration of souls that forms part of their mythology. So, the right general area; interestingly macaws are seen by much of Amerindian culture as avatars of solar heavenly fire, in opposition to the jaguar which represents the chthonic fire of the underworld!

So, not inappropriate, and symbols which lead me to want to consider afresh the innate symbolic meanings contained within the novel.

Finally, the monkey nearly always represents the trickster, but can also symbolise a need to renew your affectionate ties with friends and relations; so, no real congruence there! Although, interestingly, in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the marmoset is referenced alongside the Brazilian jaguar!

There would seem to be an awful lot of lucky guesses on my part here! or maybe my unconsciousness knows what it’s doing, even if my conscious mind doesn’t!

Blog entry twenty five: …one door closes?

By C Stevens | 29th September 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

I’ve finished Lights in the sky…maybe…

As usual, I can’t go more than a couple of weeks without writing something, so I found myself writing a short story!

This is called (at the moment) Italian Dreams and it takes place in Venice… Now this is a Venice of the imagination, but I have visited the real place, but the last time was twenty years ago, at least…

This is my second short story (the other one, The North Gate being set in Devon!), and it may go out under my other imprimatur, Stephen Clare…except, the tale, anticipating as it does ecological disaster, could be fitted into the Lights in the sky universe…

I haven’t decided, but I know there’s a trap here! Good writers have in the past succumbed to trying to shoehorn everything they write into one Grand Design (Isaac Asimov is the example that springs to mind), so I may keep this one separate…

Anyway, it’s good to write something that is unarguably mainstream fiction…

The main source material for the story is a recurring dream I had for many years, but I also make use of the (ample) pre-existing sources contained in film and literature concerned with the place…

But LITS is not going without a fight! I’ve conceived a series of short stories (provisionally called Tales from the Collapse), that will fill in the some the gaps left by the main narrative, and relate the histories of many of the minor characters…

First up (assuming Italian Dreams stays separate), is a short story that could well become a novella about Helen Choi’s creation, Clara, the first of the self-aware AI units…

C.E. Stevens September 2017

Blog entry supplemental twelve: New Earth and other fables

By C Stevens | 16th September 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

I eventually got round to watching The Search for a New Earth…

Hearteningly I had anticipated most of the issues and challenges outlined in the programme in my similarly-themed tetralogy Lights in the Sky…

What I hadn’t anticipated were: plasma rockets as a means of space propulsion rather more efficient than chemical rockets (I may substitute these in the relevant chapter, as it would only be a modest change), Proxima b as the Earth-like planetary destination, and artificially-induced hibernation as a means of dealing with the length of time needed to traverse the distance between here and the Centauran system…

But overall, not bad!

I enjoyed the programme (…at least at first!), but after a while it began to strain credulity, featuring as it did; postage stamp-sized space probes capable of reaching another star system (and beaming back data!), hibernating bears immune to radiation sickness, and hibernation-inducing serum obtained from hamsters, for Christ’s sake! And I began to wonder if the whole thing wasn’t some kind of late April Fool’s joke! Then I remembered the original Tomorrow’s World (my favourite television programme growing up!), anchored as it was by overly-enthusiastic, manically-grinning presenters, and showcasing (on a weekly basis) ground-breaking technological developments that were never heard of again!

But seriously folks, there were a couple of important issues that weren’t raised by the programme. Firstly, any manned mission to Proxima b would appear to be asking the putative crew members to spend twenty years of their lives in hibernation, time they would presumably never get back! The question of whether being in hibernation would slow the ageing process was never discussed, but it doesn’t seem to do so in the case of bears (or indeed, hamsters!).

Secondly, we have the elephant in the room! The Proxima expedition (like my Alpha Mission!), would do nothing for the billions left back on Earth, presumably to die miserably in the impending ecological catastrophe! Eventually, a significant number of those billions would realise this and start to seriously oppose these plans, asking (quite reasonably) why the effort and the (billions of) dollars going into an expedition to the stars aren’t being spent sorting out the problems here on Earth!

I was also re-assured by the rather precarious prospect offered to any settlement on the planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, with its one face permanently turned towards its primary (and being baked by its rays), while the other remains in deep freeze, and with only a thin strip of supposedly habitable planet between the two! I decided that, on reflection, I much preferred my world, Alpha 5, as the fictional destination for my explorers cum colonists…

Imaginary worlds need to be better than the one we live in, or why else would we invent them?

