I am gradually coming to terms with dog-ownership.((http://An end to)) I still struggle with the presence of a restless and demanding animal1 in the house and her talent for destruction. This afternoon, for instance, she has eaten the lace on my new pair of vegan boots, for which I have saved for some time. Nevertheless, on the whole, Tia is extremely sweet-natured and is beginning to understand commands and, when she’s not distracted by smells, birds, the cat or other dogs, is attentive and obedient enough. I’ve walked her without Amanda a fair bit, and I am beginning to really enjoy the time I spend with her.
One advantage is that she has made having an English Heritage2 membership worthwhile. Apart from Osborne House3, the card gains us entry to Carisbrooke Castle4, which is a proper castle, in just the right state of decay.
It’s a Norman castle, with a high keep and a large bailey that has a variety of buildings within it, as well as a lovely walled garden. The bailey walls are almost complete and you can walk around them, which offers amazing views of the Island in all directions. The first picture above shows Tia, on guard, this morning.
There are fields and outer battlements, mostly Elizabethan and eighteenth century, around the outside, and dogs are free to run off-lead there. We started our visit with a circuit round the outside of the castle and Tia galloped about, inquisitive and gleeful, disappearing into the woods that ring the area before reappearing, with a look of joy, and racing towards me like a happy hare. One of the tricks a dog owner needs to develop is confidence in their animal. I am gradually learning that she will always return. She may wander, but she won’t go far without checking back with me.
After we’d had our gallop, we went into the castle. It was still early and the staff were getting ready for the last day of half-term events. We stopped at the donkey stables, which Tia wasn’t sure about, and then went up to the tea room, which is in a beautiful castle building, nestled against the bailey wall. We sat in the courtyard and I had my coffee and, unasked, a member of staff brought out a dog bowl of water for Tia. I was very moved by the kindness.
We were up in Suffolk for a few days this week, visiting my parents, who were charmed by the dog. Amanda wanted to do various bits of shopping, so on Friday I took Tia over to West Stow Country Park,5 which I loved when I was a child. There is a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village there, but it is fenced and dogs are forbidden. However, the park itself is large and contains a lake, made from an old gravel pit, and has several long trails looping through it. When I was last there, fifteen years ago, it was still quite a bare place, with only young trees. The woods have thickened and matured now, and the lake looks quite natural. A river, the Lark, is well-maintained and is the only place I have ever seen otter trail in the wild, although that was when I was in my teens.
Tia and I walked around the lake, on a lovely late-autumn afternoon, with the sun low in the sky. We saw only a few other people and she was in her element. Unfortunately, there is a “dogs-on-leads-only” rule; Bury St Edmunds, being Tory to its very core, seems to be a place that loves rules for their own sake, as I can’t see what harm a dog running around in that large open space could do. However, I am an example of obedience, so Tia didn’t get to canter about, beyond the speed I can manage.
She seemed to enjoy it, though, and I achieved the peace that, as I am learning, a long walk in the company of a dog can inspire.
Yesterday, before we left Bury for the tedious journey home, we went into town to do some last-minute shopping. There is a science fiction exhibition on at Moyses Hall Museum6 and various cosplay people were standing outside, wearing Star Wars and Judge Dredd costumes and that expression of defiant embarrassment that cosplay fantasists maintain. I asked the stormtrooper to hold Tia’s lead while I took a photo, but she was unimpressed and failed to pose. The sweet young jedi made up for Tia’s failure. I have a feeling I will treasure this image.
I’m not sure I really have the time to maintain this blog any more. The part of it that matters to me most, the book reviews, take a day to write, at least, and, lately, a spare day has not been available.
Work, like a noxious gas, expands to fill all space. My job is supposed to be part time, twenty-four hours per week but it is not. I gave up the memory group work last month, so that I had more time to keep up with admin for my teaching job, but I seem to have even less time this year, with large classes and an enrolment and assessment system that demands huge amounts of repetitive paperwork.
Nevertheless, I am keeping up with that, and my learners seem, for the most part, happy. With the first half term over, my classes are making progress: we will be entering the English learners for reading exams for the end of term and I am optimistic that it will be a successful round of assessments. In maths, my classes are progressing well through the basic calculation material and we will be able to get on to application before Christmas.
