Near Future – 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

Reset

By C Stevens | 1st October 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

As I’ve said before in this blog, we live in worrying times. Previous entries have addressed other recent threats to our well-being; principally populist rulers, unaccountable billionaires and the organisations they run, including their corrosive and equally unaccountable social media platforms; but these all pale into insignificance beside the clear and present danger, which has come sharply into focus in the current news cycle. The existential threat posed by the collapse of the biosphere will mean the end of human civilisation and cannot be mitigated by technological fixes despite all self-serving claims to the contrary. The likes of Boris Johnson waffle on about ‘Green Capitalism’ as an acceptable version which would allow for continued economic growth. But as a number of commentators have pointed out, any economic growth is in the end unsustainable, and the only way out of the coming catastrophe is to drastically reduce the size of the world economy and with it the size of the world’s population.

When very rich people start buying up land in geographically-isolated places such as New Zealand, and tech billionaires draw up serious plans to colonise Mars as a back-up planet to Earth, then it’s time for everybody to worry.

However most people don’t have the options of the super-rich, and the number of sufficiently-isolated islands with the resources to support a significant population is necessarily finite. Those wealthy people wishing to seek this kind of asylum will need to act quickly, as the drawbridges are likely to be lifted very soon. You can probably think of the quarantines imposed recently by the likes of Australia and New Zealand as a sort of dry run for what they will be forced to do again later. And in the end it may be to no avail, as the populous and militarily-powerful nations at most risk of collapse are unlikely to just sit on their hands when things get desperate. Ecological collapses in the past have always led to warfare and violence, just ask the Easter Islanders!

At some point in the near future, a one-way trip into indentured servitude on Mars is going to look like a very attractive proposition, and millions will be applying.

Ironies abound in our current predicament; that we should have reached this point when pure science has enabled us to gain a frighteningly-sophisticated understanding of the Cosmos and our place in it, is merely the most poignant. But it’s not pure science which is the villain here, it’s the application of that science in technology, and the Abrahamic social and economic doctrines pursued by all urbanized societies which have brought us here.

And the reset part?

This is not a new phenomenon for our planet; mass extinctions are par for the course, although the active complicity of a sentient race in the process is (as far as we are aware) a new variant.

In the end the planet doesn’t care, it has a built-in self-correction mechanism. If things move too far in one direction it acts (blindly one assumes) to correct the imbalances that have built up within the system. All that pesky carbon will eventually be safely locked up again and the climate will return to something less inimical to higher forms of life. But in the meantime (and we’re talking millions of years here), evolution will be reset, starting again with the few hardy and adaptable species able to survive both the collapse and the testing times that follow, and it will be their descendants who eventually inherit the Earth.

Whether any of these creatures will achieve sentience is, of course, unknowable.

And if you’ve wondered why we’ve never been contacted by a technologically-advanced species from another star system…

The Author October 2021

Pluralistic Absolutism and Adversarial Hyperbole

By C Stevens | 25th August 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

A new (and in Western liberal democracies, at least) dominant philosophy has emerged in these most worrying of times, which I have given the name pluralistic absolutism. Now I did Google this, and nobody seems to have used this precise term before. It is however a new spin on an old notion, that of cultural absolutism; the notion that the values of your nation, region, ethnic group, religious persuasion, social class, or ideological belief system (delete as appropriate) are paramount and cannot be challenged. Like much in contemporary culture, this notion has mutated and been transformed by the influence of the internet, and in particular, by social media.

Ironically, an innovation that promised to bring peoples, nations and cultures together, has had precisely the opposite effect; the online world has instead atomised society, facilitating the rise of identity politics. Societies have become far more tribal, with people finding others who share their ethnicity, gender, and sexuality (or any combination of the aforementioned) and have similar beliefs, norms and values, within cyberspace. These new virtual communities are no longer necessarily limited by national boundaries. But, rather than resulting in a more tolerant attitude towards difference, a reaction against cultural relativism has led to the opposite. A Holier than Thou attitude has become mainstreamed, as everyone noisily proclaims the difference and uniqueness of their group’s particular take on the world, and its moral superiority to every other point of view.

This worldview has many additional consequences, including a conviction (on the part of everybody, it would seem) that there is a fixed way of doing everything, from watering plants in hot weather to writing genre fiction. All of this is spread and facilitated via social media, often linked to different identity groupings, and taking its place alongside the innumerable conspiracy theories, faddism in medical treatments and diets, and all the rest of the detritus.

