Trust Your Instincts

Sometimes - I don't know whether you get this - I feel a kind of wild call to take off down some other avenue of thought, usually when I'm deeply frustrated or bored with whatever I'm doing. I then run off and collect up whatever has piqued my interest, either ransacking my own shelves or buying a book or three. Eventually these wild calls ossify and I find a pile of books or other materials laying around, cluttering up my work space, and I think, 'Just what was it I had in mind then? Why are these books here? And I have to clear them up and put them away.

I did this yesterday. I've been struggling with an article that has been through multiple revisions, the time between each one expanding as I get progressively sicker of my own prose and further away from the idea or conception that produced the writing in the first place. This is a particular problem for academic writing as you have to immerse yourself in the body of scholarship that precedes your work, and many academic pieces eventually become clogged by the weight of reference and citation that they have to bear. Writing academically can be an entropic process, a slow winding down of energy from a state of initial excitement.

This is particularly burdensome for me as I have become increasingly horrified by the process of revising my own work; nauseated is perhaps the better word. My almost visceral reaction against this (and against writing on a computer - I am doing so now for convenience, actually on the glass screen of an iPad, but have reverted to pen and paper in the main) produced one of these wild calls. I thought of Jack Kerouac and his imprecations against revision, the idea of 'Spontaneous Prose', and so, of course, ran off to read On The Road, which I haven't read for many years. I started it this morning and I'm enjoying the energy, the rhythms of the prose, as well as that romantic vision of the self and of America that Kerouac inherits.

A few weeks ago I presented a paper (on the film of London Orbital) which mixed critical and creative impulses; this I wrote in longhand. The paper was in twelve sections, and all but one of the sections were as I wrote them, first draft, and as I read it out I realised that longhand writing had generated a kind of rhythm, a spontaneity if you will, that was perfect for the spoken presentation. It seemed more immediate than other of my (over-)worked pieces. The problem is, of course, is that engagement and immediacy that is perfect for a presentation runs fairly diametrically against what has become the norm in academic practice.

My frustration, then, with having to re-write this other paper resolved itself yesterday evening, when I looked over the sheaf of notes I had accumulated, and realised that a previous sketching/mapping out is really what I was aiming for, and my sense that I was losing the very thing that impelled me to write the damn thing in the first place could be recovered if I stopped trying to lens my own thoughts through the work of others - scholarship become authentication become colonisation - and returned to what I wanted to say. It was reading a short Ballard piece, on airports, I had salted away in a folder over 15 years ago that made me realise that I had been on the right track all along.

Roads, tracks, avenues, calls to flight, airports: little wonder that the article I'm revising is centrally concerned with mobility, like a lot of my current work. But it's movement in writing, in thought, that I want to recover, which is why I'm going back to Kerouac. Not to imitate, to have him dictate to me, but to try to achieve the focus that is as close to automatism that I can get only through longhand, without the interpolation and interpellations brought about by typing on a keyboard. In a notebook I wrote last night, an aide-memoire, 'Trust Your Instincts'; in the past, too, I've found out that these usually turn out to have been write all along.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Me and Mrs Brown's Anatomy

I have become, of late, one of the couple-of-hundred or so people in the UK to buy contemporary poetry – small volumes from Picador, Faber, Seren, and some small presses. I’ve been concerned that my interest in poetry is part of a drift away from the novel that I’ve been experiencing for a few years; though, to be honest, the novel of high realism has never been to my taste, and I’ve long preferred more experimental or disrupted fictions. (This is why I gravitate towards New Wave science fiction, I think.) My antipathy towards realist or mimetic fictions is also, I suspect, why I have very little feeling for fantasy fiction; as critics such as Christine Brooke-Rose have suggested, realist fiction and (certain kinds of ) science fiction are proximate in their techniques, and in particular their investment in world-building, concrete materiality through redundancy of detail (Barthes’s ‘reality effect’), and causal transparency (closeness of histoire and recit, or narrative structure and underlying chronological ‘plot’). Fantasy fiction, it seems to me, is still more invested in these techniques than sf.

A couple of articles – one old, one new – have set me thinking about the issue of ‘character’ in sf and fantasy. I’m not personally that interested in ‘character’ in fiction; I’m with Tom McCarthy, author of C, who said in interview:

'I'm just doing what I think the novel should do, and trying to achieve the things the novels I most admire achieved. I don't necessarily want to be contrarian, it's just that in order to do what needs to be done you need to reject a certain set of assumptions, certain models of subjectivity – for example, the contemporary cult of the individual, the absolute authentic self who is measured through his or her absolutely authentic feeling.'

