The Guardian's Blog, page 182

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 24: Misery

Quite unlike the rest of King's work, this terrifying story of imprisonment by a demented fan is one of the greatest thrillers ever written

1987 was a big year for King. Four novels published in 10 months. That's ludicrous. Yes, he didn't write them all that quickly (although a quick glimpse at his release schedule for previous years suggests it's not as if he took any real holidays from the typewriter), but the act of editing them, prepping them for release, and promoting them: that would have been tiring.

And it was a strange year in terms of the books themselves, because only one of the titles – The Tommyknockers – resembles the sort of thing King's staunch fanbase already drooled over. (Even then, it's a piece of SF rather than straight-up horror.) Misery is the strangest of them all, however, because it barely relates to any of King's other books. Instead? It's one of the greatest thrillers ever written.

While I might have my hyperbole hat on, this book deserves it. It began life as what would have been the final Richard Bachman book before King killed him off. The books authored by that pseudonym, as I've harped on about before, were nastier in a way than King's traditional output; their bad guys were more human, and the books less supernatural. Misery has no supernatural elements, focusing instead on a story that is actually desperately sad, and, to my mind, hugely personal to King.

Paul Shelton is a much-loved author of a specific kind of genre fiction: the bodice-ripper. His main character, the wonderfully named Misery Chastain, is loved by his fans, but not so much by her author. So, he does what any sane writer who wants to write other stories would do: he kills her off, in a book that, at the novel's start, is still unpublished. And then he writes an utterly different novel, Fast Cars, packed full of violence, and swearing, and catharsis. Paul has a car crash – the irony – and is rescued from the wreck by Annie Wilkes, his "biggest fan". She lives in the middle of nowhere, and used to be a nurse, and she can, she tells him, nurse him back to health. Only, of course, she doesn't. As his biggest fan, she's driven almost entirely by a desire to see him write the books that she wants him to write. There's the hint that she might have set a trap to get him – it's a hell of a coincidence that he should end up crashing just where she could find him – but that's not the story. The majority of the book's plot is superbly simple: Paul is injured and trapped in Annie's house, and she is insane. He has to escape, and save his life, because there will come a point, it's clear, where she will push him too far.

It's unbelievably tense, and superbly written, probably – along with Bag of Bones, but we're not getting to that for a long time yet – King's finest prose. And this is a novel with no ghosts or psychics or aliens; it's a book about a woman who feels too passionately for a character that she has created in her head, a character who doesn't – and cannot – exist, and for the writer who created her. It's a book about being mentally ill, in many ways; and, true to this period of King's output, about dependency.

There's one overriding theme that runs through Misery and the two books that followed, The Tommyknockers and The Dark Half: all three deal, whether consciously or not, with King's addiction to drink and drugs at the height of its powers. They're about stages of addiction: The Tommyknockers is probably King's most drug-addled book, like seeing the world through a lens of cocaine and sleeplessness; Misery is about kicking addiction, being deprived of the thing you need the most; and The Dark Half is about burying the person that you were, that you hated, and trying to begin the next (clean) stage of your life. That these three books were published as King was cleaning himself up and kicking his addictions simply can't be a coincidence.

In Misery, themes of addiction and entrapment abound. Paul is trapped physically by Annie, kept on a bed and, in the novel's most horrifying moment, has his foot amputated to ensure that he cannot move. And he's trapped by the drugs that she gives him, the painkillers that she gets him addicted to during his initial healing process and which make him compliant. And he's trapped in his career, writing books for a fanbase he's sick of, people who want him to endlessly regurgitate the same thing again and again (and that's a whole other thematic crossover from the text to King's real-world life). The metaphors don't stop with Paul: Annie is trapped in the books and worlds that she loves; she is trapped by her past; she is trapped by mental problems. The old adage goes that writers should write what they know, and I think here King did: he wrote a novel with two characters who are at war over him. They're at war over freedom, and the chance to start again, free of the shackles that have been holding them back. When I read the book back it was all I could see: endless references to being trapped and addicted. At the novel's close, when Paul has escaped Annie's clutches, her impact remains. He hasn't kicked his sickness; he's just escaped it for a little while. It haunts him, and likely always will.