Besides work, however, I have started an Open University course in Science, Technology and Maths. I am hoping to progress to a computing and IT degree next year. I wanted to improve my maths knowledge to underpin my teaching, but am also thinking ahead: I don’t want to be trapped in this job until I drop, as it is quite physically demanding. I have to cart large amounts of paperwork, books and a laptop around to different venues, put out tables, and am on my feet for two hours at a time as I teach. Even the act of crouching beside a desk as I guide a learner is something that I will not be able to do for many more years. I am fit enough, but my feet aren’t great and the aches and pains of middle age are beginning to catch up with me.
So, I thought that an IT degree, finished before I’m sixty, might offer me a few options. It is a sort of interest of mine: I am dubious about the mainstream methods of communication and would like to be able to set up my own channels. Not being on Facebook1 and Twitter2 is a major impediment to participation in some things, particularly politics and social events, but I sense that their high water marks may be about to pass. I would like to keep up with the tech, but not be dependent upon having to pay through the nose for new machines every time things change. For that, I need better skills in open source software, and for that, I need training.
So far, the OU course is only two weeks old and is, mostly, about study skills and a bit of environmental science. It’s an access course, so it’s about preparing learners for degree study. I’ve learnt a little bit, but not been seriously challenged yet. However, an upcoming task is to master a scientific calculator, which I am both dreading and looking forward to.
I intended to do that yesterday, but Ubuntu3 released its new version on Thursday and, like a fool, I set my desktop computer to upgrade on Friday. I should have remembered that every upgrade means I am dazzled into tinkering with my set-up.
I’m pretty sure this is Ubuntu 07.04, the first version I installed. It is running Gnome 2 with the BUUF icon scheme.A search for my first ever blog, listentopete.blogspot, about which I had completely forgotten. The gmail address is long-deleted, so don’t get excited.Ubuntu 2014ish? It’s the Unity desktop, still with BUUF icons. I was having a jazz phase, as you can see.Another shot from 2014. I don’t think my Ubuntu setup has ever looked lovelier.2015. I bought one of those phones: an absolute disaster.
That is particularly true of this upgrade, which is quite a fundamental change. Ubuntu has reverted to a Gnome Desktop,((http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/06/latest-ubuntu-17-10-update-ditches-unity-desktop-installs-gnome)) which is a shame in some ways. I have come to like the Unity desktop, but its rationale has been superseded by developments. The huge advantage of Gnome is its maturity and its integrated applications. Yesterday, I spent most of the day changing applications: I have, for instance, removed Evolution email and Calendar, because Gnome comes with a lovely calendar app and works beautifully with the simple but superb Geary email app.4
I also set up back ups, for the first time. I have relied upon an external hard drive for keeping copies of things, but it is old and becoming more of a risk than a safeguard. Last year, in a fit of optimism, I bought a 1TB hard drive and a caddy in which to run it. It is now almost full with a full set of Deja-Dup files and, if my six-year-old desktop suffers a catastrophic failure, I should have some recourse. I’d like to set up a Nextcloud server to be a secondary backup, but that takes time, resources and knowledge: all in short supply. Without those qualities, it takes money, and I really can’t afford to rent a cloud service: I’m already paying nearly £200 per year to keep this site running.
So, work and computers are my main time suckers. What else?
Well, Amanda, very skillfully, has organised the renovation of our kitchen. We went over to Ikea in Southampton on a couple of beautiful days this summer, and bought nearly two grands worth of boxes, which are currently piled up in our dining room. Last week, a very nice electrician did the wiring of the kitchen, although I think he’s done one fewer sockets than we asked for, which could mean I will be stuck with making a choice between the kettle and music when I’m cooking.
So, this half term break has a task hanging over it: assembling and installing kitchen units, getting it finished off by various trades people who know what they’re doing, and decorating the kitchen. I loathe DIY.
The other time killer is the bloody dog. She is a sweet enough animal, and I do have moments of adoration, but, Oh God! What a fucking palaver owning a dog is! As dogs go, she’s not that noisy, but there’s just that constant inquisitive presence, demanding attention, whenever I move around the house. The house smells of her, and the carpets all need deep cleaning because she whines so much in the morning that we don’t know when she’s whining to go out for a piss and when she’s just whining because we’re not in the same room as her.