I recently re-read Ursula Le Guin’s well-known article ‘Science Fiction and Mrs Brown’, where she takes Virginia Woolf’s figure of Mrs Brown – encountered in the corner of a train compartment, small and shabby but doughty and with a life story – as a means by which to interrogate what she sees as the failings of sf. For all its ‘wonders’, Le Guin suggests, sf contains very few memorable ‘characters’; she cites Mr Tagomi from PKD’s The Man in the High Castle, and Thea Cadence from Compton’s Synthajoy as rare exceptions. This, Le Guin argues, is an unalloyed failure on sf’s part, and in her (rather mystificatory) description of how she conceives of her own work, she writes of characters ‘talking’ to her or of preceding the narratives of her books. Now, I don’t read prose fictions for ‘character’, but I know I’m anomalous. The Man in the High Castle works perfectly well for me without me being invested in Mr Tagomi as a ‘round character’ (the use of Forster’s binary from Aspects of the Novel revealing the fundamental (liberal) humanism that underpins Le Guin’s strategy here). I enjoy the scenario, the metafictionality, the wonderful imagination of Japanese cultural nostalgia for pre-war American pulp commodities, the vertiginous reveal (Mr Tagomi’s vision). But I don’t have to believe in him as a ‘three dimensional’ character to enjoy the book.

Most of my recurrent (re-)reads in prose fiction – Borges, Ballard, Burroughs, Sinclair – similarly lack ‘characters’, but I don’t think that undermines them as texts. They are simply doing something other than the techniques of mimetic or ‘realist’ fiction, and perhaps encode a rather different conception, as McCarthy suggests, of subjectivity.

My thoughts turned to fantasy, and my lack of appetite for the fantasy genre and for contemporary sf, on reading John Lanchester’s recent review of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels, and the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones. I’ve neither read the books nor watched the series, and don’t really intend to, but Lanchester’s analysis (really, a kind of critical boosterism: he is ‘addicted’) is largely based on ‘character’. Writing about these fatal protagonists and antagonists, Lanchester notes:

'These are not peripheral figures but richly imagined, textured, three-dimensional portraits of central characters: the kind many writers couldn’t bear to kill off. Nobody needs to give Martin any advice about how he needs to slaughter his darlings.'

The pleasure of these particular texts is clearly based on ‘character arcs’, surprising narratives, the willingness of the story to take risks with these storylines. Game of Thrones is clearly a richly-imagined world, just like Lord of the Rings (cited with approval by both Lanchester and Le Guin), just like the worlds of Dickens or George Eliot or Tolstoy. (Lanchester wonders about ‘an unbridgeable crevasse between the SF/fantasy audience and the wider literate public’, but I wonder whether there’s much crossover between the audiences of Game of Thrones and classic tv drama; a friend has suggested that this might have something to do with gendered audiences, if not. The pleasures might not be dissimilar.) The proximity of contemporary sf to fantasy – often remarked upon by Ian Sales in his blog, for instance, and part of the discussion generated by Paul Kincaid’s now well-known negative review of some sf anthologies last year – is another reason why I find it uncongenial, and why I am drawn to Modernist fiction, and to poetry (of certain kinds).

In one of my favourite sf critical acts, John Clute’s review ‘Scholia, Seasoned With Crabs, Blish Is’ (from New Worlds 207, 1973), Clute suggests that James Blish’s sf often seems ‘radically deficient’ because it fails to fulfil the criteria of the roman, a term taken from Paul Hernadi, suggesting representation of events, linear time, and evoking of a ‘psychological present’; instead, Clute suggests, taking another critical cue from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, Blish’s best work should be understood in terms of the ‘Menippean satire’ or ‘anatomy’, characterized by stylization, dislocation, abstraction, ‘a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern’. The problem for Blish is that he has ‘immersed himself in a field – science fiction – whose generic forms cater to the heated iconicity of the romance’.

Increasingly, I find that this is my problem too. Wondering whether I’d lost my taste for fiction entirely, I took up Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and literally cried laughing at some parts. I was happy that I found it so congenial; but then, Shandy is a classic anatomy. I fell in love with Frye’s own Anatomy as an undergrad – literally ‘a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern’ – and it has helped me understand my own inclinations this Spring. It’s not that I don’t like prose fiction; it’s that I find the roman uncongenial. I’m a Menippean satire kind of person.

The theme of the assassin and hero

I always have a copy of Borges’ Labyrinths by my bedside; it’s a book that I dip into again and again. I’m not a collector, though I must own a thousand books, but if I were, the one book that I would collect would be Labyrinths. In miniature, it is a library in itself, almost as though, Aleph-like, it contains infinitude within finite space; for me, Labyrinths contains all other books, or pathways through them. I recently re-read Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which draws directly on Cervantes; the Quixote is crucial to Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard’ and many other fabulations/ ficciones; the circulation Tristram Shandy > Don Quixote > Pierre Menard sends me back, as always, to Borges. I was interested to note that reference to Sterne’s work in Borges is fleeting; the online Borges Center website has only one passing reference to offer, in a short piece by Borges on Joyce’s Ulysses. The spirit of Sterne, albeit contra ‘gravity’ in a way that the poker-faced Borges rarely countenances, can be found in the Argentinian’s work, in its bibliophilia, its labyrinthine textures, its logomachia; also in its direct address to the reader, sleights of hand made possible by the first person.

