Tim Newton Anderson's Blog, page 6

Here be Monsters

I’m reading a book at the moment called Hitler’s Monsters about the links between the rise of the Nazi Party and the broader spiritual malaise of Weimar Germany which expressed itself in interest in the occult, fringe science, and race theories.

It prompted me to think about a couple of things. One is what constitutes a monster and the second is why we are attracted to pseudo-science, conspiracy theories and mysticism when times are tough.

Neuroscience would tell us the explanation for the second question lies in the activation of the fear response when we perceive a threat. When there is an immediate danger, this can be tackled by adrenalin fuelled fight or flight which will at least deal with the time based threat, hopefully allowing us to move past it (although we also know about PTSD). However when the threat is more existential, there is not a simple way to move past it.

Covid is a good example. There was not only the danger itself – constantly reinforced in our minds by news media and politicians – but the isolation caused by lockdown which meant we could not have the social interaction which can disperse the fear through activating other systems in our brain/body. The same problem is being felt now by everyone worried about the cost of living crisis or the general marginalisation of large parts of society. As in Germany between the wars the idea that the fear we feel is the fault of some ‘other’ is a natural reaction when we are oppressed by something outside our control. Politicians, the mainstream media and others on social media are all too happy to suggest who that ‘other’ may be. Which one you choose is based on your own pre-existing views.

What made Hitler successful was a combination of blaming the Jews and other minority groups for the problem, and offering the utopian vision of an ideal Germany which would happen if people backed him. He was sold as the messiah or King Under the Hill who embodied people’s desires for peace and prosperity, identified with deep seated figures in German mythology.  I will leave it to you to decide how many contemporary politicians use the same play book.

What makes a monster is the flip side of this. The Jews in Germany were identified by the Nazi’s and their predecessors and fellow travellers with monsters of folk lore – vampires and other dark figures. Anyone who didn’t get with the programme was branded as evil enemies of progress towards utopia.

The idea of monsters comes from the primeval part of the brain that is still hiding from predators in caves or dying from snake or spider bites, or attacks by ‘other’ tribes. The concept is then attached to contemporary concepts like AI, social media trolls, immigrants, serial killers, corrupt Police, toxic masculinity, or big business, and amplified by attributing other things to them to make them an even bigger and more deliberately malign threat. Short emotive phrases condemning them are then repeated over and over again to burn it into our brains.

Monsters in fiction are made monstrous by the opposite process. Take a group or concept people are scared of and embody it in a tentacled alien, ghost or zombie, or our own body betraying us, and it becomes scary.

Sometimes we have to take a long calm look under the bed.

Avram Magus

I have just finished reading the massive two volume set of AD 100 one hundred unpublished or uncollected stories by Avram Davidson  to celebrate what would be his 100th birthday.

The books are a labour of love by Avram’s godson Seth Davies who set up Or All the Seas With Oysters press to bring back and keep Avram’s output in circulation through books and podcasts. Avram is one of those authors beloved by other authors – the Avram Davidson Treasury published after his death has notes on each story by the great and good of science fiction and fantasy. Author Henry Wessells has maintained the Avram Davidson website for many years and Avram’s wife Grania Davis was instrumental in getting a lot of his work into print after his death.

The reasons for this cultish devotion are obvious from many of the stories in AD 100. Avram was a master stylist and his digressive style full of memorable fully drawn characters and arcane knowledge. As the collection shows this style was there from his earliest stories of Jewish life and resurfaced fully when he was less constrained by the demands of publishers.

His science fiction stories are thin on the ground – especially in volume 1 – because there have been several single author collections of them. There are a lot more of his crime stories as there has only been one volume of these – The Investigations of Avram Davidson. Although the crime material is less idiosyncratic in construction – sticking mainly to the “biter bit” formula popular at the time – there are still those wonderful character portraits and dialected dialogue.

The treasures of the books for me are the Vergil Magus tales and the fantasy stories. The two story sequence of Bumberboom and Basilisk and the other tales present fully realised worlds with hints of complex history and politics that would have made great novels if Avram had time to write them. It is a tragedy he neither filled out these, or wrote the second and third novels in his Island Under the Earth series. Perhaps Seth’s relentless searching in Avram’s effects and those of his friends may give us more.

Although I already owned some of the stories in the volumes in their original magazine or anthology publications, it is a great joy to have them collected and on my shelf alongside the rest of the volumes of this great writer’s work.

The Class of Harry Potter

I suspect everyone who has ever written a story about wizards is told “yes, but isn’t it just like Harry Potter”. Including those whose stories were written decades before. Just for the record, there have been stories about people with magical powers, schools or universities of magic, and many of the plot elements of the HP series since stories began. That doesn’t mean J K Rowling ripped them off either – they are part of the vocabulary of fantasy.

