Near Future – Page 3 – Lights In The Sky

Displacement activities

By C. E. Stevens | 15th December 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental twenty one: Displacement activities
So what happened to all those submissions you promised by the end of 2018, I hear you ask? Well, the honest answer is displacement activities have taken over, and rather than wait until the New Year I’ve already started the next novel, Maya, in fact I’ve already completed the first five chapters (and one hundred pages). And this is always the way; I love writing far more than promotion. There are a number of reasons for this; let’s be honest, I really don’t like being told what to do by other people, and the search for autonomy has been the keystone of my existence. By passing my work on to others (agents, publishers, a wider readership), it ceases to be wholly mine, and other people start to assume ownership and start to make demands. Professional demands come first, ‘…we don’t like this, could you change that etc etc, then if you do start selling to significant numbers of people, your new found readership starts to make its own demands!
Aren’t you being arrogant, I hear you say? Who says that your work is any good anyway? Well, I just went back on my website and re-read part of A Children’s Crusade, and I am convinced more than ever of its merit. You cannot be objective, people will say! Well not entirely, I will admit, but I’ve read an awful lot of literature and in my usual autodidactic fashion made an extensive study of SF, and I am dispassionate and I do know the difference between good writing and bad. What I would concede is that possibly my work is not fashionable (though I doubt this, as well), and I am probably not the average agent or publisher’s idea of a marketable modern author. But more fool them…
Anyway, Maya picks up the story of Marta Camacho, otherwise known as Tata, where we left it at the end of novel four. She is safely ensconced in the free communities in Amazonas close to the Peruvian border, behind the mysterious barrier that protects them from the outside world (if this all sounds a bit Harry Potter, I ask for your forbearance as scientific explanations will follow!).
However Tata is never happy anywhere for long, and her relationship with the other David (Rodrigues) has hit the rocks, and the forces of the provisional government of Novo Brasil know where she is and are now massing outside the Discontinuity that protects them…
Maya also introduces new characters, an earnest young Canadian citizen astronomer called Karl, and the other members of his online group, and a discredited Korean astrophysicist, ‘Nancy’ Park, who’s now working as an online ‘hostess’.
In Maya the world has recovered (to a certain extent) from the shock and dislocation of the Collapse, and some nations and their citizens are starting to look forward again, albeit tentatively…
Finally, the opening chapter of After the Flood will be hitting this website imminently, and I’ll blog again when that happen…
The Author December 2018

