YA fiction for me isn’t a new thing—I’ve got a few unpublished YA novels stacked away on the Mac—but I am beginning to see it as a valuable route to a new way of writing. I hope my readers warm to this new route. Besides, as Philip Pullman’s outstanding His Dark Materials illustrates, you can write a YA novel with adult themes. My new work—the Factory Girl trilogy; The Girl With Two Souls / The Girl With One Friend / The Girl With No Soul—is not dissimilar, being an alternate-world Edwardian adventure whose underlying theme is the nature of the human condition, and particularly the question of whether or not human beings have a soul.
I can definitely see me writing more YA novels. A lot of my work involves people making discoveries about the world they live in—Zinina and Arrahaquen in Memory Seed, Dwllis in Glass, Psolilai and psolilai in Urbis Morpheos—and the YA novel, with its relatively naïve characters, is one great way to follow that theme of discovery.
GD: I’m intrigued to know what you mean by describing yourself as being ‘anti-religion’, yet in the same answer going on you reveal you’ve just written three novels about whether or not human beings have a soul. Aren’t matters of the soul, whether you believe we have one or not, the very heart of religion?
SP: First of all I’d better say that I’m an atheist, and, for various reasons, I find myself opposed not only to the great majority of the core ideas of religion, but also to it as a monolithic patriarchal structure—the cause of suffering, grief, violence, intolerance and incalculable horror over the last five thousand years. But I’d also like to quote one of my characters in The Girl With One Friend: “All I say to you is this. Individual people of faith are not to be mocked, as he mocked you. But the religion itself… that is fair game.” Thirdly, I’d like to mention that the friend in my own life who I’ve known for the longest time, who’s been a close friend and colleague for decades, is a Christian, and I’m fine with that. We’ve had some good and useful conversations; plus, he’s a really great bloke. Finally, I’d like to add that a small proportion of the core values of some religions—notably the Golden Rule; do unto others as you would have them do unto you—are valuable and worth placing into humane ethics.
Having said all that… religion is at its heart anti-understanding. It’s a prehistoric hang-over from times when all human beings grasped the world through self-centred structures: magic, spiritualism, animism and so on. All these structures were built up in geographically localised, often tribal zones, but they had an absolutely crucial function in prehistoric times: they allowed one fundamental part of the human condition to have its essential expression—the drive to explain and comprehend the world. This in my view is one of those parts of the human condition that, however warm and fluffy you feel about animals, separates us with an abyss from non-conscious creatures. We make models of the world in our minds: animals essentially use instinct. It is the quality, authenticity and lack of self-centredness of a person’s mental model that contributes in overwhelming measure to their character.
In my new trilogy, although the focus is on the characters, the plot and the story, the underlying theme is these fundamental parts of the human condition. I explore that both through the characters and through an ‘alternate’ version of Alice In Wonderland, which in my tale is by the Rev. Carolus Dodgson and is called Amy’s Garden.
I expect religious or ‘spiritual’ people to be as sceptical of my atheism as I am of their faith. The thing is; they never are. So, regarding the latter part of the question: in my opinion, the single most important task of humanity now is to develop a scientific description of the human condition. We have done pretty well so far, considering that the game-changer—Freud’s discovery of the unconscious—only occurred about a century ago. I think that, without a description linking the nature of consciousness as created by evolution by natural selection with the actualities of the human condition which we all experience—love, emotion, a sense of passing time, the comprehension of death, a meaning-framework, creativity, identity etc—we can’t understand what’s happening around us in human societies: capitalism, communism, patriarchy, organised religion, terrorism, authoritarianism… the list is almost endless. So the question of the likelihood of human souls is not only a relevant query for atheists to consider, it’s an essential one, since all prehistoric spiritualism and all modern religions posit some sort of soul/spirit—and that fact has to be explained in any full description of the human condition.
I can’t myself seriously consider any kind of soul or spirit for individuals, in fact I personally think it’s one of the most dangerous prehistoric ideas still with us. The irony is, it was absolutely inevitable that the notion would dig itself deep into the human psyche because of the impossibility of considering the reality of death from a prehistoric perspective. I’ve tried to consider this question from both sides in my trilogy.
GD: It’s interesting that you’d say, “religion is at its heart anti-understanding…” There’s a contradiction in saying religion is anti-understanding, then that religion comes out of the drive to explain and comprehend the world. If religion is a ‘hang-over’ from prehistoric times which still thrives today doesn’t that suggest it meets something fundamental in human nature which isn’t answered elsewhere? As Juanita says in Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash –
“All people have religions. It’s like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells …”
In which case an interesting question would be, why? And another would be, how do we respond?
