Science Fiction – Page 3 – Lights In The Sky

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…

Blog entry supplemental eleven: farewell Brian Aldiss

By C Stevens | 29th August 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Rather presumptuously, about two years ago I contacted the great man via his website suggesting that he might be able to help me, and directing him to the Lights in the sky opener, serialised on this website. I acknowledged my debt to him and the role Billion Year Spree played in my autodidactic study of imaginative literature, leading eventually to my writing it!

Whether he ever got to read the message I don’t know, but somehow I doubt it, assuming it to have been intercepted by one of the gatekeepers supervising his website, but I never received an answer…

Like a lot of SF fans of my generation I came to Brian Aldiss through the short story collection Space, Time and Nathaniel, before moving on, to The Dark Light Years, Cryptozoic, and eventually Hothouse! Aldiss was clearly a better writer (in purely literary terms), than my other favourite of the period, Philip K Dick (as he would prove with the incomparable Helliconia Trilogy), but stylistically he now seems to belong to another age. The films made from his stories weren’t that successful and are now never shown (with sole exception of A.I., made from his short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long), and fit much less well with the anxiety-ridden postmodernist world we find ourselves in , a milieu that Dick inhabits perfectly, and appeared to anticipate!

His SF scholarship tried (unsuccessfully) to force the literary world to take the form seriously, but in vain, and Billion (later Trillion) Year Spree’s only real fault is that it contains no appreciation of his own work!

R.I.P. then, Brian…

C.E. Stevens August 2017

Blog entry supplemental nine: the wheel is turning

By C Stevens | 27th June 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Apologies for not blogging for a while; but I’ve been away, in America, in fact! This was a road trip I took with my mate, Rob… We both play music and we’ve played together in various bands for the past twenty years; so this was a musical odyssey!

We flew to Chicago and proceeded south, mainly (but not exclusively) following the path of the Mississippi… I did the driving (to St Louis, Missouri, Nashville, Memphis, Natchez, Mississippi, ending up in New Orleans); the total distance is not far short of 1500 miles and I did that in nine days, driving on alternate days…

So what’s this got to do with SF and the Lights in the sky series, I hear you ask? Well, I’m getting to that!

The trip was a chance not only to visit and pay homage to old musical heroes and discover new ones (Rhiannon Giddens and Gary Clark jr. at the Chicago Blues Festival were particularly memorable!), but also a chance to get away from my life; away from the writing and away from my claustrophobic little island!

I completed part two of The Leftover Girl, just prior to leaving and I’m thus between two thirds and the three-quarters of the way through the book. The first two sections are called The Road, and …to Hell, and the final part will be called …paved with good intentions, so you probably get the drift…

Time away from a work-in-progress is important because it helps give you perspective, vital for a writer. I re-read the section I’d just completed on my return in preparation for starting on the final leg of the literary journey; and I realised something that, although obvious, just hadn’t occurred to me in the rush to complete part two of the book before my departure. The revelation is that the second character in my novel, Dr (later Professor) Helen Choi, ends her life in despair; concluding that she has been in error, pursuing false scientific goals and denying her essential nature. She has lived her life in maya, the world of illusion, effectively denying her own spirituality… She dies hoping that when she meets her husband (‘…in whichever version of the afterlife she is bound’), he will find it in his heart to forgive her…

The second conclusion I came to (the start of this came while watching the aforementioned artists in Millennium Park, Chicago), was that after three terrible years things are finally moving in our favour once more… Chicago Blues was important because I was disillusioned with music (which for a songwriter is my own version of despair!).

A bit of context is needed here! For those of you unfamiliar with the form, blues festivals in the UK consist of a few hundred (mostly) blokes my age or older, standing ‘round drinking real ale and watching acts even more ancient than they are!

Chicago was different; the first thing we saw (the Blues Village stage), was just like UK blues festivals, and we nearly left at this point! But I looked at the flyer and saw that Rhiannon Giddens (for Christ’s sake!), was performing on the main stage and she was just about to start! For those of you who don’t about her she’s immensely talented as a writer and performer, utterly beautiful, from North Carolina (my favourite out of the twenty seven states of the Union I have visited!), and the possessor of the best voice God ever gave a woman!

We moved to the fantastic open-air auditorium in Millennium Park (think Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao!), and were presented with at least twenty thousand people in the open air-bowl that forms the arena! And these people weren’t old gits like me and Rob, they were young people, of all races, who love music that most young people in my country wouldn’t be seen dead grooving to… The reaction to Rhiannon Giddens was ecstatic enough, but that was nothing compared to the welcome they gave to Gary Clark jr, the new Jimi Hendrix, and someone I hadn’t even heard of !