But then, through all that, the book is what matters. It's one of the best exercises in tension and restraint that I have ever encountered: as a template novel for the thriller, echoes of it can still be seen in today's huge publishing successes. It might just be King's finest novel: an example of the power that his words can have. Every character in the book feels it, and so do you as a reader. This is a book that every reader, King fan or not, should read.

Connections

Misery overtly references two of King's more conventional horror texts: Annie refers to The Shining's Overlook Hotel at one point (which also counts as a reference to King's forthcoming Doctor Sleep); and Paul Sheldon grew up near the Kaspbrak family, as featured in It. And it works the other way as well: in a few other King tales (Rose Madder, Desperation, The Library Policeman), characters talk of having read books in Sheldon's much-beloved Misery series…

Next: Late last night and the night before, it's The Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.

Stephen KingFictionThrillers
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Summer voyages: South from Granada by Gerald Brenan

This account of a demobbed English soldier immersing himself in an Andalusian village is a beguiling vision of true community

In September 1919 a young Englishman disembarked in La Coruña on the north coast of Spain. He had just been demobilised and had a little money and about 2,000 books packed in his trunks. His ambition was to find a cheap place to live, educate himself through reading and become a writer. After a few days walking in Galicia he took the train to a deeply dispiriting Madrid and then on to Granada. Here he left his belongings and set off on foot in search of an affordable house to rent in the Alpujarras valley on the far side of the Sierra Nevada.

His name was Gerald Brenan and the story of the weeks he spent walking the valley weakened by dysentery, eating poorly and sleeping in bug-infested posadas could have made an interesting book in itself. In fact, his quest is all over by page nine of the book he actually wrote, South from Granada, one of the small classics of early 20th-century British travel writing.

For Brenan, it wasn't the travelling more or less hopelessly that mattered so much as the arriving; the real journey in South from Granada begins when he settles into the routines of village life. It is, at risk of sounding hackneyed, a journey of self-discovery and of immersion into an entirely alien way of life, one that is already at risk of extinction at the time that Brenan began his nine-year stint documenting it.

Finally he found his house in the village of Yegen. Situated about 4,000ft above sea level on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada and on a road that actually did go nowhere, Yegen was an almost entirely self-sufficient village of peasant farmers. Its communal lands were fertile and well-cultivated, producing olives, grains, grapes and vegetables while the higher slopes provided grazing for enough sheep and goats to provide a surplus. For most people, the only imported food was fish from the sea less than a day's mule trek away. To anyone so recently come from the war in France and post-war London it must have seemed Edenic.

The crucial thing for Brenan was that it was a real community, and, dressed like a local labourer, he entered into the life of the villagers as fully as they would allow. He gossiped with the elders, threw dances in his house, engaged half-heartedly in the local courting rituals and explored the beliefs, superstitions and intensely local politics that formed their worldview.

In many respects this attempt to lose himself in his adopted Andalusian identity was a more or less explicit criticism of his native country. Where Westminster was distant from the daily preoccupations of the voters, the village caciques derived their power from their ability to do useful things for their clients. Where the British lived their lives behind closed doors, the people of Yegen lived theirs on the street and everyone knew everyone's business. And this, in Brenan's eyes, was clearly how it should be.

The few other British people who appear in the book serve to strengthen this negative comparison. The only other expat we see is a drunken Scottish engineer married to a local woman and living a life of malign distrust of his new family. Visitor Lytton Strachey hated the place, while his companions Ralph Partridge and Dora Carrington were too wrapped up in their lovers' tiffs to even notice where they were. Virginia and Leonard Woolf were better guests, and brought some welcome intellectual companionship, but they showed no interest in engaging with the local culture. These representatives of the Bloomsbury "community" were all too individualist to feel at home in a real village. In fact, the only time Brenan seems willing to allow that the British might be superior to the Spanish in any way is when he discusses their respective treatment of domestic animals.

Oddly enough, behind much of his love for his adopted home is his belief, based on contemporary anthropological theories, that the aboriginal inhabitants of the British Isles originated in the Alpujarras. He even indicates that they may have been soured by their race memory of the sunnier weather their ancestors abandoned.

