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