Myth and folklore – Lights In The Sky

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

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

Letting the Jinn out of the bottle

By C. E. Stevens | 3rd June 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Something blindingly-obvious occurred to me this morning, something that had never occurred to me previously, but once thought of, could not be subsequently unthought. My insight was that tech, and by this I mean the goods and services purveyed by the billionaires in Silicon Valley, is our culture’s equivalent of the Jinn in Arabian folklore.
The Jinn is capable of great benevolence and possesses miraculous powers, as befits a supernatural entity. But its benevolence comes with a price tag attached. Our relationship with modern ICT would seem a perfect analogue to the wonders formerly promised by the Jinn once released from its bottle, with the difference that your smart device actually delivers to anyone with a phone contract or a broadband connexion. With none of that inconvenient rooting around in dark and dusty caves looking for magical oil lamps.
The wonders performed by modern ICT would (and did) appear wondrous to my parents’ generation, who lived in a world where news came from printed media, two television channels and three radio networks, the banks closed at three (so if you ran out of cash, tough!), telecommunications were strictly voice-only from fixed locations, and researching almost anything usually required a visit to the local library (which also tended to close early!).
I was born and grew to adulthood in this world, and things didn’t really begin to change significantly in practical terms until the beginning of the nineties (although cash machines/ATMs had become available from the mid-seventies, and video gaming had become popular), with the notion of cyberspace confined to science fiction novels. Then, the personal computer, the mobile phone, and the internet all came along in short order, to revolutionise the way we do almost everything.
I find it difficult to think back to a world where you can’t answer almost any question in seconds, where you don’t have instantaneous electronic communication with all your friends, where you can’t remotely map and view almost any location on Earth, or listen to virtually any piece of music at any hour of the day or night.
However, I do remember how frustrating, how slow, and how boring it all was. So I am grateful for Google Documents, email, SMS, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Maps and all the million and one applications that make life today so much easier.
But nothing ever comes for free…
In exchange for the convenience of all these lovely (and apparently free!) tools and applications, we give (unless we are very savvy) the tech giants unlimited access to our personal data, which they obviously want to exploit commercially by targeting appropriate advertising based on what they (or their algorithms) know about us. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in this, if it means that we are alerted to products and services which we are likely to want to buy, although these algorithms would seem somewhat unsophisticated in their predictions, if personal experience is anything to go by, but hey! Maybe I’m just contrary.
However, If this data falls into the wrong hands, it can be used by criminal enterprises half a world away, adding a whole new level of anxiety, as cyber crime can potentially strike us from anywhere on the globe.
However the most insidious consequences of letting the Jinn of artificial intelligence out of the bottle are less obvious, but actually pose the most serious threats to our society. I refer, of course, to the impact of social media.
People who have been following this blog will know what’s coming next…
The unintended consequences of the spread of social media have included; the destabilising of conventional media and the undermining of journalistic ethics and good practice; the creation of ‘echo chambers’ whereby large numbers of people rely entirely on partial media for their news and current affairs, and are never exposed to any content that challenges their prejudices and preconceptions; the wholesale spreading of falsehoods and insane conspiracy theories; and finally, the creation of forums that enable and facilitate people with dangerous and anti-social views to meet and act in concert.
Did I leave anything out?
The overall effect has been the promotion of extreme views and the destabilising of democracy, which, for all its faults, remains the fairest, most humane and most efficient form of government yet devised.
But it’s not just random nutters we have to contend with…
Much more worrying is the clear evidence that the fabulously rich and privileged elite who run the tech giants have actively been promoting an agenda of ‘disruption’ designed to bring about a series of economic, social and political changes that they believe will benefit themselves and their corporations, to the detriment of virtually everybody else. I was recently both intrigued by the BBC series Secrets of Silicon Valley, which documented this, and appalled by the sanctimony and arrogance of many of the people leading these companies, who appeared to have bought into their own PR, and had adopted the view that their selfish actions are somehow morally justified.
Do no harm, anyone?
In the short term, the upshot of all of the above has been to put us all at the mercy of the various dangerous populists who have come to power in key countries around the world.
Returning to my opening analogy, my inevitable conclusion is that getting the Jinn back in the bottle is a lot harder than freeing it in the first place, and the consequences of summoning this spirit and making use of its miraculous powers, may now have become unstoppable.
The Author June 2020