And all the time he walked. When Strachey and company first expressed their intention to visit, Brenan walked the 57 miles to Almeria in two days to buy some extra furniture. Then when the visitors announced their early arrival, Brenan got up at dawn and walked the 71 miles over the mountains to Granada to meet them. In 28 hours. Brenan has a fair claim to being one of the founding fathers of English psychogeography.

At the end of the book an older Brenan, then living with his wife in Malaga and driving a car, returned to Yegen for one last visit. By that time he had published The Spanish Labyrinth, one of the key books for understanding the background to the Civil War and a work that somewhat overshadowed South to Granada. As he looked out over the village and the mountains beyond he realised that his original paradisal view of the place was no illusion. By then he has brought the village so vividly to life that I'm inclined to agree.

Travel writingBilly Mills
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Why authors need to join the PR circus

I can see why authors complain about this trying chore, but it is the way the world works these days

So a newly published novelist is dismayed at all she's asked to do to publicise her new book: inane bits of publicity, talking about things she thinks are irrelevant to the book, doing loads of stuff for free. A private person who just happens to have published a book who would rather stay that way: a private person. You can read Anakana Schofield's heartfelt and often very funny rant here.

She draws the comparison between a writer and a train driver; everyone tells her how lucky she is to be published, but they don't say to the driver how fortunate he is to be at the wheel. I don't think she's lucky. I have seen how hard it can be to write a novel. Having no aptitude for either career, I can however say that though I've met a couple of train drivers who have told me they'd love to be novelists, none of the authors I've worked with have ever confessed a secret longing to drive the 5.15 from London to Bristol.

Why is the focus on me and not the book? she asks. Why do I have to do so much stuff for free? And why is the world obsessed with the process of writing? I sympathise. And I feel a bit guilty: publicists like me ask a lot of our authors, and many find the publicity process irksome.

Many authors think quite reasonably that they've done their job in writing the book. It's disconcerting to find that they are then expected to promote it. Having to be a marketer as well as an artist is a surprise to many, and requires learning some new (if in some areas overlapping) skills. The storyteller Daniel Morden tells me that what they never teach you when you do a degree in drama is something critical to success as an artist: how to market yourself.

PR has always had a role to play in book sales; even in the year before his death, Charles Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" around Britain and Ireland (managing a total of 87 out of a scheduled 100). Once, publishers could pay for stock and display space in bookstores – as in Waterstones 3-4-2 promotions – but there are fewer opportunities now. Then there's advertising. Like it or not, books have a relatively small audience. Advertising is a classic way to reach a mass public (those who buy cornflakes), not a niche one (interested in literary fiction). And although cornflakes may indeed be fascinating, there's not much of a story to offer the media (though that may just be me being uncreative). With a book, there is. Which, again, is why we do PR.

And what of the nature of publicity? Yes it would be nice if every newspaper could double its review space (hey, that way twice as many of the 140,000 books published in the UK each year could be reviewed!). But it's not going to happen. If it's tough to make a living as a writer, newspapers aren't having a great time either. So a publicist has to look for other ways to spread the word – hence the first-person pieces, the Q&As, the endless guest blogs. Yes, some publicity is plain daft (we publicists do try to filter these out) but it always has been. Fifteen years ago at Penguin I turned down a Q&A that asked Richard Dawkins whether, as a writer, he had a "lucky pen".

And ultimately you have to find a way to deal with the personal questions. The fact is that many of us are fascinated by the creative process, whether it's how Captain Beefheart created Trout Mask Replica or how Esi Edugyan came up with the amazing narrative voice in her book Half Blood Blues. Is it so wrong to be curious? I know that writers often find questions about writing frustrating because they often don't feel they understand the process themselves. But coming up with something interesting on that front can't be that difficult; after all, being a storyteller you surely have a head-start in that area.

What about doing stuff for free? I've asked it myself about publishing internships (which I absolutely think should be paid). It's worth bearing in mind that in the community of readers and writers a lot of people give their time for free or for very little: prize judges (who should be given a medal); people who help with literacy schemes; established authors who read new authors' books and offer a quote if they like it; people like my former colleague who volunteers at a mobile library for the homeless; and of course bloggers. When you take bloggers into consideration, a debut author may actually get more reviews than they would have had 10 years ago.

