Mark Chadbourn's Blog: Jack of Ravens, page 21

The Stories We Need To Tell Ourselves

There is a shiny red apple filled with poison and a crone with eyes like steel. There is a virginal girl as pure as snow, a sleep like death, and a kiss that wakes her into a new life of Happy Ever After.

The tale has survived from ancient times because it was always more than just entertainment. It was an instruction for living. Snow White would have been told to young girls to prepare them for the life ahead. Beware of older women. They will be jealous of your youth and potential and will try to keep you locked in childhood. One day a man will come with a kiss — a metaphorical kiss, though stickier and sweatier — and he will awaken you to a new, adult life where you will find happiness.

Stories are the way we make sense of the world around us.

We’re moving into a new age now, one of unparalleled and accelerating technological change. Every aspect of our existence is being transformed. Hang around in the coffee shops and bars and you will catch murmurs of unease. Old friends are vanishing by the day. Familiar, comforting ways of doing things lost. Nowhere seems safe.

Never has there been a more important time for stories that instruct and guide and explain. A new narrative for a new age.

As a novelist and screenwriter, working for, amongst others, the BBC, I’m regularly in meetings with producers. Recently, I pitched a story that looked at how technology-driven change is shaping the world. Now I love the thrill of this new age and I’m fully-immersed in all aspects of tech. So I was, quite frankly, stunned to realize that I was having to explain at the start of every meeting that, no, this isn’t science fiction. It’s happening NOW.

Not long after, I was meeting a police contact to discuss research for a new TV series. He laughed at the depiction of most law enforcement officers on screen. Twenty years out of date, he said. Shows hired ex-cops to act as advisors, but the knowledge they held was from that distant, fabled time of pre-five years ago. Change was coming so fast, you needed to be on top of it, right now, to reflect it with any accuracy.

Why were all these experienced storytellers failing to keep up? For a start, it’s hard work. And paying attention is time-consuming, when you’ve got characters to create and arcs to develop and themes to sharpen and research to do. Who has the space to keep watching this tsunami of new information that’s engulfing the world?

Back in 1970, futurist Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock, a term which he defined as “too much change in too short a period of time”. The simple fact is that the majority of people simply can’t assimilate the staggering pace of today’s technological advance, one that grows faster with each passing week. Look away for one moment and so many new things have popped up that it’s easier not to pay attention at all. Get on with your life. It’ll sort itself out. Wrapped up in their jobs and their relationships, they only look up when another touchstone has fallen. And then, seeing what they’re losing but not knowing what they’re gaining, they’re fearful.

Storytellers have a responsibility to those people.

There’s plenty of academic research which shows that information or guidance provided in a tale is more sticky than plain facts taught in a lesson. Our ancestors knew that. Many of our oldest story-forms are packed with facts about agrarian life, the seasons, tree and plant lore, with life-lessons, and psychological insights. Sitting around the fire, the listeners would be entertained, and learn, and understand.

At their heart, stories are all about the human condition. Character. Emotion. Raw human nature doesn’t change — Shakespeare has shown us that. But tales are also about explaining the world around us, and how humans interact when placed under the stresses of the global environment.

Creators have always done that well. Whether it’s responding to 9-11 or the financial crash of 2008, we’ve seen plenty of fictions trying to make sense of those things.

But are they doing enough to reflect the current state of things? I don’t think so.

Part of the problem is that change is happening faster than the traditional production cycles of TV, film and novels. The entertainment industry can’t keep up. Many a time I’ve heard a producer complain about time and money wasted developing an idea that’s out-dated by the time it comes to fruition. It’s easier and more cost-effective to look back to simpler times, familiar story-forms and settings.

That’s what a lot of viewers and readers are doing. But it doesn’t help them.

In this 21st century thrill-ride of constant disruption, rapid change, of terror and hope, we need creators to start illuminating it as it happens. That means looking forward two or three years, taking in vast amounts of information and then creating something which will be relevant the moment it hits the street.

That’s hard. It requires a new way of thinking about stories. Not quite science fiction, not yet science fact. But one aspect of all that rapid change is that the tools to do this are out there, if we’re open to it.

But if creators opt for the easy option — looking around or looking back and then dreaming up their tale — they’re letting down a lot of people who really need their help in understanding what’s happening now.

(Posted earlier on Medium)

2014 – In With A Bang

Happy New Year.

Lots of new stuff on the go. I know I promised all the ebooks would be available by now, but there’s a reason – several, in fact – why ebook approval got shoved down the to-do list.

I’ll get to some of those announcements in forthcoming posts. Today I just wanted to flag up my secret identity. I know this has been an open secret to some readers, but I’ve been working on a historical fiction series under the pseudonym James Wilde.

