Lights in the sky – Lights In The Sky

Be careful what you wish for

By C Stevens | 4th January 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

Lights in the Sky began as a series anticipating an environmental catastrophe known as ‘The Collapse’, which leads to a general breakdown of science, civil society and nation states, resulting in the reduction of Earth’s human population to roughly one third of what it is today. I pushed my environmental catastrophe back to the beginning of the twenty second century (something which looks naively optimistic from our standpoint in 2022), I also invented a grand project, the Alpha Mission which is able to send a Probe to our nearest neighbour in interstellar space, the Alpha Centauri system. Conveniently, (for this is fiction, after all) the Probe finds the perfect Earth-like planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri A, one of the three stars that make up the system, effects a landfall and uses its autonomic resources to build a base. The artificial intelligence which controls the Mission is then able to bring its human colonists into existence.

Now before you accuse me of bandwagon jumping, I wrote the original short story that opens the series (then called Light-out) somewhere between the end of 2012 and beginning of 2013. I know this because I submitted the first draft of the story (without success) to Analog Science Fact and Fiction magazine on 20th April 2013. Many of the themes and concerns explored in the subsequent series of novels were not well known outside of SF circles, nor were they part of general public discourse at this point in our history. Few, for example, had heard of Elon Musk or SpaceX, that came later.

The Lights in the Sky series now stretches to seven completed novels, number eight (now retitled, hopefully for the last time, The Robot’s Progress) is nearing completion, and number nine (currently called Earthrise) is already underway.

I didn’t get everything right; for example, I didn’t anticipate a worldwide pandemic striking the planet in 2019/20; and, as mentioned previously, I have my breakdown of civilisation occurring at the beginning of the next century, when the middle of this one is now looking favourite. I was also unaware of the impact our rapidly diminishing groundwater reserves will have on the capacity of the world to feed its current population, let alone what is predicted.

But by and large, I think I did pretty well…

The notion that we should be seriously seeking a lifeboat for humanity in the form of a colony on a habitable world elsewhere, while a commonplace in SF circles, was not yet part of the zeitgeist. My version of the future sees a vast shadowy international body (the Alpha Project), funded by various governments, doing the heavy lifting, mainly because I had not anticipated the rise of commercial space exploration funded by billionaires.

I also shifted the location of our species’ lifeboat much further out. My technological solutions for getting my probe and its precious cargo to Alpha Centauri are not examples of ‘imaginary science’ in the tradition of Star Trek, but projections of existing technologies. Again, few people outside of research laboratories or the hard-core SF readership were talking about light sails as a means of crossing the interstellar gulf, now it has become a commonplace.

All of the above is extremely gratifying, as one of the usual motivations for writing in the genre is to engage in prediction. But I would also hasten to point out that this series is far more than an exercise in futurology, as story, character development, and philosophical discourse are at least as important, if not more so.

But don’t take my word for it; the first completed novel in the series, A Children’s Crusade, is published on this website, along with extracts from later novels in the series.

So why the caveat?

Well, I don’t really want to be right about these things. Anticipating a future where billions of people will die well before their time is not a comfortable thought, and as this once remote possibility looms ever larger, the old saw ‘be careful what you wish for’, starts to appear uncomfortably apposite.

The Author January 2022

Dramatic Irony

By C Stevens | 11th December 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

The project launch of the James Webb Space Telescope comes weighted with irony. That such an immensely-expensive, but also immensely-powerful, scientific resource should be launched at this moment in our history serves to illustrate how close we have come to greatness and how near we are to extinction. JWST promises to look further than ever, both back in time and out into space, and will presumably provide much new valuable data, and maybe even answers to age-old questions.

However this scientific insight, which represents the pinnacle of our achievements as a species, looks likely to come too late to be anything other than a footnote to human history, serving as an epitaph for the scientific age that few, if any, will be left to appreciate.

You may accuse me of alarmism, and I would counter that this is an occupational hazard for any science fiction writer, especially in times like these. But I would also argue that the threats to our collective survival are legion and apparently increasing by the day. COVID 19 refuses to go quietly, avian flu makes a comeback, and COP26 appears more like a ‘cop-out’ with every passing day. Add these to the long-standing issues of sea level rise, continued decimation of the biosphere, and the increasing incidence of severe weather events, together with the largely-ignored threat posed by our rapid depletion of irreplaceable groundwater reserves, then I’d say we’ve got a problem.