The Rise of Unreason revisited

By C. E. Stevens | 6th April 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Back in less alarming times, I wrote a blog entry entitled The Rise of Unreason derived from a minor key blues song I wrote back in the eighties. The blog entry (and later versions of the song) referenced the rise of irrational belief systems in contemporary culture, arguing that this tendency, reflected in the popularity of fundamentalist religious views, had now been augmented by irrational behaviour not linked to specific belief systems, but based purely on rumour and conspiracy theories spread online.
There was a time when these were relatively harmless; refusing to accept that NASA landed astronauts on the Moon, or believing that the World is flat, are (in practical terms) harmless eccentricities, and not something that threatens the well-being of society as a whole.
However, the campaign against vaccination which claims, without evidence, that vaccines are linked to autism is a different matter. It constitutes a threat to public health, which has allowed diseases that were under control (such as measles) to become prevalent again. It is also anachronistic and risible to even see this as an issue given the number of highly-talented people who lie on the autism spectrum. Of course, the proponents of these wacky ideas never let facts get in the way of their irrational beliefs.
I was interested to read that the latest unhinged theory, spreading like a virtual plague through cyberspace, namely the belief that 5G phone masts are spreading (or causing, take your pick) COVID-19, is linked to ideas promulgated by the anti-vaccination brigade. The attacks on supposed 5G masts that have followed are reminiscent of the waves of mass hysteria that characterised the late-Middle Ages (which is apt given we have our very own version of plague), and with a side order of Don Quixote, phone masts now standing in for windmills.
With the sort of doublethink that is beyond satire, these people are presumably using their mobile phones to coordinate their attacks on the very infrastructure that makes this possible. Presumably, once a vaccine finally does become, these people will refuse to take it.
Words sometimes fail me

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

A secondary world?

By C. E. Stevens | 10th May 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

A secondary world?

I viewed a rather ancient, but nevertheless interesting, documentary on JRR Tolkien on YouTube recently. The documentary was made well before Peter Jackson’s filming of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and concentrated on the books, with keynote contributions from Tolkien’s youngest son, Christopher…
Christopher Tolkien discussed his father’s concept of Middle Earth as a ‘secondary world’, that is to say an alternate reality that works by different rules, a notion that (amazingly) I was unfamiliar with; and the more he talked, the more it occurred to me that Lights in the sky, is in many regards, an example of this.
So I did some research on the concept and concluded that, although I’ve tended to think of myself as a writer of ‘realistic SF’, there are many of the elements of a secondary world in the series, particularly in the three novels set on Alpha 5. So without knowing it, I have (in some ways) been writing a work of high fantasy.
Now it’s important to keep a sense of proportion here. I have taken considerable care to make LITS as plausible and scientifically credible as possible, and what I have just said in no way invalidates any of that. But the series is many things not just one, and incorporates various literary tropes. At the end of the day it is also a work of the imagination.
Different books within the sextet are fantastic to a greater or lesser degree; After the Flood is definitely the volume with the most tenuous connexion to high fantasy, but both the books that feature Marta Camacho have long passages that dive headlong into the genre. In particular Ms Camacho’s journey down the Amazon River on her raft, following her departure from the riverboat Fitzcarraldo, which is deliberately presented in dreamlike terms.
But it’s the original trilogy that cleaves most closely to the idea of a secondary world. We have a series of novels that takes the form of a bildungsroman. The protagonist is a child when the action opens, but grows into adulthood, and comes into powers and skills beyond those of ordinary person back on Earth, although in my world these have a technological source. Marta Fernandes is also to all intents and purposes an orphan. The theme of good versus is central to the series, but the question of who is good? and who who is evil? is often indeterminate, and is left unresolved until the end of the series. This is where I mostly part company with most fantasy writers, as in my world relativism is part of the underlying philosophy. Thus the Alphanians are presented at different times (and in different ways) as both an apparent threat to the eventual triumph of good, and as its most effective proponents. The same can be said (to a lesser degree) about the Artificial Intelligence fronted by Nurse Six Gee.
The World of the series is revealed to be illusory, in the sense that the World is not as it appears to be, by a series paradigm shifts in the first three novels. A similar process is now taking place in the denouement of Maya, which I am currently writing. And at the end of the day there are beings within this cosmos whose powers are to all intents and purposes Godlike, and therefore (as far as the human actors are concerned) magical…
The Author May 2019