It's part of a larger business and cultural trend. The challenge for all artists now is how to make a living when so much is given away for free, something Nicholas Lovell tackles in his forthcoming book The Curve (Portfolio Penguin, October 2013). Lovell outlines a process by which you can connect the freeloaders at one end of the curve to the superfans at the other who will pay large amounts of money to support you. But this means understanding the marketing process, and embracing your fans. The fact is, as writers and publishers we are competing for our audience's time and money with huge corporations commanding huge budgets – and hence much greater persuasive power – than we can have. No author wants to have their book ignored.

The most important question is, surely, where are the readers in all this? Ultimately what I felt was lacking in her piece was enough consideration of this most important group of all. Readers are often curious about the writing process, and not just because they are all closet writers themselves. It's the readers who buy - and more importantly, read - the books, who come to the literary events. It's these enthusiasts who form book groups - again, something that's brought vitality into the book world over the past few years. Authors who are able to build relationships with the wider community of readers, whether via social media, events, blogs or any number of new and as yet unthought-of ways, are best placed to have an audience in the future. I've seen so many book trade discussions, whether about price or marketing or territories or formats or whatever else, get bogged down in back-and-forth about publishers/authors/trade/media, when it's the readers that count. Isn't it?

• This blogpost also appears at BookBrunch

PublishingCreative writingRuth Killick
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading, today?

The space to talk about the books you are reading, and find out which ones we are reviewing

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers

You have been reading...

Your photos of the books you have been reading over the last seven days

Last week we asked you to show us the book you were currently reading. Here's the library of photographs you sent.

If you'd like to see all the pictures, click the 'Show more' button at the bottom of the page.

Guardian readersHannah Freeman
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How do you read BookVibe?

A new 'book discovery' gizmo rifles through your Twitter feed to sift through others' picks. Would you recommend it?

A word-of-mouth recommendation is one of the most powerful ways for readers to discover new books, and now an online book discovery service, BookVibe, offers to tot up the cultural references on your Twitter feed to collate your own personal weekly list of book recommendations.

I like this idea a lot. Potentially it's actually more reliable than real word-of-mouth tips, because it's not subject to the unreliable endorsements of friends who in mad moments are suddenly gripped by the fervent belief that you're going to love that romantic novel/edgy new flash fiction sensation/serious exploration of the ageing process. And it's streets ahead of Amazon's "you liked this so you'll like …" function, because it doesn't indiscriminately assume that every book you buy is a reflection of your own reading taste.

A grand total of 3,657m new ISBNs were registered last year in the UK alone, a rise of 22% since 2009. With such a deluge of new books flooding the market every week, no wonder publishers think that lack of discoverability is the number one reason why they don't sell more books.

BookVibe is like a cross between the staff picks section in a bookshop, a word-of-mouth recommendation, and a book review section, tailored to your own specific Twitter interests.

On my list this week I'm intrigued by HhhH, "A breezily charming novel, with a thrilling story that also happens to be true, by a gifted young author amusingly anguished over the question of how to tell it," according the the Guardian review, and glad to be reminded of The Garden of Evening Mists, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012 and now out in paperback.

BookVibe claims to analyse 10bn tweets to come up with its recommendations, but big data still make some mistakes: tweets about Handel's Messiah translated into a recommendation for fast-paced, gritty serial killer novel Messiah by Boris Starling. Has anyone else given it a test run? Is it working for you?

BooksellersTwitterLiz Bury
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Summer voyages: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

Very long and very violent, this is a journey into the darkest parts of humanity. It's hard going, but it is a truly great book

A long novel is a voyage in its own right. You can be changed forever by a work of fiction that's just a few pages long, or even less, but the time you spend with a really long novel – I'm thinking, over 500 pages – breeds a particularly intense relationship. When I was eight years old I read The Lord of the Rings, which took me the better part of a year. By the time I finished it I'd become so used to its 1,100-page bulk that I continued carrying it around for a few weeks. Like the Ring itself, it had become a difficult object to relinquish.