I sometimes desire to know Spanish in order to read Borges without the lenses of translation, but then understand that to read Borges in translation is, paradoxically, to read him in the original. I compare the translations of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ in the Penguin Labyrinths, and the Grove Press Ficciones (I prefer the former, a preference almost entirely located in the phrase ‘hateful and odd’ that appears in the footnote on the first page of the story), a pleasure which would take on the colours of authenticity or faithfulness which do not, to me, seem appropriate. Borges was also an Anglophile, so to read his texts in the language of Chesterton, enmeshed in the recursive, deferring structures of another’s language, seems right. His Anglophilia points at the interesting relation between Argentina and Britain; as I live in Wales, the Patagonian Welsh community, Y Wladfa Gymreig, is of particular interest and indicates the strong cultural and familial connections that still exist (Scots, Irish as well as English settlement was very important); indeed, Borges, while not strictly an ‘Anglo-Argentine’, had an English grandmother. In this hagiographic week of Baroness Thatcher’s death, in a period when the fate of the Malvinas/Falklands has once again become a visible controversy, Borges’s magnificently deflationary description of the 1982 war as ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’ comes, once again, to mind. I imagine a bathetic version of Goya’s Duelo a garrotazos / 'Fight with cudgels', one of the Black Paintings, with bald Thatcher and bald Galtieri up to their knees in mire, squabbling over the comb, which probably lies, largely unnoticed, in the muck.  

This morning I turned to Borges’ ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, and realised the extent to which my own fascination with the figure of the assassin in the 20^th century is mirrored in Borges’s work. In ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, Borges imagines a story in which the ‘narrator’ Ryan, writing a biography of his great-grandfather Kilpatrick, a hero of a presumed ‘Irish’ revolution in 1824 (the story itself insists that these national details are entirely arbitrary), discovers that Kilpatrick was a traitor as well as a hero, and his mysterious death, an assassination, was produced under his own orders, and the circumstances obscured to preserve the revolution itself. Ryan, in discovering this, perpetuates the myth, and buries ‘history’. The story has typical Borgesian themes – the interpenetration of texts and the ‘real’, history as repetition of mythic or archetypal scenes, time and things foretold. It is also a political fable, where the traitorous Kilpatrick becomes a hero of the revolution by an act of assassination/ sacrifice, the revolution burying the ‘truth’ of events to preserve the ideological fabric of the new polis. (John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance offers a similar narrative resolution in the Western genre.) Assassination also features centrally in my favourite Borges story, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, where the death of a man called Albert is meant to indicate the place of an Allied attack against German forces in WW1, but this is often critically occluded by an emphasis on the labyrinth as figure for the text itself. 

I realised that my own recurrent interest in the assassinations of the 1960s, and particularly an article I published in Foundation last year called ‘The Assassination Report’, is deeply indebted to a Borgesian conception of the act, a mythical transaction which intervenes in space and time. In trying to conceive of what might have informed the actions of Oswald or Charles Whitman, the sniper in the tower at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, I returned to a kind of apocalypticism: that the assassination is only partly political, and that the smaller part; the assassin attempts to transform the universe, and achieve transcendence (or transcendent power). This can be traced back, of course, to Christ, and I am reminded of the brilliant scenes in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita where Pilate interviews Jesus of Nazareth, and realises that Christ is exactly who he says he is: but cannot stop the crucifixion. As is often the way with me, it is only now, as I write, that these connections become clear (connections to another experimental piece called ‘One plus One plus One’, in the journal E.R.O.S., about the death of Brian Jones, too).  I realise that it isn’t the devil that has been haunting me, but Christ, Christ as assassin, all this time.

And death shall have no dominion

[just noticed that the blog has accumulated 10,000 page views, which may not add up to a hill of beans, but thank you anyway]

[and this post contains SPOILERS (I note that they're always in caps) for the plot of Wreck-It Ralph, in case that puts you off]

These days I mainly go to the cinema to see children's films, with my 7-and-a-half year old daughter. (Between work and commuting and family life, there's not much time left.) This weekend we went to see Wreck-It Ralph, because it had gained glowing reviews, and we hadn't been for a month or two. And it was fine, really: nicely animated, good with the retro video games look (the square, bouncing characters who lived in Fix-It Felix's apartment building were particularly fun), and I got a lump in my throat in a couple of scenes. All good. I don't think the film has any great claims to originality (its narrative is a Jungle Book/ fairy tale/ Toy Story mash-up), and I don't really think it's better than Brave, as has been claimed in places (and I don't think Brave is top-drawer Pixar either, despite its gender focus and beautiful rendering). But what struck me was that two key scenes in the film, the ones I found most emotionally affecting, were scenes in which the film cheated its way out of unresolvable dilemmas, dilemmas to do with death and loss, difficult things to approach (if at all) inside a children's animated film.

