Categories

A Children’s Crusade Adolescent angst Alien Lifeforms Alpha 5 Alpha Mission Alternative history America Artificial Intelligence Brazil Climate Change Exobiology futurology Growing up History imaginative literature Intelligence intertexuality irrationality Lights in the sky LiteraryCriticism media landscape Myth and folklore narcissism narrative styles Near Future paranoia Philosophy picaresque politics populism Post Apocalypse postmodernism Prediction psychology Science Science Fiction SF scholarship Social breakdown Socialization social media solipsism Space Travel Time Young Adult Fiction zeitgeist
Book Cover for 'The Leftover Girl'
Marta
Pseudo-crustacean
Senhora Daguia
Rai
Pseudo-shrubs (detail)
Planet
Han
Jorja
Planet Surface (Detail)
Alphane life (detail) , dome in distance
Nurse G
The Dome (detail)
Su Ying
Book Cover for 'A Children's Crusade'
Priya

Recent Posts

Category: media landscape

Housekeeping

Housekeeping

By | | 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

I’d rather write a ‘cosy catastrophe!’

I’d rather write a ‘cosy catastrophe!’

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental nineteen: I’d rather write a ‘cosy catastrophe!’
I finished my last post by asserting that irrationality is a virus, a contagion that spreads via the internet; nothing that I have read, seen or accessed online in the last month has dissuaded me from this view! What do Isis, and INCEL have in common? Well, they’re examples of amoral, anti-social lunatics who would previously have remained isolated, but have now formed online ‘communities’ with devastating results! Reinforcing and justifying each others appalling attitudes and fostering a culture of thwarted entitlement!

I recently viewed an art exhibition, part of which featured posters of tech billionaires talking with chilling smugness about the virtual ‘village squares’ their technologies had made possible. Now the village square (and the town hall meeting) have a cherished place in English and American folklore, but one has to remember that Salem was a small town! At least the madness there was confined to one place, via the internet it can grow and infect others…

So, when viewing this exhibition, Pandora’s box and the Law of Unintended Consequences came to mind. I’ve realised that what I’m actually writing in the Great Flood, and in Lights in the Sky generally, is (in the best traditions of English science fiction) a ‘cosy catastrophe’ which provides comforting escapism from the ‘real’ twenty first century which sometimes seems too terrible to contemplate!

On that cheery note

Stephen Clare   May 2018

More ‘interesting times!’

More ‘interesting times!’

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental seventeen: More ‘interesting times!’
I’m now more than one hundred pages into writing The Great Flood, or roughly a third of the way through. I feel like I’m occupying two time zones simultaneously, experiencing the present while feeling it feed into my fictional future. Make that presumably and hopefully fictional! But I’m not so sure about this; from the standpoint of March 2018, the abiding feeling is of racing towards an unseen precipice.

I am reading the news online obsessively. To the point where I acknowledge that it’s no longer healthy. But this is a malign addiction (shared by many of us!) that I can’t shake! You know it’s only going to upset, enrage and alarm you, but you can’t stop!

I can’t remember the precise stories, but reading Google news last week I came to the conclusion that the world had actually gone mad! That irrationality has finally triumphed and reason has reluctantly left the battlefield! Not a difficult conclusion to come to when Russian exiles are being murdered on the streets of the United Kingdom with apparent impunity, and the so-called ‘Government’ appears powerless to do anything!

Over the pond Trump boasts openly about the lies he tells to other world leaders (for Christ’s sake!), adding these to the ones he tells routinely to the American people! Now I wasn’t a great fan of Ronald Reagan or either President Bush, but I thought at least that they were men of honour! We’ll draw a veil over Richard Nixon…

Even more worryingly the insidious rise of the far-right continues around the globe!

The Great Flood is set in the world that has been produced by these tendencies. So far the story has focussed on climate change and the dramatic consequences of this, but I feel that in the rest of the novel I need to up my game and dramatise the political, social, economic, and cultural changes more forcefully than I have thus far. The first draft is really about getting the story down (…the framework, if you like!), introducing and developing the characters by writing effective dialogue…

The next task is introduce depth into the prose by developing and manifesting the underlying themes, using symbolism, metaphor et al!

