Interzone #267 - November-December 2016

by Andy Cox [Ed. ]

  Now everything is changing as armed and armoured Johnfolk arrive from across the sea to enforce their chosen vision on everyone else. They bring softly-spoken and persuasive Teachers to explain their own version of Eden’s history. Neutrality is no longer an option for the Kneefolk or anyone else. Can they find sanctuary in Circle Valley? At least these different factions still venerate humanity’s first home on Eden. But how can that be the answer? The lack of resources in Circle Valley was what drove John Redlantern to leave.

  At this point, further summary risks ruining this book. Suffice it to say, Beckett shapes his tale with consummate skill, drawing on readers’ expectations at the same time as challenging us to justify what we might wish for Angie and the others. How far do we want this story to follow that particular path? How could that stay true to this enthralling, utterly alien world which Beckett has created and to the people we’ve come to care so much about? But those are readers’ concerns. Within the story, Angie Redlantern must combine everything she’s learned on her travels with the enduring wisdom of Knee Tree Grounds. Because, as Jeff would say, she is reely there.

  Beckett weaves different timelines and points of view together with all the skills so ably demonstrated in both previous books. Characterisation is subtle and vividly effective. Motivations and emotions are believably complex and contradictory. Deft transitions between the various strands of this story are guaranteed to keep the pages turning. Beckett similarly continues to make excellent use of Eden’s deceptively simplistic language to slide in details of this world’s history and the haphazard, often accidental, development of its culture that might almost go unnoticed – until something turns out to be crucial.

  Any fan of the two earlier books hoping for more of the same will get another tremendously readable and compelling novel in the finest traditions of science fiction. More than that, this story builds on everything that has gone before to open up a rich hinterland of ideas and questions about life far closer to home. With this final volume Beckett lifts his Eden trilogy to a whole new level.

  ***

  You’re saying this is the final Eden story. Did you envisage it as a trilogy from the outset?

  I originally wrote Dark Eden as a standalone book. The somewhat open-ended conclusion was not me making space for a sequel, but just an aesthetic choice. (I don’t like to tie things up too neatly. I always feel that’s a bit of an anti-climax.) However, I decided that there was more I wanted to write about Eden and, having made that decision, I decided to write two more books with the general idea that one would be set mainly among the “Johnfolk” and one mainly among the “Davidfolk”: the two main groupings that emerged from the split in the human community that is described in Dark Eden.

  Dark Eden still is in some ways a standalone book. All its characters are long since dead by the time of the other books, and two centuries have passed. Mother of Eden and Daughter of Eden, on the other hand, share some characters and are only ten years apart. I was clear in my mind that the story in Dark Eden was complete, and that I didn’t want a sequel with John, Tina etc in it. What did take hold of my imagination though was the idea of a future in which the events in Dark Eden had become mythologised, much in the same way that the people in Dark Eden had mythologised their ancestors who first came to Eden from Earth.

  I did consider having a similar time interval between Mother of Eden and Daughter of Eden as I did between the first two books. In the end though, I thought it would be more interesting to have two books which were set at roughly the same time, but among people who had radically different takes on the original events in Dark Eden. A bit like Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims in the real world, whose ancient dispute is based on disagreements after the Prophet’s death about who was his true successor, so the people of Eden are divided about who is the legitimate successor to the original parents of all of them. I wanted to explore the two different world-views that emerged, and how they characterise one another. That works better if they are close in time.

  Calling Eden “otherwordly” is a massive understatement. Where did your concept of a perpetually dark planet spawning bioluminescent organisms come from?

  The original prototype of sunless Eden and its luminous life was a short story called ‘The Circle of Stones’ which appeared in Interzone (like every decent thing I wrote for a decade) way back in 1992. (It also included prototypes of John, Tina, Gerry and Jeff.) At that time I owned one of those old Amstrad computers whose screen displayed luminous green letters on a black screen. As I’ve said before, I’m fairly certain that staring at that screen was what gave the idea, firstly because letters on a page do sometimes strike me as looking a bit like a forest, and secondly because the Amstrad inverted the normal arrangement of dark letters on a white field, in much the same way that Eden, with its shining trees in a dark setting, inverts the arrangement we are used to, where trees have no light of their own and are dependent on light around them. So I may have Alan Sugar to thank for Eden!

  Of course, it wasn’t just the Amstrad. The idea wouldn’t have caught my imagination if it didn’t resonate in some way with things inside me that I wanted to express. The story of Eden, the original Biblical story I mean, deals with the expulsion of humans from their original home, and speaks (to me at least) to a sense of a gap that’s part of the human condition: an absence, of something that should be there but isn’t. The dark planet with its absent, longed-for sunlight, seemed to me to connect with that, although of course here humans are exiled to Eden not from it.