A question of attribution

By C. E. Stevens | 8th October 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental twenty: a question of attribution
I’ve finally finished After the Flood, well almost. I’m still playing around with the ending, but it’s in a condition where I can now start submitting to agents.
However a new issue has arisen. After the Flood is a Lights in the Sky novel; although the fifth to be written, it’s actually the first chronologically, set in 2043 (i.e. twenty five years from the present). But I’ve used my mainstream pseudonym, Stephen Clare, whereas all the other LITS novels are under the pen name, C.E. Stevens.
So something has to give; I’m minded to abandon the C.E. Stevens moniker altogether. It has always sounded clumsy to me, whereas Stephen Clare sounds like an author. I imagine him living in a thatched cottage somewhere in the Cotswolds, or tramping the Yorkshire Moors in green wellies and a tweed jacket like a latter day Ted Hughes. Naturally he’ll have chiseled features and probably smoke a pipe, or at least he will have done until told to give up on doctor’s orders.
Anyway, Lights in the Sky started out as a humble trilogy, expanded to a tetralogy, but has now become a pentalogy, and there will be a sixth. The LITS novels are (in order of writing), A Children’s Crusade, The Fixed Stars, The Lost Colony, The Leftover Girl, plus the current volume. The final part of what will be a sextet has the provisional title Maya (or Illusion), and I’ll start this in the New Year.
After the Flood is set in the fictional world of LITS, but in form and subject matter it’s very much a mainstream novel, which just happens to be set a quarter of a century in the future. This continues the trend established with The Leftover Girl, which is mainstream science fiction as opposed to genre SF. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed the title has changed (formerly it was known as The Great Flood), but I prefer the new title, which is more elegant with its Biblical connotations.
I have made use of a number of literary sources, specifically High-Rise by J.G. Ballard, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, and Dickens’ last completed novel Our Mutual Friend.
These are deployed as thematic references rather than mined for plot or storyline, Every chapter (apart from the first) is prefaced by quotation which refers to the narrative or thematic content in some way. The majority of these quotations are taken from the four main sources, but I do quote other people (including Joe Strummer!).
There is an element of intertextuality at work here. Karen, a journalist, did her degree in English Literature at Birmingham, and the subject of her dissertation was Conrad. Mariyam is deeply affected by reading High-Rise while at University, and the literary interests of other characters impinge on the narrative.
So far, so postmodern, but After the Flood, as well as being a character-led drama is also an adventure story, or rather it’s a series of individual adventures. Some (but not all) intersect, but they are all set against the climate change wrought cataclysm that is the Great Flood of London 2043. In a case of real-life imitating (my) art, I recently read a number of recent articles talking about this very possibility, predicated on our not (as a species) doing anything effective to halt global warming, and sticking our collective heads in the sand rather than planning for the consequences of this.
After the Flood is also my London novel, and before you ask, I did live in London while studying for my first degree, and I also lived in Chelmsford in Essex (a London dormitory town) for a number of years beforehand. A lot of the action in the novel takes place in East London, from the City and the Tower of London, up to Stratford, Forest Gate and Ilford in the north, taking in Wanstead and Dagenham, and proceeding along the Essex side of the River as far as East Tilbury. But there are detours, to the Palace of Westminster, to Teddington Lock, south to Maidstone in Kent, and north to Milton Keynes. And the central part of the narrative is the voyage of the container vessel Ulysses from the Pool of London to Dover. So, a novel about the sea, the River, and London, based in part on first hand knowledge, but also relying on the imagination to conjure its fictional world…
I hope to include an extract on the website in the near future…
Stephen Clare October 2018

I’d rather write a ‘cosy catastrophe!’

By C Stevens | 7th May 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

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

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

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

On that cheery note

Stephen Clare May 2018

The midway point

By C Stevens | 5th April 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental eighteen: The midway point
I’m now roughly halfway through writing The Great Flood, having completed eleven chapters and one hundred and fifty pages. Following the convention I’ve established, each of my novels has twenty two chapters, although the actual length of each book has varied! Twenty two is the typical number of episodes in a season of US television drama (science fiction or otherwise), which is the source of the convention. All of my books are written in a format that would facilitate adaptation for this medium.

My general conclusion having reached this point is that I haven’t paid sufficient attention in my fictional future society to the virtual world and the tendency of a growing number of people to want to take refuge within it, pace Ready Player One and similar works. This is something I will need to address in part two of the book.

I have already identified which of the characters will be missing their virtual existence the most. Through her story I’ll explore the phenomenon, its seductions and its limitations, which (not unnaturally) have been brought home to her by the disaster.

At this point I would normally be banging on about the march of authoritarianism in modern politics, but I’ve decided to give it a rest for the moment. Of far more interest is the extremely partisan nature of modern identity politics, something which social media have exacerbated. This divides us as a species and is not good!

That social media is a two-edged sword is becoming more apparent by the day; as well dividing us into (mutually antagonistic!) tribes, it concedes far too much power and control over our lives to very rich men and they are usually men!) and unaccountable corporations! The Robber Barons of the late-nineteenth century would have envied the nabobs of Silicon Valley! Large tech corporations have gained (by a combination of stealth and flattery!) access to all of our lives and could use it against us, if they saw fit. They already exploit it for personal and corporate gain, something which has become apparent over the past few days!

Even more worrying is the extreme subjectivity inherent in social media’s hold over the dissemination of ‘news’ to huge numbers of people; this destabilises the very notion of objectivity, and thus of responsible independent journalism. That this is an existential threat to the notion of liberal democracy is also self-evident!

