Blinking to miss it: Isolated Examples of Imaginative Transformation in the writings of Luke Kennard

George Ttoouli has just finished reading Luke Kennard's novella, Holophin...

This is one of those notes to self that feels fresh enough in my thinking that I want to share it here, in case someone else has input. (I'm increasingly using G&P to air ideas I've not got straight in my head, for which, trad-mag readers, I apologise. Go find a weekend supplement, they're more reliable.)

Firstly, Luke Kennard's novella, Holophin. I'm going to try and restrain myself from gushing praise, as Luke is a friend and has had enough PR from me. Read someone else on it: Annexe and also the trailer (rumour has it, Tom Chivers literally hung out of a plane at 25,000 feet to get that footage). It is, of course, wonderful reading, imaginatively fresh, technically surprising... etc. etc. I'm not entirely sure what the crazy chapter between 14 and 15 actually means, but it looks pretty.

Two isolated incidents I want to refer to:

1. In Holophin:

"the ... School's tutors have been re-hired as Learning Resource Managers. The Research Institute is no longer free - a luxury we cannot afford in such straitened times"

(I've elided some of this and not referenced precisely because some of this might constitute a spoiler otherwise.)

2. In Planet Shaped Horse (Nine Arches Press):

"The gate has no lock, but is operated by credit card, // charging you £1,500 each time you swipe to open it" (from 'Snob').

[The latter quotation was embellished by Luke in performance to something like, "£1,500 the first time, then £3,000, rising to £9,000 when you swipe to open it" so more obviously a reference to UK university tuition fees.]

Something I remember Luke saying in response to writing from personal experience: whatever happened to making stuff up?

Here's a writer who's also a university lecturer dishing out poetry about a man recovering from mental health problems waiting in a halfway house, and a[n] SF novella about a world supported by little dolphin stickers, with no little resemblance to Ghost in the Shell crossed with a war between Apple and Microsoft computing and a minor dash of Terminator thrown in for good measure. Plus fairytale, and maybe even The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. I'll stop there, the influences and connections are so manifold as to become meaningless after a while - it is an original synthesis of familiar tropes in a way that utterly delights. (Oh, more gushing...) But it reads fresh, the characters are made up, as far as I can tell, the world distinct from the genre comparisons, despite the odd homage. (This pitches into an awkward discussion about how easy it might be to demonstrate originality, when it's taken to mean organisation of language, rather than structural, or contextual organisation, but let's save that for another day.)

Anyway, two references to the privatisation of education, but transformed into the context of the two books' worlds (which I've elided in the first quote, but read it yourself and decide). I got these references and responded to the satire because it's an issue close to my heart, of course. Does it stand up, or is it a cheap shot at the real world, at contemporary society, which takes you out of the SF?

SF operates in a tension between utopia and reality. The reality we are living, what we understand of the world, its physics and society today, is the reader's point of reference for engaging with the [impossible / extrapolated / speculated / dys- / u-topian] world of an SF story. (SF doesn't have exclusive rights to this, of course, as Planet Shaped Horse demonstrates: an alternative reality world where everything is surreal but plausible through a distorted subjectivity.) Holophin falls into the category of speculative fiction in the main part - a dystopian world loosely based on technological projections and the replacement of nation states by corporations. You could argue there are elements of pure fantasy SF in there, in the context of the implausible energy and material resources that would have to drive Holophin's society (which only gets one minor reference), but let's leave that alone.

Well-executed satire is satisfying, right? Only it does leave you with that bitter taste of reality washing back in after a cool clear dram of escapism. That's called morality, or if I were feeling ungenerous, moralising, but done here in a delightfully Hogarthian way, a non-puritannical 'let's make entertaining stories and be good people at the same time!' kind of thing.

Is it satisfying enough? Here, the transformation of satire on privatisation of university education is entertaining, sure, but that's just one of the three elements of great writing: "magic, story, lesson" as Nabokov put it (PDF link); or in reverse order, 'educate, entertain, enchant' as Peter Blegvad rephrased it. Along with satire, the education of social critique, we want story, the context of the world, but what about enchantment? That feeling of flow that keeps us out of reality and in the story's new world, forgetting all the research I should have been doing this morning, not going to the library to work, because I was reading this book.

I think that came out of the urgency of Hatsuka's story: her relationship to her parents, the tension with Max, the super rich room mate. Then another kind of 'dropping out' of the story arose with a thread centring on depression - something else this shares with Planet Shaped Horse - a treatment that reminded me of Eggers' film version of Where the Wild Things Are, emotionally affecting enought to make me stop and think for a moment, also dropping me out of the flow of reading.