Not only did this restore my faith in music, but I realised that things in general are changing! It’s not just music; Jeremy Corbyn’s popularity with young people in the UK (as evidenced by his reception at Glastonbury!), the totally unexpected election result, the retreat of Fascistic populism everywhere etc etc

The wheel is indeed turning; favouring authenticity rather than artifice; art rather than commerce; individual expression rather than Simon Cowell-mentored posing; idealism rather than self-interest!

Finally, we seem to be throwing off the twin dead hands of Postmodernist ‘irony’ and neoclassical economics, and discarding the appalling cynicism they engendered…and it occurs to me that this can only be good for me personally, because the type of fiction I write may even come back into fashion…

I talked about the zeitgeist in a previous post; well, I think its just shifted…

C.E. Stevens June 2017

Blog entry supplemental eight: Tapping into the zeitgeist

By C Stevens | 11th May 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

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

Blog entry supplemental seven: …if we had but world enough and time

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

One of the principal attractions (to me) of writing science fiction is that you get to create your own world. This even has a technical term (it’s called world building!), and formed part of the syllabus of the one day course is writing SF that I did three years ago.
Of course, any form of creative writing involves a bit of this, but with mainstream fiction you’ve got much more to go on! SF and Fantasy require much more creativity in this regard as you’re often starting from scratch. This has its own perils; fantasy and sword and sorcery novels in particular tend to suffer from a plethora of daft (sometimes faintly ludicrous) names for things, people, beasts, countries, worlds etc etc.
To avoid this I’ve tried to ground my narrative with a greater sense of realism by writing the near (and hopefully horribly plausible) future. It’s really an alternative history (currently a popular genre, with the success of Amazon Studio’s television adaptation of Philip K Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle), but this is future history rather an alternative past!
As I’ve said, this notion is extremely seductive as you get to play God, but also extremely satisfying and comforting as you create a world that you, the author, can escape to. And Lord knows we need that at the moment!
Mainstream critics (and even some authors) can be extremely disparaging about speculative fiction of all kinds; but this is essentially grounded in ignorance and a rather sniffy attitude towards genre fiction in general!
Any decent SF (or Fantasy) novel will contain all the characterisation, narrative experimentation, and philosophical speculation of a comparable mainstream novel, but in addition will require the creation of a convincing world, right down to the last detail! This is very complex and challenging and some of our (so-called) critics should give it a try!
One of the most challenging aspects is the so-called timeline (i.e. keeping all your ducks in a row temporally!), and the foregoing diatribe serves to introduce a new feature coming soon to the Lights in the Sky site; the Alpha Mission timeline, which will soon be added by my good friend Rob Tyler.
CE Stevens April 2017

Blog entry supplemental six: The leftover girl

By C Stevens | 3rd February 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

As I’m now more than one hundred pages into the prequel to Lights in the sky, currently called The leftover girl, although this may change (mainly because the ‘such and such girl’ as the title of a novel has become something of a publishing cliche in the last few years!). If it does change it’s likely to change to The leftover world which is also apposite. One decision I have made is to use my SF non de plume C.E. Stevens, rather than Stephen Clare. This is practical reasons as I can continue to use this website, and I am less likely to confuse potential readers.
As I’ve probably said previously the new novel is written in a mainstream SF style with magical realist elements, and is set entirely on Earth. It has three narrative strands; opening with the story of the protagonist as an adult, continuing with a flashback to Tata’s childhood and adolescence, and then the third strand which follows the life of a third character, Helen Choi.
The Tata narrative dramatises life in Brazil, and by extension throughout the world, following the Collapse (a breakdown of civilisation resulting from climate change and resource depletion). Helen’s story is essentially the story of the Alpha Mission.
The book thus tells the story of Earth in the run up to the departure of the Alpha Mission probe, and what happens afterwards!
There obvious crossovers both within the book, and between this book and Lights in the sky. Tata knew Mrs Choi when she was a child, but never knew why the old woman had taken an interest in her. Her quest is geographical (to reach the fable ‘free communities in Amazonia), but also spiritual (to discover the truth about her own life and origins).
Both characters appear in Lights in the sky, although Helen Choi is only referred to (by Han, she’s his role model!). Tata appears on three separate occasions; twice in dreams/visions experienced by Marta Fernandes, and finally in a chapter of her very own!
One possible strategy I may employ is to use this chapter (The Jungle) as part of the text at the appropriate point in the narrative, which a nice exercise in intertextuality.
My intention is to post the first chapter of the novel on this website on the near future to act as an introduction, once I settle the question of the title!

Blog entry supplemental three: A real SF writer, already!