Rather naively, I had thought that future authoritarian regimes would make use of CGI (once it had become indistinguishable from real life!), and literally rewrite history! But the actual use of modern technology by authoritarian groups has been far more subtle.

These developments would appear to pose almost as much of a threat to our way of life (and possibly our continued existence as a species) as climate change, environmental degradation, and resource depletion, the threats I have previously identified and highlighted in my fictional world. My current novel needs to address this, and will do so in part two.

But it’s not just social media; the pioneers of our online world were by and large idealists, Tim Berners-Lee literally gave his idea of a world-wide web to all of us, free of charge, and this idealism is also reflected in things like Wikipedia and Linux! But the downside of all this had been the ready availability of so much information and free content! This has had profound economic, political, social, and psychological results, the consequences of which are only just beginning to become apparent!

If I wanted to sum up all of the above in one pithy phrase I would say that irrationality has become a contagion and it spreads via the internet!

Stephen Clare April 2018

More ‘interesting times!’

By C Stevens | 17th March 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On that note…

Future history

By C Stevens | 31st January 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental sixteen: Future history
My plan to write a series of short stories filling the background of the Lights in the sky universe went awry (after three stories), when one of the stories decided to turn itself into a novel!

So I’m now writing my sixth piece of extended fiction with the current title The Great Flood. If this sounds like historical fiction then that’s the point; writing about a putative future as if it were history, a common approach in science fiction!

As ever the intention is to write something that will appeal to the general reader, to a mainstream readership, in fact!

We’re in recognisable world (a possible criticism is that it’s a bit too like our own!). I think this is inevitable and a commonplace in fictional works set in a supposed future! I’m not futurologist, nor do I have clairvoyant powers! Most futuristic fiction reaches an accommodation with its audience… It’s different from the present day, but not too different! This provides reference points for the reader…

The trick would appear to be to introduce a number of technological, cultural, and social changes while maintaining a recognisable milieu…

This is complicated in the current times by the sheer pace of technological and related social and cultural transformations, but nothing is worse than supposed future world filled with supposed ‘developments’ which prove laughably wide of the mark (personal jetpacks and flying cars anybody!).

Science fiction reflects the time that it is written, anyway; and mine reflects a suspicion of and an apprehension with unchecked technological advance and economic change which is a part of the current zeitgeist! Obviously, another strand within the same zeitgeist welcomes this change with open arms…

This schism forms part of the ideological and cultural wars that characterise our times. This is very much a work in progress and it will change, as I modify and customise the text through the writing and editing process…

As ‘historical’ fiction the past is very much present in the world of the novel, manifesting both in the preoccupations of the main characters, and in the thematic elements and symbolism I intend to employ…

Stephen Clare January 2018

Goodbye and good riddance!

By C Stevens | 31st December 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental fifteen: Goodbye and good riddance!
I find it difficult to remember a year that I’ve wanted to see the back of more than 2017, although 2018’s not looking too promising!

This year we’ve had the full horror of Donald Trump’s populism unleashed on the world, and the full implications of Brexit (as well as the sheer ineptitude of the current government!), have become clearer by the day…

Add to that the now widely accepted belief that the environmental cataclysm and the accompanying mass extinction event are underway and that there’s nothing we can do about it! Apologists are even now saying that this the way of the world and we should embrace the natural order of thing;, I would like to point out to these people that the species likely to disappear includes our own! Oh and President Trump thinks that some good old Global Warming would be good for his country! Maybe he should tell that to Californians…

Signs of optimism for next year include the possibility of a Democrat majority after the US midterms followed in short order by Trump’s impeachment, and a snap General Election that sweeps away the Maybot, and leads (at the very least) to more rational variety of Brexit… But I’m not convinced!

But hey, Birmingham’s got the 2022 Commonwealth Games!

My response to all this has been to take refuge once more in my fictional futures; Lights in the sky is finished, but Tales of the Collapse is well under way…

So far this consists of four short stories, with another one, The Great Flood, well underway!