The issue I have with Harry Potter and most tales of people with magical powers – and much other science fiction and fantasy – is nothing to do with their originality. It’s the politics.

A common trope is that magic exists, but ordinary people have to be protected from the knowledge of its existence. There is a cabal of magic users who hide their powers away either to protect themselves, or the population at large.

I don’t subscribe fully to the Marxist or Structuralist analysis of texts, but can’t help see the echo of the way our mundane elites protect themselves in this. Just like magicians, they club together consciously or unconsciously to disguise the effect they have on our world and ascribe any bad effect to the esoteric secrets of market forces. An even more insidious meme is that any problems one group of ordinary people have is caused by another similarly disadvantaged group not those at the top of the pyramid.

Class is clearly a part of the Potterverse and the long standing magical families look down on those of “muggle” heritage. They are the bright working class kids who have won an academic scholarship to a public school and are easily spotted by the children of the elite because they can’t afford the right uniform or the skiing trips.

The path in “classic” or Tolkeinesque fantasy is that a peasant discovers a talent for magic or fighting and rises to the top. They rarely bring everyone else with them – just join the elite even if they depose the current top dog. The social heirarchy is preserved and the poor peasant often turns out to be the illegitimate offspring of someone important rather than a lowly serf. At the start of Gormenghast we are cheering for Steerpike the social climber, but like many who have ascended the ranks he pulls up the ladder behind him and enforces the social rules even more strictly than those born to it.

Even Harry Potter, who starts off as an outsider suffering at the hands of the elite ends up accepting the system, just wanting to get rid of the worst elements of it.

We need a revolution, but I suspect the new boss will be same as the old boss. We will get fooled again.

Second Hand Rows

Any book lover will tell you there are two joys of visiting a second hand bookshop – finding a book you have been looking for, and finding one you didn’t know you wanted. I’m not sure which is better.

There aren’t as many second hand book shops as there used to be. A combination of charity shops and Amazon have meant they are less profitable and they are often run by people who love being surrounded by books rather than those who just want a successful business.

I look in charity shops, too, but most of the books there are former best sellers or those people have acquired because they think they should have them like encyclopedias or fashionable cook books. You will often find parts of collections cleared from the homes of deceased relatives but as someone with particular enthusiasms they rarely match those on offer. Military books are just one area I have no interest in and there are lots of those.

I also use Amazon, despite its record on paying tax and giving its workers decent salary and conditions, because I can often find books of interest with a category search and lots of scrolling. It is not as much fun as finding a physical copy in a shop, though.

It is particularly gratifying to find a book I want in a shop that has a degree of disorder. It’s a bit like finding buried treasure. It’s a fine balance – you don’t want total chaos or total order. Just enough organisation so things are roughly in sections, but not in alphabetical order. Piles of recently acquired books that are not yet shelved are also good as they are small enough to check through in the hope of finding a gem.

One of my favourite local bookshops that gets it just right is Barnabees Books in Westleton. As well as having the right mix of order and chaos it isn’t overfull of popular paperbacks. Westleton is a bit of a book village as there is another second hand bookshop there – Chapel Books.

In case any booksellers are reading this, if you have collections on ‘Pataphysics and Alfred Jarry, surrealism, Oulipo, Fin de Siecle Paris, Lewis Carroll or mathematical fiction, get in touch and we may be able to do business.

Harrison’s Weird World

I’m most of the way through M John Harrison’s anti-autobiography Wish I Was Here, which is as wonderful as I expected.

It’s called an anti-biography because there are very few biographical details in it and it is certainly not in any kind of order – or is it?

Mike Harrison started his career in New Worlds in the 60s with his own take on fantasy, space opera and the disaster story. He has since become a touchstone for the New Weird movement and is praised by discerning critics as one of our best novelists. However, he tells us in this book that as a writer he tries to avoid all the usual cliches of structure, plot, and obvious meaning in favour of capturing the world as we all live it. There is no plot to our lives and only fleeting resolution and any meaning we ascribe to our lives and the world as a whole are fleeting, contingent, and probably wrong.

In Harrison’s stories weird things happen, but off stage, and his characters rarely have more than a glimpse of them as they try, and fail, to make sense of their lives. There is generally an air of desperation about his characters who tend to be making a living on the fringes of the world, and have a sense of self that is fragile, fluid, and haunted by the ghosts of their past attempts at self invention as much as by any existential crisis facing their worlds.

What drives the story is not plot as such, but the accumulation of observation and detail of the world which are intended not as clues but simply what is. If there is an autobiographical element to this book and his fiction it is the threading of his own attempts to capture these observations as truthfully as he can. And that truth is independent of any meaning we ascribe to it.