The first is when Ralph, inside the 'Sugar Rush' game, is approached by the King of the game and told that, if the young girl racer/ glitch Vanellope were to win the game, she would become an avatar, and if children were to play as this glitchy character, it might lead to the shutting down of the game. For all the other characters in this game world, it would render them refugees; but as a glitch, Vanellope would be unable to migrate to other games, and would 'die' when the power was shut off. Ralph, having helped Vanellope build the car, prevents her from driving it and, true to his name, wrecks it. Now, this is interesting, I thought; the film is proposing a kind of rites of passage, but for the locum parent rather than the child. Ralph, of limited understanding and knowledge, encounters a kind of adult, no-win situation: either he destroys the car and betrays Vanellope's dreams, or he allows her to race and allow a set of events to unfold which might result in her 'death'. Properly, Ralph chooses the least-worst scenario, and wrecks the car; unfortunately, his incapacities (of speech and thought) mean that he can't explain to Vanellope just why he has done this, and she sees it purely as a betrayal (just like ol' Baloo trying to explain to Mowgli why he should go to the man-village; 'You wouldn't marry a panther, would you?', with the same results).

So, an entry into the adult world, I thought, interesting. But then the film cheats itself out of this dilemma, and the audience's possible alienation from Ralph-as-betrayer, by revealing that the King's story was not true, that Ralph had been deceived. There was no need to destroy the car; indeed, the imperative is to reconstruct it, and allow Vanellope to race (her dreams and narrative resolution stitched back together). This possibility had been flagged up by the prior behaviour of the King, who is explicitly typed as a malign version of the Mad Hatter in the Disney Alice, so it's narratively legitimated, but emotionally, a cheat, not least because it loads the scene with significance and seeks a response, then invalidates it as the scene's outcome is narrratively inconvenient. The overall narrative logic - Vanellope resolves the film by winning the race - is at odds with the the emotional logic of the developing parent-child relationship; but the film cheats because it wants us to have both.

The same is true of a later scene, where Ralph 'saves' the world of 'Sugar Rush' by wrecking a Mentos plug in the throat of a Coca-Cola volcano, causing an eruption that will draw invading 'cy-bugs' to it. He can only do this by killing himself in the process, smashing down on the surface to plunge the Mentos into the boiling Coke below (thereby immolating himself). This he does, and a tear came into my eye as, in slow motion, Ralph seems to fall to his death, a sacrifice that will save Sugar Rush and Vanellope (but, somewhat forgotten, would condemn his own game and its characters to permanent 'Out of Order' status). This, once more, completes a kind of emotional logic, a kind of redemption-through-heroic-sacrifice for Ralph - he had, inadvertently, brought the 'cy-bug' into Sugar Rush in the first place; and as a locum father, is willing to give himself so that his 'daughter' may live on.

And then, again, the film cheats itself out of the impasse: Vanellope uses her glitching power to pilot her race car to the mountain in time to save the falling Ralph. And all's well.

But I thought: wait a minute. Twice this film has pulled the same trick, got me to respond emotionally to moments of loss (innocence, life) but has then, through narrative prestidigitation, invalidated them. Ralph's act has emotional meaning because he sacrifices himself; but the narrative of the film can't allow him to die. (It's like when the gang are about to go down into the Pit in Toy Story 3 - where at least the makers had the good grace to indicate that rescue was nothing more than a literal deus ex machina, the Claw.) The emotional responses produced in Wreck-It Ralph are a con, because they run counter to the narrative logic and are quickly got round; an exercise in button-pushing, no more.

This set me thinking about death and loss in children's films, and how even recent films that come close to a truly affecting moment end up looking away (just as Baloo's 'death' in The Jungle Book is undone by a joke and a swift restitution of the the double-act with Bagheera). In Toy Story 3, noted above, or in Brave, where the human 'light' going out in the mother/bear's eyes is wonderfully done but then swiftly reversed,  film-makers sail close to death and loss to gain an emotional punch, but finesse the problem narratively to allow the audience to have their cake and eat it. Just like in video games, nobody dies, the film resets, and we can leave the theatre with a song. 'Look for those bare necessities...'