Amanda and Tia in Firestone Copse, September 2017
Having said that, the walks are nice. We went to Firestone Copse on Friday and had a really good wander. She can be let off the lead now, which means Amanda and I can talk, when Amanda’s not trying to turn the whole thing into a ‘training session’. On days when long walks aren’t possible, we are lucky to have two recreation grounds within five minutes’ walk. Also, I have got into the practice of taking Tia up to Osborne House if Amanda wants a sleep in the afternoon and I’ve finished work. Dogs have to be kept on leads there, but Tia’s happy enough sniffing around. The grounds are beautiful and I get an hour of daydreaming. We wander along the valley walk path, through Prince Albert’s landscaped park, down to the beach, and then back up through the woods, past the cottage and along the top field. We have had quite a lot of good autumn weather this year, although it has been punctuated by extreme bizarreness, and it has been lovely to have a reason to get out and enjoy it.
So, yes, I am busy. Having laid it all out here, though, it sounds less awful than it has seemed. I have a lot to be grateful for, really, even if it does include a bloody dog. The cat’s adapted;5 so shall I.
Update December ’21: I was wrong: Geary was a nightmare and the Gnome Calendar sacrifices flexibility for beauty. I now use Thunderbird for both functions. [↩]
When we were considering getting a dog,1 I repeatedly expressed concern about the cat and the response (from, as I now realise, mainly dog lovers) was invariably, “Don’t worry about it; they’ll work it out.”
This is a comforting lie. What has happened is that the cat’s indoor territory and his freedom of movement through the house has been drastically reduced. Tia, the dog, can be taught to sit, lie down, be quiet and wait, but only if the cat isn’t about. If he is, she will terrorise him, and the cat has had to confine himself to upstairs, beyond the incredibly inconvenient stairgate we’ve fitted to keep Tia downstairs. She is jealous of any attention he receives and will whine and yap as I pet him. She regards him as an intrusion to be driven out.
While I am enjoying the walks with Tia, despite the fact that they eat up huge chunks of time and fill up my already over-allotted days, making time to think, write or read even rarer than it was, I do not really like her. She is like a charming, beautiful, spoilt princess who has disrupted my life when it didn’t really have time for disruption.
Fortunately, Albee is a stoic, and has claws, so he gets in and out of the house with a little help and can find peace on our bed or in my study. However, I miss his presence in the sitting room or in the garden, from which the little princess has entirely driven him. He goes over the road now, to the garden opposite, and no doubt annoys our neighbours’ cats, passing on the misery.I’m sorry, Albee.
The cat is not amused and I am bewildered, but Amanda wanted one, researched the whole process and procured Tia, a Cypriot refugee, from a rescue charity.
She is a sort of miniature labrador, spaniel-sized and very hectic, but gentle and sweet-natured with it. My cat lover’s heart has been somewhat won over, despite the destruction she has wrought. Amanda is besotted and very happy, and that’s good enough for me.
Amanda and me on the Undercliff path. Photo: Charlotte Kirin
My sister, Charlotte, and Amanda’s friend, Marny, stayed with us this weekend, arriving on Friday night and leaving this morning, Sunday.
Beside the pleasure of a couple of drunken suppers in the company of three intelligent, amazing women, I was reminded by their visit just how lucky I am to live on the Isle of Wight. Yesterday, after a lazy breakfast, sitting in our garden until lunchtime, drinking coffee and enjoying Marny and Charlotte’s demolitions of their respective ex-husbands, we drove to the south coast of the Island and had a walk down beneath the Undercliff between St Catherine’s Point and St Lawrence.1
The day was clear and bright, with a decent breeze: perfect walking weather. Our guests were dazzled by the beauty of the coast and we rediscovered how lucky we are to live in an area where such beauty is a short journey away. Charlotte had brought her dog, Jasper, who responded to the open space of the beach with the sort of glee only a dog off its lead can project. It was a bit of a clamber to get to the isolated beach, but it was a wonderful outing.
In the photo above, you can see the point that marks the start of Binnel Bay. We walked to just before the Point, and then, thoughts of beer and chips calling, made our way back, before climbing back up the Undercliff Path to The Buddle Inn,((http://www.buddleinn.co.uk/)) where we had a pint in their gorgeous garden.
