But love, and help, and pain, beautiful one,
Have made thee mine, till all my years are done.
I cannot put more of it into words. She closed her arms about me again, and went on singing. The rain in the leaves, and a light wind that had arisen, kept her song company. I was wrapt in a trance of still delight. It told me the secret of the woods, and the flowers, and the birds. At one time I felt as if I was wandering in childhood through sunny spring forests, over carpets of primroses, anemones, and little white starry things—I had almost said creatures, and finding new wonderful flowers at every turn. At another, I lay half dreaming in the hot summer noon, with a book of old tales beside me, beneath a great beech; or, in autumn, grew sad because I trod on the leaves that had sheltered me, and received their last blessing in the sweet odours of decay; or, in a winter evening, frozen still, looked up, as I went home to a warm fireside, through the netted boughs and twigs to the cold, snowy moon, with her opal zone around her. At last I had fallen asleep; for I know nothing more that passed till I found myself lying under a superb beech-tree, in the clear light of the morning, just before sunrise. Around me was a girdle of fresh beech-leaves. Alas! I brought nothing with me out of Fairy Land, but memories—memories. The great boughs of the beech hung drooping around me. At my head rose its smooth stem, with its great sweeps of curving surface that swelled like undeveloped limbs. The leaves and branches above kept on the song which had sung me asleep; only now, to my mind, it sounded like a farewell and a speedwell. I sat a long time, unwilling to go; but my unfinished story urged me on. I must act and wander. With the sun well risen, I rose, and put my arms as far as they would reach around the beech-tree, and kissed it, and said good-bye. A trembling went through the leaves; a few of the last drops of the night’s rain fell from off them at my feet; and as I walked slowly away, I seemed to hear in a whisper once more the words: “I may love him, I may love him; for he is a man, and I am only a beech-tree.”
Interview: Simon Morden
Simon Morden’s Metrozone (Petrovich) Trilogy, Equations of Life, Theories of Flight & Degrees of Freedom won the Philip K. Dick Award. The adventures continued with The Curve of the Earth. Currently the author is writing a series of novels about Down, a world linked to London by a network of mysterious portals. Down Station was released at the beginning of the year, with The White City out in October. Here Simon Morden talks to Gary Dalkin.
Gary Dalkin: Down Station was published in February, and when I reviewed it for Vector I wrote that it felt rather like a Young Adult novel, and wondered if it might not have been better marketed that way. It also seemed very much like a set-up novel, introducing the world of Down and a group of characters—most prominently the dutiful 19-year-old Sikh engineering student Dalip and 18-year-old Mary, streetwise from being in and out of care all her life—then giving them an initial adventure and setting them on a quest to reach the possibly mythical White City. It seemed there could be an indefinite number of adventures along the way before anyone ever reached the city, but then the title of the second book in the series was announced as The White City, so it’s not giving anything away to say that some of the characters from Down Station do, eventually, reach their destination. At which point I think it’s worth noting that The White City feels like a very different book to its predecessor: Mary and Dalip have really matured from when we first met them: no one turns into a dragon and there are no magical battles. Rather, we get pirates, some pointers towards a much bigger picture, and find the White City is not at all what we might have expected. With all that said, how important is it to you that each book has its own distinctive feel? Surprising developments towards the end of The White City leave possibilities for the series wide open. It feels now like the story could go in all sorts of directions, and that’s rather exciting …
Simon Morden: I could, if I wanted to, write the same story over and over again with the serial numbers filed off. It makes sense to give readers a predictable, satisfying read that isn’t too challenging, and to repeat that formula and build a brand. Publishers love that. Marketing really loves that. And it works. It works incredibly well across all genres—from crime and thrillers, through war stories and family sagas, historical novels and fantasy, to science fiction. People make careers out of writing variations of the same book for their entire lives. Kudos to them: they’ve found their audience and they know how to please them. We are, for all our artistic pretensions, part of the entertainment industry: an industry which is worth £70bn to the UK economy. We shouldn’t lose sight of that.
Having laid all that on the table, I have to acknowledge that I don’t do that. I could do that, but I don’t. Writing books is a solitary task. It involves locking yourself away for hundreds of hours and fashioning a vicarious experience out of nothing but the same twenty-six letters and some random pieces of punctuation. If I’m going to subject myself to that discipline, then I’m going to want to, at the very least, entertain myself. So, in the initial draft stage, I’m writing for an audience of precisely one: me. I appreciate that might make me sound like a terrible narcissist, but, really? If I’m not enjoying it, I strongly suspect that anyone who subsequently reads the story isn’t going to either.