Conspiracy theory

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

Blog entry supplemental twenty four: Conspiracy theory
The final part of Lights in the sky ( and hence of the whole series) centres around a conspiracy theory; the biggest conspiracy theory of all, in fact, that the world, and by extension the whole Universe may not be as we imagine it. That the whole world is actually much younger than we imagine it (in direct opposition to Rupert Giles’ theory that it is, in fact, much older!). That it was actually created by unknown beings for unknown purposes and that consequently we are all property and experimental subjects. If you are thinking so far, so Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s important to realise that Douglas Adams was drawing on an older tradition within SF. This is also a serious book rather than a lighthearted satirical comedy, and my intention is to explore the nature of faith (obviously I’m riffing on Creationism here!), and the psychology of believers.
To the vanishingly small number of people who have read the original Lights in the sky trilogy, this development comes as no surprise as it was already revealed to the Children on Alpha 5.
I started to think (dangerous, I know, in these times!) what if the old stories were actually in some sense true? Not literally, as they have been subject to imperfect transmission, distortion and reinterpretation over the centuries. But that they contain essential truths about the nature of existence that science has been missing.
Now I’m aware that there’s a danger that putative readers will also take what I have written literally, employing the same mindset that takes the Bible (essentially a series of creation myths, parables, and folk tales) literally.
If you think that’s unlikely you’re right, mainly because it’s unlikely that my stories will ever reach a wide enough audience. However the history of the twentieth century teaches us that the most bizarre and far-fetched of notions can become the subject and focus of fanatical belief.
So readers should remember that this is a work of fiction, set in an imaginary world, for the purposes of entertainment and to provoke philosophical debate.
The Author 5th March 2019

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: The young person’s guide to time

By C Stevens | 11th December 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

This blog is designed to be read in conjunction with chapter twenty, The young person’s guide to time, now published on this website. The title is a riff on Benjamin Britten (for all you classical buffs), although I think it’s something of a misnomer; as our heroine is not being confronted with the true nature of time (at least not in this chapter!), but rather the true nature of her existence!
The opening section of chapter twenty was written several months before I reached this stage in the story; so there was always an element of trying to find a narrative pathway through to that particular moment in time, the moment when Marta has to confront the fact that she is not a unique individual, that she is not even a ‘real’ child. This serves to dramatise the fears that all children have at some point in their development; that they are not in fact the offspring of their parents, that they have no place in the world, that they are not special, and that no-one actually loves them!
When I first re-read this chapter I thought I had gone over the top; thinking that Marta’s reaction was too extreme given the circumstances! But while editing for publication I’ve changed my view!
My reaction was partly emotional; as I found (after a period of ambivalence), that I was moved once more, as I had been when I originally wrote the piece! But this was also an intellectual response; because when you factor in the peculiar nature of Marta’s upbringing (as a child with no parents), and combine that with all the traumas (admittedly, mostly self-inflicted) that she has had endure so far in her life, her suicidal impulse is entirely predictable…
But I do think I have put my heroine through too much; in the process stretching dramatic license to the limit ( this is fiction after all!), and if some hypothetical future editor were to suggest changes, one I would probably agree to would be reducing the number of times she is placed in mortal danger…
I like the language in the passage that opens the chapter; the moment when Marta concludes that she’s essentially a forgery achieves the lyricism that I strive for, and the rest of the chapter is basically a flashback to the events that led her to that revelation.
I also decided to lift the lid on the true nature of the Nurses (peeking behind the scenes of the Alpha Mission), presenting Six Gee as ‘she’ actually is, rather than how she presents herself to the Children.
The ‘Eve’s Rib’ passage in Marta’s final remembered dream is an obvious play on Christian creation mythology, Marta also misquotes Matthew 5.29 in line seven; and, of course, her first words (which also close the chapter), are adapted from Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice!
As I mentioned, I went through a period where I became ambivalent about this chapter, thinking it was too melodramatic; but now I think that it is important to demonstrate that there are psychological consequences to the kind of trials that the Children undergo. All too often in contemporary televisual SF, the main characters experience things that would have most of us in therapy for the rest of their lives, without any apparent psychological damage; and I wanted a counterbalance to this.
It’s also important to stress that Marta is now ‘different’; she has grown-up, and views her world (the Mission, her companions, her partner, and Alpha 5 itself!), with a new kind of detachment, that distances her from everybody else.
And this is important for what is to come…
Happy Reading