This is not to say that I want my daughter and I to sit through films where main characters are killed off all the time (though I think it's to the credit of a film like Bridge to Terabithia that it takes death and loss of a primary character head-on). But I want even children's films not to cheat me, to get me choked up and then say - it didn't matter anyway. You might argue that Wreck-it Ralph's logic is that of the video game, with multiple lives, the possibility of the reset; but the film goes out of its way to assert that, for Vanellope, and for any character who 'dies' outside of their own game world, it is the end. Except, of course, for when it is not.

The Doors of Apperception

On my commute to and from work, I’m prey to the schedules of BBC Radio 4’s afternoon programming. This is very mixed fare, but the other day I heard a program in the Word of Mouth strand on language and autism. At the centre of the programme was Phoebe Caldwell, who has worked with many autism-spectrum children, and in her idea of ‘intensive interaction’ stressed the idea of ‘listening with all the senses’ or ‘total attention’, an interaction that isn’t based on linguistic communication but on a range of practices.  The difficulty for autistic children, she suggested, was that the processing equipment that human beings generally acquire as part of ‘normal’ development – the ability to filter out the barrage of auditory, visual, semiotic and emotional information which comprises the sensorium of modernity – is not acquired. The implication is that ‘normally’ developed human adults construct a kind of membrane or shell, a distancing or processing system, which enables us to operate within the (Benjaminian) shocks of modernity without being overcome.

That hearing, listening and attentiveness are not a transparent processing/ recording system is simple to demonstrate from everyday life. It’s a common experience, for instance, to enter a psychological ‘zone’, where concentration or heightened attention causes the blocking out of extraneous noise, or visual stimulus, or voices. Or, if you record a conversation in a busy room, the separation of background/ ambient sound from foreground conversation (noise and signal) that the brain operates for us is flattened by recording equipment that lacks the psychological processing/ filtering that inheres in the physical act of hearing. Your experience and memory of that conversation will be directed towards what was said; the device will pick up everything in its field. (Joe Banks’s Rorschach Audio project places this post-physical sound processing at the centre of its investigation of EVP and other sound phenomena.) Attention is crucial not only to listening, but to the (f)act of hearing itself.

It seems clear to me that the disciplinary regime of attention in the visual field that Jonathan Crary analysed in his fine book Suspensions of Perception is replicated in the auditory field. Crary suggests that visual attention is subject to discipline in order to fit the human subject more efficiently into the tasks required of the worker in industrial modernity – which, at the same time, because of the repetitiveness of these tasks, produces a correlative inattentiveness (boredom) in irreducible tension. The disciplining of the auditory perceptual apparatus, the construction of the auditory membrane, is an index of just how fragile the human consciousness is; it cannot bear the full sensorial stimulation of the modernity that humans have themselves created, and to operate with a measure of facility, has to filter out most of the stimuli. The difficult experiences of the autistic subject, without the disciplinary or protective apparatus in place, demonstrates not their ‘diminished’ capacity to operate in the world, a deficiency; rather, what we consider to be a ‘normal’ apperceptual regime is in fact constructed to shield us from the overwhelming experience of modernity.

I’m reminded of Ballard’s ‘Low Flying Aircraft’, where the cessation of ‘normal’ births and the delivery instead of ‘mutated’ children – perceived by an increasingly gerontocratic population to be ‘deformed’, other – leads to a horrendous slaughter of the innocents. In a neat reversal, Ballard’s protagonist realises that the ‘deformed’ children are in fact the product of biological and evolutionary necessity, and will be more fitted to the coming changes in the Earth’s ecology than their ‘normal’ parents, who will themselves die off and be supplanted. Ballard's typical motif of the necessity of embracing biological or evolutionary change is used to displace the human from the centre of the narrative, or rather, what is commonly held to be the 'human'.

Ballard's reversal of field, the exposure of assumptions of normalcy and otherness, reveals how constructed the human subject is, how fragile, how temporary, how limited; and, by extension, how necessary for the regimes of capital and modernity are the psychic, cultural and apperceptual defences that surround and protect us, that are constructed by and protect us from the very world constructed by human agency. Is there possible a bypassing of the apperceptual membrane, a way of circumventing the filters, without inflicting psychological damage? Is this, then, the project of the hermit, the divine, the self-excluded seeker: to open up, in silence, in nature, by meditation or isolation or other practice, a fuller perceptual experience? To become more or differently human through excluding the noise of the social?

It's little wonder, perhaps, that I've read Huxley's The Doors of Perception recently, or that I find the utopian and psychedelic yearnings of the late 60s and early 70s (documented in Rob Young's Electric Eden) so fascinating. Sometimes I too would like to switch everything off, enjoy the silence, and see what happens. 