Length presents significant extra-literary challenges to the reader. Shorter work rises to the top of the to-read pile as heavier volumes sink slowly into the unread depths. The investment of time that a long book requires can derail even the most enjoyable reading experiences. A case in point: I recently restarted The Fugitive, the penultimate volume of In Search of Lost Time, having put it down to make a cup of coffee in December 2008.

In what Roberto Bolaño intended to be his final novel, 2666, the philosophy professor Oscar Amalfitano considers the difference between long and short books. He remembers an old acquaintance who "chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick" and "A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet", and finds it "a sad paradox" that people should be

afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown … They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters … they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

2666 is great, imperfect and torrential. Its pages bear more than enough blood, mortal wounds and stench for it to earn its epigraph, "an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom" (from Baudelaire's poem "Le Voyage"). Bolaño intended it to be published as five separate short novels in order to best provide for his family (he knew he would be dead before it was on the shelves), but its truest expression is as a single, mammoth volume.

Like the majority of Bolaño's work, 2666 is mazy with journeys. Its five sections are essentially various kinds of quest narrative, each of which share as their focal point the fictional Mexican border city of Santa Teresa. Four European academics travel to Mexico on the trail of the reclusive writer Benno von Archimboldi (mirroring the journey the poets Belano and Lima make from Mexico to Europe in The Savage Detectives, one of numerous links between the books). A Chilean academic slides into madness. An American journalist becomes embroiled in violence while covering a boxing match. And Archimboldi's sister comes to Mexico to visit her son, who is jailed there. We follow Archimboldi, too, and his movements east and then west across Europe as a soldier in the Wehrmacht, and after the war as an itinerant writer and, at one point, a gardener in Venice (which is either a joke, a metaphor, or proof that I know less than I thought about Venice).

The date 2666 is a riddle that recurs throughout Bolaño's body of work. He thought of his novels, stories and poems as an interconnected system, and in the short novel Amulet we hear a character describe a certain street in Mexico City as "more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child". At the end of The Savage Detectives the poet Cesárea Tinajero appears to be making a prediction about the end of the world when she names a date "sometime around the year 2600". The date seems to operate as a locus or vanishing point for humankind's capacity for cruelty, but beyond that its precise meaning is occluded. As with two of his idols, Borges and Kafka, many of the mysteries in Bolaño's work resist solution.

The Savage Detectives is probably Bolaño's best novel, but 2666 is where he engages most directly with the dark current that runs throughout his work. The book's longest section, "The Part About the Crimes" (300 corpse-choked pages), is a brutal masterpiece that indicts as shallow and nasty the many books that use rape and murder as little more than plot points. Michael Wood identifies this remorseless ordeal of violent death as "Bolaño's tour de force, and a piece of writing sufficient in its own right to give him good odds against oblivion". Because of the section's great length you will be moving through its hostile terrain for at least a couple of days, in which time the malignant force it generates infects the world beyond the page. It becomes an almost physical presence.

Its duration is a fundamental reason why "The Part About the Crimes" is such an extraordinary portrait of malevolence. It is constructed from a multitude of smaller details, and if it didn't drag on as long and relentlessly as it does its effect wouldn't be so profound. As he was writing the book Bolaño referred to it as a "colossal" project, and his friend Rodrigo Fresán sees the book's scope as a conscious attempt to join "the same team as Cervantes, Sterne, Melville, Proust, Musil, and Pynchon". But why would you want to encounter "an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom" in the leisurely days of summer? Because you'll have time to immerse yourself, for one thing. There's never a bad time to read a great book, however dark, however dangerous.

Summer readingFictionRoberto BolañoChris Power
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Poem of the week: In a Garden by Amy Lowell

Despite using the precise details and sharp focus of imagism, this is nonetheless a rhapsodic love lyric

This week's poem comes from Amy Lowell's second collection, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914). It was the book in which she found her characteristic style. Her first, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912) was heavily coloured by the English Romantic poets, especially Keats, whose biographer she later became. The discovery of the imagist poet HD, whose work was published in Harriet Monroe's magazine, Poetry, in 1913, was the most important catalyst in her development.