Blog entry nineteen: Recovery

By C Stevens | 4th December 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

In chapter nineteen we’re back in the real world with a vengeance, and the consequences of Marta’s willfulness have become apparent…
The scene in the desert owes much to Wim Wenders classic arthouse film Paris, Texas, and the line ‘…her eyes fixed on her own far horizon’ is adapted from the lyrics of a song I wrote in the 1980’s while under the spell of that particular movie.
The landscape of Alpha 5 again becomes a character in its own right, with the scale and implacability of the landscape contrasted with the insignificance, frailty and sheer ephemerality of individual human lives.
A friend of mine recently said to me, ‘…I wish we could all go to your planet!’ and she hits the nail on the head, Alpha 5 is a means of escape (for me as much as anyone!), from a scary and increasingly hostile world; but I would like to make the point that although A5 is a refuge (both metaphorically and literally!), the ‘real world’ is still presented in this novel (most notably in chapter twelve), and the likely future consequences of our present actions are laid bare…
But this, after all, is the role of science fiction (or it should be!), the genre providing an escape from the real world, while at the same time commenting on it…
We can also glimpse the power relationships within the world of the Children, and it is clear that (in the absence of Marta) Priya, although the youngest, is the dominant personality.
The first two sections of Recovery are a fairly conventional search and rescue drama, but what surprised me is how much it moved me when I was re-reading it for the purposes of online publication. The eagle-eyed among you will have noted that Priya uses an outmoded version of CPR when reviving Marta after the rescue ’plane crash-lands. This is because the chapter was written before the new guidelines emerged; I’m minded to keep it that way, it’s my world after all!
In section three we return to the subjectivity of Marta’s unconscious mind. In essence this is a continuation of Sleeping Beauty; our heroine’s physical body may have been rescued, but her mind is still away with the fairies!
Section three, appropriately enough, uses a three part structure:
i) Marta’s debates the nature of Time with ‘the serpent’
ii) Marta as Goddess transcends the Cosmos
iii) Marta (as her childhood self) rides the very-slow-moving train and receives her gift from the Dark Lady
I’d like to acknowledge two influences here; firstly, the late Iain Banks’ wonderful second novel The Bridge, which has had a hold on my imagination since first reading; and secondly, Lewis Carroll (if you haven’t noticed that Marta takes the role of Alice in her exchanges with the serpent, then you haven’t been listening!).
Our sojourn in Marta’s unconscious ends when she wakes…
Another influence, which has only just occurred to me (even ‘though I actually quote his lyrics in Sleeping Beauty), is Jimi Hendrix’s 1983, which can be found on Electric Ladyland.
In section 4, we (and Marta), are back in the real world, and our heroine is finally facing up to the consequences of her actions…
There is some foreshadowing here (in Jorge’s reaction to Marta’s dream), and some bitter self-knowledge on her part; but Jorge’s love for her is able to transcend the barriers that have sprung up between them…
But then we always knew it would…
Bye for now

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