In the Lights in the sky series of novels I push the general collapse of human civilisation back to the end of this century. But now it appears that I am being rather too optimistic, as the chances of our culture lasting past the middle of the century are looking increasingly remote.

In the light of this, the James Webb Space Telescope programme looks quixotic in the extreme and the telescope seems likely to join Hubble, Voyager and all the rest, as silent monuments to our collective folly, forever adrift in the blackness of space.

Maybe one day a space-faring civilisation will venture this way and encounter the remnants of our technological endeavours, starting first with radio transmissions, then microwave telecasts, before encountering the Voyager probes steadily tracking their way across interstellar space. Perhaps they will decipher the Golden Disc and reflect on our naive optimism and cultural hubris, before moving on to more profitable avenues of exploration. Or maybe they will delve into the heart of our system, meeting JWST at the second Lagrange point, before observing the ragtag bands of primitive hominids fighting for survival on the blasted remains of the marginally-habitable third planet.

If these putative starfarers possess any capacity for irony, perhaps they will reflect on their own tendency for hubris and give thanks that their own civilisation was never subject to the full weight of retributive justice.

The Author December 2021

Anxious Times

By C Stevens | 12th November 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

The worrying times we live in have elicited an artistic response from yours truly. After a gap of several years, I’ve finally written a completely new song from scratch. Appropriately enough, it’s entitled Anxious Times, and I include a sample of the lyrics below,

Men fighting on the forecourts/Stuff’s missing from the shelves

And everybody hides behind their closed doors

They’re all thinking about themselves

Yeah, they’re all thinking about themselves

I’m biased, but I think that this short extract indicates it’s an effective piece of reportage, a response to what, at the time, looked like a developing and worrying crisis. Since then we’ve slipped back into low-intensity crisis mode; the supermarket shelves still have big gaps, but at least we can fill-up our gas-guzzling automobiles. The song (based on a Major 7th riff I wrote for an existing song, but decided it was so good that I built a completely new song from it) is essentially a litany of modern age anxieties, both personal and general.

Essentially nothing has changed; COP26 produced some useful but rather limited agreements between the major polluting nations, but will they be implemented? The rich nations still refuse to bite the bullet, maintaining we can have our ‘green cake’ and eat it. That making everyone drive electric cars will be enough to combat global warming, and that we can still have endless growth providing it’s green growth.

The truth of the matter is that any form of private automobile is a luxury we can no longer afford, and we must now switch en masse to walking, cycling and public transport, with our towns and cities being repurposed to accommodate this with smaller, local (and hopefully independent!) shops. The return of the high street, anyone?

The fallacy of endless economic growth also needs to be acknowledged, along with endless population growth. Our biosphere will just not sustain it, and the next crisis is going to be a shortage of fresh water, all over the world.

The other elephant in the conference room, that the delegates were careful to tiptoe around, is (of course) the role of the super-rich in all of this. The problem is that the various tech billionaires are individually richer than many of the small countries that their indolence and obscene extravagance threaten to inundate.

One can only hope that the likes of Musk and Bezos make good on their threat to leave Earth altogether and do move to Mars. Given the much lower gravity on the Red Planet, this is inevitably a one-way trip, even assuming they even make it there in the first place.

And I say good riddance, because without the drain on Earth’s resources resulting from their appalling wealth, the rest of us little people can concentrate on saving our Planet!

In the refuge provided by the fictional world of Lights in the Sky, Klara the robot has joined with a tribe of indigenes called the Yanomami. They are on a quest together, seeking the fabled Comunidades Livres, a place also foretold in Yanomama mythology. Currently they are journeying along Rio Tapauá through the Green Heart of Amazonas, far away from the dangers of the Portuguese world.

But Klara knows that the Europeans stand between them and their goal.

The Author November 2021

Languorous times

By C Stevens | 28th May 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

Apologies for just getting in under the wire, and finally blogging just as this miserable washout of a May breathes its last.