I’ve tried to make every book I’ve written different from the previous one. For the Petrovitch books, Equations of Life is a flat-out, old school cyberpunk thriller. Theories of Flight is my war story. Degrees of Freedom a Cold War spy caper. The Curve of the Earth is a bastard mutation of a buddy film. The fifth book (written, unpublished) is different again. And so on: Arcanum is an epic fantasy that turns by degrees into the most science fiction story I’ve ever written.
On to Down. It was interesting to hear your thoughts on whether it should have been marketed as YA—there is, of course, nothing to stop the teenagers finding it for themselves. My moral compass regarding what can and can’t go in a YA novel is somewhat skewed in that I grew up reading adult SFF, with all the sex, violence and drugs that involved. So maybe Lovecraftian existential horror and pit-fighting wild animals are good to go. I’ll mention it to my editor!
This is a really long answer to a relatively simple question, for which I apologise. Yes, The White City is a different type of story to Down Station. It’s a continuation but, inevitably and naturally, it’s going to be different story, because the protagonists are growing in their understanding of how Down works and are becoming more comfortable in their new roles. So, Pirates! Adventure! Treasure! And all the weirdness of The White City we can’t talk about.
The end? I loved writing that. I didn’t know it was going to happen until it happened. Dalip’s surprise is my own. The possibilities are now, literally, limitless.
GD: Which leads me to something I’ve been wondering about. Given you didn’t know what was going to happen until it happened, how much do you plan and plot in advance, either with these books or in general? I’d assumed that you knew essentially all about Down, this strange world where people from various times find themselves when fleeing from London for various reasons, but clearly it can surprise you as much as the reader. And sort of allied to that question, which came first: the world in which the Down novels are set, or the central characters? And if the world came first, how do you decide whose story to tell within that setting? Presumably, given the right circumstances, anyone in London could find themselves in Down …
SM: This is where I get to sound like the Worst Author Ever. Either that or the Wizard of Oz, dazzling you with magic when it’s all done with mirrors. I don’t plan. I don’t plan at all. Sometimes I have an end point but no beginning. Sometimes I have a beginning but no idea where it’s going to go. Sometimes I have several ideas that I’m kicking around and they’ll suddenly line up in my conscious mind as being related. My preferred method of writing is simply to sit down and write, describing the scene to myself as I go along, then stitching another on after that, and so on until I’m done. I don’t know when I start how long it’s going to be, or anything about the plot arc. I’m literally making it up. When I reach the end, whenever that is, I stop.
That, of course, means that it can get problematic when I work with big publishers who want to see an outline, not just of book one, but of any subsequent books in a series. We’ve pretty much come to an arrangement now where I write something that sounds feasible, and they don’t hold me to it when I give them the manuscript. I do, of course, then have to turn in something that’s just as good as the outline, if not better.
It also means that I end up writing a fair bit more than gets published, because I’m off on a frolic of my own, outside of any contract, just putting the words down and indulging my flights of fancy. If the result is good, then I’ll write a proposal based on what I’ve actually written, and I’m able to hand any interested party a fully-functioning draft if they’re interested. I acknowledge that it’s a ridiculous way to work. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter: Equations of Life was written before I sold it. Down Station was written before I sold it. The White City outline possibly vaguely resembles the The White City that’s being published in October. Sometimes, I can end up spending a year on a project that goes nowhere. But please, don’t try this at home. You’d have to be mad to do it the way I do.
So I should really answer the question now, shouldn’t I? Down wasn’t planned. I didn’t work out the magic system before I started. The only clues I had were was the idea of opening the door and seeing a whole new world, and a series of Channel 4 documentaries I remembered about night workers on the London Underground. I wrote about the people I saw in those programmes, to start off with. There are no natives to Down—so people like Crows and Bell are also part of that ‘anyone in the right circumstances’ scenario. Everyone you eventually meet has a story of coming to Down. I just started with my protagonists, and described their experiences of Down as they happened. I have to trust my subconscious a lot, that it will have already done the heavy lifting by the time I need to set something in stone. Mostly it works. Sometimes, it needs a bit more editing than otherwise would be necessary.
That’s how I do it. I suppose I didn’t know any better, and now I’m entrenched in that way of working, and can’t stop.