Ian Sales's The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself

Source: http://whippleshieldbooks.wordpress.com/

Ian Sales’ second novella in his Apollo Quartet, The Eye With Which the Universe Beholds Itself, will be published in early 2013. The first, Adrift on the Sea of Rains (which I wrote about here) projected an alternative 1970s during which the Apollo program was not discontinued, but was developed to found a moonbase, a research station for the investigation of Nazi ‘wunderwaffe’ (miracle weapons). These ‘wunderwaffe’ include die Glocke, ‘the Bell’. In a short story available as a chapbook or ebook, Sales imagines a pre-history for this wonder-weapon, in which the Nazi scientist Rotwang constructs a cyborgised ‘Maria’ to travel through the portal that the Bell opens in space-time, he presumes to another part of the planet. When the protagonist follows Maria through the portal, he discovers that the Bell is no teleportation device, but a means by which to travel into the far past, or (perhaps) another, parallel world. ‘Wunderwaffe’ is a highly enjoyable mash-up of Metropolis, Nazi myths, Ultima Thule/ Atlantis legends and time-travel sf; in its playful use of a range of generic and pop-cultural material, it corresponds to a story like Charles Stross’s ‘A Colder War’, where the Cthulu mythos is stitched onto the Cold War and Space Race eras.

‘Wunderwaffe’ also has a bibliography; so do Adrift on the Sea of Rains and The Eye With Which the Universe Beholds Itself. In some ways, this seems like an extension of Sales’s preference for verifiable, science-based sf that didn’t need implausible gosh-wow special effects and OTT space-operatics to be good science fiction, or indeed to entertain’ (from his Introduction to the collection Rocket Science, 2012, edited by Sales himself). The bibliographies seem to privilege fact, not fabulation; research , rather than making up worlds out of whole cloth. We can, however, see the bibliography as part of the apparatus of the text itself, part of a world of documentation, a textual world: the world of scientific reports, NASA manuals, technical files. In both novellas, much of the historical backstory and framing context is given in a ‘Glossary’ section, which ostensibly concentrates on the technical details of the story (Apollo or Ares missions, names for craft and suits) but is a kind of parallel texts, a means of providing information without disrupting the economy of the novellas’ narratives. In The Eye With Which..., an important ‘Coda’ is placed between the Glossary and Bibliography. So, while seeming to offer a transparent, hard-sf narrative, Sales’s texts actually reflect the playfulness of what once might have been called ‘postmodernist’ fiction, and require the reader to do a bit of decoding.

This is also true of the actual story of The Eye With Which..., because, as the second text in the Apollo Quartet, one might expect a continuity with the world of Adrift on the Sea of Rains. Not so. Careful examination shows that the latter novel is, in fact, on a subtly different time-line, though both novellas extrapolate from the Apollo program. In Adrift..., the extended Moon program is a direct extension of the historical Apollo; in The Eye With Which..., the point of divergence is the moment in the descent of Apollo 11’s LM when Armstrong, in ‘our’ world and history, piloted the module manually to a safe landing. The Eye With Which... predicates NASA’s Mars program (named Ares) on Armstrong’s decision to abort the landing, which then gives the opportunity for the Soviet Zond program to land Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov on the Moon first. (In our history, the catastrophic failure of the 3 July 1969 test of the N1 rocket delayed the Soviet program for 2 years, and no Cosmonaut ever walked upon the Moon.) This failure drives the US to land a human being on Mars, which is the Ares program; this first man is the protagonist of The Eye With Which..., Major (later Brigadier General) Bradley Emerson Elliott.

The Eye With Which... is a narrative with a double time-frame; in 1979, Major Elliott lands upon Mars, and makes a discovery that will alter the possibilities of human exploration of the galaxy; in 1999, Brigadier General Elliott (long since absent from NASA) is invited to travel to a distant star aboard a craft powered by the technology that is a result of his Mars landing. It’s a cunning device, and works really effectively: time is itself in a kind of flux, unstable, just as it is under the influence of die Glocke in Adrift... and ‘Wunderwaffe’. Sales ties in the second mission with Elliott’s growing estrangement from his wife, a consequence of his career as an astronaut (and the kind of desires and gratifications that career entails). The characterisation of Elliott is an advance on the heroic Peterson of Adrift..., and the sense of those left behind (the astronaut’s wife as a kind of symbol) becomes crucial to the emotional import of the story. A later novella in the quartet is promised to feature an astronaut’s wife in the centre of the narrative.

One of the strengths of The Eye With Which... is how it handles fairly hoary sf tropes (FTL drive, alien artefacts) within a concrete world not very far removed from the technological development of our own. Eliott travels to the FTL craft aboard ships not noticeably more refined than Apollo Command Modules; the interiors of the stations he visits are recognisable from Skylab or Mir. Inter-service rivalries and resentments are apparent, and the Space Command astronauts seem at once respectful of and suspicious of their distinguished visitor. There’s a human emotional complexity to The Eye With Which... that is an advance upon the technical homosocial group of Adrift..., though it’s is still predominantly a masculine world. The consequences of that gender imbalance are, though, much more apparent.