The English Government (I say English because it doesn’t even pretend to govern in the interests of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) increasingly comes to resemble a comic opera, possibly some hitherto-undiscovered work by Gilbert and Sullivan, Trial by Tabloid, perhaps! Or possibly Princess Carrie, maybe even The Pirates of PPE Procurement!

Other commentators have compared Johnson’s administration to a Carry on film, Carry on lying would appear to be most apposite.

The overall effect of this blizzard of misrepresentation, graft and incompetence, very much like a similar exercise on the other side of the Atlantic, has been to ensure that a weary electorate ceases to care, and will welcome any good news.

Opposition to the Tory Ascendancy is not helped by a colourless Labour leader, who always seems to have fear in his eyes when he faces the cameras, and an opposition that’s fatally divided, allowing the Conservatives to rack up huge majorities on minority votes. The time for Labour to press for proportional representation in General Elections is clearly now, but will they realise this?

I recently read an article (which I cannot now find) which argued that Languorousness, as opposed to Anxiety or outright Depression, is the default psychological state of our times. One of the online dictionaries that appeared when I searched listed sixteen different synonyms for languor, including lethargy, apathy and weariness, inertia, ennui, lassitude and listlessness. Any of these would appear appropriate descriptions of the public mood as we complete the fourteenth month of the pandemic.

My private literary universe has never appeared a more welcome refuge than now. However, in the world of Lights in the sky, divisions are emerging within the Camposetta movement, even as it consolidates its grip on most of Brazil. Splits between the hard-line Evangelical Christians that make up the majority of the movement’s foot soldiers, and the Environmentalists, Socialists, Trade Unionists and Libertarians who also opposed the Federal Government. Self-interest, graft and authoritarianism are also on the rise, leading many of the original idealists to try and get out while they still can.

The historically-aware amongst you will probably have spotted the parallels with the Spanish Civil War in my tale of a Revolution gone wrong. As has often been said, all revolutions have a tendency to eat their children.

The Author May 2021

Normal service resumed

By C Stevens | 20th April 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

After blogging twice in February I’ve now managed to miss out March 2021 entirely!

I think I’ll blame the mental fog that is supposed to be a consequence of lockdown, though in truth the limitations haven’t changed my life that much. My life is no more isolated than it was previously and uncertainty is a part of life, but hey!

As forecast back in February, I’ve become dissatisfied with the new name for novel eight of Lights in the sky, but I know if I give it time, the right title will emerge.

We have reached a crucial point in what’s currently still called Finding your place, my heroine has lost most of her friends to the vicissitudes of guerilla warfare and has realised that her place is far from secure within the changing Camposetta movement. The opportunistic and cynical leadership still expects Bolivar’s Army to take Manaus, but have not provided them with the means to do this.

I watched another Adam Curtis series recently, this one from the prehistory that is the 1990’s, Pandora’s Box apparently originated the format Curtis has mined successfully ever since, and, despite a truly terrible theme tune composed (it would seem) by members of post-punk quartet Gang of Four, it was both informative and stimulating. The last programme A is for Atom sticks in my mind as it dissects the lies, state secrecy, total disregard for safety, manipulation and general venality that lay behind the nuclear energy programme, leading with appalling inevitability to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

Nuclear fission as a source of energy is now thoroughly discredited, but a concerted campaign to boost nuclear fusion is underway. I think it’s fair to say that the only saving grace about fusion is that it’s unlikely ever to work. This is not a flip comment, I have read extensively on the topic and technical limitations have made it impossible to achieve anything beyond milliseconds of fusion, attained at colossal expense. Even if the necessary reaction could be maintained (and contained), the necessity to use elements such as deuterium or tritium, rather than plain old hydrogen, means that (despite the claims) nuclear waste will still be produced. As with fission, the likely cost of the power (if any) finally produced continues to rise. And of course, rather like mining the Asteroid Belt and other fantasies, all that success would lead to is the continuation of our mad Abrahamic Crusade until our entire world is utterly despoiled.

Fusion is rather like mass-migration to Mars; the very worst thing that could happen would be if it were to succeed.

