True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  So which would an ambitious, high-minded, young Scottish socialist choose, as he bounced on the end of the springboard over the genre lagoon? Why, Option B. Naturally, Option B. Of course, Option B. Banks’s first SF novel, Consider Phlebas, featured interstellar space battles, settings measurable in parsecs, and characters called things like Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alseyn Balveda dam T’seif. I can remember reading it and feeling as if an electric fan supercharged to hurricane speed were blowing at me out of the pages every time I opened it. Also, feeling mightily puzzled, for from the T.S. Eliot allusion in the title onwards, this spectacularly un-serious-seeming story seemed to want to carry me to some serious and even melancholy places.

  Banks was not alone. He was joined in the turn back towards space opera by a whole suddenly assembling group of British writers, Colin Greenland and Alistair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter and Paul McAuley, plus the 1970s SF grandee M. John Harrison, who had never quite given up on it in the first place. Among other things, it was for all of them a move towards narrative vigour, a kind of counterpart in writing to the punk/new wave return to rock’s danceable 1950s roots after the wafty complexities of the prog scene. It worked as a kind of heavily ironic declaration of independence from American SF – taking over what had been the old heartland of the American future, with very different aims and (often) politics.

  But Banks had noticed something else besides, it became clear as book followed book, each one a firework display of the disgraceful. He had seen that the bigness of pulp – the apparently naive splendour you get when you pop the scale of the expected by envisioning a whole planet pierced through like a Chinese puzzle, or a cosmos bursting with intelligent life, tentacled and otherwise – also prised open a kind of philosophical space, a domain in which a popular art could give serious elbow room to ideas, could let them unfurl experimentally on the grandest of stages. ‘In widescreen baroque’, as he put himself. Especially ideas which had been seen as being just as disreputable as rayguns ’n’ starships.

  Banks’s SF series twirled the narrative focus around with virtuoso ease, but the books almost all shared a background: the Culture, a post-scarcity utopia populated by trillions, where humans and machine intelligences shared a plenty that made money irrelevant and could flick away any challenge. ‘Basically, hippies with enormous guns’, Banks joked cheerfully in interview. But the Culture was more than wish-fulfilment for leftists. Insouciant though it was, superbly casual though it always insisted on being in its outflanking of tyrants, it was a serious attempt (with the finest pulp tools) to imagine a state of existence beyond necessity, where stories would all be driven by conflicts of character rather than the pinching of environments, and, unnecessary tragedies dispensed with, some kind of irreducible bedrock of genuine sorrow would come into view. Like all serious utopians, Banks maintained a tender eye for mortality and heartbreak. The Culture was not a place for happy ever after. Often (Look to Windward and Matter) it was a place for farewells, for entropy unflinchingly acknowledged.

  Much of the time of course, with an irony Banks entirely registered and relished, it had to fade to the literal background of the narrative, so that he could go on telling distinctly pre-utopian stories, as dark as might be expected from the author of The Wasp Factory. Then we tended to get the Culture represented by ‘Special Circumstances’, the Culture’s far-from-stainless corps of meddlers. Then, the off-stage loom of utopia became a critical device, throwing into lurid question the cruelties we might have shrugged at if the Culture weren’t available as contrast. A bright background darkened the foreground. He made his boldest experiment on these lines in The State of the Art, when a Culture contact team slips quietly into orbit around our very own Earth, circa 1978. The ordinary defects of our actual history shock these impressionable Chekists rigid, and having decided against intervention on moral grounds, the best they can do is take symbolic revenge by culturing stray cells of our nastiest dictators for a dinner party. ‘Most of you over there will be eating either Stewed Idi Amin or General Pinochet Chili Con Carne; here in the centre we have a combination of General Stroessner Meatballs and Richard Nixon Burgers . . . there are in addition scattered bowls of Fricasséed Kim Il Sung, Boiled General Videla and Ian Smith in Black Bean Sauce . . .’

