You said in an interview in Revolution SF “the core study of any branch of fiction is people.” I’ve just finished reading your latest Laundry Files book The Rhesus Chart and it’s been a pleasure to watch Bob Howard mature and grow throughout the series.
How important to you is getting the human perspective of your ideas and story across to your readers? Maybe it’s time for other SF writers to focus a lot more on how people react and respond to our “Sfnal” world?
CS: I find the human dimension of storytelling increasingly important as I grow older. We’re living, as I said earlier, in the science fictional future of the 20th century: if you want a mere sense-of-wonder kick and the weirdness of the cosmos or the elaboration of our technosphere you don’t need to read fiction for that—you can get it in the pages of New Scientist every week, or in the newspapers.
To the extent that relevance is important to written SF (and I’d be the last person to deny that you don’t need relevance for recreational escapism, which is and traditionally has been about 80-90% of our genre’s raison d’etre), we aren’t about naively predicting the future: rather, we’re about figuring out what human beings will make of the future. (While it’s possible to write SF that features no human beings at all—in settings where humanity never existed, or is extinct—it’s hard work, and it’s a niche market.)
Fiction is a ritualized rehearsal for life, so fiction in future settings that asks questions like “what is it going to be like to live in a world where everyone is on the internet 24x7 via their clothing and the artefacts in their environment” may be useful. Deeper questions like, “what happens when the sort of people who run fake Microsoft Support call centres to install RATs [Remote Access Trojans] on the PCs of pensioners in order to steal their bank details discover the Internet Of Things” can provide lots of material for stories of unanticipated consequences and humanity.
A lot of this stuff is deeply weird, because the way we’re embodying crude representations of our own intelligence in the artefacts around us echoes the paranoid, strange realm of a Philip K. Dick novel—advertisements that crawl cockroach-like into our cars or living rooms and shout at us, doorknobs that won’t let us out of our home until we pay a subscription fee in accordance with an arcane contract we don’t remember signing. And these representations of our intellect are deeply broken insofar as they’re inflexible and they model human modes of behaviour and cognition only partially. For example, consider Facebook’s attempt at giving everyone an annual album of their uploaded photographs from the past year, sorted by “popularity” (how many people “liked” the photos or tagged them). Obviously this seemed like a good idea to the bright twenty-something engineers who came up with the idea: it never occurred to them to put themselves in the shoes of a grieving parent whose only child had died of leukaemia over the preceding year, precipitating a divorce, because of course they and their friends never upload photographs to Facebook that are associated with sad or unhappy memories.
There’s going to be a lot more of this sort of weird emotional brokenness in our superficially-smart future. And that’s before we get into big current topics like climate change, the ageing of the global population, the fallout from the financialization and asset stripping of the west, and so on.
I’m going to ask this even though it’s just a few weeks before the General Election in the UK, with the whole thing up in the air and feeling balanced on the edge of uncertainty. How much would you agree with Arthur C Clarke’s 1970 comment when he said “Politicians should read science fiction not westerns and detective stories,” and what lessons can the politicians learn?
CS: ACC was right; unfortunately someone was reading him, and that someone was Rupert Murdoch (who used to phone up Clarke for a chat every week, or so I’m told). Murdoch got the message about satellite TV broadcasting and its utility in spreading a political agenda; since then, all the politicians have been living with the fallout of Clarke’s nostrum.
Politicians these days are mostly career professionals. To get to the top while still young enough to be viable as a prime ministerial candidate precludes any experience of the world outside of politics. This is, I think, a disaster for us in the long term because we’ve handed over our government to managerialists like Ed Milliband and public relations guys like David Cameron. They’re non-specialists who are at the mercy of lobbyists funded by the industries and economic sectors they’re supposed to control. These in turn are largely run by big public corporations. The joint stock corporation is essentially a form of very slow artificial intelligence that we invented about 300 years ago: these days they are increasingly replacing their executive and decision making functions with automated but not individually intelligent units. So our politicians are out in front, pretending to lead—but in reality they’re being steered from behind by not-terribly-bright sociopathic AIs fine-tuned for short-term survival and profitability at any cost.
How we get out of this mess is not obvious, but I doubt the eventual solution will emerge from within our existing political framework.
