—The Talmud
These are the proverbial interesting times for writers of speculative fiction. As tellers of truth, but not facts, it’s disturbing to watch those who’d have us live in fear of our friends and neighbours twist those facts to fit such hate-filled falsehoods. But, as Ursula Le Guin notes, Science Fiction and Fantasy cannot be confused with lies.1 The responsibility of the artist is to respond in kind: to tell the truth, encourage empathy for the oppressed, and show a way out of the darkness—if not, a little light for a while. Art becomes even more vital in times when the truth is obscured.
Yet, this also is when making that art becomes so much harder. For those trapped by greed and ignorance, their health, livelihoods and families take precedence over creativity. Meanwhile, those outside can only watch the suffering of loved ones played out on social media. What were once havens of community and escapism for us all become litanies of pain, catalogues of tragedies that never had to happen. To engage with it all is to stay informed—but risk harassment, or burn out. To disengage is to allow yourself to heal—but risk cutting yourself off from friends and family, and miss the chance to speak out against the next curtailment of our rights.
Some writers seem to thrive in these times, keeping positive and sharing passionate polemic that raises resistance to glorious art. Others retreat into the work, their created worlds offering the respite that they and their readers so badly need. As cabaret satirists The Creative Martyrs pointed out at their January Sinister Wink show, “we must stay strong, for we are the lucky ones, and there are people who need us.”2 But it’s not always that easy. In the face of such willful, relentless hate, it’s hard to feel like anything we do matters.
I think a lot about Mervyn Peake these days. Peake was an enthusiastic World War II conscript, despite being so unsuited to soldiering, he was demoted to writing signs for the officers’ lavatories. I think of his grotesque ‘Self-portrait’ of Hitler, of his proposed propaganda leaflet of art to be attributed to the Fuhrer.3 Of how he repeatedly applied and failed to become a war artist, eventually had a mental breakdown and was invalided out of the army. It’s a cheap dig to say he should have picked his opportunities better. Peake wanted to contribute. He just couldn’t.
Peake’s ‘Self-portrait’ betrays empathy for Hitler.4 What might seem counter-intuitive for a willing soldier, for a writer, makes perfect sense: in the business of making things up and writing them down, making our creations as real as possible is paramount. If her reader doesn’t believe in a storyteller’s characters, she’s in big trouble. Likewise, sympathy with her reader allows a storyteller to speak to them. But more than this, it is the bedrock of creativity itself.
Terri Windling’s blog, Myth and Moor, recently drew attention to ‘It all Turns on Affection,’ Wendell Berry’s treatise on imagination and a more conserving economy.5 For Berry, imagination encompasses the full scope of the verb “to see,” embracing all attributes of an object. Berry believes this full seeing enables sympathy with those with whom we share a place—as opposed to regarding them as mere unimaginable statistics—and that this affectionate imagination is essential to the creation of art.
Peake also saw imagination as entwined with love and the heart. In examining his creative process, Peter Winnington explains that, for Peake, the heart responds to emotion, which the imagination answers in turn. Imagination cannot substitute for the heart—without it, any creation of the imagination is mechanical, conventional.6 In other words, you can’t write something true if your heart’s not in it.
For those who feel unable to write the hopeful message these times call for, this may seem unhelpful. But Berry notes that imagination also carries knowledge to the heart. In the act of imagination that goes into reading a story, then, the reader absorbs the empathy woven into the work at creation. Studies have shown that reading does increase empathy—empathy that is badly needed in times of hate.7
This empathetic resistance may come from unlikely quarters. In Peake’s ‘Self-portrait’ we see the fascist dictator of the Third Reich reduced to a reflection in a mirror. Peake forces us to empathize with the man’s weariness, the panic in his eyes. Instead of fearing Hitler, we pity him: this is not a monster, but a man. And, as a man, he is weak and fallible, so defeatable—a more subversive stance than may be imagined from the idea of a portrait.
The artist’s resistance, then, lies not only in the ‘what’ of the art we make, but the ‘how.’ In enabling empathy through imagination, artists encourage a more caring, conserving community. This is why art is so vital to human society. Indeed, Berry believes this process is as important to the arts of economy and domestic life as high culture. Moreover, this empathetic creation is just as vital for the artist. In developing our own empathy, we realise that those who seem to be thriving in times of crisis may be struggling just as much as we are. And perhaps they need the gift of art too.
Peake states one further condition for creative imagination: silence, so we may hear the heart beating—“the sound of the imagination at work.” In other words, it’s as important to take a break from the world to heal as it is to engage. Perhaps this is what the Creative Martyrs meant about staying strong. To be free to make the art we choose is to be incredibly lucky. And we cannot deny there are people who need this. Ourselves as much as anyone else.
1 Danuta Kean, Ursula Le Guin rebuts charge that science fiction is ‘alternative fact’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/ursula-le-guin-rebuts-charge-that-science-fiction-is-alternative-fact, [accessed 9th February 2017].
2 The Sinister Wink, The Bungo-Lo, 29th January 2017.
3 Mervyn Peake’s war paintings unveiled by National Archives, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jul/22/mervyn-peake-paintings-national-archives, [accessed 9th February 2017].