C.E. Stevens September 2017

Blog entry twenty four: The end of the road

By C Stevens | 6th September 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

I’ve finished Lights in the sky…

I’ll qualify that; I’ve finished the final novel in the series, the leftover girl, which (counterintuitively), is the first chronologically in the series. This is not to say that I’ll never return to the world of Alpha 5, I’ve left some loose ends and there are still stories to tell, but the main narrative is finished! It’s taken me four (or possibly five) years of living at least partially in a world of my own creation. The series covers a period of two centuries from the birth of Helen Choi right through to the death of last of the twins on Alpha 5…

So how do I feel?

Well, empty, grieving, directionless etc etc…

This is the first time that I haven’t had anything to write in nearly a year…

It’s like a bereavement, or possibly like the empty nest syndrome you get when your children finally leave home; the novels are like my children!

So how do I deal with this?

By doing the (to me) drudgery of promoting the series. I have a list of 15+ agents plus a number of independent publishers (you have been warned!). And I’m now looking to sharpen up my (rather blunt) act by making my website more visible and marketing my writing more effectively via social media (even!).

By writing something else!

Another volume of LITS (possible, but the safe option, and there’s always the danger of diminishing returns!)
By starting a completely new project (scary!)
By continuing the ‘Simon’ series (lacking enthusiasm for this at the the mo’, and compared to LITS it’s a teensy bit prosaic!)

So a bit of thinking to do, but plenty to get on with…

’til next time…

Blog entry supplemental eleven: farewell Brian Aldiss

By C Stevens | 29th August 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Rather presumptuously, about two years ago I contacted the great man via his website suggesting that he might be able to help me, and directing him to the Lights in the sky opener, serialised on this website. I acknowledged my debt to him and the role Billion Year Spree played in my autodidactic study of imaginative literature, leading eventually to my writing it!

Whether he ever got to read the message I don’t know, but somehow I doubt it, assuming it to have been intercepted by one of the gatekeepers supervising his website, but I never received an answer…

Like a lot of SF fans of my generation I came to Brian Aldiss through the short story collection Space, Time and Nathaniel, before moving on, to The Dark Light Years, Cryptozoic, and eventually Hothouse! Aldiss was clearly a better writer (in purely literary terms), than my other favourite of the period, Philip K Dick (as he would prove with the incomparable Helliconia Trilogy), but stylistically he now seems to belong to another age. The films made from his stories weren’t that successful and are now never shown (with sole exception of A.I., made from his short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long), and fit much less well with the anxiety-ridden postmodernist world we find ourselves in , a milieu that Dick inhabits perfectly, and appeared to anticipate!

His SF scholarship tried (unsuccessfully) to force the literary world to take the form seriously, but in vain, and Billion (later Trillion) Year Spree’s only real fault is that it contains no appreciation of his own work!

R.I.P. then, Brian…

C.E. Stevens August 2017

Blog entry supplemental ten: Life in the Alpha system and other implausibilities

By C Stevens | 11th August 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Apologies for taking an absolute age to blog again… I have been busy writing, honestly; and the fourth novel of the Lights in the sky series, The leftover girl is nearly complete. One more chapter (the 22nd) needs to be written, with the working title, Kansas.

The chapter will bring my protagonist Tata to the end of her quest and will (hopefully) tie up most of the loose plot ends into a nice bundle… However, I’ve decided to leave some things unexplained about the nature of the new community our heroine finds herself in; firstly, because I haven’t decided how much I want to reveal (or indeed if it is all revealable!), and secondly, because it gives room for a sequel! There are a number of new developments in this chapter that would merit further investigation, and (you guessed it!), I can’t bear to leave the world of LITS just yet!

The presenting reason for this blog entry is again something I picked up from the scientific press, namely the recent discovery of two new exoplanets orbiting Tau Ceti, the second nearest Earth-like star to our own…

Both of these exoplanets (designated Tau Ceti e and f), life just within the habitable zone that surrounds their star (the so-called Goldilocks zone where liquid water is a possibility). It’s important to point out that the likelihood of life having got a foothold on either is fairly remote, as the nearer planet (e) would probably be too hot, and the one further out (f), rather too cold! Add to that the fact that they both lie within the massive debris disc that surrounds Tau Ceti, and this would rather be like Earth being at the heart of Sol’s Asteroid Belt, and subject to constant bombardment from asteroids, comets etc…

Nevertheless, it got me thinking and I decided to revisit the various articles on Alpha Centauri and recheck my facts! The results were encouraging. As I mentioned earlier, Proxima Centauri (sometimes referred to Alpha Centauri C!), has recently been identified as possessing a possible candidate for the fabled Earth-like planet! Had I been in possession of this information when I started the series I would probably have made Prox the location of my world. However Alpha Centauri A and B aren’t out of the race just yet! Theoretically, either or both could harbour the elusive new Earth, although nothing has been found as yet!

