zeitgeist – Lights In The Sky

Anxious Times

By C Stevens | 12th November 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

The worrying times we live in have elicited an artistic response from yours truly. After a gap of several years, I’ve finally written a completely new song from scratch. Appropriately enough, it’s entitled Anxious Times, and I include a sample of the lyrics below,

Men fighting on the forecourts/Stuff’s missing from the shelves

And everybody hides behind their closed doors

They’re all thinking about themselves

Yeah, they’re all thinking about themselves

I’m biased, but I think that this short extract indicates it’s an effective piece of reportage, a response to what, at the time, looked like a developing and worrying crisis. Since then we’ve slipped back into low-intensity crisis mode; the supermarket shelves still have big gaps, but at least we can fill-up our gas-guzzling automobiles. The song (based on a Major 7th riff I wrote for an existing song, but decided it was so good that I built a completely new song from it) is essentially a litany of modern age anxieties, both personal and general.

Essentially nothing has changed; COP26 produced some useful but rather limited agreements between the major polluting nations, but will they be implemented? The rich nations still refuse to bite the bullet, maintaining we can have our ‘green cake’ and eat it. That making everyone drive electric cars will be enough to combat global warming, and that we can still have endless growth providing it’s green growth.

The truth of the matter is that any form of private automobile is a luxury we can no longer afford, and we must now switch en masse to walking, cycling and public transport, with our towns and cities being repurposed to accommodate this with smaller, local (and hopefully independent!) shops. The return of the high street, anyone?

The fallacy of endless economic growth also needs to be acknowledged, along with endless population growth. Our biosphere will just not sustain it, and the next crisis is going to be a shortage of fresh water, all over the world.

The other elephant in the conference room, that the delegates were careful to tiptoe around, is (of course) the role of the super-rich in all of this. The problem is that the various tech billionaires are individually richer than many of the small countries that their indolence and obscene extravagance threaten to inundate.

One can only hope that the likes of Musk and Bezos make good on their threat to leave Earth altogether and do move to Mars. Given the much lower gravity on the Red Planet, this is inevitably a one-way trip, even assuming they even make it there in the first place.

And I say good riddance, because without the drain on Earth’s resources resulting from their appalling wealth, the rest of us little people can concentrate on saving our Planet!

In the refuge provided by the fictional world of Lights in the Sky, Klara the robot has joined with a tribe of indigenes called the Yanomami. They are on a quest together, seeking the fabled Comunidades Livres, a place also foretold in Yanomama mythology. Currently they are journeying along Rio Tapauá through the Green Heart of Amazonas, far away from the dangers of the Portuguese world.

But Klara knows that the Europeans stand between them and their goal.

The Author November 2021

Pluralistic Absolutism and Adversarial Hyperbole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On that cheery note, ’til next time

The Author August 2021

Languorous times

By C Stevens | 28th May 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

Apologies for just getting in under the wire, and finally blogging just as this miserable washout of a May breathes its last.

The English Government (I say English because it doesn’t even pretend to govern in the interests of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) increasingly comes to resemble a comic opera, possibly some hitherto-undiscovered work by Gilbert and Sullivan, Trial by Tabloid, perhaps! Or possibly Princess Carrie, maybe even The Pirates of PPE Procurement!

Other commentators have compared Johnson’s administration to a Carry on film, Carry on lying would appear to be most apposite.

The overall effect of this blizzard of misrepresentation, graft and incompetence, very much like a similar exercise on the other side of the Atlantic, has been to ensure that a weary electorate ceases to care, and will welcome any good news.

Opposition to the Tory Ascendancy is not helped by a colourless Labour leader, who always seems to have fear in his eyes when he faces the cameras, and an opposition that’s fatally divided, allowing the Conservatives to rack up huge majorities on minority votes. The time for Labour to press for proportional representation in General Elections is clearly now, but will they realise this?

I recently read an article (which I cannot now find) which argued that Languorousness, as opposed to Anxiety or outright Depression, is the default psychological state of our times. One of the online dictionaries that appeared when I searched listed sixteen different synonyms for languor, including lethargy, apathy and weariness, inertia, ennui, lassitude and listlessness. Any of these would appear appropriate descriptions of the public mood as we complete the fourteenth month of the pandemic.

My private literary universe has never appeared a more welcome refuge than now. However, in the world of Lights in the sky, divisions are emerging within the Camposetta movement, even as it consolidates its grip on most of Brazil. Splits between the hard-line Evangelical Christians that make up the majority of the movement’s foot soldiers, and the Environmentalists, Socialists, Trade Unionists and Libertarians who also opposed the Federal Government. Self-interest, graft and authoritarianism are also on the rise, leading many of the original idealists to try and get out while they still can.

The historically-aware amongst you will probably have spotted the parallels with the Spanish Civil War in my tale of a Revolution gone wrong. As has often been said, all revolutions have a tendency to eat their children.