I have tried, and failed, to capture some of Harrison’s spirit in my story Under Shude Hill which was published by the Dark Lane anthology series. It is incredibly hard to resist tying up a story with a plot and a message and to make observations that are accurate and not in some way symbolic. I plan to have another go, but don’t hope for much more success. The tropes of fiction are embedded in all of us, and we employ them in trying to understand the world as much as in writing. They are part of the DNA of stories since our ancestors gathered round a fire and tried to make sense of the universe of experience.

All hail Harrison for trying to mirror the world as it is without adding a layer of interpretation and allowing us to do the same.

Decadence and the Dark

The Decadent movement in literature had a significant influence on the development of the Ghost story in England.

The ornamented style which they took from the Symbolists was perfect for creating the atmosphere of a good story of the supernatural and the elements of decay and decadence also translated well. What the English writers brought to the party was a sense of a world beyond our senses that then infiltrated daily lives.

For me, the best of them were Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson. As a member of The Golden Dawn, Machen had considerable knowledge of the occult – as did Algernon Blackwood, who I am less fond of. Blackwood’s John Silence was one of Hodgson’s inspirations for the Carnacki stories, although again I prefer Hodgson’s version.

I have just bread a collection by Richard Middleton – The Ghost Ship. Middleton was an acquaintance of Machen, who wrote the introduction to the book. Paradoxically, the best story is the title one which shares little with the intense prose of the other tales. Unlike Machen, the other stories are all atmosphere and none of the feeling of transcendent powers Machen brings.

The other ghost story I have just read is Charles Williams early Et in Sempiternum Pereant. I am a great admirer of Williams novels and, while not as good as those, the short story also creates an intense atmosphere of the reality behind the mundane. Williams was one of the Inklings and while there is little of CS Lewis or Tolkein in his writing he did influence Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, which I have always thought the best of his novels. Both men were deeply Christian, but Williams uses his beliefs in the philosophy of his fiction rather than trying to translate the Christian mythos to SF and Fantasy. Williams work is equally influenced by Arthur and the Matter of Britain and is closer in themes to Dion Fortune.

The writer who most reminds me of Williams is David Lindsay – not Arcturus, but Sphinx, The Violet Apple and his other works. Williams is the more polished writer, but Lindsay perhaps the more powerful one.

Poetry Rocks

Amazon UK

I’ve said before I’m nit comfortable writing poetry, yet I have three in this book.

The wonderful Rhys Hughes invited me to submit something and I was delughted he accepted some of mine – Gold Glistens, The Human Race, and The Inhuman Race. Thankfully there are also lots of other great writers who have pieces in this book including:

Maithreyi Karnoor Tony Peak Mitali Chakravarty Anna Tambour Paul Battenbough Vicki Day Mia Tijam Fábio Fernandes Carmelo Rafala Santosh Bakaya Samantha Underhill Bob Lock Anita Nahal Joji Mathew David Rix Jim Matthews Boris Glikman Andrew James Wilson Richard Temple Peter Banks Marie C Lecrivain Jeanne VanBuren

The link at the top is for Amazon UK but it is available as an ebook or a real one across the globe. Enjoy.

Alice, who the **** is Alice?

One if my literary interests is the Alice books – and Lewis Carroll in general. A glance at my bookshelves demonstrates the level of this as there is a full shelf of Carroll’s works, books about them, and sequels by other authors.

I probably had read Alice in Wonderland as a child, but the thing that sparked my interest was Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice which I borrowed from the library in my early teens. As someone who was also interested in maths and physics as well as puns, the book was a revelation. I now have the original hardback as well as the Millennium edition and the latest version with further annotations added after Gardner’s death. I also have his Annotated Snark and the Annotated version of The Wasp in a Wig episode which was excluded from the original books.

I also have Carroll’s complete works, early editions of the two Sylvie and Bruno books and lots more including books about his maths, logic and magic (I also have a number of books of mathematical fiction including some by the great Rudy Rucker). The sequels are of variable quality – no-one has yet come close to emulating the genius of the originals. The best are probably Gilbert Adair’s Alice Through the Needle’s Eye and Jeff Noon’s Automated Alice.

The industry around Alice and Carroll has provided many alternative interpretations of the books, but also Carroll’s life. The question mark that always hangs over Carroll is his sexuality and the appropriateness of his relations with young girls. Personally, I read his interest in children in general as a search for innocence – not unusual in Victorian times and much of the rest of the children’s literature and art of the period. However, our contemporary eyes look at things differently. We all face the question of whether we can separate the artist and the art.