  And then, when I came to think about it, it seemed to me that sunless planets were surely a real possibility (I subsequently discovered science agreed with me) and life really could exist on a such a planet, powered solely by the heat of the planet itself. After all, such life forms exist on Earth. There is life around volcanic vents in the depths of the ocean, whose energy doesn’t come from the sun at all. There are liquid lakes under the Antarctic ice (where life is thought to be possible) melted not by the sun, but by the Earth’s heat from below.

  So, three things came together. The shining letters, the Biblical story, and my awareness of geothermal life forms here on Earth. That’s what it’s all about isn’t it, this business of writing fiction? Scientists are analysers but we are synthesisers. We bring together material from diverse places and bind it into something new, like the players of the Glass Bead Game in that book by Hesse.

  Do you have a fully developed ecology, geology and geography of Eden to draw on, which we readers merely glimpse?

  My theory of worldbuilding is that the reader must be persuaded that the narrator can see the whole world, even if the reader can’t. (That’s why Tolkien is so good at it, for instance: he had it all worked out, and you can sense that when reading him.) I saw Philip Pullman saying somewhere that he didn’t bother with that: he just made up the bits necessary for the story, and didn’t worry about the rest. And I have to say, although I greatly enjoyed his Dark Materials books, that showed. I didn’t get a sense that he knew what was happening off-stage or what had happened before, or how this particular world had come about.

  So yes, I have a pretty clear map of Eden in my mind, and a definite sense of how life evolved there, and how it works. Because no one in Dark Eden was remotely scientific they couldn’t know what I know, and that freed me from having to explain it all, but it provided a compass for me and I suspect that it is one of the reasons that many people find the world compelling.

  How many times have you been challenged to explain or to justify aspects of the hard science underpinning Eden? How much do you think that sort of thing matters?

  I was giving a talk at a school once, and a young boy asked me how Eden folk got Vitamin D with no sunlight. I was quite taken aback. It had just never occurred to me. But it was relatively easy to fix: starflowers are rich in it, okay?

  No one else has ever actually challenged me in that way, but some people have very gently pointed out some problems. Firstly, human genetics: everyone
on Eden is descended from two people. Could you really get a viable population that way? I’ve been told not, though I’ve also read of cases where entire islands have been populated by a few isolated animals arriving on mats of vegetation, so I’m not sure. Secondly, thermodynamics: could geothermal trees, acting like radiators, transfer enough heat from the planet’s core to its surface to warm up the atmosphere to a point where human beings could live? I’ve been told not, but I really don’t know. (A third problem is faster-than-light travel, but half of SF would disappear if we didn’t allow that!)

  I don’t know that it matters all that much, if our invented worlds really are completely viable in the real world. I think they have to have a certain surface plausibility though. Eden seemed plausible to me, and I went with that!

  How important do you think understanding the so-called softer or social sciences is to science fiction?

  Some science fiction engages primarily in thought experiments to do with the hard sciences, but this is surely a relatively specialist niche. The great glory of SF as a form is that it allows us to engage in thought experiments of a sociological kind. And that surely is what most of the great SF novels are doing. I’d go as far as to say that SF is the most well-suited of all forms of fiction for sociological speculation. Just as the conventional literary novel allows authors to explore relationships and human psychology by making up characters and giving those characters challenges to face, so a sociological/anthropological SF novel like Dark Eden allows the author to explore the ways that societies evolve and change, by making up societies and giving them challenges. I have to give credit here to Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia trilogy, which (although I read it some thirty years ago) stayed with me as a masterclass on how to do this. In his case, it was the effect on society and human belief systems of a Great Year in which seasons lasted for hundreds of years.

  Not that one has to be aware of academic literature on sociology to do this. We live in a world where we are exposed as never before to competing world views and beliefs, but also a world in which technological change is constantly making old belief systems redundant. (I think, for instance, of the effect of modern contraception on sexual mores. I grew up in a Britain where premarital sex was still a “social problem” and a source of public anxiety. Who worries about it now?) We all have to think about this dizzying absence of a fixed set of social structures and beliefs, and the kind of thought experiment that SF provides helps us make sense of it.

  On one level, this is a history of an isolated, impoverished and illiterate community and all that these people achieve despite such handicaps in the midst of a hostile environment. On another level, these books explore the nature of stories and their influence on societies. Where does your interest in the role of narrative come from?