Reason for the name change? People in the publishing industry like simplicity – it makes their job easier. Mark Chadbourn books go in this part of the bookshop.  Historical fiction goes over here. I once wrote a non-fiction book called Testimony.  In every bookshop I went into, I’d find it in a different section.  Readers had to go on an epic quest just to track it down.

I learned my lesson.

So if you want to read about England’s greatest hero, Hereward (who was the template for Robin Hood), seek out James Wilde.  The stories are bloody – as befits a time where wars were fought with axes and spears – but I know you’ve all got strong stomachs.  They’ve sold extraordinarily well – a Times best-seller – and as a history buff, as you all well know, I’m having a blast writing them.

Stirring covers from my publisher too:

 

More soon on interesting developments in TV and film, and on the new ebook release schedule.

Proof Of Heaven – Book Review

Near Death Experiences (NDEs) are a fascinating topic. They affect people regardless of cultural background or religious belief, or lack of it, and they’ve been recorded from the earliest days of civilisation. For years science has suggested explanations for the tunnel, the white light, the dead relatives waiting to greet you, and all the other familiar markers of an NDE. But whether dumps of DMT from the pineal gland, primitive brainstem programs or toxic overstimulation of cortical neurons, those theories have all been found wanting as we have discovered more about what really happens to the brain under the threat of death.

If you had to suggest what would make the best case study of an NDE, it would involve: a skeptical patient, someone who was an expert in neuroscience, and a situation where there were extremely detailed records of what was happening to brain chemistry at the point of death. By the laws of chance, that is never going to happen…

Except here it did. Eben Alexander is a leading neurosurgeon with a well-documented career of writing and teaching about neuroscience in leading institutions. He was also a confirmed materialist and a skeptic of anything spiritual – even of the notion that consciousness existed beyond a mechanical construct of the brain’s processing of experience and memory.

And then Alexander was struck down by a rare and seemingly incurable form of bacterial meningitis that threw him into a coma. The doctors at the hospital where he worked gave him less than a ten per cent chance of survival, and even if he did pull through he was expected to be irretrievably brain-damaged. Finally they advised his family to turn off life support.

Yet against all the odds, Alexander did wake up, and with all his faculties intact. And he came back with a staggering account of an NDE that is all the more powerful because it could not…should not…be. His detailed medical records show that there was no activity in his brain that could possibly have accounted for what he experienced – in effect, the human, thinking part of him was dead.

The unique case study alone is worth the four stars – it’s an important account in the study of NDEs. The book itself, for me, probably deserves three. It’s easy reading – no doubt because Alexander wanted to convey his experiences to the widest possible audience – but I would have preferred some more analytical writing and less visceral or emotional.

Having said that, Proof of Heaven is worth reading because of the confluence of Alexander’s scientific background and the life-changing experience he underwent, one which kicked away all the props of the intellectual life he’d built over his years in science.

The End Of Big – Book Review

This is an important book. We’re going through the fastest period of change in human history and one that’s accelerating – everything we’re used to is going to alter in some way, and if you want to survive with your job, finances, health and sanity intact, you have to be prepared for what’s coming. The End of Big is your road map.

Nicco Mele, who sits on the faculty of Harvard’s Kennedy School, examines the changes that are rushing through different sectors: business, the news media, the entertainment industry, politics and government, universities and education, the army and warfare, while touching on other sectors too. As he says: “We’re at the beginning of an epochal change in human history. Scan the headlines every morning – through your Facebook and Twitter feeds – and you can feel history shifting under your feet. Every day I find more and more evidence that we are in the twilight of our own age, and that we can’t quite grasp it, even if we sense something is terribly amiss.”

As the title suggests, the author’s evidence shows that ‘big’ cannot survive – whether that’s big political parties or big companies. We’re not only moving from serving the general to serving the specific, but economies of scale have less impact with the technology that’s emerging. For book lovers, Mele shows, for instance, why the big publishing companies have little hope of continuing in their current form. Don’t get the impression that this is all negative. The author indicates that there are a great many opportunities coming up fast. If you’re a creator, or have particular skills, you’ll thrive. Small businesses and independent retailers are well-placed for success. (The subtitle is: How The Internet Makes David The New Goliath.)

Don’t be deterred by what may seem heavy reading matter; it’s really not, and Nicco Mele writes with a very engaging, popular style. Because of the scope, this is necessarily a broad-brush approach so you aren’t going to get bogged down in the detail of a sector that doesn’t interest you. I have minor doubts about a couple of the author’s conclusions, but that’s exactly how it should be. The book tells you exactly what *is* happening, right now, and what’s coming up in the near-future, and then lets you answer your own questions about whether those changes are good or bad.