What can we look forward to seeing you publishing in the new few months or so?
CS: I’ve got a new novel coming out on July 7th, from Orbit (in the UK; in the USA it’s published by Ace). It’s “The Annihilation Score”, and it’s book six in the Laundry Files series. Unlike earlier Laundry novels, this one breaks with Bob, hitherto our sole narrator and first-person viewpoint—it’s told by Dr Mo O’Brien, who is parachuted into the Home Office to deal with an emergency: a plague of superheroes. And supervillains …
Charles Stross, many thanks for taking the time out to talk to Shoreline of Infinity.
Border Crossings
Steve Green
Steve is a stalwart of Science Fiction fandom, starting out way back in the 1970s. He is well known on the SF Convention circuit and was Chair of Novacon 2014. He is a freelance editor and journalist and has brought his skills to bear in many SF publications. We welcome Steve as our first regular columnist.
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I first stepped upon Scottish soil exactly thirty-five years ago, appropriately enough to attend the first National British Science Fiction Convention held north of Hadrian’s Wall. It was a dismally cold and miserable April weekend, and Glasgow’s Albany Hotel was playing host to hundreds of English sf fans who may well have considered travelling to the lunar surface less of a voyage into the unknown (my oldest friend and I had spent the first five hours of Good Friday crammed into a not-so-good railway carriage, chatting to the alleged brother of the leader of our destination city’s Hell’s Angels chapter, with only the prospect of the Albany bar serving Belhaven 80/- at 47p a pint to buoy up our spirits).
What I didn’t know then, as we emerged into the damp air and politely declined our erstwhile fellow traveller’s offer to go wake up a local publican (with a gentle shake, should it prove necessary) so the three of us could launch the bank holiday weekend properly (these being the days before sensible Easter opening hours, when the only way to get truly crucified was to nail the lead role in a passion play), was that the acclaimed French film director Bertrand Tavernier had walked down those same rain-drenched avenues just a few months earlier, having found the perfect setting for a very bleak and disturbingly prescient socio-political augury.
Dangerous Visions
Tavernier’s inspiration for his new project Death Watch (aka La mort en direct) was David Compton’s 1973 novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (edited for US readers as The Unsleeping Eye), another of the author’s explorations of moral dilemmas within a near-future context and one which echoes his 1968 breakthrough Synthajoy, wherein human experience becomes a transferable product, rather in the manner of such movies as The Sorcerers (1967), Brainstorm (1983) and Strange Days (1995).
Despite Mortenhoe appearing the same year as PBS’ landmark documentary series An American Family, now judged by many as Patient Zero in the current plague of ‘reality television’ formats, it’s unlikely Compton (then living in London) could have been influenced to any degree as he conceived a society so utterly devoid of colour its worker ants must draw succour from the more damaged and distressed within their midst.
Sydney Pollack’s regular collaborator of choice, Daniel Rayfiel, had come on board to co-author the script with Tavernier, a relationship which would later produce the Oscar-winning Dexter Gordon biopic Round Midnight (1986). Together, they took Compton’s dark, decaying panorama and embued it with harsh realism, the director having decided early on to eschew the comfortably sterile imagery of such technophilic movies as Things to Come (1936) and Logan’s Run (1976) in favour of a grim, grey urban wasteland. Glasgow City Council’s “Smiles Better” advertising hoardings clearly failed to persuade Tavernier he hadn’t located the ideal candidate.
Their storyline in large part revolves around the smart, sensitive author Katherine Mortenhoe, already adrift in a world which prefers computer-crafted pabulum to works of genuine literature. Hers is a Britain virtually cleansed of disease, but filthy with poverty and despair, poised at the tipping point towards total collapse. Mortenhoe’s unique diagnosis of a terminal, incurable illness offers certain more shadowy elements – a sinister fusion of Westminster and media – to approach her with a Faustian compact: in return for hefty remuneration, she will spend her final days in the unblinking gaze of 24/7 voyeurism. Bread and circuses moulded from wafers and last rites, for an audience no longer capable of grasping the truth of death.
Enter cracked lensman Roddy, estranged from his partner and so desperate for a new anchor in this sea of troubles that he agrees to have video cameras implanted into his eyes, allowing his employers to spy upon Katherine regardless of her refusal to comply with State-sanctioned surveillance. The catch? Prolonged darkness will lead to permanent blindness.