By C Stevens | 2nd October 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

I noted with interest a few weeks ago that astronomers think they have discovered a potentially habitable planet in orbit around Proxima Centauri, the smallest star of the Alpha system (and the nearest star to Earth)…
Of course, in my fictional Centauran system, the habitable planet orbits Alpha Centauri B, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve passed some sort of test as a science fiction writer, by making a prediction that has turned out to be true!
There have been been intelligent beings placed in the Alpha Centauri system before (the Centaurans in the ‘90’s SF television series Babylon 5 spring to mind), but there’s never been serious speculation about such a planet been located so close in the real world!
A Children’s Crusade (indeed all of the trilogy novels), can be viewed as a series of short stories that just happen (when read together) to make up a novel…
The origin of the series was, it must be remembered, a SF story that I submitted (unsuccessfully) to Analog magazine; and the work exists in two forms: a series of short stories, and a novel of twenty two chapters!
The number of chapters is significant; twenty two (or so it appeared to me) was the average number of episodes making up a typical season of American television drama, and Lights in the sky was conceived from the start with adaptation in mind!
So far, I have written one screenplay, a pilot episode for the series, which will soon be available on this website.
Ironically, it needed two chapters worth of material to produce one screenplay of just under forty minutes; the minimum needed to fill one standard hour-long slot on American television.
So I guess that’s a half season then!

Blog entry supplemental two: The Sick Rose and other references

By C Stevens | 1st September 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

As I’ve probably already said, I understood from the start that I would write only one extended work of science fiction. A prequel (or should that be sequel) to Lights in the sky is underway, but although the Alpha Mission looms large in the background, the new novel is already taking a somewhat magic realist turn! So far I’ve only got provisional titles (it was going to be the The World we left behind, but now the ‘left-behind’ or possibly ‘the left-over World’ are under consideration). One decision I have made is that I will write it under my mainstream nom de plume, Stephen Clare…
I think it’s important to try and articulate why I’ve written the trilogy and where the inspiration came from. The original inspiration is actually a nonfiction work, Brian Aldiss’ history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree (later published in a revised and expanded edition as Trillion Year Spree co-authored with David Wingrove), which I essentially used as the syllabus, if you like, of my own self-guided study of SF and related literature. Of course, like all generalisations this is an oversimplification! I started reading SF and other forms of imaginative literature well before I came across a dog-eared copy of Aldiss’ SF history in an East London second hand bookshop; but if you go through the book, all the fictional inspirations for LITS are there. So, Mr Aldiss, I am forever in your debt!
I’ve getting ahead of myself recently; the reason being that as I prepare more chapters of A Children’s Crusade (a Kurt Vonnegut reference!) for publication on this website, the inspiration for specific passages and episodes within the novel become apparent!
For example, I specifically reference William Blake in a future chapter by the simple expedient of having the protagonist, Marta Fernandes, study the great London mystic as part of her continuing education. Like the rest of the Children, Marta starts by resenting having to study such an apparently irrelevant subject as English Literature, but unlike the rest she ends up drawing parallels between her rather strange existence and subject matter of one of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Sick Rose.
Later references include Lewis Carroll (from Alice’s Adventures underground), and in the same chapter, the rather obvious debt I owe to the writings of Philip K Dick…
Both, of course, feature in Billion Year Spree…

Blog entry twelve: The Truman Show

By C Stevens | 19th August 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry twelve: The Truman Show
In chapter twelve of A Children’s Crusade, entitled the Truman Show, we’re back on Earth; specifically the Earth of 2106!
The Earth we’re presented with is in stark contrast to the claustrophobic world of the Alpha Mission, with its nine human crew members; rather its a world of countless billions, each individual scrabbling for their place in the sun…
We get our first inkling as to the status back home of the Mission and the Children, with Marta da Guia’s rather jaundiced description of Marta Fernandes as a ‘…[Brazilian] national hero…’
There are other references later in the chapter (to the craze for all things crusty, and the cult of the Star Children), which confirm this first impression.
We are also told (indirectly) that the relationship between Marta on Alpha and her ‘Earthsister’ might be something more than interstellar pen pals, but the precise nature of the relationship eludes us. Eludes us, that is, until the crucial moment when Marta da Guia, fleeing civil disorder (and the implied threat to her privileged existence), says a prayer for her sister at the roadside shrine…
But how can this be?
Elsewhere in the chapter more detail is sketched in, of a world previously only dimly glimpsed. We begin to appreciate the hold the Networks have over the Mission, and we learn how this came about. And crucially, how the lives of the expedition crew members have been repackaged as cheap entertainment for a mass television and online audience…
We learn more about interface technology and the advantages it gives to the elite who use it; also learning about the downside…
And finally, we are vouchsafed a glimpse of a society in crisis…of a world descending into chaos…
On that cheery note…

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