Near Future – Page 2 – Lights In The Sky

Life during wartime

By C. E. Stevens | 18th March 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

There’s a particular art rock song from the late nineteen seventies that’s now running through my brain, it’s insistent, driving sub-disco beat has become (pro tem) the soundtrack to my existence. It’s called Life During Wartime and was recorded by the Talking Heads in 1979; going on YouTube I notice a number of other people have already made the connexion. And it is entirely appropriate because this is a war, but against an unseen enemy, one that hides in plain sight and infiltrates all of our lives by stealth, and the song’s mood of incipient paranoia speaks perfectly to our times.
I notice that every page I visit online features automated adverts for events that have been cancelled, shops that will soon close, products that no-one will be buying in the near future.
They now seem (to me) to be relics of a time that has passed, and at some point in the future they will just cease…
OK, we don’t know how this is going to play out, however, the assumptions made by Governments, business and national and international institutions are constantly being undermined by events and it seems certain that the World that emerges will not be the one we have now.
In that case, we are really entering a period of mourning for the World as it was and the lives we once had…
It occurs to me that my generation (i.e. the baby boomers) and the generations that have followed, have never really been tested, unlike our parents’ generation who had to live through the Second World War and an existential threat to our way of life (if not our very existence).
So this (finally) is our test, and we need to rise to the challenge…
The Author March 2020

Your place on the curve

By C. E. Stevens | 10th January 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Timing, as they say, is everything…
To be ahead of the curve, in that curious English phrase, is never good; early adopters of new technology (and new products in general) tend to pay a premium for their feeling of exclusivity, and may also be plagued by performance and reliability issues in their role as (unpaid) market testers.
But to be ahead of the curve in the arts is worse…
I recently purchased the DVD of Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy, a film which, while praised by most contemporary critics, was ignored by the cinema-going public and lost money, to the extent that the director considered giving up making motion pictures altogether.
From the standpoint of 2020 (the film was originally released in 1982) it looks prescient in its forensic examination of the relationship between celebrity and its often deluded fanbase. The film also explores the notion that any schmuck can be ‘King for a day’ providing they are sufficiently opportunistic, amoral and ruthless, something which the rise of social media in the decades following the film’s release has served to reinforce.
Re-viewing after a gap of probably thirty years, I found the film an uncomfortable watch, as it was all too easy to identify with frustration felt by de Niro’s protagonist, and with the hostility he feels not only towards those who are successful, but also to the army of facilitators who (to his mind) work to keep the successful in place, mainly by frustrating the attempts of new talent to gain a foothold.
Without labouring the point, anyone who is trying to break into an insanely competitive creative arts field probably feels like this, which doesn’t make them (necessarily) a bad person. It’s the nature of the beast. We have two consolations; at least we didn’t stoop to morally-reprehensible actions to achieve success (or end up in gaol!), and we are unlikely ever to be on the receiving end of the attentions of the Rupert Pupkins of this world.
Returning to the original theme of this piece, two years ago I completed a novel called After the Flood, set in London, twenty five years into the future, in which rising sea levels and a perfect storm of unfavourable circumstances combine to inundate London.
Back then, this seemed like a good original idea for a book, but now it appears everyone is writing (and publishing) this novel. There’s even one set in Birmingham, however unlikely this would appear, geographically speaking…
The Author January 2020
–

‘The Roaring Twenties’

By C. E. Stevens | 4th January 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