We drove on into Ventnor for our chips, which was a stage too far for my energy levels, really, but was an experience of faded seaside glory at its most Islandy. When we got home, we ended up collapsed on our sofas, knackered, and I abandoned plans to cook supper, in favour of phoning for a takeaway from the excellent Taste of India2 in East Cowes, where Amanda and I had spent a lovely evening last summer.
Forgive me allowing myself a little boast, but I feel as though, for once in my life, I was ahead of the herd. I joined the Labour Party because of Jeremy Corbyn, have voted for him for leader twice, and have never lost faith in his power to be a potent influence for good in British life. I have a ‘Corbynista’ shirt which I have worn to local party meetings throughout the Blairite fightback, and I have held out hope, through two turbulent, contentious years, that a lucid, honest politician, who talks about real life rather than rarefied, contained abstractions, could bring British politics back to sanity.
Of course, I am in the lowest twenty percent of median average household incomes, and approximately £500 per year worse off than I was before 2008, which is probably, when we get past the hypnotised fixation with media control, a pretty good driver of mood. I’ve also been working in public service throughout the period in which the Tory hit squads have been “working tirelessly” to destroy them.
Until a couple of weeks ago, being a Corbyn supporting member of the Labour Party was seen widely as an extreme position, but it suddenly appears mainstream, and the violent, corrupt, brutish, hateful extremism that has passed as the political centre-ground for most of my life, just as suddenly, seems like a marginal, confused, farcical and outmoded embarrassment. It’s not gone; it’s still hanging on and still a danger, but a visible one, stripped of its disguising power to confuse. Neo-liberalism is looking vulnerable, fragile.
Nine weeks ago, it seemed as though we were enduring business as usual and that it was fixed and eternal. True, the Labour Party continued to make dangerously reasonable and realistic policy statements, as they had been doing for the last year, but they were drowned beneath news stories that all started with “the trouble with these ideas is that they’re not part of the proper political dialogue”. I was avoiding media, reading the LRB but staying away from the ‘news’, because its hypocrisy just enraged me. Every time I heard a commentator who was, supposedly, ‘in the loop’, I was reminded of my favourite piece of cartoon art.
So, we had a government committed to an ideology that was impossible to pin down, but amounted to the idea that the state and state institutions are somehow inherently evil and must be dismantled. In practice, what that meant was that they had to make life as hard as possible for ordinary people. There was a crisis, which, again, they couldn’t clearly identify, but it involved, variously,
* being threatened by refugees, who were about to “flood” this country and destroy some, again unidentifiable, quality of Britishness. The fact that those refugees were mainly children, starving in abject, wretched poverty in a field in Calais, didn’t reduce the threat.
* being ripped off by an endless horde of people who pretended to be ill, or disabled, or dying, or old, so that they could live at the expense of Tory voters whose property is more sacrosanct than the lives of people with disabilities.
* being incandescently offended by a failure to worship at the altar of the military, or the royal family, or “traitors” not eating fish and chips in a suitably patriotic manner.
The method they chose for addressing the nagging sense of threat they were so busy maintaining was to impoverish the majority of British people and tell us that it was for our own good. In the meantime, the publicly owned structures – our shared wealth – was to be stolen from us and given to various privatisation parasites, prominent among whom were Richard Branson, American banks and Rupert Murdoch’s advertisers, all of whom seemed to be, mysteriously, clients of Theresa May’s husband.
It also meant, as Chris Riddell’s brilliant depiction of the establishment delusion illustrates, that they were compelled to continue making more refugees, by manufacturing excuses for constant, unending war. And, it turns out with only a very little googling, that most of the government had financial interests in that process as well.
Michael Gove. Penfold. Not my image.