The pace of change is so great that The End of Big is going to be out of date very quickly. All the more reason to buy it now, so you’re fully prepared for those changes and can plan your own future effectively in these turbulent times. Highly recommended.

Can Google Solve Death?

A couple of posts back, I opened a review of Ray Kurzweil’s book Transcend with the line, ’Want to live forever?’  Seems that quite a few people do, and some are prepared to put a big heap of cash up front to make that happen.

Google has just announced the launch of Project Calico, an offshoot company designed to tackle the illnesses of ageing and, in essence, to find a way to beat death.  If you read Kurzweil’s book, that’s not as crazy as it sounds.  The technology is coming, and with Google’s backing could come a lot faster.

It looks like Google chief Larry Page has also read Transcend.  Earlier this year, Google hired Kurzweil, and it seems this may have been with Calico in mind.  The world is changing fast.

In the 20C, you became a big player in the business world with a psychological outlook  that was not in any way admirable – studies have shown the most successful are literally psychopaths.  (That account says 1 in 25 – recent studies say it may be much higher…)

In the 21C and the knowledge-based economy, you don’t need to be a psychopath to get on, you need to be smart.  The new breed of business leaders emerging from Silicon Valley are, almost to a person, utopians – they want to make their heap of cash, but they want to make the world better at the same time (presaged all those years ago by Google’s famous informal company motto, Don’t Be Evil).

The world is changing better.

White Gold Magic And Deep, Dark Tunnels

Coal dust covered the land of my youth.  I grew up among the mining villages in the old Kingdom of Mercia, where everyone knew someone who worked in the deep dark.  My grandfather had missing fingers and a crumbling spine from the days he spent up to his neck in deep water after a tunnel collapse.  The doctor took out his eyes to wash the coal dust from behind them.

It was a place secretly ruled by women, but where the men pretended to be kings and the women let them do it.  Men in pubs, swilling beer and laughing till they cried.  Men taunting other men because humour was the only way to combat death always standing at your shoulder.

My mother gave me books.  She ensured I was the only one in my class who could already read when I rolled up for my first day of school.  My father…well, I knew he read vast amounts.  We were one of the few houses in the street with a wall filled with well-thumbed books.  But he was one of the men of that area, who laughed a lot but kept a huge part of themselves hidden away in the dark.  Still, he taught me a lot.  To work hard.  To look after the people around you.  And always to put the women first.

He left the mine when I was still young, at my mother’s urging, and landed a job as an engineer, working away from home for the entire week.  Distant though he sometimes seemed, it still broke my heart when I saw him packing his case on a Sunday night.  And after a while, he worked away for months at a time, in Spain, Belgium, the Middle East.

But when he returned home it was always a celebration.  One day he brought me back the first of Stephen Donaldson’s fantasy novels about Thomas Covenant and urged me to read it.  That stunned me.  Firstly, that he was giving me a book to read.  Secondly, that he loved a fantasy novel – it seemed so at odds with the down-to-earth man he presented to the world.  That was when I started to realise there were deep tunnels inside him, ones that I had never explored.

In 1990, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.  I still recollect my shock when I saw the headlines.  That was where my father was working.  For days, there was no news.  Hope that the British embassy might have helped him get to safely slowly ebbed.

The Iraqi forces took him prisoner at gunpoint and sent him to a concentration camp in northern Iraq.  He became one of Saddam’s human shields, westerners sent to strategic sites in a desperate attempt to stop the US and Britain bombing them.

Eventually we were allowed an exchange of letters.  My father asked for a book – he was bored with nothing to read.  I sent him a fantasy novel: Samuel Delaney’s Tales of Neveryon.  When he was released, he confided in me, in a way that he rarely did, how much of a comfort that book was.

That event threw life off-kilter.  It was a time of worry, desperation, never knowing if we would hear the news that my father had been executed.  My mother came down to my flat in London where I was working, and slept on a camp bed.  Every morning we sat before the TV news, hoping.  My family had always been close.  I had an idyllic childhood, and though we rarely had much, times always seemed good.

Still in her fifties, my mother died shortly after my father was freed.  The strain of those long weeks…months…proved too much for her health.  I returned to the Midlands to help my father through the hard time of grieving, and never went back.  In the years that followed, I got to know him better than I ever had.  He liked a good tale, did my father.  A fantastical story with heroes and bad guys and overwhelming supernatural force.

A few years later, he too died, after a rapid descent into dementia.  The doctors believed it had been caused by inhaling the toxins from the oil fields Saddam had set alight during his period of imprisonment.