GD: Mary and Dalip work well as a contrasting pair of protagonists. A more conventional writer would likely have put them together romantically by now, but there’s no sign of that, which is refreshing. Dalip is an interesting choice of character, in that Sikhs feature rarely in SF and Fantasy, a notable exception being perhaps Walter Jon Williams’ Days of Atonement. Was Dalip inspired by one of the people featured in the Channel 4 documentaries? He takes his faith very seriously, and while the books don’t touch much on the spiritual side of his beliefs, he has a very strong moral sensibility. How was it, yourself being a Christian, writing about a member of a different faith, especially in terms of understanding how Dalip sees the world and getting him ‘right’? More generally, how much does your Christian faith inform your fiction? Was there a particular concern to ensure that Dalip was a fully rounded character, which he clearly is, and not a stock representative of his religion? Was there even some worry from your publishers that your portrayal might cause offense—I’m remembering when JK Rowling was attacked by Sikh leaders in India for her portrayal of a Sikh character in The Casual Vacancy.
SM: Regarding Mary and Dalip’s friendship. Yes, I’m aware that in any given stressful situation, standard operating procedure is that two people of compatible sexualities will inevitably become romantically attached, the strength and speed of such bonding being directly proportional to the degree of threat. If one saves the other’s life, then it’s an absolute and inviolable law of the universe that they’ll fall in love … because that’s what happens in real life.
Referring back to my answer in a previous question, I didn’t know whether they were going to become a couple. They’re of similar age, but that’s about the only thing they have in common. Their life experiences are radically different, and if it wasn’t for Down, they’d never have met. It was much more likely that they’d spend their time trying to get on, because that’s what circumstances demanded, while not really getting on, because each one thought the other was a bit of an idiot. That’s what you see to start off with. It’s only as they get to understand each other do they relax into each other’s company, and even then more things happen to make their trajectories diverge rather than converge.
And yes, I wanted a similar diverse cast of characters that I saw on the documentary—all I did was bring it up to date to reflect the recent demographic changes in London, even if that did leave me open to criticism from the Daily Mail for being ‘dutifully multicultural’. I’m not quite sure which London the reviewer thought I was writing about, but I’ve been subsequently assured that my fiction is more realistic than her reality.
So Dalip wasn’t a deliberate choice, in the sense that none of my choices are particularly deliberate. That he’s a young Sikh man, brought up in the faith, beginning to work out what it means for him, rather than simply following his parents’ expectations of Sikhism, is part of who he is, and not an overlay to make him more interesting, or provide narrative drive. I agree it’s not that common, but there was no good reason to exclude him. So I didn’t.
On to the whole ‘what do I write’ question, and cultural appropriation and the entirely inescapable fact that I’m a mostly-white, British, English-as-first-language, fifty-year-old heterosexual male, writing about things that are outside my immediate experience. I’d argue that part of the writers’ skill, and probably the most critical part for a writer of fiction to possess, is the ability provide vicarious experiences. Using words to describe a place you’ve never been to, to describe a scene you’ve never witnessed, to describe a character you’ve never met: it’s something that all fiction writers have to do in order to construct the story they’re telling. You have to bring these things to life, not metaphorically but literally. You have to breathe life into them.
If you don’t put the time and trouble into fashioning your creations as perfectly as you can, then when you try to bring them to life, it can go horribly wrong. Have I just made a Frankenstein analogy? I’m going to fall back on Tolkien now, who viewed his imagining of Middle Earth as an act of sub-creation: not sub as in substandard, but sub as in secondary. As a Catholic, he viewed his creative urge as part of what it meant to be made in God’s image. I want to make that theological and philosophical insight part of the scaffolding that supports my writing.
And with that underpinning the way I tell stories, I don’t think there should be any no-go areas for writers. None. We—whatever culture we come from, whatever our skin colour, our ethnic heritage, our class, our gender—have to have the freedom to write about whatever we feel drawn to. That doesn’t mean we can’t be held accountable for what we write: Rowling’s perfectly free to include a Sikh family in a book, and Sikh leaders are free to tell her she made a hash of it—with an acknowledgement that UK Sikhs then criticised the critics for trying to sweep the problems Rowling was highlighting under the carpet. The idea of a monolithic cultural identity is long past its sell-by date: we wouldn’t dream of doing it for ourselves, so why impose it on others?