From the French symbolist poet Paul Fort she learned a technique of writing "polyphonic prose" – prose which used the different voices of poetry, such as "metre, vers libre, assonance, alliteration, rhyme and return". This, too, had an all-round liberating effect. And not least was her deepening relationship with the actress Ada Russell. "In a Garden" is one of the many love poems Amy wrote for the woman who would became her life-long partner. These sensuous and boldly unguarded expressions of lesbian eroticism range from the explicit "The Weather-Cock Points South" to rhapsodic muse-poems like "In Excelsis", and are startlingly ahead of their time. They represent Lowell's most substantial and original achievement.

Her enthusiasm for imagism took her to England, where she established an association with Ezra Pound and his circle. He accepted one of her poems for the first imagist anthology: then Amy took over the "brand" and the funding. She became imagism's ambassador, and edited the three subsequent anthologies. Pound objected to her "democratising" aesthetic, and rebuffed her with the famous taunt of "Amy-gism". A more sympathetic commentator, Harriet Monroe, wrote, "The force which Miss Lowell's New England ancestors put into founding and running cotton mills, or belike into saving souls, she puts into conquering art and making it express and serve her."

"In a Garden" is both sensuous and subtle, as carefully shaped for sound effects as for imagery. The feminine symbolism of flowing, opulent water is introduced by a chain of extended relative clauses. "Gushing from the mouths of stone men," the water doesn't appear until line six. These stone men are presumably the figures of the fountains, their gargoyle-like faces spewing water, but the phrase also evokes an opposed, masculine resistance. The image of "Granite-lipped basins" furthers the association. The water, by contrast, is "spread at ease under the sky", and even the irises seem playful: they "dabble their feet/And rustle to a passing wind". The preposition "to" in preference to the expected "in" suggests a kind of flirtatiousness, as if the flowers were female dancers, the wind their partner. And already the sound of the water has been conjured in the verbs, "dabble" and "rustle".

The hyperbaton in the second stanza is carefully judged, reversing the usual syntactical hierarchy and ensuring the most significant words come first. The sound of the water and the gently elated mood register through repetition. "Stone" in line eight echoes the poem's opening. The "fountains" of line nine become "marble fountains" in the next. The word "water" appears in every segment of the poem, three times forming a line's feminine ending.

The softness of "moss-tarnished" steps, connected to the damp, ferny tunnels, contrasts with the crisper clarity of "gurgling" and "leaping", the latter verb both visual and auditory. Lowell chooses unremarkable words, words often associated with the description of water. But they have precise, and clearly separate effects, and are combined in a wonderfully realised polyphonic soundscape.

Stanzas one to three are important but introductory: they set the scene for the emotional and narrative crux that lies in waiting, and now occupies the remainder of the poem, beginning, "And I wished for night and you." The tone is not necessarily one of disappointment or loss. "I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool" may express simply that, a desire, and an imagined happiness to be fulfilled. The brightness of moonlight touches water and naked flesh, and the bathing woman herself becomes moonlike. Lowell's romanticism is both conventional and unconventional: the moonlit woman is not a nymph, after all, but a real woman in a swimming-pool. The lilacs, too, remind us we're in an ordinary though transformed garden. The beautifully-paced last line summarises and completes the imagined scenario, but leaves the poem still in motion, ending as it began, with the present participle of a verb.

"I do not believe it is what one says in a poem that matters," Lowell wrote to Richard Aldington, "It is the kind of light that plays over it." This perhaps suggests an impressionistic technique rather than the hard clear focus of imagism. "In a Garden" is imagist in its "direct treatment of the thing" and in the musicality of its phrasing. If it contravenes the strict interpretation of the imagist dictum "to use no word that does not contribute to the presentation", the writer would surely argue that the repetitions are vital to the presentation of her poem in all its sensuous variety. And we would have to agree with her.

In a Garden

Gushing from the mouths of stone men
To spread at ease under the sky
In granite-lipped basins,
Where iris dabble their feet
And rustle to a passing wind,
The water fills the garden with its rushing,
In the midst of the quiet of close-clipped lawns.

