Chris Beckett's Blog, page 2

To the Stars and Back: stories in honour of Eric Brown

Cover image: To the Stars and Back

I’m proud and pleased to have had a story selected for this collection, which has been put together by Ian Whates at Newcon Press in honour of the late Eric Brown who died last year.

Eric was well-known and well-loved in the British science fiction world. He was a warm, gentle, unassuming man without a trace of arrogance or pretentiousness, and was an exceptionally prolific writer, not just in science fiction, but in many genres including children’s books and crime novels. Yet he’d never read a book until he was in his teens, when he first encountered the work of Agatha Christie. This (as Eric described it) opened up what felt like a magical and entirely new world to him to which he proceeded to dedicate himself, as a reader, writer and reviewer.

The stories in this collection are written by some of his many writer friends. Some of them (I’ve only read a couple so far) refer directly to Eric and his world. Mine doesn’t, but I like to think it’s a story he would have approved of, and perhaps even one that he might have written. It’s called ‘The Peaceable Kingdom.’

Here is the Guardian’s obituary for Eric (who was the paper’s SF critic for many years)

Richer than you think

I was struck by this article which showed that the carbon emissions of the top 10% by income of the global population are as high as those of the bottom 50%. The top 10% ‘encompasses most of the middle classes in developed countries’, the article points out, or anyone earning more than £32,000 ($40,000).

(The article doesn’t make clear, annoyingly, whether it is talking about disposable income or gross income, but £32,000 is roughly the median disposable income in the UK. The median disposable income of the UK’s poorest 20% is £14,500.)

The article makes the point that failing to allow for this fact can mean that those least responsible can end up paying a proportionately higher price for measures intended to reduce carbon emissions than those who are much more responsible, which helps to explain resistance to such measures from poorer people (the article gives the example of the ‘yellow vests’ movement in France protesting against a hike in fuel prices.) This is not the only instance, I think, of measures supported by the liberal middle classes which are resisted by poorer people on whom they more directly impact – a phenomenon that can result in a rather spurious sense of moral superiority on the part of liberal middle class folk.

The more general point I take from this is that many people who do not see themselves as rich, or as extravagant consumers – indeed many people who think they are entitled to be richer than they are, and identify themselves as being among the victims of injustice – are in fact, in global terms, rich and extravagant.

Let loose

Here I am (on the right) signing copies of the Ballard-themed anthology, Reports from the Deep End at Forbidden Planet in London on Saturday. To my right are Maxim Jakubowski (who co-edited the book with Rick McGrath, as well as contributed to it), Pat Cadigan and Andrew Hook. Chemo has made me even balder than usual. I’ve even lost all my nostril hairs. (This makes my nose drip suddenly and without warning, which can be embarrassing). But I’ve had my last dose of those horrible toxins and am on the way up. I came down to London on the train which I wouldn’t have attempted even a week earlier. It felt great to be doing things again.

Chris Beckett in the Underworld

[This post was started in 2013 but never actually posted, but I’ve just been trimming this blog, and I thought I’d finish and post it.]

When I posted my dream/story The Egret and the Gander, a couple of different people commented that it was a take on the story of Achilles (the gander) and Hector (the egret) from the Iliad.   To be honest, I hadn’t noticed this, but I see it now.  I obviously have a classically trained id, because here is another dream I had a few months ago:

I dreamed I had descended to a place deep underground which was a kind of morgue with corpses lying around on trolleys.  In the midst of it there was kind of canteen where I met a waitress.  She was Eastern European, and had a kind of punk sensibility.  She had a doubled piercing on her forehead through which was threaded a large nail.  I offered to get her out of that awful place, and led her to a ladder that climbed up a vertical cliff face towards the surface.  But when I was nearly at the top, the rungs became smooth and hard to grasp, and I became afraid that I would slip and fall.  I wasn’t going to be her heroic saviour after all.

Orpheus and Eurydice, right?

Of the Devil’s party without knowing it

Some further, possibly not very coherent, thoughts carrying on from a previous post. In that post, I expressed my increasing dissatisfaction with TV nature documentaries which, on the one hand, mainly show scenes of predators hunting, or male animals fighting for control of females, accompanied by the kind of tense, exciting, sinister music that I associate with action scenes in movies, and on the other invite us to see nature as something fragile and vulnerable and in need of protection. Why is an orca drowned in a fishing net tragic and pitiful, but a baby seal being tormented by orcas a thrilling spectacle?

I suppose one way of responding to this is by saying that empathy is always selective. In a war, for instance, people tend to be moved to pity by the sufferings of people on their own side, and unmoved by, or even exultant about, the sufferings of those on the other. in these documentaries, the wider concern of the filmmakers is not individual animals, but the ecological web as a whole. To make this vivid, they enlist our pity for a victim of human behaviour that threatens that web, but not for the victim of the endless chain of slaughter or be slaughtered that the web itself largely consists of.