You may have noticed that the commanding heights of the world economy have been seized by a bunch of sociopathic billionaires. The phrase, ‘this is not really happening!’ springs to mind (thank you Tori Amos!), which is of course correct, because this is now a virtual world within a virtual economy.

And here’s me thinking that the AntiChrist had been voted out of office, but of course these people don’t actually believe in democracy because they know better! An opinion shared with oligarchs and autocrats everywhere.

And it’s just been announced that a number of English soccer clubs, some very successful, others not so much, have decided to join a new Europe-wide league with other like-minded clubs. Nothing like enlightened self-interest, huh!

Just like the tech billionaires want to get rid of annoying inconveniences like accountability and the democratically-expressed will of the people, the so-called European Super League wants to get rid of fair competition and the notion that you might actually get demoted if you’re shit!

Lovely world we live in…

The Author April 2021

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 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

Art overtaken by events

By C. E. Stevens | 5th November 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Apologies for not blogging at all during the month of October, hopefully this entry will make up for that.
I’m imagining a conversation with the taciturn proprietor or sales assistant at the nearby corner shop (I can never work out which he is), not that we have conversations, as such. He’s asking me what I think of lockdown/life nowadays/the US Election (delete as appropriate), and I say that I don’t think things will ever go back to what we regarded as normal before the pandemic. I go on to offer the following opinion,
“…in a funny way, it’s actually a privilege to be living in such an epoch-making period in human history, but you’ve always got to bear in mind that the Chinese had an old (and possibly apocryphal!) curse, ‘…may you live in interesting times!’”
The shop assistant or proprietor doesn’t react to this, but outside the four walls of his rather down-at-heel emporium those ‘interesting times’ grind on relentlessly…
I’ve recently been re-reading In other Worlds by the redoubtable Margaret Atwood and I was struck by how prescient her views on the future direction of civilisation were. Taken from the point of view of 2011, Ms Atwood seems to have predicted 2020 with a scary degree of accuracy.
In my fictional universe, we are coming to the end of the seventh novel in the Lights in the sky series. I’m actually writing the last chapter (chapter twenty four in this particular book!), but as with all last chapters there is a lot to do, character arcs to complete, loose ends to tie up etc etc, so it’s taking a time to finish.
There are other reasons for this dilatoriness; it’s always horrible to let go of a particular story, and I know that before the end of …when you wish upon a star, I will need to do beastly things to characters I’ve grown to love. But that’s the nature of fiction writing.
And it’s not the end of the series; volume eight is already under way, and there will be at least one more short story after that…
I recently came across an x and y axis representation of literary genres, whereby the x axis moves between naturalism at the top and expressionism below, and the y axis between the mimetic on the left, over to the fantastic. This results in four classification quadrants, labelled as follows: top left Realist, top right Speculative, bottom left Stylized, bottom right Fabulist.
The compiler had helpfully produced two versions of the diagram, locating various literary subgenres in each quadrant in the first, and various authors in the second, and I amused myself by locating my own writing within this design, based on my influences and my artistic and ideological leanings. Following these, I would place myself close to the intersection of the x and y axes, within the Fabulist quadrant; this quadrant also contains magical realism, fairy tales and postmodernism, and even a cursory reading of the novels within Lights in the sky demonstrates the debt I owe to all of these. My attachment to the gothic takes me close to the x axis, and the near future, SF and high fantasy elements ensure my work’s proximity to the y axis and the Speculative quadrant.
All of which goes to demonstrate that I steer well clear of Realism as defined by nineteenth century writers and critics. This was always going to be the case given my attachment to Romanticism and my use of speculative and fantastic elements, but does not mean my writing lacks realism.
In recent years, the cultural analysis inherent in nineteenth century notions of ‘realism’ has been rather overtaken by events, as what was previously seen as ‘speculative’, ‘fantastic’, and ‘belonging to the realm of science fiction’ has remorselessly forced its way into our lives and become the mainstream.
So, welcome to your own personal disaster movie/gothic fantasy/near future SF miniseries (delete as appropriate) and despite what the man in the corner shop may think, the times are definitely ‘interesting’ and we have no choice but to live through them.
The Author November 2020

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