It sounds as though it should be a story about evil genius, but the truth is they’re not geniuses. To list the parade of fools who make up the front row of our current government is to court despair: Michael Gove, the Penfold lookalike who dreams of an illiterate peasantry; Chris Grayling, who reversed a decade’ improvements in the criminal justice system in a few short years of amateurish profiteering; David Davis, who is currently humiliating us with his cluelessness in the Brexit ‘negotiations’, and Boris Johnson, who Marina Hyde brilliantly described last week1 as “Britain’s foremost stupid-person’s-idea-of-a-clever-person”. Then there’s the odious and openly corrupt Jeremy Hunt, who never saw a piece of public property he didn’t try to flog and the floundering and out-of-his-depth chancellor Philip Hammond: they’re all dim-witted crooks, propped up by worn-out spin and at one another’s throats because they serve the deepest right-wing lie: look after number one and never tell the truth when a good lie will do. They are, as Frankie Boyle says in the video below, “…some of the worst people in the world…broken sociopaths.”2
The battles they’re really concerned with are not the challenges of taking responsibility for the safety, well-being and prosperity of this country. Rather, they are fixed on their own in-fighting; the maintenance of their individual positions in a deeply antagonistic and futile occupation: professional establishment politicking. It’s a game to them. When we ask what on Earth Theresa May was thinking, calling an early election just after having declared to the EU that we were off, we have to remember: it wasn’t about us. Their game-playing is never about us. It’s about their strange little world, in which their concerns, their insecurities and their weird fantasy bubbles are all that matter.
Theresa May, it turned out, is no brighter than the rest of them. An element of the game-players’ corruption was a sense of entitlement, buttressed by the belief that the Labour Party, having stepped out of the establishment bubble with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader, was out of the game. Who’d listen to a party that wanted to * snort * renationalise the railways?
Anyway, they had the media on their side.
Except, the suspicion that the backbone of establishment power, a uniform and breathtakingly malign press, was on the wane was a key reason why, when May called the election, I had real hope that she had made a mistake. The overwhelming prejudice of the public environment in the UK said that it would be a foregone conclusion, but that didn’t ring true in the way it had in 2015, when the media had actually worked to try to make the election seem tighter than it was. The people I knew, who in 2015 were reliably parroting the approved lines from The Sun and The Mail about Europe and immigrants, had lost track of what they were supposed to believe and had started focussing on the difficulties in their lives. Very few of them thought by this time that those difficulties had anything to do with immigrants or terrorism: they could see that their enemies were the increasingly fascist dole office, the eviscerated council, the absence of the police in their communities, the rising costs of food, electricity and other luxuries.
Perhaps most hurtfully, they saw their children being victimised. They moaned about the impossibility of getting a place at the few good schools around here. They spoke in resentful rather than aspirational tones about the ‘free’ schools, the fee-paying schools and the ‘academies’ that were sucking all the educational resources out of the Island for the profit of a group of foreign investors and that were, effectively, if not explicitly, establishments reserved for the children of people who had large houses and big cars and friends on the Council.
In the children’s centres where I do a lot of my work, the service users were presented with the steady reduction of options. My own learners had gone through the period of uncertainty about their chances of completing their courses. The Tory/UKip council had abolished our council funding, almost as an afterthought, and the contempt behind that act had registered. My learners knew that we were (and still are) hanging on by a thread, and that the abandonment of all these services is a process of calculated insult, class-to-class.
Beneath all these frustrations, there was the nagging knowledge that our positions within society are becoming embedded and inherited: the Samanthas and Tobies who go to the ‘free’ (private, exclusive, racially and class homogenous) school up the road will be richer, happier, fitter and will live longer than the children of my community, however good the teachers and leadership in the local council school are.
Awareness had cut through all the bullshit about immigration and ‘our brave troops’. The word ‘inequality’ had gone from a slogan to an experienced truth in the two years between the two elections. I felt that there was a chance to connect people with politics in a way I hadn’t seen in my adult lifetime and, thank God, so did the leadership of the Labour Party. They pushed fairness, they pushed change and they made the approved establishment narrative seem what it truly is: the visceral hatred of the bullying classes who gain their sense of undeserved self-worth from their loathing of the mass of their fellow citizens.
So, telling the corrupt rich that their shit does smell was the right message at the right time, but what had made it so? Was it really that people had put two and two together over the previous two years? Well, yes, in part. Poor people aren’t stupid, but they have been persuaded, by the very political environment that causes their dis-empowerment, to believe that politics was inherently corrupt and they were powerless. Other voices, [some well-intentioned][5], but many less so, had turned disengagement into a form of rebellion: a political anorexia that imagined it was hitting back while playing into the hands of its abusers.