4 Sebastian Peake, The Hitler Portfolio, The Mervyn Peake Blog, http://mervynpeake.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/hitler-portfolio.html, [accessed 9th February 2017].
5 Terri Windling., A neighborly, kind, and conserving economy, Myth and Moor, http://www.terriwindling.com/blog/2016/12/wendell-berry.html [accessed 9th February 2017]. For the full lecture, see https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-lecture.
6 G. Peter Winnington (2006) The Voice of the Heart: the working of Mervyn Peake’s imagination (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), pp5-27.
7 For two examples, see http://www.sbs.com.au/topics/life/relationships/article/2016/07/28/study-finds-reading-fiction-develops-empathy and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264162058_The_greatest_magic_of_Harry_Potter_Reducing_prejudice, [accessed 9th February 2017].
Ruth EJ Booth is a BSFA award-winning fiction writer and academic, studying on the MLitt in Fantasy at the University of Glasgow. Her work can be found at www.ruthbooth.com
Reviews
The Corporation Wars:
Insurgence
Ken MacLeod
Orbit, 320 pages
Review: Iain Maloney
Midway through Insurgence, the sequel to Dissidence and midpoint of the trilogy, Carlos the Terrorist finds himself in a hellish maze, his way lit by faint clumps of phosphorescent lichen. He knows the path in front of him will be difficult but that his goal, everything he’s fought for in his life – and virtual afterlife – is in this direction. It’s a computer generated simulation based on a thousand-year-old game popular when Carlos was alive, a circle within a circle within... well, it’s still not clear how deep it all goes. It may very well be turtles all the way down.
The maze is a perfect metaphor for the series. The Corporation Wars are a labyrinth of reality and unreality, lies, ruses, fictions and double-double crosses that would baffle even the smartest AI, where you have just enough information to keep you on track but are lost in a web of unanswered questions. Each chapter brings a new development that only redoubles the confusion.
Fortunately, we can trust the architect. Ken MacLeod is a master storyteller who makes all this plot-based writhing so enthralling that we forgive the confusion. The scenarios and characters introduced in Dissidence return with a few additions, most delightfully the freebot known as Baser, who is perfectly happy building a home for itself on a solitary rock until its peace is shattered by the arrival of some noisy, aggressive humans. The freebots are a wonderful creation, sympathetic and amusing characters coping with their recent sentience.
The reader is clearly encouraged to side with the freebots against both human/AI factions, the Acceleration and the Reaction. The former are ultra-Capitalists, the latter far, far, far-right conservatives intent on a white supremacist future for mankind. Because of the wit with which MacLeod writes, each character is entertaining and compelling, even when you find their politics abhorrent, but there are no humans we could really term ‘likeable’. The freebots however, well, them you can really identify with.
The centrepiece of the novel is the battle between a hardcore Acceleration faction and the Direction unit we were embedded with in Dissidence. Since nobody really knows which group really represents which faction and there are sleepers, traitors and those just plain fed up with the whole thing secreted in each team, it’s almost impossible to set out, without the aid of multi-dimensional graphics, what happens in Insurgence. There are dramatic set-piece battles, tense escapes from captivity, epic drunken parties in a computer generated fantasy world, as much casual sex as you could ask for and, thankfully, a good few discussions and debates that expand the backstory and fill in some of the gaps in our understanding.
Many issues that will concern us in 2017, such as the return of far-right ideology and the prospect of AI revolutionising the workplace and economy, are played out and examined from a number of angles, though always within the demands of the storyline and without ever straying into dry philosophising. A key character is the logical conclusion of the right wing internet troll, whose hate speech made him an icon back in the day and who now considers himself a sleeper agent – though it’s unclear if this is strategically valuable or just another piece of self-aggrandisement by an epic egotist. He balances on a razor’s edge of ideology and self-interest, admitting to himself that a lot of what he espoused was nothing more than rhetoric while a battle, inspired in part by that rhetoric, unfolds around him.
Unlike many middle parts in a trilogy, this isn’t merely a placeholder getting us from the beginning to the end. Rather it’s a tight, startling thriller that builds on part one and sets up part three without ever taking its eye off the prize: walking us through that dastardly labyrinth in breath-taking, humorous style.
Thought X: Fictions and Hypotheticals
Edited by Dr Rob Appleby and Ra Page
Comma Press, 304 pages
Review: Pippa Goldschmidt
This volume is the latest in a series of anthologies published by Comma Press showcasing specially written short stories inspired by a specific theme. This one takes as its subject ‘thought experiments’, experiments carried out in the safety of one’s own head to explore the world. Each short story is accompanied by an essay written by an expert in the field.
Thought experiments can be used to expose the apparent misconceptions of a theory and one of the most famous was devised by Schrödinger to clarify what he thought of as the wrong-headed interpretation of his own wave equation by other physicists. The cat trapped in a box who simultaneously exists in the quantum states and is both alive and dead until the box is opened was meant to be a reductio ad absurdum, an obviously impossible circumstance. In this anthology Schrödinger’s cat is used inventively by Margaret Wilkinson in her story ‘If He Wakes’ to explore the complex relationship between an adult daughter and her father who may (or may not) be living in a nursing home.