My themes are written out (although new ones may emerge!), I now need to weave them more fully into the fabric of the novel…

On that note…

Blog entry supplemental thirteen: The rise of unreason

Blog entry supplemental thirteen: The rise of unreason

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Back in the late 80’s, in more innocent times, I wrote a song based on a common minor key blues progression called The Rise of Unreason; this charted the rise of Christian fundamentalism and the religious right in America, and elsewhere. Over the years I have revised and added to this song, both lyrically and musically, in response to changing times; but after 9/11 it acquired a new resonance and urgency as Islamic Fundamentalism cast a growing shadow over both the West and the Muslim world.

The song is now in its fifth or sixth iteration, and has never seemed more relevant…

But, I think we’ve gone beyond the relatively well thought out irrationality of the religious fundamentalists (which at least has some basis in belief, scripture, and ideology, however extreme and archaic!), to something deeper.

The rise of narcissistic populists in the political sphere seems to have coincided with (or maybe unleashed!) a more general outbreak of irrational behaviour on the part of ordinary people not linked to any particular belief system. Everybody seems to be angry, but why should this be so at this point in our history?

Outbreaks of delusional behaviour are not new, and characterised much of the Mediaeval period, persisting into the early Modern Age. But the Enlightenment and the triumph of rational economic systems was supposed to have put paid to them. So what’s happening to bring them back to the fore?

Well, there are a number of suspects…

It’s worth revisiting Clarke’s dictum that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ and apply it to our own societies. Technological change has been so rapid and so remarkable in recent years, that ordinary people are being left behind; marveling at what their new handheld devices can do, but not understanding the science that lies behind the tech. Not so long ago any reasonably well-read lay person could be expected to comprehend in broad terms the technological and scientific principles that underpin his or her civilisation; this is no longer the case! And irrationality has a habit of rushing in to fill such lacunae in our understanding…

And then there are the various existential threats our civilisation now confronts…

Some of the more improbable; the asteroid strike or the erupting supervolcano, are essentially beyond our current power to mitigate, and thus not worth considering, but others are clear and present dangers. Climate change, resource depletion, pollution and the potential impact of AI on employment are all things that human activity is responsible for, but rather than address the issues, large sections of the populace seem to want to deny they are happening altogether, or slip into a kind of helpless apathy.

Reaching for the irrational belief system is a symptom of all this…

Demagogues and despots have always known the emotional appeal of the irrational when times are tough and the solutions demanding and difficult, hence the election of right wing populists.

In our cultural life the appeal of the supernatural and of the superhero is strong at the moment; fantasy worlds to visit and fantasy heroes to rescue us.

Fundamentalist religion, I’ve mentioned, but there is also the growing popularity of pseudoscience, which rather than offering solutions re-frames the threat in mythic terms; the oft-promised arrival of Nibiru functions almost like a giant metaphor for the real dangers that we face. The next global extinction event has already started according to many scientists, and there’s plenty of evidence to support this view. The old chestnut of finding a new home for the human race has leapt off the pages of science fiction and into popular discourse, something I have referenced in previous blogs.

So what’s all this got to with your SF saga, I hear you ask?   

Well, Lights in the sky anticipates the coming ecological cataclysm, but I’m thinking that my fictional doom is (in the best traditions of British SF), a rather cosy catastrophe! By the end of the series Gaia and her allies have staged a successful counterattack, and the biosphere is recovering nicely.

In the real world ‘the civilisation of the world as we know it’ would appear to be coming sooner than expected, and the cavalry doesn’t appear to be about to ride to the rescue…