Both Adrift... and The Eye With Which... are published through Sales’s own Whippleshield Books imprint, and the impressive design of the first novella (and high-quality feel of the book as object) look to be repeated here. If you bought and liked Adrift... (or ‘Wunderwaffe’), The Eye With Which... is a worthy sequel and impressive advance, a  must-buy; if you don’t know Sales’s work, I thoroughly recommend it. It’s detailed, thoughtful, artfully constructed, and highly impressive sf. It will be published in January 2013.

Space is the place (utopia and silence)

Even though, in his 1962 guest editorial-cum-manifesto 'Which Way to Inner Space?' in New Worlds, JG Ballard repudiated a science fiction of 'robot brains and hyper-drives' and instead proposed a fiction which explored 'inner space, not outer', he consistently returned to the figure of the astronaut. In fictions such as 'A Question of Re-entry' (1963) (which posited the arrival of a dead astronaut in the South American jungles as a kind of cargo cult) to the 'fugue time' stories of the late 1970s ('News From the Sun', 'Memories of the Space Age'), where the NASA space programme 'cracks the hour glass of time' and leads to various forms of 'space sickness', the astronaut is a central and symbolic figure, a kind of evolutionary mistake which leads nonetheless to a pathway out of time.

Ballard's refiguration of the NASA programme as a symbol for both human error and human potentiality, while at the same time abandoning the actual possibilities of orbital, lunar, inter-planetary or deep space exploration, foreshadows the fate of both NASA and the Soviet space programmes at the hands of science fiction. In my book on Masculinities in Fiction and Film, I noted how few science fiction films used NASA imagery (environment suits, Saturn Vs and LMs), or extrapolated from Apollo. There is Marooned in the mid-60s, about a disaster in space; Capricorn One, about a faked Mars mission; the historical pictures The Right Stuff and Apollo 13; De Palma's Mission to Mars and Clint's Space Cowboys; but not many others. Recently, Ian Sales has done an excellent job of imagining an alternate history of the Apollo programme during the 1970s (which turns to military missions) in Adrift on the Sea of Rains; and I can also think of Sterling and Gibson's 'Red Star, Winter Orbit' (collected in Mirrorshades), which imagines a decaying 'Kosmograd' space station at the point of its cancellation, with the central character a cosmonaut - the first man on Mars – whose weakened bone structures will not allow him to return to Earth.

I've always wondered why this was so, as, even though I was born in March 1969, and so was only three months old when Armstrong set foot on the Moon, the majestic Saturn V and the fragile, delicate Lunar Module have always been iconic and deeply resonant objects for me. (I wish I had bought Airfix kits of them when I was a lad.) The Space Race still excites me, there seems something grand and extraordinary about it, even though it was obviously profoundly implicated in the Cold War and what Dale Carter once called 'the American Rocket State'. (His book, The Final Frontier, is now some 25 years old.)

Thinking about space and silence recently (about the cosmological register of RS Thomas's later poems about God, for instance), I came across a piece written by Eduardo Rothe and published in the Situationist International number 12, 'The Conquest of Space in the Time of Power', which pointed towards a contemporary critique of the Apollo programme and why sf writers may have shunned it. Rothe conceptualises the space programme as part of 'spectacle', the Situationist figure for both ideology and media representation, and the astronauts as media 'stars'. Rothe suggests that the 'science' involved is both militarised and ideological, and is used in the service of placing a human upon the moon in order 'to make people march to the time of work'. 

Most importantly, Rothe posits the space programme as 'part of the planetary hope of an economic system which, saturated with commodities, spectacle and power, ejaculates into space when it arrives at the end of a noose of its territorial contradictions. Functioning as a new “America”, space must serve the states as a new territory for wars and colonies - a new territory to which to send producer-consumers and thus enable the system to break out of the planet's limitations'. This reading would view space exploration as a form of primitive accumulation, the acquisition of new territory (new space) to enable the further expansion of capital (and thereby forestall the otherwise inevitable crisis of the exhaustion of expansion of terrestrial markets). There is also an inescapable colonial or imperial imperative to this expansion.

At the end of Rothe's essay, he proposes that 'once the walls have been smashed that now separate people from science, the conquest of space will no longer be an economic or military “promotional” gimmick, but the blossoming of human freedoms and fulfilments'. If the exploration of space is to be taken away from technical specialisation, bureaucracy and the military-industrial complex, then what will take its place?