Which is all a very long way around of saying that the only person Dalip represents is Dalip. Another Sikh would react differently in the same situation—much mention is made of Dalip’s grandfather, a World War Two veteran of the Far East campaign. Swap those two over, and you’d have a very different book indeed, and I try my absolute hardest not to write characters that are interchangeable. Whether I succeed is an exercise left to the reader. Gollancz expressed no misgivings whatsoever. They are, of course, brilliantly on-the-ball, and I’d have been told during the editing process if they thought I’d done something badly.
I do want to talk briefly about Arcanum, which involved exactly no white British people at all. It was set in Alpine Carinthia, and the entire cast was either Jewish, pagan Europeans, or dwarves. Expressions of medieval Judaism and Germanic paganism in a fantasy setting was part of the characters’ lives: why wouldn’t I write about them, involve them in the plot, have people discuss differences in practice and theology? If you’re a good writer, that’s what you do. You don’t ignore the religious beliefs of your characters.
Finally, if one of the questions you’re asking is, ‘Do you feel compelled to wedge evangelical Christianity into everything you write?’, the answer is emphatically no. Otherwise, it’s very difficult for me to say how my own faith affects my writing, because it’s an intrinsic part of me: I’d argue that it’s impossible for me to untangle everything. I’m sure there are themes I keep coming back to, character types I deal with in different ways, but again, that’s probably better discussed by people who aren’t me. How it affects me as a writer is more straight-forward: behave professionally, honour contracts and confidences, meet deadlines and fans, treat everyone with respect, listen to your editor, and don’t be a dick. Those attributes aren’t exclusive to Christianity, or any particular religion, but it keeps me on the straight and narrow.
GD: As well as The White City, you wrote a story which I commissioned for the anthology Improbable Botany, which all being well should be coming out towards the end of the year. I think ‘Shine’ is a really powerful story, with a striking ending. Did you find any particular challenges in crafting botanical SF? Are writers missing a trick not exploring botany more in fiction?
SM: I’m what you’d call a ‘hard’ scientist: a first degree in geology and a PhD in planetary geophysics, so there’s been a lot of inorganic chemistry and physics along the way. The only biology has really been taxonomy of fossils—and plants don’t have too many hard parts to preserve. It’s been a slow realisation—not just through gardening, but generally paying attention—that plant life dominates the biosphere to an incredible degree. If we find basic life somewhere, it’s going to be an algae analogue.
Writing an SF story where plants were a significant factor in the plot has been part of a natural progression, but it’s one which, yes, a lot of writers ignore, and I did it myself. But there’s no excuse: The Martian, with its potato-based heroics, John Wyndham’s Triffids (and Lichen), Christopher’s Death of Grass, and Wells’ red weed (from The War of the Worlds) are all examples of SF botany done well. Any terraforming attempt will have atmosphere modification by plants as virtually top priority. Plants supply building materials, medicines, food, clothing, air ... yes. More plants.
GD: Finally, what’s next? Presumably at least one more Down novel, but do you have any other works in progress that we’ll be reading in the next two or three years? Or is it too early to say yet where your imagination might take you?
SM: I’ve finished works aplenty looking for homes—Petrovitch 5 is waiting for contractual wranglings to be settled—and other novel-length works doing the usual rounds. After Down 3, I’ve several other things I’d like to write, but some of that’s dependent on what publishers want. I’m also doing on spec work—I’ve just sold a novella to Ian Whaite’s NewCon Press I’m very happy with, as it’s proper old school deep space SF, and I’m half-way through what will probably be a novel-length standalone work, about a little robot probe exploring a huge new planet: ours.
Noise and Sparks 2: You Have to Live
Ruth EJ Booth
“You have to live,” he’d said.
I recall this in the refuge of my study; but, out of the door behind me, waits chaos. Paper and stationery, plates and glass knick-knacks, laundry, books, electrical whoozits and whatsits, all gathered into higgledy heaps and ill-fitted boxstacks; as if freeze-framed in some strangely organized game of Katamari Damacy. I’m moving, and it could be the biggest mistake of my life.
The decision itself was startlingly easy, but recently, it’s gained a foreboding weight. This doesn’t feel right. It seems selfish to leave a life that’s supported me for half a decade for something that might make me happier, but is, unquestionably, much less secure. Even if this works out, it’ll mean less time for my writing—my passion; my cherished bolt-hole when the world gets too, too much. Half the reason I’m writing this column right now is so I don’t have to think about all the clearing and packing still left to do.
So much rests on what’s to come. Yet I’ve no compass for what I’m about to do; no plan should it all fall apart. Frankly, I’m terrified. It’s not a decision I’d have made six years ago. But then, writing SF wasn’t part of the plan either.