It’s New Year’s Day and what’s that sound filling the air? Well, if you’re in the Antipodes it’s probably the roar of bushfires as they consume your neighbourhood. A former friend moved to Australia with her husband a while back, and lives in Sydney, I’m wondering how she regards that decision today. I’m also wondering how much longer the television series Wanted Down under will continue to be made (or even shown), and I’m thinking that this may turn out to be a post-Brexit windfall for Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers, with a steady stream of skilled expatriates returning from the Southern Hemisphere to take the jobs recently vacated by those EU citizens heading back across the Channel. My niece is already here, and her parents may not be too far behind.
As ever, I feel like I’m in some way inextricably-linked to unfolding events, as no sooner do I write about something than life starts to imitate art. In a passage from my current novel …when you wish upon a star, I write about an Australia being consumed by flames, with a scene set in a gridlocked traffic queue inching its way to hope-for safety, beset on all sides by fire. This has now become a reality for thousands of unfortunate Australians in New South Wales and Victoria.
Although it’s gratifying on one level to be part of the zeitgeist, it’s not something I expected to be happening this soon. It all adds to the feeling of apprehension as we contemplate the 2020’s, a feeling that it may already be too late and climate change has become inevitable. In …when you wish upon a star I write about a world consumed by fire and flood, but I set the worst consequences of this comfortably in the future. But it seems that the future is only too eager to start early, like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse trying to crash your New Year’s Eve party, and guess what? They’ve brought a couple of extra friends, Fire and Flood, along with them.
In short, the coming decade is not filling me with a great sense of anticipation. Many people (I imagine) will be too lost in their personal orgy of unnecessary and conspicuous consumption to notice, and it may take something really ‘significant’ happening (like the World Cup or the Olympics being cancelled) before it registers.
However we have (very nearly) the worst possible set of political leaders in place at this moment, whose ‘strategy’ would appear to be denial, closely followed by lies and excuses. One can only hope that a new generation emerges, before it is too late.
Happy New Year
The Author January 2020

The flight from current realities

By C. E. Stevens | 17th November 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Modern cultural and political discourse appears to embody not merely a retreat into various forms of irrationality, but also a retreat into solipsism (and for many narcissism!). I confess that I’m guilty of the sin of solipsism; what is Lights in the sky if not a retreat from the unpleasant realities of the world that we find ourselves in? and I’m obviously not alone in seeking a refuge from an alarming and increasingly dangerous world.
Part of the novel form’s appeal is the degree of control it gives to the writer; without a director or stage manager, or a cast of actors to interpret your work, you are effectively God. What you as the author decree goes in the world you have created. This is especially true of the fields of fantastic literature and science fiction, where you literally create a new world in many cases, and I’m sure it’s no accident that these genres attracted a whole host of extreme personalities (Edgar Rice Burroughs, HP Lovecraft and Philip K Dick spring to mind, but there are others).
However the solipsism previously on offer to the novelist, the poet and the fabled lonely artist working in their garrett is now on offer to everyone. The online world and smartphone culture enables people to conduct large parts of their everyday business without having to directly interact with other people. People can conduct elaborate ‘friendships’ with people they will never meet, and, in the case of online celebrities, who remain completely unaware of their existence. It is possible (via gaming) to escape into virtual worlds of mind-boggling complexity and become utterly divorced from the world outside. I was slightly alarmed (but not surprised) to learn of a strain of scientific and philosophical thought that advocates perpetuating the human species (or maybe just themselves, I’m not quite sure!) within conveniently-wrought AI, enabling these lucky people to inhabit their private worlds (presumably) for all eternity.
There are obviously cultish aspects to all of the above beliefs and practices (and, I would argue, aspects of the transcendentalist and monastic religious experience), but for the would-be solipsist they offer yet another series of alternative realities where the individual is in sole control.
Of course out in the ‘real world’, it also offers that other breed of narcissists, the populists of the New Right, carte blanche to continue to mould the physical world in their own image; safe in the knowledge that the fractured solipsism of contemporary culture makes it unlikely that a sufficient number of potential opponents will ever be able to effectively organise against them.
Of course, a lot of this is symptomatic of a current reality where things are now ‘looking so grim that you have to wear shades’ (to misquote a minor alt-pop hit of the 90’s), and I’m drawn to Douglas Adams’ wonderful notion that the renegade President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox, would sport sunglasses that automatically obscure his vision whenever danger threatens.
Strikes me we’ve now all been issued with this particularly-useful piece of kit,
‘…impending global catastrophe, what do I care? I’m going to lose myself in whichever role-playing and world-building online game is flavour of the month! See you on the other side, or not!’
So what about your latest novel? I hear you all ask…
Well, chapter six is now complete, and Marta da Guia is now on the cusp of adolescence. I have reintroduced a familiar character, Klara, the emotional automaton (and prototype of the nursemaids on Alpha five) invented by Dr Helen Choi. Klara’s role will be that of the Greek Chorus I talked about in previous blogs, commenting on the action, and on the changes taking place in the wider world.
However this volume is inevitably (with apologies to Gabriel Garcia-Marquez) a Chronicle of a Death Foretold, we know how this story is going to end, and it’s not good…
This narrative appears to me completely appropriate in our current times…
The Author November 2019

