intertexuality – 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However, I’m unknown and unpublished, Kazuo Ishiguro is internationally famous, so I’m going to have to change the title of the eighth Lights in the sky novel.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

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

Housekeeping

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

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

Caught in the slipstream?

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

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

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

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

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

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 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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