If I were to be sceptical of your atheism I would be doubting your sincerity, which would not just be offensive, but fly in the face of the evidence. The evidence being that you are an atheist, because you tell me that you are, and that I’ve no reason to doubt you’re telling the truth. That might be why people are never sceptical of your atheism. Which is obviously different to being sceptical about atheism itself…
SP: Oops, yes, points of semantics—I meant understanding as in non-guesswork understanding. As you say, the drive to find meaning is entirely rooted in the human condition; in our use of mental models. It’s fundamental to who we are as a species. The big difference is: faith explicitly rejects the idea of testing the real world, while the scientific method does test the real world. By ‘my atheism’ I meant atheism.
Your Snow Crash quote is an excellent example of what we’re discussing. I don’t think there are ‘religious receptors’ in our brains, that’s an inappropriate analogy, since receptors work in massively parallel arrays—tens, hundreds of billions of them. But every one of us is undoubtedly hard-wired to develop and use a meaning-framework, of which of course atheism is one of many. The ‘why’ of this is because of the human mind’s use of a mental model. Without meaning there is no coherence, and without coherence there is insanity.
GD: Without going too much further down this path, which is straying a long way from any direction discussion of your books! I’m intrigued that you say we’re undoubtedly hard-wired to use a meaning-framework, the niggling question obviously being, why? I mean, how do you resolve the apparent paradox that a lack of meaning results in insanity when—and I’m presuming this here, so correct me if I’m wrong—as an atheist you would consider the universe the result of chance, rather than meaningful action? Where does a need for meaning so important that without it insanity ensues come from in such a universe, in which the very idea of meaning itself must be meaningless? Not only shouldn’t meaning be necessary to underpin the coherence which supports sanity, it shouldn’t even exist.
Apart from which, faith doesn’t explicitly reject testing the real world, though some ‘faiths’ may do so. All the time we accept things ‘on faith’ based on observational evidence—I see white stuff falling from the sky so I believe that it is snowing without going outside to test that what is falling really is snow. Equally I don’t run tests to try and work out if I am in some virtual reality being fed a simulation of something I think of as snow. That would be self-defeating as we can never get beyond the evidence of our own senses.
And ultimately none of us can prove all our assumptions. There comes a point when everyone takes what they believe on ‘faith’—I’ve not seen God, though I’m aware of plenty of evidence which can rationally and coherently be pointed in the direction of a creator—the same as I’ve not seen a sub-atomic particle but believe they exist because it’s rational to infer their existence from various indirect effects.
SP: When you see white stuff falling from the sky, you don’t need to do any testing—it’s an already proven event. Snow isn’t taken on faith, just as the existence of the Earth and the Moon aren’t taken on faith. (You’d need to be a solipsist to bother with all that.) So, snow isn’t something you need to make any effort to believe in—belief not required. Similarly, you don’t need to believe in Newtonian mechanics, nor keep doing experiments to test it. It’s the law.
I do agree with you that, at the extremes of both sides of this discussion, neither the atheist nor the believer can prove their position. But that rather sidesteps the point that science says “beyond reasonable doubt,” eg. it is beyond reasonable doubt that frozen water falls from the sky as snow. We don’t need to keep doing experiments to show that it does happen in the real, testable world.
To return to the main question: We’re undoubtedly hard-wired… it shouldn’t even exist.
I don’t think there is a paradox in the existence of a random, chance-driven physical world containing conscious beings having an absolute requirement for those conscious beings to use meaning frameworks. One thinks of the oft-repeated position of religion trying to claim that only faith-based frameworks based in books written millennia ago can explain this fundamental drive, as if, because we now live in a world explained by science, we are being told to live our human lives according to science—not humanity. That argument should I think be seen as the fraudulent sleight-of-hand it is. But as a species we have yet to create what above I called “the single most important task of humanity now… to develop a scientific description of the human condition.” The point that I think is most often missed (or more likely ignored, since the majority of philosophers are men) is that human beings evolved into conscious creatures in societies. As Dirk Ngma says in Beautiful Intelligence: “I think consciousness [is] between people, not in a brain. It [is] between us all, like water for fish.” A single, isolated baby who had their every physical need cared for would not in my opinion become conscious as it grew up, because consciousness can only exist in a society of human beings all of whom have that potential. It is an emergent property. Consequentially, so is the need for meaning emergent, not to mention all the other aspects of the human condition.
For 13.8 billion years the universe evolved according to those laws and initial conditions that epitomised it. Then we came along. Quite possibly conscious beings have already evolved on other planets; they will have faced the same questions we do. But on Earth, the arrival of conscious human beings did not alter the random, physical law-driven universe (at least, not on the macroscopic scale—but quantum mechanics may have something to say elsewhere…).
The meaning of our lives comes from ourselves, not from any external agency. This is why I keep emphasising the need for a scientific description of the human condition. The time has come to discard imaginary descriptions and to determine what in the human condition makes us crave meaning. To paraphrase Carl Sagan: the long childhood of humanity is over.