Damp smell the ferns in tunnels of stone,
Where trickle and plash the fountains,
Marble fountains, yellowed with much water.

Splashing down moss-tarnished steps
It falls, the water;
And the air is throbbing with it.
With its gurgling and running.
With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur.

And I wished for night and you.
I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool,
White and shining in the silver-flecked water.
While the moon rode over the garden,
High in the arch of night,
And the scent of the lilacs was heavy with stillness.

Night, and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Summer voyages: The War of the Worlds by HG Wells

The narrator's journey is not many miles, but takes him – and the reader – an exhilarating distance from the familiar

A journey doesn't have to be particularly long to change your view of the world. It doesn't even have to take you far from home. In fact, I would argue that one of the most powerful descriptions of a journey in literature works precisely because its narrator stays close to home. Its power comes in showing those familiar places in a new light. Showing them, in fact, in a green-tinged light. And then blowing them to pieces.

Yes, I'm talking about the path of destruction wreaked by the Martians in HG Wells's War of the Worlds. More specifically, I'm thinking of the journey the novel's narrator takes as he battles to survive the invasion. In all, he probably doesn't travel more than 50 miles, and he certainly doesn't leave the beaten path – but that isn't to detract from the profundity of his experience or the epic nature of his struggle. Indeed, it's precisely because he remains in what even now I'm tempted to describe as the "safety" of the Home Counties that The War of the Worlds is so effective. Both because it's disconcerting to see poisonous gas and heat rays laying waste to that comfortable world – and because, it's fun. Who wouldn't want to have a blast at Weybridge, after all?

Certainly HG Wells later claimed to have relished the prospect. In an introduction to a 1920s Atlantic edition of the novel he explained how much he enjoyed cycling around the settings for the novel, diligently noting the outstanding architectural features in each place – and jotting down ideas for how he would wipe them from the map. It's possible even to read the book as an enjoyably mischievous rampage through middle England. Landing the Martians in Woking is certainly a good way to shake commuters out of their bourgeois complacency.

Yet that isn't really how the story comes across, even if Wells may have had a sense of humour, and plenty of interesting thoughts about the morality of late Victorian capitalists. Invasion, he shows carefully and compassionately, is no fun at all. This journey is a nightmare.

Apparently, HG Wells disliked the famous Orson Welles radio broadcast of War of the Worlds because it spread the Martian attack out over too much of the USA. He keeps things deliberately small in scale, for practical tactical reasons (the Martians are able to keep in contact with each other and move on London in formation) and because reporting these intergalactic events on a human scale makes them more vivid and more easy to imagine. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing to Leatherhead, and a brief visit to Ottershaw Observatory (in whose eminently civilised confines we first meet the narrator, watching the skies and some interesting eruptions on the planet Mars), he travels no further than Kensington – a pleasant day's cycling from Woking. Or a pleasant day's cycling if the Home Counties hadn't just been ravaged by tripod fighting machines and poison gas.

There's still a certain cosiness to the places the narrator visits, which Wells exploits to the full. How strange to read "Byfleet was in a tumult". How odd to think of the waters of the Thames boiling and steaming around the ferry at Shepperton. How unsettling to witness mankind on its knees at Walton-on-Thames, and a soot-smudged curate ranting: "Fire, earthquake death. As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work –"

The narrator travels by slowly, by pony and trap, by rowing boat, by bike and by foot, sheltering in ordinary suburban houses, eating tins of peaches, drinking beer from bottles. Much of what he encounters is small scale, local, everyday. Naturally, that makes the contrast with the ravaged wastelands left by the Martians all the stronger. Even now, more than 100 years after publication it's easy to picture the scene and share the narrator's horror at losing his home. It's eerie too, to think of the silent London he eventually reaches. Then to feel his dazed horror on his return to Woking and to a life returning to an even keel, but for the odd encounter, like seeing a pony he left for dead on the way out, the body now picked down to the bones.