However, I’m still left with a feeling that there is something self-contradictory about these programmes -a mismatch between the message communicated implicitly, and the one communicated explicitly. They celebrate the stereotypically ‘masculine’, but then swerve towards the stereotypically ‘feminine’ so abruptly that it is unconvincing. (It comes over rather like the prologue of some old play or novel, reassuring us that the depravity depicted is for our edification and not for our titillation).

And the reason this is unconvincing, is that the ‘masculine’ ethos these programmes implicitly celebrate is actually the same ethos that justified in the first place the human destruction of much of the nonhuman world: ‘manifest destiny’, ‘right of conquest’, ‘survival of the fittest’* etc etc. Blake said of Milton that he was ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it’, because Satan and the fallen angels in Paradise Lost were so much more vivid and attractive and energetic than the angels who remained faithful. We are pretty addicted to the ‘masculine’ as the source of drama: the gun, the battle, the striving for mastery. Even feminism, it sometimes seems to me, is more interested in claiming the ‘masculine’ for women, than it is in promoting the status of the ‘feminine’, which is to say the nurturing, healing side of being human.

Yet, I think, when I look back over my life, it is really the ‘feminine’ things I most value, like reading my little granddaughter her bedtime story and kissing her goodnight. I think that ultimately means much more to me than, say, the slightly hysterical exultation that comes from winning a prize. And it is the ‘feminine’ that will save the world, if it is still to be saved: The ‘feminine’ with the ‘masculine’ in its service, rather than the other way round, as has been the case for pretty much the whole of history.

See also:

An unsung Einstein

* To be clear ‘survival of fittest’ is, in one sense, an evolutionary fact: what I am talking about here, is use of this idea as a moral/aesthetic principle, the turning of description into prescription.

Chemo

I wrote a post exactly a year and a day ago, in which I reflected on my feelings during a brief period when I neurotically imagined I might have cancer. This is funny because I actually do have cancer right now (though not the kind I feared), and am midway through an 18 week programme of chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy is unpleasant. I spend a morning every three weeks having toxins put into my bloodstream, and into my spine. I’m aware of the poison in my system straight away, but after about 5 days it dominates everything. (And it is poison, though it’s designed to kill cancerous cells before it kills too many others). I feel exhausted and slightly nauseous, there is a permanent unpleasant taste in my mouth, and food tastes absolutely disgusting, like glutinous cardboard. Even water tastes unpleasant. For several days in each cycle it’s almost impossible to eat at all, and I don’t feel up to doing anything except lying down and trying to dissociate from my own experience.

Gradually this eases. It becomes easier to eat, though it remains a rather revolting experience with no pleasure in it. (I never realised until now how much the little treats that are meals help to get me through the day.) For the final few days of the three week cycle, I start to feel a bit more normal, and up to doing things like gardening jobs. Then the whole cycle begins again, but with the twist that there’s a cumulative aspect to it, so that the nastiest bit lasts longer and is a little more unpleasant each time.

During the first cycle I attempted to do some writing, but I’ve given up on that. I’ve pretty much given up on serious reading too. Not only food but pretty much everything else is polluted by the poison. My book diet is mainly audiobooks that don’t ask anything of me, but simply pass the time, or help me to settle into sleep. I’m currently listening to Sherlock Holmes stories, though I’ve never been interested in crime writing: the simple formula chunders round, the problem is resolved without my having to care about anything, and another 45 minutes have gone by.

Giving up on writing isn’t just about lack of energy, it’s also about what’s in my head. This process makes me aware of the disgustingness of the body, of being trapped in the body, no matter what, and my mind goes very quickly to places of horror, those awful places in our world where people would do anything to be free of their bodies, and of existence, but must continue to exist anyway, and continue to inhabit the bodies that torment them.

I mean, who would want to read anything that continued for any length of time in the same miserable mood as this post?

Cancer

I wrote a post exactly a year and a day ago, in which I reflected on my feelings during a brief period when I neurotically imagined I might have cancer. This is funny because I actually do have cancer right now, and am midway through an 18 week programme of chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy is unpleasant. I spend a morning every three weeks having toxins put into my bloodstream, and into my spine. I’m aware of the poison in my system straight away, but after about 5 days it dominates everything. (And it is poison, though it’s designed to kill cancerous cells before it kills too many others). I feel exhausted and slightly nauseous, there is a permanent unpleasant taste in my mouth, and food tastes absolutely disgusting, like glutinous cardboard. Even water tastes unpleasant. For several days in each cycle it’s almost impossible to eat at all, and I don’t feel up to doing anything except lying down and trying to dissociate from my own experience.