The main stumbling block to this appears to be the fact that the two stars are in a binary relationship, and the resultant tidal gravitational forces would have made the accretion of the mass of debris needed form a planet orbiting either of them very difficult (but not impossible!).

However (in my defense) I’d like to stress that Lights in the sky is a work of fiction, and my Alpha system is an imaginary realm. It is also worth pointing out that later in the series there are revelations that account for differences between the Alpha system of the series, and the one that we see in the night sky!

The other heartening thing I gleaned from the articles that I read was confirmation that the development of light sail propulsion systems (boosted initially by lasers, as in my series), would bring the travel time between systems down to decades rather than millennia…

Until next time

CE Stevens August 2017

Blog entry supplemental nine: the wheel is turning

By C Stevens | 27th June 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Apologies for not blogging for a while; but I’ve been away, in America, in fact! This was a road trip I took with my mate, Rob… We both play music and we’ve played together in various bands for the past twenty years; so this was a musical odyssey!

We flew to Chicago and proceeded south, mainly (but not exclusively) following the path of the Mississippi… I did the driving (to St Louis, Missouri, Nashville, Memphis, Natchez, Mississippi, ending up in New Orleans); the total distance is not far short of 1500 miles and I did that in nine days, driving on alternate days…

So what’s this got to do with SF and the Lights in the sky series, I hear you ask? Well, I’m getting to that!

The trip was a chance not only to visit and pay homage to old musical heroes and discover new ones (Rhiannon Giddens and Gary Clark jr. at the Chicago Blues Festival were particularly memorable!), but also a chance to get away from my life; away from the writing and away from my claustrophobic little island!

I completed part two of The Leftover Girl, just prior to leaving and I’m thus between two thirds and the three-quarters of the way through the book. The first two sections are called The Road, and …to Hell, and the final part will be called …paved with good intentions, so you probably get the drift…

Time away from a work-in-progress is important because it helps give you perspective, vital for a writer. I re-read the section I’d just completed on my return in preparation for starting on the final leg of the literary journey; and I realised something that, although obvious, just hadn’t occurred to me in the rush to complete part two of the book before my departure. The revelation is that the second character in my novel, Dr (later Professor) Helen Choi, ends her life in despair; concluding that she has been in error, pursuing false scientific goals and denying her essential nature. She has lived her life in maya, the world of illusion, effectively denying her own spirituality… She dies hoping that when she meets her husband (‘…in whichever version of the afterlife she is bound’), he will find it in his heart to forgive her…

The second conclusion I came to (the start of this came while watching the aforementioned artists in Millennium Park, Chicago), was that after three terrible years things are finally moving in our favour once more… Chicago Blues was important because I was disillusioned with music (which for a songwriter is my own version of despair!).

A bit of context is needed here! For those of you unfamiliar with the form, blues festivals in the UK consist of a few hundred (mostly) blokes my age or older, standing ‘round drinking real ale and watching acts even more ancient than they are!

Chicago was different; the first thing we saw (the Blues Village stage), was just like UK blues festivals, and we nearly left at this point! But I looked at the flyer and saw that Rhiannon Giddens (for Christ’s sake!), was performing on the main stage and she was just about to start! For those of you who don’t about her she’s immensely talented as a writer and performer, utterly beautiful, from North Carolina (my favourite out of the twenty seven states of the Union I have visited!), and the possessor of the best voice God ever gave a woman!

We moved to the fantastic open-air auditorium in Millennium Park (think Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao!), and were presented with at least twenty thousand people in the open air-bowl that forms the arena! And these people weren’t old gits like me and Rob, they were young people, of all races, who love music that most young people in my country wouldn’t be seen dead grooving to… The reaction to Rhiannon Giddens was ecstatic enough, but that was nothing compared to the welcome they gave to Gary Clark jr, the new Jimi Hendrix, and someone I hadn’t even heard of !