Swimming against the tide of history

By C. E. Stevens | 12th September 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Discussing recent political developments as well as longer-term societal trends in my recent blogs has got me thinking, and my speculations have made me somewhat fatalistic.
I (and others of similar opinions and disposition), can hope, in the short term, for the amelioration of the current crises afflicting Western society. We can hope for a rational resolution of the Brexit issue domestically, we can hope that a Democrat is elected as US president in 2020, we can hope for a lot of things…
But there is such a thing as the tide of history, deeper and more fundamental changes that occur underneath short-term political developments. In my last blog I referenced a shift from what I referred to as a written culture to new culture mediated by artificial intelligence. Now I’m not arrogant (or ignorant) enough to suppose that I’ve come up with an original idea, but I think it’s likely that many cultural commentators and theorists writing on this matter will have a different standpoint to me. Many will welcome the change that appears to be happening, rather than regretting or fearing it.
But the point is that, irrespective of your standpoint, this is happening and the way people think, feel and act will change accordingly. People of my generation and way of thinking will rapidly become cut off, isolated in a culture that no longer understands them, and which they feel little or no affinity for. Small changes are straws in the wind; I still have a cheque book which I intend to use to pay some outstanding bills, pretty soon this won’t be an option; I like reading books and I spend some of my time writing them, but how long before a post-literate culture emerges where all books are audio books? Where people rely on virtual helpers such as Alexa to conduct all their transactions; I also like physical shops, but I fear for their survival.
All in all, I feel that pretty soon I’m going to be like an updated version of the protagonist of the 1960’s television series Adam Adamant Lives, an Edwardian adrift in contemporary society…
Of course, another trend, one that is proceeding quietly under all the sound and fury of contemporary politics, may put a stop to this ‘Brave New World’, at least for the majority.
I refer, of course, to the various elephants in the room, climate change, sea level rise, resource depletion, all the issues that drive the narrative in Lights in the sky. I note that in today’s press various scientific institutions, as well some obscenely-rich private citizens, are again discussing possible fall-back strategies should our actions make our planet uninhabitable. It’s the usual guff: NASA wants to colonise the Moon, Jeff Bezos wants to build vast environments orbiting the Earth, where the climate will be, ‘..like Maui, but every day!’, as last on seen the SF flick Interstellar, Elon Musk wants to nuke Mars etc…
I think it’s quite likely that at least some of these ideas will come to fruition, but on a strictly limited basis; probably consisting of a few scientists and military personnel living out barren lives underground on Mars or the Moon, while the rest of us left on Earth mostly die, and the unlucky survivors descend into savagery.
I recently bought the DVD (another soon to be obsolescent piece of tech) of Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Cold War satire Dr Strangelove, and I think that Kubrick was being prescient here, just not in any way he could have imagined!
But that’s the problem with futurology, things never turn out quite the way you anticipated…
Which, of course, may mean that I’m being unduly alarmist.
Time will tell…
The Author September 2019

New novel or displacement activity?