And yet most of all I remember the gift of white gold magic that my father had given me.  What it said about the hidden parts of a man, and what it illuminated, to me, in someone so close, and yet so distant.  I think about the power of imaginative stories in the real world.  I think about how we all need them so much; and why.

Live Forever – Book Review

TRANSCEND by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman

Want to live forever? This is the book for you. That may sound like a fatuous statement to accompany some woolly, magical thinking guide, but everything here is based on the latest scientific studies (all referenced, if you don’t want to take the authors at their word). Indeed, Kurzweil is a leading scientific philosopher, best-known for his writing on the coming technology singularity. Grossman is a doctor.

How can you live forever? It’s a simple equation. In the 2020s, biotech advances will extend lifespans. In the 2030s, nanotech advances will help your body repair itself ad infinitum. This book is a guide to everything you can do yourself to help you live just long enough to reach the first ‘bridge’, which should then carry you through to the second. Simple. Here is all the latest thinking on nutrition, exercise, relaxation, supplements, calorie reduction, new technologies and more – and not just what works, but why it works. You will also find some of the surprising, hidden things that are slowly killing you. And if you think you know all this stuff, I’m betting that you don’t.

None of the advice is onerous. Little changes have big consequences. Even if you’re a confirmed cynic, making those changes will undoubtedly make you feel better, so what’s to lose?

If you don’t consider yourself ‘scientifically minded’, don’t worry – all the scientific evidence here isn’t hard-going. The two authors have a lively writing style and communicate detailed information in an easily-digested form. This is a ‘how to…’ guide, recommended for everyone. Philosophically, it’ll make you look at the world around you in a different way. And as a template for really improving your day-to-day existence, it’s unparalleled.

Iron Age Massacre Discovered At UK’s Largest Hill Fort

Excavations at Ham Hill in Somerset have uncovered evidence of what may be thousands of Iron Age bodies, dismembered and with their flesh stripped away.  This is the largest hill fort in the UK – covering an area of something like 129 football pitches – yet most of it has so far been unexcavated.

This is just one of several as-yet-unexplained finds of flesh being stripped from human bones in this era.

World’s End Revisited

For anyone who enjoyed World’s End, Book One of the Age of Misrule, here’s a photo I took the other day.  You’re looking down at the harbour in Tenby, South Wales.  In the background is castle hill where the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons spied the Wild Hunt.

The Wind In The Willows And The Voice Of Old Gods

Memories are strange.  When I look back on my childhood, I remember scenes from books as potently as the real, mundane things that happened to me, as if I lived them with the characters, walking a few steps behind.  The groves of Middle Earth.  The coal-dusted backstreets of Swadlincote.  I swear they were on the same map, and I wandered in and out of both.  I recall the smell of them both, how things tasted, the quality of the light.

Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is a book that I now realise had a big, big influence on my life.  It was less the story of Mole, Ratty and Toad, I can see now, and more the world they inhabited.  A rural idyll long-lost to the modern industrial world, a bucolic landscape where it was still possible for the uncanny to exist only a step or two away.

And the key chapter was The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, where (and…sigh…spoilers) Pan appears to the animal characters.

‘Oh Mole! the beauty of it!  The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping!  Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet!…’

The Mole, greatly wondering, obeyed.  ’I hear nothing myself,’ he said, ‘but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers.’

As a child, I found that chapter haunting and strange.  Strange because it had absolutely nothing to do with the story, and yet there it was.  And strange because even though it was a narrative cul-de-sac it affected me so deeply.

Animals had their own gods?

And yet it wasn’t even that oblique revelation.  It was the feeling that magic could intrude on the world I knew.  That it was there, in the woods, under the hedgerows.  A power in nature.  Something very old, and alien, and entrancing, and sometimes frightening.

I’ve lived in a lot of cities, and I enjoy the urban life.  But I still get a frisson when I visit the wild, as I regularly do.  The moors, the coast, the mountains, even the lanes that wind around my home.  Those are my cathedrals.

And clearly I wasn’t the only one to recognise the power in that chapter.  At infant school, when our class read through The Wind in the Willows, we skipped The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.  My nine-year-old self was baffled.  I tried to get some sense out of my teacher, a man who loved books and encouraged my wider reading.  He hinted at the reason, but seemed incapable of giving me a full explanation.  Now I realise it was a Church of England school, a state school where the church was allowed some influence in the education.  The Church didn’t want the children reflecting on that chapter at all.  I guess, in their own muddle-headed way, they were right: words have an alchemical  power.

But I do wonder if we hadn’t skipped that chapter, and if it hadn’t been flagged up to me that here was something potentially…dangerous?…the Great God Pan might have stayed with Mole and Ratty.

As it was, those authorities made sure his voice rang through clearly.  And I can still hear the pan-pipes today.