I have not been tempted to write a straight sequel to the Alice books although I did write a story where someone was trapped in their mind and characters from the books appear as Jungian archetypes. I found it was very easy to read them that way – which may be because they are symbols that we share as well as having references to Carroll’s outward life and people he knew. There are articles on Carroll and Jung in Robert Phillips Aspects of Alice – a great book. I hadn’t actually read them for some time though so my inspiration was the original books themselves and Jung’s Man and His Symbols.

Whatever I read, I always come back to the books themselves – Alice is for every age and all ages.

Sleepers – a woke

As someone whose wife is following Buddhism, I find it ironic that people use ‘woke’ as an insult. Surely going through life awake is far preferable to sleepwalking through it.

The word usually has air quotes around it, of course, which suggests they mean people are only pretending. Personally, I would take being called ‘woke’ a badge of honour.

What it generally means when used pejoratively is that someone cares about people and the environment and is opposed to ‘isms’. It is employed when anyone questions the prejudices of the non-woke – racism (or at the very least xenophobia), sexism, homophobia, anti trans feelings and any other act of putting people into categories they can then classify as “other”. It is particularly used by those in power and authority to set those without it against each other some they can blame some other group at the bottom of the hierarchy for their problems.

What those who are anti-woke (and anyone who has fixed views about other people’s views) particularly hate is reasoned, fact based discussion. They are quite happy to use numbers, as long as no-one puts those numbers into context. They are also quite fond of the “Yes Minister” irregular verbs. I am a refugee, you are an asylum seeker, he is an illegal immigrant, they are criminal scum abusing the system, raping our women and children, and murdering us in our beds.

The technical term for their arguments is “tarring with the same brush” – a particularly damning phrase given its links to the treatment of black people and white people who supported them in the Southern US. One member of a group I don’t like (BME, LGBTQ+, other religions, single parents, the working class) has behaved in a way that is bad, so all of that group must also be like that. If you draw a Venn diagram of that group and the general population with the intersection being the bit society at general would condemn, you simply ignore the circle of the rest of the population. You can use the same technique to condemn vaccines (some people who have had it have suffered a medical problem) all police and politicians (some of them have done bad things) teachers (some have taught lessons you don’t like).

Being woke means that you treat people as individuals and don’t take an aspect of a person who has done something bad to condemn everyone else who shares that quality. You especially don’t work the other way round – I am prejudiced against this group so I will look for an excuse to attack them.

Questioning people’s prejudices and calling them out where needed is not ‘woke’ in the right wing meaning. Questioning whether what people say or write may be offensive is not ‘woke’. Suggesting people behave respectfully to each other and don’t cause intentional offence is not ‘woke’. It is simply being a good, grown up, empathic person.

Manners Maketh the story

I love it when writers use the comedy of manners as part of their story telling in fantasy or science fiction.

My story series about Lord Minimus – the very real Jeffrey Hudson – and the equally real Lord Buckingham takes a lot of inspiration from Fritz Leiber’s Grey Mouser and Fafhrd but also Jack Vance’s elegant and ironic fantasy and science fiction creations.

Vance was the king of the comedy of manners and his inventive societies often seemed set up to allow the lead character to misinterpret their mores.

I suspect one of Vance’s influences was James Branch Cabell, whose works can all be described as Comedies of Manners, even though only one actually bore that subtitle. A key element was always the tension between who his characters were, and the way society constrained them to behave, with the efforts they took to bypass that. In both Vance and Cabell, the ironic prose is brilliant, especially in conversation.

I should give a nod to Matthew Hughes for keeping up the Vanceian tradition, but the two series I absolutely love for their comedy of manners are the Anthony Villiers           series by Alexei Panshin and the Drake Majistral books by Walter Jon Williams.

Both have the trappings of Space Opera. In Panshin’s books the hero has run away from home to escape an arranged marriage and travels with a literal illegal alien. There is an overarching plot about a conspiracy, but the joy is in the detail of the culture and the eccentrics he meets. William’s hero is a licensed thief and there are heist plots, but again the interactions are more fun than the thefts.

My own stories are set in the Restoration period of the 17th century. It was an important time of transition in politics, religion and science. Even people we think of as scientists like Newton were also interested in alchemy. The King and his family had to straddle the fault lines between the Catholic Church (it was only 50 years since the Gunpowder plot and a few years before the conspuracy accusations of Titus Oates) and the protestant church that supported the Roundheads. The monarch had been restored, but the ambitions of Parliament were not back in the bottle. On top of that there were continually shifting allegiances in European politics and piracy and slavery were rife on the high seas.

I had found out about Hudson when looking for a character for a story about the Tarot and magic but his life was so extraordinary the only challenge was creating plots for him that were as fantastic as his reality. The first story was published in the 2022 edition of Fall Into Fantasy and I can only hope they achieve what I set out to do and honour Hudson and my influences.