Certainly, the Labour Party offered something completely new in this election: a genuine, meaningful political alternative from a major party with a real prospect of having an effect. In our first past the post system, it may be nice to vote Green, but it’s pretty useless. Labour, on the other hand, even though it lost the election in terms of both votes and seats, has already shaped government policy to a degree that has scared3 the establishment,4 and its rabid lackeys,5 to their shrivelled souls. Click those three links. I love the undertone of panic in Andrea Leadsom’s stupid drift towards totalitarianism, and even more so the failure of certainty in the Guido Fawkes piece, piercing his habitual above-the-fray affectation. It’s like his smirk has faltered, but then, he’s suddenly got a lot less to smirk about. He’s a true believer whose world-view has just collapsed. What is the point of selling yourself to Satan if you can’t spit on the poor?
Amid the glory of the election campaign’s powerful attack upon the status quo, we suffered four outrages to decency that were all symptomatic of the hatred that is at the heart of neo-liberal capitalist politics: two horrible ‘blowback’ incidents from the genocidal warfare of the capitalist war machine, an attack on faith by a far-right lackey of the ruling classes and a mass-killing as a result of reduced state oversight of housing and safety systems. We must not let the anger these events inspire divert us from focussing on the true enemy: the ruling classes of this country. Magnificently, it seems that the purpose of the never-ending, racist ‘terrorist’ emergency that the establishment maintains has lost its power to sway mass opinion: the response has been, overwhelmingly, to choose love,6 rather than division.
We are, for the first time in my lifetime, fighting fit to resist the divisive power of racist hatred, and we see where our anger should, rightfully, be directed.
It’s not over.
Live a good life, because living a good life is a good in itself. Go vegan, recycle, ride a bike to work rather than using your car.
But, more than anything, it is time to get involved in the political process, and to fight the power of insane, self-serving neo-liberal capitalism.
Tomorrow, Amanda and I and a group of Isle of Wight Labour comrades will be in London, marching for better housing, better wages and better public services. Will we see you there?
WARNING: YouTube! No privacy protections whatsoever, despite all their pop-ups saying otherwise. Click on this and they own you. However, it’s the only place to see this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyFZX39joSM [↩]
When I have had a really overwhelming book experience, as I had with Becky Chambers’ Books, I am often lost to reading for a week or two, unable to recapture the feeling inspired by the book I have just finished. Thanks to Kobo’s recommended books feature, that difficulty is somewhat mitigated, although, for the first half of All The Birds In The Sky, I did feel a little disengaged.
To an extent, that may have been simply that this book suffered by comparison. It is a clever and beautiful premise, that moves steadily and gracefully from American high-school realism into a fantasy/SF mix that charts the collapse of the world into ecological and economic disaster. At first, it felt a little pedestrian after Becky Chambers’ beautiful companionship, despite its early magical elements which lay the groundwork for what is to come. A part of my discomfort, however, was with Anders’ tone: she writes with a sort of glib, coffee-shop blogger’s self-assurance that it took me a while to come to terms with.
However, her characters and, particularly, her settings, which get more other-worldly as she moves away from the familiar now, grow to suit her cosmopolitan, Californian writer voice. This is a world of bloggers, web-comic artists, start-up sharks, musicians, magicians and inventors. The two protagonists, Patricia and Laurence, each start out as outcasts and grow to be extraordinary: she, as a witch who is discovered, educated and manipulated by the magical underworld, and he as an engineer who is taken under the wing of a technological visionary who has made it his business to save the human race from its own folly.
The greatness into which this book develops is the balance between two outlooks, the technocratic and the mystical, which, while it produces a really powerful fantasy, at least in its second half, achieves a balance between the two. In other words, the artistic product becomes representative of its own plot theme. Last Saturday, despite having had a long, tiring day, I stayed awake after we’d gone to bed, reading for two hours until I’d finished the book. By the end, I was entirely seduced.
She skirted some considerable risks in the writing of this book. It cannot be easy to do a ‘realist’ SF book in which there is a school for witches. Somehow, she managed to avoid the Hogwarts comparisons, and produce an experience of magical polity that is true to its own vision without being parody. In the same way, her fictional tech is brilliantly persuasive. I felt as though I had seen a caddy and really needed to get one.
The resolution of the plot is a surprise. It is preceded by utter devastation and apparently irremediable defeat. I felt real grief during the descriptions of the catastrophes that begin the collapse of civilization, as global warming begins to bite into American civilization. It was, I realized, something that SF should do all the time, but seldom achieves: to visualize what the currents of contemporary experience predict, and to make them seem as though they are already happening. This novel is a fine achievement, and I will look out for her next with eagerness.