The Author May 2021

Modern unicorns part two: Nuclear Fusion

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

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

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

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

One of those times is now…

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

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

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

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

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

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

1, that more tech is the solution to everything

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

3, that endless economic growth is both possible and desirable

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

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

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

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

The Author January 2021

Happy Xmas (Hope is Over)

By C Stevens | 21st December 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

The end of the worst year I can remember (both personally and in general) fast approaches. The end of the old year is traditionally a time for reflection, for the learning of lessons and for resolutions to do better in the future. Resolution one is surely never ever to put our trust in the reassuring falsehoods of any politician described as a populist. The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is a step in the right direction but many traps, both those deliberately left and some that are entirely incidental, await the new administration, and then there’s the rest of the psychopathic crew…

The other really good thing about the past year has been the emergence (and my discovery) of the wonderful Phoebe Bridgers, a singer/songwriter who is absolutely plugged into the zeitgeist and somehow manages to confront the approach of the apocalypse with her winning Cheshire cat grin firmly in place. So resolution two is surely to cherish all the creative arts, rather than taking them (and the artists that produce them) for granted. Lockdown has given us a scary glimpse at what life could be like without them.

Set against the above, is the stubborn and suicidal course of action being pursued by the present UK Government, a ship of fools commanded by that ultimate in lazy, self-indulgent, indecisive and ignorant populists. You all know who I’m talking about! The ship of state is about to hit the rocks (judging by recent headlines this has already happened), as events unfold with the appalling inevitability of a slow-motion car crash.

In past blogs I have referenced the rise of unreason in contemporary life, harmless in most contexts but not so much when it begins to compromise public health or dictate voting intentions. The apparent loyalty shown by the majority of the Republican legislators to the current incumbent is a case in point. Partly this is out of fear of the electoral consequences of angering his fan base, but it’s also a conscious decision to exploit irrational beliefs for political advantage. As a recent article in one of the UK broadsheets pointed out, when the rational start to make use of irrationality in their political arguments alarm bells should start ringing; and it’s not just American politicians who are guilty of this, as it is (naturally) the stock in trade of the Brexit lobby in domestic politics.

This is another example of a djinn that once out of the bottle may prove next to impossible to get back in. The Brexiteers and the GOP legislators probably regard themselves (in some sense) as being revolutionaries (draining the swamp, or freeing Albion from the clutches of the European superstate etc etc), but it’s a truism that revolutions have a tendency to eat their children, and once irrationality takes hold it can become self-sustaining.

In the light of the above it seems almost irrelevant to announce that I have finally completed the seventh volume of Lights in the sky, which goes by the catchy title of …when you wish upon a star, but in dark times all creativity and any means of escape from grim realities is to be treasured.

In 1971 John Lennon was optimistic enough to wish for an end to war itself; we are not so hopeful (or possibly no longer so naive), but in the current climate within perfidious Albion it can sometimes appear that we have brought an end to hope…

The Author December 2020

Escaping unpleasant realities

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

This strangest of years continues its tortured course, and we all remain in limbo, asking ourselves when the grownups in the room are going to step up and start running things again…
And this question is getting quite pressing; I personally don’t think the United States will survive another four years of the current administration without serious political violence, and the only parties who will benefit from this are China and Russia.
Europe will survive our departure, but I don’t think we’ll be so lucky; mass unemployment and national bankruptcy are looking likely, the break-up of the United Kingdom and the collapse of our political institutions are both outside possibilities.
And the pandemic looms over everything, putting all of our futures on hold…
Unsurprisingly, I spend as much time as possible in my fictional world, the real world being so unutterably bleak.
In the world of Lights in the sky, Marta, with the help of her allies João Azevedo and Globo Television and the support of her agent cum manager, Salvador Perez, has been able to take control of her life and continue her process of self-actualisation.
By buying her estate in Minas Gerais, she is also able for the first time to build a life separate from São Paulo, the Show and the Alpha Mission. She also accepts Salvador as her new lover.
At the same time, she fulfills her long-term ambition of becoming the anchor of the Alpha Mission Hour and effectively becoming the Earthly representative of the Children on Alpha. Ironically, it is an unintended consequence of the death of her friend and companion, Sophie Valente, that facilitates this.
All this comes at a price as she becomes distanced from those who formerly were her friends.
The Author September 2020

Not the end, then?