Not only did this restore my faith in music, but I realised that things in general are changing! It’s not just music; Jeremy Corbyn’s popularity with young people in the UK (as evidenced by his reception at Glastonbury!), the totally unexpected election result, the retreat of Fascistic populism everywhere etc etc

The wheel is indeed turning; favouring authenticity rather than artifice; art rather than commerce; individual expression rather than Simon Cowell-mentored posing; idealism rather than self-interest!

Finally, we seem to be throwing off the twin dead hands of Postmodernist ‘irony’ and neoclassical economics, and discarding the appalling cynicism they engendered…and it occurs to me that this can only be good for me personally, because the type of fiction I write may even come back into fashion…

I talked about the zeitgeist in a previous post; well, I think its just shifted…

C.E. Stevens June 2017

Blog entry supplemental seven: …if we had but world enough and time

By C Stevens | 24th April 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

One of the principal attractions (to me) of writing science fiction is that you get to create your own world. This even has a technical term (it’s called world building!), and formed part of the syllabus of the one day course is writing SF that I did three years ago.
Of course, any form of creative writing involves a bit of this, but with mainstream fiction you’ve got much more to go on! SF and Fantasy require much more creativity in this regard as you’re often starting from scratch. This has its own perils; fantasy and sword and sorcery novels in particular tend to suffer from a plethora of daft (sometimes faintly ludicrous) names for things, people, beasts, countries, worlds etc etc.
To avoid this I’ve tried to ground my narrative with a greater sense of realism by writing the near (and hopefully horribly plausible) future. It’s really an alternative history (currently a popular genre, with the success of Amazon Studio’s television adaptation of Philip K Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle), but this is future history rather an alternative past!
As I’ve said, this notion is extremely seductive as you get to play God, but also extremely satisfying and comforting as you create a world that you, the author, can escape to. And Lord knows we need that at the moment!
Mainstream critics (and even some authors) can be extremely disparaging about speculative fiction of all kinds; but this is essentially grounded in ignorance and a rather sniffy attitude towards genre fiction in general!
Any decent SF (or Fantasy) novel will contain all the characterisation, narrative experimentation, and philosophical speculation of a comparable mainstream novel, but in addition will require the creation of a convincing world, right down to the last detail! This is very complex and challenging and some of our (so-called) critics should give it a try!
One of the most challenging aspects is the so-called timeline (i.e. keeping all your ducks in a row temporally!), and the foregoing diatribe serves to introduce a new feature coming soon to the Lights in the Sky site; the Alpha Mission timeline, which will soon be added by my good friend Rob Tyler.
CE Stevens April 2017

Blog entry supplemental six: The leftover girl

By C Stevens | 3rd February 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

As I’m now more than one hundred pages into the prequel to Lights in the sky, currently called The leftover girl, although this may change (mainly because the ‘such and such girl’ as the title of a novel has become something of a publishing cliche in the last few years!). If it does change it’s likely to change to The leftover world which is also apposite. One decision I have made is to use my SF non de plume C.E. Stevens, rather than Stephen Clare. This is practical reasons as I can continue to use this website, and I am less likely to confuse potential readers.
As I’ve probably said previously the new novel is written in a mainstream SF style with magical realist elements, and is set entirely on Earth. It has three narrative strands; opening with the story of the protagonist as an adult, continuing with a flashback to Tata’s childhood and adolescence, and then the third strand which follows the life of a third character, Helen Choi.
The Tata narrative dramatises life in Brazil, and by extension throughout the world, following the Collapse (a breakdown of civilisation resulting from climate change and resource depletion). Helen’s story is essentially the story of the Alpha Mission.
The book thus tells the story of Earth in the run up to the departure of the Alpha Mission probe, and what happens afterwards!
There obvious crossovers both within the book, and between this book and Lights in the sky. Tata knew Mrs Choi when she was a child, but never knew why the old woman had taken an interest in her. Her quest is geographical (to reach the fable ‘free communities in Amazonia), but also spiritual (to discover the truth about her own life and origins).
Both characters appear in Lights in the sky, although Helen Choi is only referred to (by Han, she’s his role model!). Tata appears on three separate occasions; twice in dreams/visions experienced by Marta Fernandes, and finally in a chapter of her very own!
One possible strategy I may employ is to use this chapter (The Jungle) as part of the text at the appropriate point in the narrative, which a nice exercise in intertextuality.
My intention is to post the first chapter of the novel on this website on the near future to act as an introduction, once I settle the question of the title!

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