C.E. Stevens   October 2017

Blog entry supplemental eight: Tapping into the zeitgeist

Blog entry supplemental eight: Tapping into the zeitgeist

By | | Comments 0 Comment

A few months ago I commented on the discovery of a potentially ‘Earthlike’ world in orbit around Proxima Centauri, and gave myself a pat on the back for very nearly predicting this in my SF series Lights in the sky. In my series the habitable world orbits Alpha Centauri B, rather than Proxima Centauri, but this is really a detail, given that the chances of finding such a world this close (less than 5 light years away), were dismissed as astronomical (pun intended!), prior to the discovery!
But it’s happened again!
Stephen Hawking’s forthcoming BBC documentary Expedition New Earth argues that we have approximately one hundred years to send a successful colonizing expedition to another habitable world. Lights in the sky is (of course) based on this premise, and charts the progress of such an expedition. The strapline of the Alpha Mission, the organisation behind the endeavour, is ‘Mankind’s lifeboat’, a recognition of the fictional threats to the survival of the our species (or at the very least of our civilization and our culture) that prompt the attempt. The series is set in a world where many of these potential threats have become all too real; where climate changes, rising sea levels, resource depletion and environmental degradation have led to war, famine, political instability, and mass migration, threatening the continued existence of our civilization and our culture.
Professor Hawking added a couple of new dangers that I had overlooked; specifically an asteroid strike, and new pandemics that our current antibiotics would be unable to control. The last of these was given new urgency (in my mind) by an article I read recently that warned of the dangers posed by the melting of permafrost throughout the Arctic and Antarctic regions. These (it argues) have the potential to release long-dormant microorganisms on human (and animal) populations, which would lack any resistance to them.
Critics of Hawking’s thesis have made a number of reasonable points, including the contention that sending a few colonists would do nothing for the billions left (presumably to die), back on Earth, that spreading our destructive culture to other worlds is hardly the actions of responsible culture, and finally, that the only winners in this scenario would be the Elon Musk’s of this world who would stand to make a killing in the inevitable hysteria that would follow a serious attempt to mount such an exhibition.
Not being a journalist I haven’t viewed the programme, and like the rest of us I will have to wait for it to be broadcast. But, in writing the series, I did think long and hard about the issues and do a fair amount of research.
I do think (even if a I say so myself!) that I have done a good job of reflecting many of the issues and concerns now being raised. The Alpha Mission, as portrayed in the trilogy, is very much the creation of a privileged elite. This elite is threatened by a popular uprising resulting from the dislocations the planet faces in my fictional future, and is opposed by radical elements who ( unsurprisingly), argue that the very existence of the Mission represents a huge distraction from the need to change our ways here on Earth, and which (even if successful), will do nothing for the mass of humanity.
Later on in the series, the expedition itself faces crucial choices; do they attempt to pursue the policies and philosophy of the organization which sent them (which I have characterised as Abrahamic!), or do they attempt to live in harmony with the biosphere of their new world.
I must stress that Lights in the sky is a work of fiction, and is not intended as futurology! I have also presented here a necessarily simplified take on a very complex series of novels; there’s a lot more going on, thematically and philosophically! But like all intelligent science fiction it attempts to dramatise the issues that face our culture and our species.
If you’ve come this far I would suggest that you start reading the first volume of the trilogy, A Children’s Crusade, which is serialized on this website, as well looking at previous posts which discuss many of the issues raised in the series.
C E Stevens May 2017

Blog entry fourteen: Significant others

Blog entry fourteen: Significant others

By | | Comments 0 Comment

This blog entry should be read in conjunction with chapter fourteen. Significant others is somewhat episodic and something of a mixed bag. It’s function is essentially to advance various plot elements, and so lacks the strong narrative of the chapters it sits between.
This is all well and good; a novel that consisted solely of action sequences would probably make no sense, and would also lack depth and effective characterisation.
We open with Marta Fernandes viewing an Earthside packet sent by Miss da Guia; two things have become clear: Miss da Guia’s career plans have gained traction, and Marta Fernandes is starting to develop a greater awareness of the role the media plays on the home planet.
She understands that the Children on Alpha 5 are now ‘famous’, but hasn’t begun to comprehend what this means!
For the moment events on Earth are only really a mildly diverting sideshow as she’s much more more exercised by things happening closer to home. Her anxiety over whether the twins will bond with her, and regard her as their real mother. Her battle of wills with Rai and Jorja over the naming of the infants. Her fear that she will be permanently sidelined scientifically by the Mission authorities, combined with her struggle with Nurse Gee over how to progress her work with ‘Oswald’, her pseudo-crustacean research subject…
She also learns something really important about the crusties, from Han of all people, although she has to dig the information out of him.
Marta wins some of the battles, but loses others and these outcomes will be pivotal in how things develop from here on in…
For now, the chapter finishes on a more hopeful note as our little community comes together to welcome its two youngest members…