Every little identity group now maintains that their narrow view of the world and their particular way of doing things is right and rejects (and often condemns as evil), all competing philosophies and methodologies.

The result of this is civil paralysis and confusion, which is exploited by Populists and authoritarians, and threatens democracy and the basis of Liberal society itself, which relies on tolerance and the willingness to agree to differ.

Accompanying this is what I will term adversarial hyperbole, in itself nothing new in the pages of the popular press. However this is now aggressively colonising other areas of the media once considered immune. Hence, every pronouncement by a celebrity or public figure is now an admission rather than a comment. Mild observations about others are repurposed as ‘brutal’ or ‘crushing’ criticisms! (sidebar: when did our public vocabulary become so limited?)

Every form of public discourse now appears to be conducted in the most ludicrously adversarial terms, and one has to ask what this fashion for violent public discourse tells us about our culture and about the likely fate of our democracy.

Not wishing to be alarmist here, but the Weimar Republic comes to mind, and others have already drawn parallels between the Reichstag Fire and the storming of the US Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters. This leads me to the conclusion that the new pluralistic absolutism is effectively a product of the Baroque phase of Western Liberal Democracy, and likely a harbinger of its imminent dissolution.

On that cheery note, ’til next time

The Author August 2021

Modern unicorns part two: Nuclear Fusion

By C Stevens | 14th January 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

It’s a truism that nearly all the news about real life is bad these days. As if to compensate, the media seem to be turning in desperation to increasingly speculative subject matter, presumably in an attempt to boost morale and have something positive to talk about.

In my last post I referenced the stream of stories about Martian colonisation plans which currently infest the popular media. In this post I will cover the other ‘positive science news story’ that virtually every periodical (or at least, all the ones that feature in Google News) is now pushing, namely nuclear fusion.

The line that perennially introduces the subject of fusion power is that it is ‘thirty years away’, in fact it has been thirty years away for the whole of my adult life. It has also been the subject of constant reinterpretation and misinformation, a prime example being the fallacies perpetrated by the advocates of so-called cold fusion in the late 1980’s. Fusion has a tendency to lie low for decades, but like Dracula rising from his grave, will always return when least expected, or wanted.

One of those times is now…

The current attempts to develop nuclear fusion as a ‘reliable power source’, are characterised by the following; on the one hand, vast amounts of money spent by Governments who really ought to know better, building huge white elephant projects that suck in huge amounts of energy (as well as cash), without giving anything back. On the other, lone ‘geniuses’ working small-scale projects in obscure research institutions, making the same sort of extravagant claims as the proponents of cold fusion. The result is always the same; at best, fusion that lasts for nanoseconds and no prospect of anything approaching commercially-viable electricity generation.

One side side of me (the Romantic side) hopes that I’m wrong and one these lone geniuses will get it right, the rational side knows this a chimera, and the lone geniuses are in fact the modern equivalent of Medieval alchemists, doomed to spend their lives trying to transmute their base metal into gold.

The fact that any of this gets house room, let alone endless column inches promoting highly-speculative claims, tells us rather more about our current society than the credibility of the fusion lobby.

It tells us we have an obsession with the notion of genius, and of genius (sic) solutions. These are often promoted as hacks (or tricks), i.e. shortcuts that will enable us to solve difficult and intractable problems. As such, they appeal strongly to generations with limited patience and rather short attention spans.

Even a cursory reading of history tells us that these sorts of attitudes have prevailed in the past, usually in times of rapid technological change (the 1880’s and 90’s spring to mind), when even the highly-educated begin to lose track of the giddying pace of change and start to see science as a source of magical solutions. This particular zeitgeist is, of course, ripe for exploitation by charlatans.

There are however, underlying all of this, some even more fundamental notions:

1, that more tech is the solution to everything

2, that technology is always the solution to existing problems, never the cause of fresh ones

3, that endless economic growth is both possible and desirable

Recent history gives the lie to the first two; one only has to look at the intractable problem of storing the by-products of nuclear fission, waste that will remain deadly for thousands of years; at the non-biodegradable plastics filling our oceans; and to the dangerous climate change being unleashed by releasing millions of years of stored carbon through the burning of oil and gas.

The fallacies inherent in the last statement are nicely illustrated by the recent claim that ‘a population of trillions can be supported off-world by exploiting the resources of the Asteroid Belt!’

When it comes down to it, this guff is ideological and quasi-religious; advocated by people who propose spreading the Abrahamic notions of the Old Testament (‘…thou shalt have dominion over the Earth’, etc) throughout our Solar System and beyond.