Gradually this eases. It becomes easier to eat, though it remains a rather revolting experience with no pleasure in it. (I never realised until now how much the little treats that are meals help to get me through the day.) For the final few days of the three week cycle, I start to feel a bit more normal, and up to doing things like gardening jobs. Then the whole cycle begins again, but with the twist that there’s a cumulative aspect to it, so that the nastiest bit lasts longer and is a little more unpleasant each time.

During the first cycle I attempted to do some writing, but I’ve given up on that. I’ve pretty much given up on serious reading too. Not only food but pretty much everything else is polluted by the poison. My book diet is mainly audiobooks that don’t ask anything of me, but simply pass the time, or help me to settle into sleep. I’m currently listening to Sherlock Holmes stories, though I’ve never been interested in crime writing: the simple formula chunders round, the problem is resolved without my having to care about anything, and another 45 minutes have gone by.

Giving up on writing isn’t just about lack of energy, it’s also about what’s in my head. This process makes me aware of the disgustingness of the body, of being trapped in the body, no matter what, and my mind goes very quickly to places of horror, those awful places in our world where people would do anything to be free of their bodies, and of existence, but must continue to exist anyway, and continue to inhabit the bodies that torment them.

I mean, who would want to read anything that continued for any length of time in the same miserable mood as this post?

Art App

In the Ballard-themed anthology, Reports from the Deep End, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Rick McGrath, from Titan Press. Published 7th November, 2023.

Reports from the Deep End: a J. G. Ballard Tribute Anthology

I’m delighted to have a story in this Ballard-themed anthology, which will be out in the autumn (Nov 7th) – and in some very fine company too. I’m a big admirer of Ballard, particularly his short stories.

My contribution to this collection is called ‘Art App’. Ballard was an exceptionally painterly writer. His stories are not primarily driven by plot or character development, but by the accumulation and arrangement of very powerful images. I tried to honour Ballard’s attachment to Surrealist art and, in particular, to the work of Max Ernst, whose peculiar vision I only really became aware of as a result of reading Ballard.

The Eye of Silence, by Max Ernst

Nature

I watched the BBC series Wild Isles, presented by David Attenborough. It was beautiful to look at, but it left me wondering about the view of ‘nature’ these programmes present.

My unease began in the first episode, when we were shown a pod of Orcas off the coast of Shetland (or was it Orkney?). I’ve watched enough of these shows to know the kind of spectacle we can expect from Orcas – they typically harry their prey to a very slow and terrifying death and I still vividly remember, from Attenborough’s Arctic show, the closeup shot of an exhausted seal looking straight at the camera, as orcas dragged it off an iceberg to a horrible death. It felt all wrong to be staring into its eyes.

Sure enough, we saw a baby seal, which had swum out some way off the shore, being caught by a member of the pod. The orca then took it, still alive, to a group of its companions, where, after a certain amount of playing with its victim, the successful hunter demonstrated to younger orcas -Sir David sounded quite aroused at this point- how to hold it under water and drown it.

Later on, though, we were shown an orca that had itself drowned in a fishing net. Sombre music played. This drowned cetacean was apparently a tragedy, while the slow torment of the baby seal had been presented as something rather thrilling. Why, I wondered? Why should I care about one and not the other?

The same pattern persisted throughout the series. Predators hunting and killing -and quite often targeting the young of their prey- dominated most episodes, and were presented as an exciting spectacle, accompanied by rousing, if sinister, music, like you might hear in an action scene in a movie. We were being offered animal-killing as a voyeuristic entertainment, not so unlike the animal slaughters that the Romans put on in their amphitheatres, except that this was ‘nature’ so we could savour it guilt-free. But then there would be a sudden switch of tone and talk about the fragility of ‘nature’ and the need to protect it from the depredations of humanity. I found this no longer worked for me. I grew bored of the slaughter, not to say sickened by it, and it certainly didn’t put me the mood for ‘only man is vile’ pieties. My thoughts were more on the lines of Kurtz in the Congo jungle: ‘The horror, the horror.’

After hunting scenes, the next most frequent dramas depicted in these shows are the endless combats between male animals fighting to obtain, or defend, access to females. In one episode a huge, repulsive male seal spotted an equally huge and repulsive rival that had emerged from the sea, and flopped and wriggled his blubbery bulk across the sand to do battle. They ripped each others flesh, they roared, they reared up to look as big as possible. The much less repulsive female seals meanwhile hurried to get their babies out of the way, because the males in such battles are apparently so indifferent to anything except their need for dominance, that they will crush their own children to death without a thought if these are foolish enough to get in their way.

It all felt rather familiar actually, like the story-line for much of human history. Not so much a case of ‘only man is vile’, as ‘nature is vile, and we’re a part of it.’