Thus the drama, thus the horror: she runs, he follows and the moronic masses spectate in silence, enraptured by their television screens whilst all around falls into dust and chaos.
On this high-definition microscope slide, the trivial gathers absurd import: in what could almost be a trail for the next season of Big Brother, or perhaps a summing up of this culture’s entire Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / MeGeneration descent into narcissistic entropy, Katherine observes, “Everything’s of interest, but nothing matters.”
Loving the Alien
Tavernier’s success in second-guessing the futurescape bore bitter fruit: instead of the gleaming spires and plastic domes which now look as ill-imagined as food pills and hovercars, most cities stumbled onwards with few obvious changes beyond the introduction of smoking bans in pubs, high street off-licences (not all bad, then) and – in a near-nod to Compton’s dystopian fatalism – the highest CCTV count per capita in Europe. No fewer than thirty-two years might have passed before Jonathan Glazer arrived in Glasgow to direct his third movie, but you’d be hard-pressed to spot the join.
Michel Faber’s Whitbread-winning source novel had appeared in 2000, the same year as Glazer’s debut feature Sexy Beast, but the film-maker soon realised its route would be as long and circuitous as the highland byways Faber’s predatory extraterrestrials prowl for unwary hitch-hikers. At various points over the following decade, both Brad Pitt and Gemma Arteton were attached to the project, until Glazer and his co-writer Walter Campbell decided to shift the opening two-thirds of their storyline into an urban setting and downsize the main cast to a single, female alien.
Faber, no stranger to cultural dislocation (born in Holland and educated in Australia before making Scotland his home in 1993), had used his novel to explore themes of self, sexuality and isolation. Clearly, Glazer needed to somehow find an actress with enough box office clout to provide Under the Skin with some long-overdue traction, but one able to slip unrecognised into the pedestrian traffic passing through a Glasgow shopping centre. I’m certain I wasn’t the only person left fairly surprised when this chimera turned out to be Hollywood headliner Scarlett Johansson.
It’s our own fault, of course, for buying into the baloney studio press offices extrude whenever she turns up in a ‘blockbuster’ action thriller such as the recent Avengers: Age of Ultron. In actuality, Ms Johansson has an admirable history of appearing in her industry’s equivalent of off-Broadway productions, ranging from historical dramas (Girl With a Pearl Earring, The Other Boleyn Girl) through romantic comedy (Match Point, He’s Just Not That Into You) to fantasy (The Prestige, Lucy) and the delightfully odd (Ghost World, Her); clearly, a young woman who enjoys a challenge.
The fact that we never learn her character’s true name (’Isserley’ in the novel) is perfectly in tune with the shroud of invisibility Ms Johansson dons as she strolls into the Buchanan Galleries or encounters a well-lubricated hen party outside a Livingston nightclub. It’s a deeply thoughtful and considered performance, possibly nuanced by her knowledge that she is truly alien to this environment, hiding her own identity just as the quasi-female extraterrestrial must simulate humanity in order to complete its mission.
Glazer’s use of hidden cameras – as many as ten running simultaneously – during his star’s improvised interactions with unsuspecting non-actors adds an extra level of disconnect to this film’s already dreamlike narrative, as well as ironically echoing Compton’s predictions nearly four decades earlier. That’s the way with the future: it’s just like the present, only more so.
Bet you can’t still get Belhaven 80/- at 47p a pint, though.
Death Watch (1980): directed by Bertrand Tavernier; screenplay by Betrand Tavernier and Daniel Rayfiel; based upon the novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, written by D G Compton. Featuring Romy Schneider as Katherine Mortenhoe, Harvey Keitel as Roddy, Harry Dean Stanton as Vincent Ferriman, Max von Sydow as Gerald Mortenhoe; Thérèse Liotard as Tracy. Released on Blu-ray in 2012 by Park Circus.
Under the Skin (2013): directed by Jonathan Glazer; screenplay by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer; based upon the novel Under the Skin by Michel Faber. Featuring Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy McWilliams, Michael Moreland, Dave Acton. Released on Blu-ray in 2014 by StudioCanal.