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

As I intimated in my last blog, Lights in the sky is not over, as I’ve now started the seventh novel, with the title I trailed last time, …when you wish upon a star, which was just too good to pass up really!
The downside being I’m again putting off trying to market my growing ouvre to agents and publishers, in favour of doing what I really want to do, which is to write more fiction and spend more time in the comforting fictional world I’ve created, as opposed to an increasingly scary real world. There’s also an element of selfishness in this. While I remain obscure and largely unread, the world of Lights in the sky remains mine, and mine alone. I have no agent to make suggestions, no commissioning editor to suggest revisions, no readership to make demands. It gratified me, when reading the obituary of the great Toni Morrison, to learn that she’d kept the manuscript of her first novel, The Bluest Eye, for years before eventually submitting it, even though she worked in publishing. She subsequently explained that she’d wanted to keep the novel private, recognising that once it went out into the world it would no longer be entirely hers. And I can understand that; a fictional world is a precious and intensely personal thing, and being published (and acquiring a readership) entails letting go of part of yourself.
Anyway, back to the work in hand…
As usual, writing a new installment in the series entails a lot of research in order to develop new characters with convincing backstories, and develop tangible locations where the action of the novel can take place, what in cinema is referred to as mise en scene. Some of this research is via my usual sources (step forward and take a bow, Wikipedia, and Google Maps), but a lot of it consists of rereading and research within the existing books of the series. I find that although Marta da Guia is an established character who appears (at various points in her life) in at least three of the novels, there’s an awful lot that we don’t know about her. This is of course the reason for the book, she’s pivotal to Lights in the sky, without her neither of the other two Martas (the main characters in our series) would exist at all. But she has hitherto remained on the periphery, a supporting character, never the main event, bar the twelfth chapter of the first novel.
All this will now change…
I have also decided to incorporate the stories of the other two characters I referenced last month into this novel, rather than condemning them to short story purdah. It makes sense really: Ester Almeida will become a pivotal figure within the Camposetta movement that will eventually destroy the Alpha Mission and Miss da Guia’s world. She will do this via her position as the leader of the Camposetta’s political wing, Partido dos trabalhadores do campo. Clara will not be centre stage, in fact she will eventually go into hiding, but her purpose will be to dramatise how the developing crisis destabilises the lives of ordinary people, as the certainties that have underpinned their existence are steadily eroded.
Finally, I have decided to make Miss da Guia’s biological parents (who never actually meet their child, or each other) significant characters in their own right, more so than Marta’s Alpha Mission-appointed foster parents, and the various educationalists and functionaries that will surround her. By remaining detached, I hope they will be able to take on the role of a Greek chorus, commenting on the action as it proceeds with the grinding inevitability of all history.
So that’s the plan, but there’s so much more to be done, and so much more to come…
As a sidebar to the above, I’ve found a number of really good YouTube channels in the last couple of days, writing specifically about SF movies, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar, and my personal favourite, the peerless Arrival.
Their various analyses (especially those on the nature of language, presented in two programmes on Arrival) got me thinking, and I came up with the following notions, which may not be original, but aren’t based on anything I’ve ever read.
Around five and a half thousand years ago we went through a pivotal moment in the development of human society, specifically the jump from a purely oral culture to a written one. This gradually percolated downwards from a learned elite to eventually encompass the bulk of humanity, and in the process profoundly altered the way people think, effectively rewiring our brains.
And now I think this is happening again, with a jump from a written culture to one mediated by Artificial Intelligence. This has already significantly altered the way many of us behave, and the process of rewiring human consciousness appears to be happening all over again. But this time with frightening speed, and with profound and unknowable consequences for us all.
’til next time
The Author September 2019

Housekeeping

By C. E. Stevens | 29th August 2019 | 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

Island: analogy and its uses

By C. E. Stevens | 28th March 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Island: analogy and its uses
I came up with a neat and (I think) apposite analogy recently while writing chapter fifteen of Maya, imagining the Edgbaston campus of the University of Birmingham (a future version features as a setting) as an island in a sea of ordinary concerns.
I thought further and applied the analogy (on a larger scale) to an England, ‘…separated geographically, politically and culturally from its European neighbours and the wider world,’ post-Brexit. It then occurred to me that the same analogy applied to my writing (and this blog), given that I am largely talking to myself here.
The analogy continues to gather force and gobble up more territory as I’m currently suffering from a painful and debilitating ailment which makes the ordinary tasks of daily life challenging, makes it harder for me to leave the house, and has the effect of isolating me from the rest of the world (on my own island).
If this is beginning to sound like an extract from one of Kafka’s famous Blue Notebooks (recently brought back to my attention by the music of Hans Richter), then this is apt as I claim him as an influence.
On that cheery note
The Author March 2019