Worrying, this last piece seems to want to grow beyond a mere short story and is threatening to become a novella (or maybe even a novel!)…

Happy New Year

C.E. Stevens December 2017

Blog entry supplemental thirteen: The rise of unreason

By C Stevens | 24th October 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

Well, there are a number of suspects…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C.E. Stevens October 2017

Blog entry supplemental twelve: New Earth and other fables

By C Stevens | 16th September 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

I eventually got round to watching The Search for a New Earth…

Hearteningly I had anticipated most of the issues and challenges outlined in the programme in my similarly-themed tetralogy Lights in the Sky…

What I hadn’t anticipated were: plasma rockets as a means of space propulsion rather more efficient than chemical rockets (I may substitute these in the relevant chapter, as it would only be a modest change), Proxima b as the Earth-like planetary destination, and artificially-induced hibernation as a means of dealing with the length of time needed to traverse the distance between here and the Centauran system…

But overall, not bad!

I enjoyed the programme (…at least at first!), but after a while it began to strain credulity, featuring as it did; postage stamp-sized space probes capable of reaching another star system (and beaming back data!), hibernating bears immune to radiation sickness, and hibernation-inducing serum obtained from hamsters, for Christ’s sake! And I began to wonder if the whole thing wasn’t some kind of late April Fool’s joke! Then I remembered the original Tomorrow’s World (my favourite television programme growing up!), anchored as it was by overly-enthusiastic, manically-grinning presenters, and showcasing (on a weekly basis) ground-breaking technological developments that were never heard of again!

But seriously folks, there were a couple of important issues that weren’t raised by the programme. Firstly, any manned mission to Proxima b would appear to be asking the putative crew members to spend twenty years of their lives in hibernation, time they would presumably never get back! The question of whether being in hibernation would slow the ageing process was never discussed, but it doesn’t seem to do so in the case of bears (or indeed, hamsters!).

Secondly, we have the elephant in the room! The Proxima expedition (like my Alpha Mission!), would do nothing for the billions left back on Earth, presumably to die miserably in the impending ecological catastrophe! Eventually, a significant number of those billions would realise this and start to seriously oppose these plans, asking (quite reasonably) why the effort and the (billions of) dollars going into an expedition to the stars aren’t being spent sorting out the problems here on Earth!

I was also re-assured by the rather precarious prospect offered to any settlement on the planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, with its one face permanently turned towards its primary (and being baked by its rays), while the other remains in deep freeze, and with only a thin strip of supposedly habitable planet between the two! I decided that, on reflection, I much preferred my world, Alpha 5, as the fictional destination for my explorers cum colonists…

Imaginary worlds need to be better than the one we live in, or why else would we invent them?

C.E. Stevens September 2017

Blog entry twenty four: The end of the road

By C Stevens | 6th September 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

I’ve finished Lights in the sky…

I’ll qualify that; I’ve finished the final novel in the series, the leftover girl, which (counterintuitively), is the first chronologically in the series. This is not to say that I’ll never return to the world of Alpha 5, I’ve left some loose ends and there are still stories to tell, but the main narrative is finished! It’s taken me four (or possibly five) years of living at least partially in a world of my own creation. The series covers a period of two centuries from the birth of Helen Choi right through to the death of last of the twins on Alpha 5…

So how do I feel?

Well, empty, grieving, directionless etc etc…

This is the first time that I haven’t had anything to write in nearly a year…

It’s like a bereavement, or possibly like the empty nest syndrome you get when your children finally leave home; the novels are like my children!

So how do I deal with this?

By doing the (to me) drudgery of promoting the series. I have a list of 15+ agents plus a number of independent publishers (you have been warned!). And I’m now looking to sharpen up my (rather blunt) act by making my website more visible and marketing my writing more effectively via social media (even!).

By writing something else!

Another volume of LITS (possible, but the safe option, and there’s always the danger of diminishing returns!)
By starting a completely new project (scary!)
By continuing the ‘Simon’ series (lacking enthusiasm for this at the the mo’, and compared to LITS it’s a teensy bit prosaic!)

So a bit of thinking to do, but plenty to get on with…

’til next time…

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A question of attribution

By C. E. Stevens | 8th October 2018 | Comments 0 Comment