In those few miles of travelling the narrator has witnessed the end of human civilisation. Or, at least, civilisation as he knew it. He has journeyed from a world with regular trains, newspaper deliveries, friendly astronomers in convenient observatories, dinner parties and policemen, to starvation, chaos and corpses on the road. He has seen what it is to be invaded. Plenty of Wells's contemporaries no doubt transposed the Martians for Germans. Some might also have thought about what it means to be part of the world's biggest empire. (War of the Worlds was published in 1898. A year later, Conrad published Heart of Darkness containing the famous line: "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.") Today, such concerns are further from us. Plenty of the Victorian setting also seems quaint. But there are still enough shocks of the familiar, and moments of alarming strangeness to ensure The War of the Worlds remains essential. It's hard to beat as a journey into the end of everything you take for granted.

HG WellsSummer readingScience fictionFictionSam Jordison
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Science fiction's five best guides to the present

SF is not great at foretelling tomorrow's world, but it brings today's into clearer focus than anything else

Science fiction marks the point where the artistic project to understand the human condition meets the scientific project to transform it. It's arguably the one discipline in the liberal arts and humanities properly equipped to talk about the technological revolution creating the future. I've read SF for my entire life, because it's the only reliable guide I've found to the weird present we're now all living in. But its specific predictions of the future are often wildly inaccurate.

It's 2013 and there are no bases on Mars or even Luna. We aren't exploring the galaxy at warp speed and, given the impossibility of faster-than-light travel, we never will be. Even less probable is an artificially intelligent computer, being in the scheme of things about as likely as an AI pencil case. But SF has never been about specific predictions. Its real value, like most art, is in the deeper meaning of its metaphors. So where has SF succeeded in helping us understand the present?

HAL 900 and Skynet may not be rising up just yet, but algorithms are already secretly ruling the world. They are driving financial transactions, selecting candidates for their future careers, marketing products to us and, as PRISM revealed, determining if we present a threat to national security. The terrifying reality of machines ruling our lives is not that they are intelligent, but that they are not intelligent. Artificial Unintelligence is the threat that SF failed to predict, along with our willingness to hand over quite so much power to unconscious systems.

If that's making you think of Big Brother then you have George Orwell's science fiction masterpiece 1984 to thank. We're able to perceive the totalitarian threat of Microsoft placing a 3D scanning device in every living room because of the eerie echoes of Orwell's novel. And indeed dozens of other dystopian masterpieces, from Brave New World to The Handmaid's Tale, that SF has provided to warn of technology's darker side.

If we've avoided an Orwellian state so far, it's arguably only because we're so good at oppressing ourselves in pursuit of material wealth. Golden Age science fiction predicted that technology would satisfy all our material needs, and in many ways it has. Mass production and then automation mean that our food, cars and Nike trainers are made for near-negligible cost. It takes a massive industry of marketeers and ad execs to keep us paying top dollar for tat. But the more cynical vision of Frederik Pohl and Cyril M Kornbluth in The Space Marchants comes closer to the reality of today, where corporate interests and basic human greed keep us trapped in economic scarcity long after we might have escaped it.

Far be it from me to make any claims to psychic powers, but in the last 24 hours I've plucked thoughts from the minds of hundreds of other humans in 140-character bites and read dozens of news stories published only minutes before they hit my mind. Octavia E Butler's Patternist novels are a speculative vision of psychic powers operating between human minds, and it's remarkable how many parallels to the internet are to be found there and in other SF tales of psychic powers like Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man. We may not have reached the full Vulcan mind-meld just yet, but our smartphone obsession is not a million light years away from it.

It's been a full century since quantum mechanics and relativity theory changed our basic understanding of the universe, but most of us are still live our daily lives as though they operated with the clockwork certainty of Newtonian physics. The emerging literary genre of Quantum Fiction tries to shift our scientific understanding into the human realm, and includes novels by Audrey Niffeneger, Douglas Adams and Scarlett Thomas. A list to which I would add M John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, that takes us on a journey across space and time, only to return us to the point where our dreams and flights of imagination impact with the quantum foam at the root of reality.

Algorithmic robot overlords. Microsoft Big Brother. Post-Scarcity economics. Psychic powers. Quantum reality. there are some wild ideas in science fiction. For a world going wild with technology, they may be the most realistic literature around.

Science fictionFictionGeorge OrwellDamien Walter
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