Irrational behaviour

By C. E. Stevens | 8th February 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental twenty three: Irrational behaviour
Apologies for not blogging last month, but I’ve been rather busy…
Maya, my seventh novel (the final part of the Lights in the sky sextet), is, amazingly, nearly half way through. Though an issue has arisen with the title of the previous volume. While doing the SEO on this website I found there were two very similar books; a Scandinavian novel whose title (when translated into English) is also After the Flood, plus a home-grown novel (also made into a film) called Flood, which has a very similar premise. How closely the two novels resemble mine I’m not sure, yet. However accidental plagiarism is an occupational hazard in creative writing as the zeitgeist tends to generate similar artistic responses to it.
What this has done is make me re-evaluate the title of my last novel, and I’m thinking I may return to the original title, The Great Flood, which would emphasis the historical echoes implicit in the work. Flood (on first glance) would appear to be a thriller set in very near future, and thus a different sort of animal. But more research is needed…
The SEO on my website is something I’ve been meaning to get around to for some time, and I’m enjoying the exercise, which fills in time between finishing chapter ten of my current book, and starting chapter eleven. Rob is currently in the process of revamping the website, which should soon boast a new landing page with a revolving gallery of images, and tabs giving easy access to my latest blog entries and excerpts from the books.
Out in the wider world things seem to go from bad to worse, as if the fates are determined to bring my fictional predictions to pass. The case of the man in India who is suing his parents for conceiving him without his permission is both completely barking, and an illustration of a philosophical tendency that I hadn’t previously been aware of, that of antinatalism.
Now, I’ll confess there are elements of this philosophy in the series, at least one of the protagonists characterises the human species as ‘a virus on the skin of the Planet!’ But these are individual points of view in what is essentially a pluralist work. Lights in the sky is at bottom both humanist and positive; humanity is tested and the biosphere threatened with extinction, as a result of our selfish actions. But both survive, and a better, more ethical (and non-Abrahamic) society emerges, with a little outside help, but then I’ve always been partial to a nice Deus ex machina!
Back in today’s grim reality it occurs to me that Trump may really be the Antichrist, and this probably accounts for all the support he receives from those US Fundamentalists, who see him (presumably) as a necessary precursor to the Last Days!
On that cheery apocalyptic note…
The Author February 2019

After the Flood

By C. E. Stevens | 21st December 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental twenty two: After the Flood
At last, it’s here!
After promising you the first chapter of my sixth novel, I’m finally in a position to deliver. After the Flood is (as regular readers will be aware) also the fifth novel in the Lights in the sky sextet.
The opening is very much in the tradition of ‘it was a dark and stormy night’, although we a very quickly plunged into the world of 2043. I wrote the four lines of verse that provide an epigraph for the chapter, and the novel is book-ended by a much longer poem which closes the narrative. The story is about the Great Flood of London of 2043, and was originally called ‘The Great Flood’, but the title changed (as they often do) to be replaced by the rather less matter of fact and rather more evocative present title, with its Biblical connotations (and indirect reference to Bob Dylan).
After the Flood is also more appropriate because almost the whole of the novel is about what happens next. We follow a group of people, most of whom we meet in this opening chapter, who survive the Deluge, and we see how they cope and how they attempt to repair or in most cases remake their lives in the chaos and the loss that follows the inundation of London.
In chapter one we see the arrival of the Great Wave which devastates London from the point of view of our diverse group of protagonists. All of whom survive (in one case miraculously), while others around them perish. These people are ordinary and flawed; they are not necessarily the right people (i.e. those that deserve to live), and all suffer from what you might term ‘survivor’s guilt’ at various times and to various degrees.
All are changed by their experiences (though some more than others), and most become better people.
Chapter one is necessarily episodic, as I try to portray the implacability and the sheer inevitability of the cataclysm as it unfolds (at times almost in slow motion). Thus we have a fractured narrative; unsurprising as the events are told from a variety of perspectives, but also because I want to put over how such an event would be experienced by those caught up in it, and convey the overwhelming feelings of shock and dislocation they would feel.
A friend who is reading the novel described it as ‘your disaster movie’, and (like all Lights in the sky novels), it is written with adaptation in mind. Dialogue is important, but it is balanced by the interior monologue of the main characters, the pace (initially at least) is frenetic, and I have tried to convey visually the impact of the Event on the ancient city of London.
And on re-reading this chapter I am convinced more than ever that I have succeeded in my aims. See if you agree…
The Author December 2018

Categories

Recent Posts

Category: Near Future