  Now, as this dandy cannibal satire on the Last Supper suggests – blasphemy of a grade you just don’t see much, nowadays – Banks is also engaging, with the creation of the Culture, in a piece of sly, prolonged and magnificent anti-theism. I don’t so much mean because, here and there, he’s used his wide screen for explicit attack on elements of religion, as in Surface Detail’s Hieronymus Bosch-worthy demonstration of the repulsiveness of the idea of hell. I mean that the Culture itself represents an elegant absorption of, and therefore displacement of, one whole department of religious yearning. It offers, in effect, a completely secular version of heaven. With its sentient ships as omniscient as any pantheon of gods, and a lot more obliging and benign, and its vision of human nature uncramped from disease and hunger and oppression, and its rationalised equivalent of transcendence, it gives its inhabitants (and you as you read the books) all the pie in the sky they could possibly want; but transformed by being made wholly material, by being brought within the reach of human aspiration. Where religion, on the Marxist reading of it, is a kind of comprehensible counsel of despair, the heart of the heartless world, Banks supplies a counsel of optimism. The handwaving physics and the cheerful vagueness of the economics don’t matter. The Culture is a declaration of imagination’s power. It wants to demonstrate that a materialist imagination can reach just as far as a religious one; further, even, since it can encompass within the order of nature everything that religion must reach outside nature to dream up. Give us enough real sky, says the Culture, and the pie will follow. Plus rayguns!

  Iain Banks’s medical bad news was the kind of catastrophe that even utopia cannot exclude, as his own utopia had been showing for decades with stoic melancholy. For him, we need to imagine a properly science-fictional counterpart to the honour guard of books that Proust had standing watch over the death of a novelist, silent in respect in every bookshop window. Explode the bookshop, for Iain Banks. Stretch its space out into immensity. And through the huge dark, set gliding in respectful procession the Culture’s Ships, kilometres across, each as vast in proportion to mortal human bodies as our imagination is; but not silent, no, never that; all talking, all chattering in negligent grandeur, threading laughter, menace, wit, hope, wrath, through the vacuum, vaster still, where we must find our meaning for ourselves.

  (2013)

  THE DYER’S ELBOW

  It’s always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it’s going well.

  When it’s going badly, then you feel it: there’s the gluey fumbling of the attempts to gain traction on the empty screen, there’s the misshapen awkwardness of each try at a sentence (as if you’d been equipped with a random set of pieces from different jigsaws). After a time, there’s the tetchy pacing about, the increasingly bilious nibbling, the simultaneous antsiness and flatness as the failure of the day sinks in. After a longer time – two or three or four or five days of failure – there’s the deepening sense of being a fraud. Not only can you not write bearably now; you probably never could. Trips to bookshops become orgies of self-reproach and humiliation. Look at everybody else’s fluency. Look at the rivers of adequate prose that flow out of them. It’s obvious that you don’t belong in the company of these real writers, who write so many books, and oh such long ones. Last, there’s the depressive inertia that flows out of sustained failure at the keyboard, and infects the rest of life with grey minimalism, making it harder to answer letters, return library books, bother to cook meals not composed of pasta. All vivid, particularised sensations, familiar from revisiting though somehow no less convincing each time around.

  But there’s no symmetrical set of good feelings when the work goes well. I find that hours pass without my being awar
e of myself enough to be in the business of having sensations; at least, of having any marked, distinct ones. It isn’t just that the dyer’s hand is stained the colour of what it works on. The dyer’s elbow follows it in, the dyer’s arm, the dyer’s whole body plop into the vat, to disperse into my attention to the thing being made. When things are going right, almost all I notice is the fiddly half-created structure of the writing, with all the mutual dependences of the pieces of it upon each other, including the delicate dependence of written parts upon parts not yet written, and vice versa; and the whole thing in motion, or at least in a kind of state of responsiveness, ready to flow into new positions and new configurations as the possibilities alter. To try to attend to my own state of mind while this is happening would be to throw myself abruptly out of it, back to a place where there’s nothing to feel but that I’m cold from sitting still so long, and wouldn’t mind visiting the cottage cheese pot in the fridge with a teaspoon. So far as I can look at my own mind at all, it is in a state of flow, mirroring the responsive flux I feel in the writing. What I know, from a thousand books read and conversations had, works itself together as if by itself; what I need next comes to my hand without being forced, ready to be turned, examined, compared, remoulded, adjusted, smoothed until it aligns itself in parallel with the other pieces of what seems at this moment to be the design.