  Ah, now that is an interesting question. I’ve always been fascinated by this: by narratives and by beliefs which are really narratives which we choose to “make function as true” (to pinch a phrase from Foucault). I’ve always been aware that beliefs never really are completely true, and that nevertheless we need them. (Philip Dick is brilliant on this sort of thing.) I guess there is a sociological explanation for my interest and a more personal, psychological one. The sociological one is that, as I said just now, we are aware as never before of competing belief systems, which challenge our own. The psychological, personal one, the reason why I am more obsessed with this than other people seem to be…well, I am speculating here, but perhaps it comes in part from growing up with two parents who subscribed to radically different narratives, my mother’s broadly progressive and liberal, my father’s much more conservative and traditional, and having to navigate between the two. And perhaps it comes too from an early awareness that my mother in particular, in many ways the dominant influence in my life, was a very unreliable narrator. I’ve always been aware that the stories on which I try to build meaning in my life are like wobbly stepping stones in a stream which you can’t stay on too long, or you’ll fall in. (Angie Redlantern, the narrator of Daughter of Eden, actually uses this analogy.)

  How far is your writing offering commentary on what’s truth and what’s spin in our own world of mass and social media?

  Well, I’m not attempting to comment on particular instances in the contemporary world, but in all of these books I try and draw attention to the way that narratives are shaped by power and serve the purposes of power, even while meeting other important needs. Narratives have to have some degree of plausibility and/or speak to some need of the listener, or they wouldn’t catch on, but power bends them like gravity, twists them around so that, even as they meet people’s needs for meaning and purpose, they also serve to explain and justify the status quo. Contemporary politicians and advertisers use ideas like Community, or Family, or Love, or Nation to win support or sell products. In Dark Eden, the shadowspeaker, Lucy Lu, cynically manipulated the messages she received from the dead to meet the requirements of powerful figures whose patronage and support she needed. In Mother of Eden, the Teachers have perfected a narrative that recruits the memory of the mother of everyone to justify their own male power. In Daughter of Eden, Angie worries about the effect of this gravity-like pull of power on the message that her mentor Mary gives to the low people as she travels around the Davidfolk Ground.

  What writers and books drew you into reading SF originally? What interesting developments do you see in the genre these days?

  My father had fairly eclectic tastes in genre fiction. He consumed large numbers of detective novels, and he also had a large collection of novels by Georgette Heyer. Neither of these tastes rubbed off on me: I never read detective novels, and I’ve never read the books of Georgette Heyer, though I’m assured they are very witty and good. However he also had a collection of SF novels and story anthologies, and as a teenager I consumed these voraciously. I can’t remember all the books now. Van Vogt was there, I remember – Voyage of the Space Beagle and a short story collection or two – and several Heinleins (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, my father and I both agreed, was another masterclass in worldbuilding, whatever you thought about its politics). There was a lot of Ballard. (I recently reread those old Ballard story collections and they were even better than I remembered: ‘The Watchtowers’ in my opinion is as close to perfect as a story can get.) There were a number of John Wyndham novels and stories, and quite a lot of Aldiss: Greybeard springs to mind.

  These were the foundation of my interest in science fiction, and I began writing SF stories when I was still in my teens. Funnily enough, even though I’ve since discovered SF writers that weren’t on my father’s shelves, the ones who have most influenced me still tend to be from that same era. Philip Dick for instance. The Strugatsky brothers. Or even a much more recent discovery: the brilliant and harrowing stories of James Tiptree/Alice Sheldon.

  I don’t read enough SF at the moment, or fiction of any kind, to be able to comment in detail on developments in the genre, particularly as I don’t consciously read to keep up with what’s going on, but simply follow my own path through books old and new, fiction and non-fiction, as the fancy takes me, or to fit in with current writing projects. (I’ve been reading a lot about US politics for instance, for my next novel.)

  I am aware of, and welcome, the recent challenges to the dominance of male characters and male writers in the genre. Those old books on my father’s shelves were all written by men, and almost all of the major actors within them were men as well. Having women as the main protagonists of Mother of Eden and Daughter of Eden was a conscious decision on my part to go against that pattern.

  Might you be tempted to explore what happened between Dark Eden and Mother of Eden in any more detail? In a few short stories, perhaps?

  Interesting you should say that because it is an idea that I have in the back of my mind as a possible future project. I’m as certain as I can be that I won’t be writing another Eden novel, but it has occurred to me that a short story collection might be fun, dipping into lives (as you s
ay) lived in the period between Dark Eden and Mother of Eden, but also in the 160 years before the events in Dark Eden, between the original arrival of Tommy and Gela on Eden and John Redlantern’s act of rebellion. Whether I’ll ever get round to it is another question!

  ***

  SLIPPING

  Lauren Beukes

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  Barbara Melville

  The author of The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters brings us Slipping, a cocktail of fantastical narratives spanning crime, cyberpunk, magic realism and journalism. Anthropology and social comment are central to these narratives, each giving us messages far beyond their events. Several offer ethnographies of South African culture, with a helpful glossary provided to unravel the terminology. Themes explored throughout the work include our relationship with technology, political unrest, celebrity culture and sexism, to name a few. And it all works for the most part. Not unlike Kelly Link’s Pretty Monsters or Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, quirkiness, intelligence and what can only be called the heebie-jeebies bring life to every page.