The Sterling/ Gibson story I mentioned above, 'Red Star, Winter Orbit', offers one possibility. At the end of the story, with the cosmonaut Korolev seemingly trapped on a damaged station in a decaying orbit, he is surprised to be 'visited' by travellers from detourned 'solar balloons, mirrored geodesic spheres tethered by power lines', a failed solution to an energy crisis taken over by raggle-taggle 'new frontiersmen' who have 'made the big jump' (by firing booster rockets in mid-air) to orbital space. This colonisation is democratic, unplanned by governments or bureaucracies, to be inhabited by parents and children rather than technocratic astro- or cosmonauts.

It's difficult quite to know how to read this story. In one sense, it's a part of a Gibsonian 'the street has its uses for things' politics of detournement, retrofitting and appropriation. On the other hand, it seems to privilege a sentimentalised idea of the frontier which speaks to a peculiarly American mythos of can-do, individualism and rejection of government. As is perhaps typical of cyberpunk era sf, it is legible in terms of the politics of both left and right.

The possibility of space exploration as the imagination (and settlement) of an autonomous space brought to mind the activities of the AAA, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, who were active from 1995-2000, and whose avowed aims were to democratise space exploration and promote the building of working-class spaceships, and thereby offered a critique (expressed in Situationist and absurdist terms) of the techno-militarism of Soviet and NASA space programs. The AAA were part of a wave of marginal, avant-gardist individual and groups that operated in the 1980s and 90s and whose documents were collected by Stewart Home in Mind Invaders (1997), some of which were written by Home himself. The AAA's 'dreamtime mission' was itself to destroy a dualism between outer and inner space, and the 'craft' used to travel in space could be mental or psychic as well as physical. Strong echoes of Ballard here, then – the outer collapsed onto the inner – as well as the suggestions of occultism that also flavoured some of Home's more outré and provocative documents.

Tom McCarthy’s later ‘International Necronautical Society’, a part-pastiche avant-garde group (also including Simon Critchley) which disseminated communiqués and manifestos in time-honoured Modernist tradition, was clearly influenced by the work of the AAA. In a ForteanTimes piece on the INS, McCarthy claims the influence of both Situationism and of the AAA directly, and an interview with the Autonomous Astronauts appears on the INS website. Stewart Home’s critique of the INS (partly through a mocking blog review of a 2009 talk held at Tate Britain) was that, although they inherit the ‘merciless assault on authenticity’ which connected the Neoist/ Psychogeographical/ Luther Blissett/ AAA groups in the 80s and 90s, it was rendered in a discourse that is more literary and academic: where the AAA’s ‘craft’ are explicitly connected to the politics of a working-class appropriation of space flight, the INS’s ‘craft’ are purposed to journey into, and occupy the space of death itself. For me, death isn’t the interesting part of the project: it is, rather, the sense that we live in a world of aetheric transmissions, signals, ‘programming’, that ‘thinks us’, a radical critique of subjectivity (and, in terms of poetics, of ‘originality’ or ‘authenticity’ or Romantic ideas of genius) that chimes entirely with my own thoughts – and, in terms of ‘receiving’ messages from the Outside (Jack Spicer’s word), also hints at my own writing practice.

While I find the INS documents collected in The Mattering of Matter (and re-played/ remixed in McCarthy’s e-book essay Transmission and the Individual Remix) stimulating, and work as a parallel endeavour to the kind of texts and ideas I have myself been working through over the last couple of years (Orphée, Burroughs, transmission, Kraftwerk, Rilke, EVP, tape, radio) it seems to me that this is a retreat from the world of politics into the world of art. The INS’s provocations – often using the language of Marinetti’s Futurism or the work of Heidiegger, as well as less problematic figures from post-war critical theory such as Blanchot or Derrida – speak the language of the academy rather than the 'street' or the everyday. Death may indeed always be with us, but the concept of occupying the space of death is figural rather than utopian.

And this is where I would like to return to space, and to silence. In my last post, I noted how Derrida posited the impossibility of silence, of ‘saying nothing’, and ‘how not to say’ was implicated both in silence and in speaking properly. Silence, then, may be thought of in terms of a Utopian dynamic, what Fredric Jameson identifies as the ‘failure to project the Other of what is’, failing to imagine the future, a failure that (in positive terms) always returns us to the urgent political imperatives of our own world and time. This may explain the recent controversy in the sf world to do with the ‘exhaustion of sf’, which Paul Kincaid associated with a failure to imagine the future that is diagnostic not simply of generic exhaustion but of a cultural and political moment. Can we imagine the future? Can we imagine space? Can we imagine death? If we build symbolic craft to journey into them and to return, this in itself becomes a utopian project, an encoding of the desire to imagine, to represent, to comprehend the Other – and to transmit those findings.

In a world of transmissions, Twitter, blogs, social media; and considering that I need to write as part of my job; perhaps my attraction to silence, the space of silence, the Other of language (which is God), is a Utopian yearning that I should always strive for, even if I always fail to achieve it. (And in the worlds of Beckett, quoted so often in the texts I have read recently: fail better.)