If I could quote a brief passage from The Girl With One Friend:
“Sir George stood up, his knees creaking, but Erasmus caught him by the sleeve. ‘What shall I say when he asks me what is to replace Christianity? I cannot say science.’
“Sir George glanced at Kora. ‘Why not describe the simple human dignity of your friendship with Kora?’ ”
We also shouldn’t forget the importance of the fact that consciousness evolved according to the rules of natural selection. It must therefore have a profoundly important reason for having emerged—an observation made with most brilliance by Nicholas Humphrey in his ground-breaking book The Inner Eye. Had consciousness emerged in groups of proto-humans but led to insanity owing to fundamental differences in its qualities, those groups would have been selected against, and their offspring would have disappeared. But we didn’t disappear. We really are all one.
GD: That’s all genuinely fascinating and we could discuss this endlessly, though I’m aware this is already becoming a long interview so perhaps we should return to your books. In an interview with Tony Ballantyne you said “I have a feeling that [the Factory Girl trilogy] could be an important point in my development as an author.” Did you mean in terms of the quality of the books, their potential for commercial success, the subject matter or style, some combination of all of these, or something else entirely?
SP: Definitely the commercial angle, but also a kind of awareness (still a little undefined in my mind) that I’ve somehow put my overtly experimental novels behind me and come up with something that feels more traditional. I did a final edit of the trilogy before sending it off to Keith Brooke, and the word that I unexpectedly used to describe it all when I mentioned it on the phone to a friend was ‘epic’—even though it’s mostly set in the Sheffield of 1910-11. I don’t know… I just have a feeling that this one is different in some way.
That’s not to say I won’t ever experiment again. I believe in it, I believe in giving my fans something entirely unexpected, I believe in stretching myself as a writer, and I do believe (though it’s often commercial suicide) in writing books that challenge the reader. All the great books I love have this aspect of being challenging—like Gene Wolfe’s The Book Of The New Sun. If your reader has to invest a lot of themselves into a work, that makes a different kind of relationship than with a read-once-only type of novel. I can definitely see myself writing more YA novels anyway.
Stephen Palmer’s latest work is a Young Adult trilogy, The Girl With Two Souls (published 22 November), The Girl With One Friend (29 November) and The Girl With No Soul (6 December).
A fourth volume, The Conscientious Objector, set four years later, will follow in spring 2017.
All four books are published by Infinity Plus.
Noise and Sparks 3: Interlude
Ruth EJ Booth
Through the library turnstiles and out into late afternoon. I slip cozy earbuds in and pull down my hat, but hold off pressing play, just let them sit there; a sign to myself as much as anyone else that I’m not to be disturbed. Tenement streets open either side of me, golden halls in the late afternoon light, leaves mouldering to a soft carpet underneath my boots. Sun cracks through rolling cloud. Across the valley, the hills glow red: a gift of a moment. None of this will last.
I feel that strongly here, now. Here, in this place, just a little to the north and west of my hometown, the collapse from mid-October into the depths of Winter is vertiginous; this drop into darkness, accelerated by the same quirk of planetary tilt that brings this land its glorious never-ending Summer evenings, now limned with frost and new possibility. The moments I’ve had to take stock have been rare, filled with books, events, seminars, deadlines, and an illness covering that sharp tip from indian summer into the long fall. Now I’m no longer confined to bed—no longer cushioned from the threat of looming deadlines—I’m struck by the realization of how much time has moved on without me.
I shouldn’t feel this disorientated. Writing is forever anchoring yourself to a future that is almost here—whether working to deadlines or seasonal publications, or within your own distant worlds. So, while this is the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, it’s also the season of frost and snow, new flowers and March dew, endless July light. Being a writer involves living with this seasonal dissonance as a constant companion.
But in this new city, where the seasonal shift has a difference nuance to the one I’m used to, missing that deft wrist flick from one to the other is unsettling. Already nighttime streets run thick with lamplight, pooling away into drains as I hide under my soaking hoodie. Already, the morning light is the white hue of a North-East winter afternoon. Already, the moon is high near midday, accompaniment to the chill that even now scrapes its fingers through the sun-drenched air, the first sign of a subtle paring of reality that will be long under way by the time you read this. I mourn every passing moment with quiet anxiety. The Orionid Meteor shower snuck up on me this year without me even realizing it. I should be thinking of Christmas by now. This gold slope down to the leafy Kelvin will be all ice by then.
Perhaps this is why this time of year is so rich with stories, not just the temptation to avoid the cold by getting toasty by the fire. There’s a gothic wonder about it, of the world transformed. In its atmosphere, the whip and force of winter wind, the peculiar electricity of a November sky. In the familiar transmuted by snow into rough shapes of potential—a car-ish something, a tree-ish something. And more, as the year nears its end, and the dark closes in. Beyond the fairy lights and tinsel, outside, the sense of the world thinning, perceptibly, just beyond the glass.
