Categories

A Children’s Crusade Adolescent angst Alien Lifeforms Alpha 5 Alpha Mission Alternative history America Artificial Intelligence Brazil Climate Change Exobiology futurology Growing up History imaginative literature Intelligence intertexuality irrationality Lights in the sky LiteraryCriticism media landscape Myth and folklore narcissism narrative styles Near Future paranoia Philosophy picaresque politics populism Post Apocalypse postmodernism Prediction psychology Science Science Fiction SF scholarship Social breakdown Socialization social media solipsism Space Travel Time Young Adult Fiction zeitgeist
Su Ying
Book Cover for 'A Children's Crusade'
Pseudo-shrubs (detail)
Planet
Han
Alphane life (detail) , dome in distance
Marta
Book Cover for 'The Leftover Girl'
The Dome (detail)
Nurse G
Pseudo-crustacean
Senhora Daguia
Jorja
Priya
Planet Surface (Detail)
Rai

Recent Posts

Category: secondary world

A private world

A private world

By | | Comments 0 Comment

I sometimes make the mistake of supposing other people think about and understand the world in the same way as me…
But, of course, most people don’t; most people don’t write novels, they read them, or increasingly these days listen to them as audiobooks. I recently tried to listen to an Arthur C. Clarke audiobook online, 2001: A Space Odyssey, as it happens. I lasted one chapter because the process is so slow! I can read the story so much more quickly than the voice droning on through the speaker is able to tell it, plus you have the freedom and time to insert your own thoughts and mental impressions (i.e. create the world of the novel in your head) rather than having to conform to the narrator’s pace. Needless to say I will not be investing in any audiobooks in the near future.
Another thing most people don’t do is write songs, or play musical instruments with a reasonable degree of proficiency. Since I didn’t learn myself until I was in my early twenties I can still remember (as an adult) being an outsider as far as music is concerned; not understanding how it’s put together, not being able to perform it, or create original music. But that now seems like a far off place…
Of course, most people have other concerns: raising children, placating spouses or partners, working for other people, while I have none of these things. I sometimes feel like a monk in some draughty monastery on the Northumbrian coast, sometime in the Dark Ages, working away at my equivalent of an illuminated manuscript. Except that the world is right outside my front window, not many leagues away, and (hopefully) Viking raiders aren’t making their way stealthily up a nearby river.
Since I succumbed and started writing volume seven of Lights in the sky, I’ve been making good progress and I’m now working on chapter four. I’m in that delicious phase, when the whole thing is in front of you and you can start to grasp the full extent of the territory that the novel will occupy (albeit, dimly at times), but you still have to go out and explore and traverse that territory.
The number of characters appears to be increasingly exponentially; some will be familiar, having featured in other novels in the series (usually at different points in their lives), others are invented specifically for this particular volume. I have a feeling that this book will be the longest yet, and once more I’m wondering how I’m going to be able to keep to my convention of twenty two chapters.
But it feels cosy and safe in my fictional world; whereas the world outside seems to be getting more and more hostile. My little suburban monastery is pleasant place to live at the moment, but the Barbarians are massing in the distance, and may be just over the next hill…
The Author October 2019

A secondary world?

A secondary world?

By | | Comments 0 Comment

A secondary world?

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