This is all beginning to get a bit incoherent. I have been trying to say something about how Luke has managed to transform elements of his personal experience - for example, university work, no doubt some emotional life as well, to help breathe life into the characters - into something highly entertaining, morally positive, and, within the whole, a sustained degree of enchantment also. Some moments that are so hilarious they put all the cheap chuckles of a 'comic writer' like Bill Bryson into the recycling bin and throw a petrol bomb in after them - equally, moments that drop you out of the story, because you can hear yourself laughing.

Maybe we need these moments - it's not a flaw to say you left the flow of reading, the page-turning. But you're acknowledging those moments when the story made you think, or feel; moments when you remembered you were human. The idea of being fully in the flow of a story would be meaningless without little reminders of the world you have to return to; it might even be a negative thing; you might start believing that you could escape the real world, your problems, rather than only leaving for a while to gain some perspective. (Maybe that's the problem with apathetic social idealism: it isn't facing up to the problems, it's trying to escape. Oh, another can of worms - I'm leaving them in to feed the trolls.)

OK, enough. If someone knows what I was trying to say, please fax it to Luke's departmental office at the University of Birmingham. They're barely funded by taxpayers money these days, so consider it an act of resistance against the Nautilus future I'm trying to prevent (read the book to get the reference). I'll close with a list of names I came up with at one am to describe the colour of Holophin's cover - more suggestions welcome:

Lurid 9

Wallflower Comedown
Grape Grope (sadly, this one exists)
Broken Fuschia
Summer Pervert

Ripe Stains

Culpability Pink

Bubblegum Vulva  (blimey, so is this one)
Gollyberry
Keninnards

===

Holophin was printed in a limited edition hardback run of 300 copies. Less than 100 remain - I know this because I have copy 203 (assuming Tom is as OCD as me and only sends them out in the correct numerical order; also he tweeted about having sold more than two-thirds). It will be out as an e-book in a few months, but trust me, the hardback is beautiful. So is the text, of course. It deserves to sell millions. I haven't read so much joy since Heartsnatcher.

Simon Turner - Post-Apocalypso

A triffid, yesterday.

I've spent the week, on the back of the Guardian Review's feature on science fiction last Saturday (which fulfilled the Review's remit of publishing at least one interesting article every six or seven months) immersing myself in post-apocalyptic fiction, because I'm exactly the kind of happy-go-lucky, optimistic type who revels in tales of speculative human catastrophe.  Let's leave aside for now the thorny issue of mainstream reviewing's tendency to ghettoise genre fiction as though it were 'literary' fiction's (Christ, I despise that term: it's utterly rancid with received notions of what the novel is expected and permitted to do, and there's an unhealthy sheen of snobbery attached to it as well, as if anything not originating from the pens of Atwood or Amis were deemed un- or anti-literary) dunce of a cousin (periodically patronising it with its own feature, just because the British Library has an SF exhibition on, which translates roughly as 'That's our populist remit out of the way: now we can get back to artificially inflating the reputation of whichever lyrical realist mediocrity we happen to be salivating over this month'), because it's not why we're here, and besides, it only makes me angry (see above).  The fact of the matter is that SF, considered as a cogent body of work in every narrative field, represents one of the cornerstones of human imaginative achievement.  It extrapolates from our current situation and considers the possible ramifications of certain developments (sometimes scientific, sometimes social), showing us not only where we might be heading but, often in the starkest and most troubling of terms, where we already are.  In effect, science fiction is a subset of the novel of ideas, but unlike 'literary' novels of ideas, SF deals with concepts and ideas that matter, that people might actually care about.