  Why do I write? From selfishness. Because this state of liquefied, complex concentration, however faintly and dimly I’m able to perceive it, is the greatest pleasure I know.

  (2007)

  SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author and Yale University Press gratefully acknowledge the original publishers of the pieces included here for permission to reprint them. Every effort has been made to obtain permission from copyright holders for the use of copyright material; the author and publisher apologise for any errors or omissions.

  COLD

  ‘Winter Night’ was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 1996.

  ‘Ice’ was first published in a slightly different version in Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture, edited by Stephan Harrison, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (Reaktion Books, 2004), pp. 279–81. Copyright Reaktion Books 2004.

  ‘Worst Journey’ was first published as the introduction to the Folio Society edition of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, 2012.

  ‘Shackleton’ was first published in slightly different form in Waterstone’s Books Quarterly, 2001.

  ‘Read My Toes’ first appeared as a review of Tom Lowenstein’s Ancient Land, Sacred Whale and The Things That Were Said of Them in the London Review of Books, August 1993.

  ‘Borealism’ was first published as a review of S. Allen Counter’s North Pole Legacy in the Times Literary Supplement, May 1992.

  ‘Huntford’s Nansen, Huntford’s Scott’ was first published as a review of Roland Huntford’s Nansen: The Explorer as Hero in the Times Literary Supplement, April 1998.

  ‘The Uses of Antarctica’ was first given as a lecture at the ‘Imagining Antarctica’ conference in Christchurch, New Zealand, September 2008, and then published in the essay collection Imagining Antarctica, edited by Ralph Crane and Elizabeth Leane and Mark Williams (Quintus, 2011). The author and Yale University Press gratefully acknowledge the permission of Faber & Faber Ltd to quote from ‘Malcolm Mooney’s Land’ in the book Malcolm Mooney’s Land by W.S. Graham (Faber & Faber Ltd, 1970).

  RED

  ‘The Soviet Moment’ was first published in the Guardian, August 2010.

  ‘Plenty’ was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 as ‘Plenty: The Land of Cockaigne’, April 2005.

  ‘Responsible Fiction, Irresponsible Fact’ was first given as a talk, in different form, to the Open University Historians’ Group, December 2011.

  ‘Idols of the Marketplace’ was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3, September 2007.

  ‘Unicorn Husbandry’ was first posted in different form at www.crookedtimber.org, June 2012, as a response to the Crooked Timber seminar on Red Plenty.

  SACRED

  ‘Dear Atheists’ was first published in the New Humanist, August 2012.

  ‘Contra Dawkins’ was first delivered as a speech at the Faclan Book Festival, An Lanntair Arts Centre, Isle of Lewis, November 2012.

  ‘Puritans’ was first published as ‘The World Cannot Be Disenchanted’ in the New Statesman, 27 March 2013.

  ‘Who is God? An Answer for Children’ was first published in Big Questions from Little People . . . Answered by Some Very Big People (Faber & Faber Ltd, 2012).

  ‘C.S. Lewis as Apologist’ was first published in a shorter form as ‘When an Apology Was Called For’ in Church Times, 22 November 2013, as part of the paper’s anniversary coverage of C.S. Lewis, which remains available online at www.churchtimes.co.uk.