As, like a plague of technological locusts, we seek to consume and destroy everything within our reach.

The Author January 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

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

Standing on the brink

By C. E. Stevens | 2nd July 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

We find ourselves at a curious point in our history…
For the last four months all our lives have effectively been on hold in the deep freeze of lockdown. This will change on July 4th, and the mood is best described as impatience mixed with apprehension.
On the one hand, we yearn to break free of the cage we’ve been imprisoned in; to see friends and family properly, to get a haircut, to be able to walk round our local town or city centre, go on holiday or visit a tourist destination, have a meal in a restaurant or a drink in a pub.

On the other hand, we fear that the true consequences of the pandemic and the response to it will now be revealed. These range from the prosaic; merely walking down the nearest high street and noticing how many businesses have closed, never to re-open; to the intensely personal, when one finds one’s job has disappeared and furlough payments are about to end; to a general realisation of how much of the life we knew has now gone, possibly forever.
In the UK, this encompasses a virtual cessation of all live arts performance, with theatres, dance performances, concerts and gigs all now only available remotely, or through recorded performances, combined with the indefinite suspension of public participation in most team sports and indoor recreation opportunities. This is just a sample of things we have lost, new things occur to me constantly, but it’s impossible to keep it all in your mind.

However, the general conclusions are bleak:

* Arts, culture and learning will be disproportionately affected, as populist governments concentrate on mainstream activities to the detriment of anything highbrow, intellectual, radical or alternative
* Life will move decisively online with virtual experience being privileged over physical interaction, and that this will persist, even when the pandemic ends

For understandable reasons, my own ‘virtual world’, the Lights in the sky series provides a welcome and much needed escape. There are now only three more chapters (plus two more ‘interludes’) to be written before the series is complete…

I wonder what I will do then?

The Author July 2020

A new and terrible world

By C. E. Stevens | 8th May 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

A few days ago a friend of mine sent me an image of a notice in a bookshop which had (presumably) been altered to read, Please note: the post apocalyptical [sic] fiction section has been moved to Current Affairs. I replied to her as follows: Unfortunately, my literary output has been somewhat prescient, sorry…
This brought home to me how much our lives and our country has been transformed in the month since my last post. I don’t recall the exact death toll as of April 6th, but consulting a linear graph of total deaths online reveals it to have been roughly 5,000. This is bad enough, but I’m sure that nobody (least of all the UK Government) anticipated that it would be more than 30,000 at the start of May, and that we would have the highest total in Europe, and second only to the United States worldwide. An article I read in today’s Guardian described the death of so many elderly care home residents as ‘a harvest’, and argued it was the result of Government’s short-lived policy of seeking herd immunity, which was undertaken (and then abandoned) without the necessary safeguarding measures being implemented to protect this vulnerable group. All of which suggests, if not actual callousness, a cavalier disregard for public safety, and will ensure that the Public Enquiry which is bound to follow will be keenly anticipated, if not by ministers in the present government.
It is not a comfortable experience to find that events and consequences that you had fondly imagined were confined to the pages of your latest novel have now turned up on the front pages of the newspapers and are suffusing daily life. All of which makes me more wary about actively seeking publication for this series, given that there are probably enough lunatics out there for whom the boundary between fiction and real life is sufficiently blurred for them to want to seek revenge against those who they somehow deem guilty of bringing the apocalypse about by anticipating it. If people can attack mobile phone masts, then what price a poor old novelist.
And while I did not reference infectious disease as one of the drivers of my literary apocalypse, preferring the rather more visual combination of fire, flood and civil disorder, neither did Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
In my defence, I will say that my breakdown of civilization does eventually lead to a kinder and more rational world, not that this would be of any consolation to the paper billions I consign to a brutal and premature death.
Anyway, it is what it is…
My speculations were based on future threats to our biosphere and our civilization set out by a whole host of scientists and cultural commentators, and set within a long literary tradition. It’s rather unfortunate that at least one of them has chosen to arrive rather sooner than anyone anticipated.
Lights in the sky continues to take shape, blissfully unaware that life has now decided to imitate art. I’ve decided to just write until I finish the story, which may mean a final novel approaching eight hundred pages, which I would then divide into two volumes.
Which all leads to the inevitable question; which comes first? The end of the series or the end of the world?
On that cheery note…
The Author May 2020

Categories

Recent Posts

Category: Near Future