This is where post-apocalyptic fiction and film fits in, as the extrapolations and projections from the contemporary world in this instance are injected with an urgency that is absent from other breeds of SF.  We're not only looking to possible futures in works like I Am Legend or The Day of the Triffids, but possible futures where mankind has well and truly fucked things up.  In that regard, post-apocalyptic SF doesn't really have to take the form of SF at all: it might be, say, a perfectly normal virus that screws us, or a famine, or an atomic holocaust, all of which events have been, and remain, horribly plausible.  It's not the event itself that's of import (Cormac McCarthy's The Road takes this to an extreme, giving us the sketchiest apocalypse in literary history: it might be a nuclear war that wipes out human civilisation, or it might be environmental degradation, or a combination of the two, or neither - it might as well be the Rapture for all the information we're given.  What matters to McCarthy is the (monstrous) behaviour of those left behind) but rather the aftermath.  In effect, the post-apocalyptic scenario is a projection, not of society as it is, but of how the author conceives of society.  Which is to say that what happens post-event will match the political and social ideas of the author.  Two post-apocalyptic novels roughly contemporary with one another - John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951) and John Christopher's The Death of Grass (1956) - bear this out quite neatly.  Wyndham's novel is the better known, having been filmed a number of times (most recently by the BBC), and its opening scene - the hero comes to in hospital to find the world irreversibly changed, and wanders dazed through the empty streets of a shattered metropolis - has influenced any number of other post-apocalyptic narratives: see 28 Days Later for an excellent homage (HBO's The Walking Dead more recently pulled a similar trick).  It's also strangely quaint, very much the product of a society that had just defeated Nazism and, in the process, created the NHS and laid the foundations of the welfare state.  Wyndham is, in short, an optimistic left-leaning liberal democrat (that's small l and small d: I don't want to insult the man), and the message of the book seems to be that, however grim things get, some form of British left-leaning liberal democracy will survive: in this instance, on a heavily fortified Isle of Wight (and, no, I didn't make that up).  Tellingly, his apocalypse is man-made: not malicious, just horribly short-sighted (appropriately enough, in a novel where most of the world's population gets blinded in the opening pages).  The triffids have been farmed (and perhaps genetically engineered) as a cheap source of cooking oil, whilst the 'comet shower' that causes the mass blindness I've already mentioned might not be a comet shower at all, but the result of a malfunctioning series of weapons satellites.  And a man-made apocalypse can be overturned, or at least countered, by the same inventiveness and cunning that created it, at least in the optimistic universe that Wyndham's characters inhabit.

 A tripod, yesterday.

Far bleaker is Christopher's The Death of Grass.  Readers of a certain age might remember the BBC's adaptation of his genuinely harrowing childrens' books The Tripods, which has haunted me to this day.  I suspect, having just read it, that The Death of Grass will likewise shadow me for the remainder of my life.  It's a truly shocking and troubling book, the dark and brutal flipside to Wyndham's Bevanite optimism.  The scenario is simple: a virus emerges in China that wipes out rice crops.  It swiftly mutates to decimate all grass crops, including wheat, rye and barley, leaving the entire world facing starvation.  The novel concerns the attempts of one family and a number of hangers on to make their way from London to the north of England, where the protagonist's brother keeps a (now-fortified and famine-ready) farm.  Anything else I might add would likely ruin the novel for any newcomers, so I won't pull any spoilers from my sleeves.  But I will say that I cannot recommend this novel highly enough.  It's still in print (there's a Penguin Modern Classics edition, in fact, and rightly so), so there is, frankly, no excuse.

But these are very English apocalypses.  Across the pond, the States has a rich record of post-apocalyptic scenarios of its own, and one of the most interesting is Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954).  Like The Day of the Triffids, I Am Legend has been something of a draw for film-makers: most recently, Will Smith was given the lead in a rather flaccid adaptation, and in the 70s, Charlton Heston (the king of post-apocalyptic science fiction movies, having appeared in Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green, both of which rule, in a pessimistic, post-Altamont kind of way) starred in The Omega Man, which is far better than the more recent attempt in every way, but still oddly unsatisfactory as an adaptation of the novel.  Part of the problem for any cinematic translation is that I Am Legend is very literary, very self-aware, and much of the novel's energy is given over to a critique of the genre from which it arose.  Matheson's novel proposes that vampires, far from being creatures of legend and folklore, are real and scientifically explicable: in the wake of an atomic war, a plague, the symptoms of which are eerily similar to vampirism as defined in classic horror and Gothic fiction, has ravaged the planet, leaving the novel's protagonist Robert Neville as (potentially) the last human alive in the States, or at least in LA.  Different in temperament though Wyndham's and Christopher's novels are, they share at least a sense of forward momentum: they're linear narratives, warped hangovers of the Medieval quest, with their protagonists searching for (and mostly failing to find) safe haven.  Matheson's novel is comparably static and claustrophobic: Neville spends his time holed up in his fortified house, his wife and daughter long ago having succumbed to the plague, fending off nightly attacks from marauding vampires, and spending his days desperately (and futilely) searching for a cure for the plague.  Neville isn't a typical resourceful SF hero: he drinks, he's inarticulate (mostly through isolation), sexually frustrated ... Indeed, there's far more in common between Neville and the narrators of Richard Ford's novels or Raymond Carver's stories, than between Neville and his adventurous and resourceful precursors in Wells or Verne, another facet that's failed to translate across into the movie adaptations: Charlton Heston and Will Smith are too heroic, frankly.  This is Matheson's greatest innovation, arguably, and it makes the horror of the situation all the more troubling.  The end of the world won't be survived by strong-jawed messiahs who'll save the human race at the eleventh hour: the last man on earth will be you, or me, and we'll be utterly powerless and monstrously alone.  I think I need a stiff drink.