  ‘What Can Science Fiction Tell Us About God?’ was first published on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, July 2011.

  ‘Uneasy in Iran’ was first published in shorter form as ‘Inside the Shrines of Iran’ in the Tablet, June 2000.

  ‘Wild Theism’ was first published as ‘Spiritual Literature for Atheists’, a review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living with a Wild God and Sam Harris’s Waking Up, in First Things, November 2015.

  ‘The Past as Zombie Hazard, and Consolation’ first appeared as part of the ‘Common Creed’ series of essays at the Theos website, www.theosthinktank.co.uk.

  ‘Three Ways of Writing Faith’ was first given as a talk at an event for Marilynne Robinson at King’s College London, November 2013.

  TECHNICAL

  ‘Difference Engine’ was first published as ‘The Difference Engine and The Difference Engine’ as a chapter in Cultural Babbage, edited by Jenny Uglow and Francis Spufford (Faber & Faber Ltd, 1996).

  ‘Boffins’ was first given as The George Hay Memorial Lecture, entitled ‘The Fall and Rise of the British Boffin’, at Eastercon, Blackpool, 2004.

  PRINTED

  ‘Half in Praise’ was first published as ‘Half in Praise of Reading’ in the Independent on Sunday Magazine, 2004.

  ‘Kipling’s Jungle’ was first published as the introduction to the Everyman paperback edition of The Jungle Book, 1993.

  ‘Robinson’s Mars’ was first published in much, much shorter form as a book review in the Guardian, 1994.

  ‘The Amazing Terence’, updated for this edition, was first published as a book review of Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents in the Guardian, 2001.

  ‘You Could Read Forever’ was first published as a review of Robert Irwin’s The Arabian Nights: A Companion in the Guardian, 1994.

  ‘This Grand Cause of Terror’ first appeared as a blog post, ‘But When This Grand Cause of Terror Makes Its Appearance, What Is It?’ as part of the Crooked Timber seminar on Felix Gilman’s The Rise of Ransom City, September 2013.

  ‘Bats of Some Kind’ was first published as a review of Elif Batuman’s The Possessed in the Guardian, 2010.

  ‘In Memoriam, Iain M. Banks’ was first published in the New Humanist, June 2013.

  ‘The Dyer’s Elbow’ was first published in The Arvon Book of Literary Non-Fiction, edited by Midge Gillies and Sally Cline (Bloomsbury, 2012).

  NOTES

  1.The Things That Were Said of Them: Shaman Stories and Oral Histories of the Tikigaq People, told by Asatchaq; translated from the Inupiaq by Tukummiq and Tom Lowenstein (University of California Press, 1992).

  2.Tom Lowenstein, Ancient Land, Sacred Whale: The Inuit Hunt and Its Rituals (Bloomsbury, 1993).

  3.S. Allen Counter, North Pole Legacy: Black, White and Eskimo (University of Massachusetts Press, 1991).

  4.Well, Colonel Bluford still looks pretty good.

  5.Review of Roland Huntford’s Nansen: The Explorer as Hero (Duckworth, 1997).

  6.Jason Anthony, ‘Vostok, or A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth’ (2006), available at: www.albedoimages.com/vostok.html

  7.Stephen J. Pyne, The
Ice: A Journey to Antarctica (University of Washington Press, 1998), p. 291.

  8.Richard Byrd, Alone (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1938), p. 7.

  9.Byrd, Alone, p. 85.

  10.Henry D. Thoreau, The Maine Woods (James R. Osgood & Co., 1873), pp. 70–1.

  11.The crash of 2007–8 was just around the corner when I wrote this.

  12.http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/red-plenty/

  13.Henri Bergson, Le Rire (1900); translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell as Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Macmillan, 1914).

  14.http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/

  15.Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (HarperCollins, 2005).

  16.Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion (Simon & Schuster, 2014).

  17.Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything (Grand Central Publishing, 2014).