By C. E. Stevens | 5th August 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Sometimes you convince yourself that you’ve reached the end of something only to find you haven’t. This has happened several times with Lights in the sky, which started life as a short story, submitted (unsuccessfully) to Analog magazine, became a novel, grew into a trilogy and over the past few years has become a septet…
Well, it’s happened again…
I was always conscious that I needed to tell the story of various minor (and not so minor) characters introduced at various points during the series arc, and have found many ingenious ways of doing this. The story of Klara, the original self-aware automaton, and thus the prototype for all the nursemaids on Alpha 5, was to have been accommodated as a parallel narrative within …when you wish upon a star, which otherwise concerns itself with the story of the original Marta on Earth.
I’d written five ‘interludes’, telling Klara’s story from inception in the Alpha Mission laboratory of Dr Helen Choi, right through to her demise at the hands of a marauding band of Camposetta irregulars, more than half a century later. But when it came to it, this felt unsatisfactory, an unnecessarily perfunctory end for a much-loved character, however shocking in its brutal suddenness it might have been.
The solution was obvious; Klara will get her own book and so her future existence, beyond the confines of …when you wish upon a star, can be fully explored.
As usual the source material for the character’s future arc is to be found in the character’s thoughts, beliefs and actions. Without wishing to give anything away about a work in progress, it will become clear that her subsequent actions are entirely consistent with what we already know about her in the four chapters that currently exist.
The provisional title of the eighth book in the series is Klara, but this may change, and work on it will commence in earnest once the current novel is completed
Back in the increasingly surrealistic ‘real world’, it is clear neither Brexit nor the Pandemic will be resolved soon. We exist in the same curious but fevered state, swinging between fearing the worst, while seizing on the smallest crumb of comfort in the media that reassures us that things might not be quite as bad as anticipated.
As ever, COVID-19 is the great unknown; we just don’t know nearly enough about the virus that causes it to predict its long-term effects on our society, economy and personal well-being. We don’t even know for sure how many people have been infected, as the vast majority of cases appear to be asymptomatic, which makes a reliable estimate of the death rate from Coronavirus extremely difficult. We have no idea when (or if) it will mutate and whether this will make it more or less dangerous, though evidence from previous pandemics would appear to suggest that the ‘second wave’ will be worse than the first. Whether being asymptomatic the first time round will protect people from future infection, is again unknown, as is whether any of the dozens of potential vaccines currently being developed around the world will even be partially-effective.
This uncertainty is corrosive of our institutions whether they be commercial, political, artistic or sporting, and the long term implications of all of this can only emerge over time.
Brexit, by contrast, is more straightforward, as it becomes clearer by the day how damaging, short-sighted, irrational and essentially masochistic this whole enterprise is. I note that highly skilled and qualified people are already voting with their feet and choosing to relocate to countries within the Eurozone. They will presumably be followed by the flight of capital, as the wealthy (who are, of course, in possession of more than one passport) begin to remove themselves and their wealth from poor old Blighty, once the shit really begins to hit the fan. Ironically, the Brexit-supporting amongst them may be forced by deteriorating conditions in the United States, to relocate to Europe, of all places, where they will presumably continue to either, assure the rest of us that everything is going swimmingly, or blame us for the fact that it’s not. To quote an anonymous ballad sung by British soldiers in the Great War,

It’s the same the whole world over.
It’s the poor wot get’s the blame,
It’s the rich wot get’s the gravy,
Ain’t it all a bleeding shame?

The transformation of Kent into one huge lorry park, the end of most foreign travel, and shortages of food and essential medicines in the New Year are likely to be only the start…
But, of course, things may all turn out for the better…

The Author August 2020

Standing on the brink

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

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

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

However, the general conclusions are bleak:

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

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

I wonder what I will do then?

The Author July 2020

A new and terrible world

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

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

The Rise of Unreason revisited

By C. E. Stevens | 6th April 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Back in less alarming times, I wrote a blog entry entitled The Rise of Unreason derived from a minor key blues song I wrote back in the eighties. The blog entry (and later versions of the song) referenced the rise of irrational belief systems in contemporary culture, arguing that this tendency, reflected in the popularity of fundamentalist religious views, had now been augmented by irrational behaviour not linked to specific belief systems, but based purely on rumour and conspiracy theories spread online.
There was a time when these were relatively harmless; refusing to accept that NASA landed astronauts on the Moon, or believing that the World is flat, are (in practical terms) harmless eccentricities, and not something that threatens the well-being of society as a whole.
However, the campaign against vaccination which claims, without evidence, that vaccines are linked to autism is a different matter. It constitutes a threat to public health, which has allowed diseases that were under control (such as measles) to become prevalent again. It is also anachronistic and risible to even see this as an issue given the number of highly-talented people who lie on the autism spectrum. Of course, the proponents of these wacky ideas never let facts get in the way of their irrational beliefs.
I was interested to read that the latest unhinged theory, spreading like a virtual plague through cyberspace, namely the belief that 5G phone masts are spreading (or causing, take your pick) COVID-19, is linked to ideas promulgated by the anti-vaccination brigade. The attacks on supposed 5G masts that have followed are reminiscent of the waves of mass hysteria that characterised the late-Middle Ages (which is apt given we have our very own version of plague), and with a side order of Don Quixote, phone masts now standing in for windmills.
With the sort of doublethink that is beyond satire, these people are presumably using their mobile phones to coordinate their attacks on the very infrastructure that makes this possible. Presumably, once a vaccine finally does become, these people will refuse to take it.
Words sometimes fail me

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