I read Creation Machine as an ebook after we had returned from our holiday in Norwich, having looked through a copy in Waterstones. Sorry, Waterstones, but I did buy Cold Welcome1 on the same visit, so I wasn’t completely parasiting on your hospitality. One of the reviews called Andrew Bannister a worthy successor to Iain M. Banks, and I think there is something to that: Bannister writes with an attentive detail that focuses upon wonderful settings and societies whose values almost-but-not-quite echo real historical eras. He has the gift Banks had of creating the shimmer and weight of the worlds in which his characters scheme and grapple, and he is a competent master of plotting: the book unfolds on several timetracks and it is not clear until the end which will be the base setting for the trilogy. I was surprised and somewhat grieved by his choice of which lead character died in the climax; which thread came to a close. It was an absorbing, atmospheric read.
The background of the novel is a galaxy that is the manufactured product of a vast, dead civilization, now divided into zones of influence that are fluid and in tension. A coup within the largest, led by the hero’s evil industrialist father, has crushed the rebellion of which she was a part and he is now leading an expansive war of aggression against its unsavoury neighbours. Fleare, the hero, is enhanced, and her sidekick-cum-spirit guide is a dead former comrade and lover who has been revived as semi-material computer code. They gather various other allies on a quest to discover an artefact of the makers; the species who created the galaxy. That artefact is sentient, and becomes a deus ex machina in the book’s climax.
As the story progresses, Fleare is forced to interact with an agent within a multi-layered virtual universe, in which I thought I detected references to the real Earth, though I may have misread that. I felt that the cyber elements of the plot dragged a bit, and was worried, for a while, that the author had lost his way, although he brought it back to a successful and emotionally coherent conclusion with great control.
Bannister’s love of SF is evident in his writing. In summary, the book sounds like a collection of cliches, but it is not actually so. As I read it, I was happily absorbed, and had that satisfying sense of not wanting it to end that really well-envisioned novels build. It is, I think, a success.
Strangely, though, less than a month on from finishing it, I could hardly remember it, and had to reopen it on my Tolino to remind myself of its plot and structure. Like a few of Banks’ Culture novels, it is an experience without an aftertaste, hinting at great depth and moment, but failing to entirely find its own pulse or purpose. The second book, Iron Gods, like Banks’ Culture series, is set in the same universe as the first, but in a different era, with, I assume, a different cast. That may not be a bad thing: Banks managed to create something vast and beautiful from such an approach, and the links of familiarity often gave me shocks of excitement, as in the dawning realization of Vosill’s true identity in Inversions.2Since this is a first novel, I hope that, as Banks did, Bannister will find his focus. I will be reading the next instalment, but I am not in such a rush that I will buy it before it drops a bit in price.
The majority of the SF I have read recently has had a common theme: the acceptance of otherness. This trilogy, however, is quite different. The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End, by Cixin Liu, are much more than a single theme, but, at their heart, they explore the idea that the universe, if intelligent life is common within it, might be characterised by a nihilistic Darwinian savagery, in which species seek to eradicate any other worlds which promise to rise to a level of technology which might challenge theirs. On Earth, a division between idealists and hard-nosed Machiavellians leads to a disastrous transmission of our existence to the hostile galaxy, and the planet becomes a target for a malevolent and desperate alien invasion force.
This is hard SF, in the sense that it tries to create an entirely plausible scientific framework for its extrapolations about the future. Intelligence, even down to the level of an ant tracing out the carving in a headstone, is treated as a set of theories, rooted in mathematical and physical laws. Some of its conclusions, as they crop up through the vast plot, are stunning, and I don’t want to spoil the enjoyment of discovery for readers who have not yet read them, but they are not what most moved me about, at least, the first two novels of the trilogy.
Rather, this series begins in, and seems to expand upon, recent Chinese history, finding in the brutal, perverted logic of the Cultural Revolution a pattern of human behaviour that undermines the hope that humanity might ever advance its condition through the application of science and logic. Neither does it seem to offer a solution: idealism, love, asceticism and devotion to duty all serve within its epic progress to cause further destruction, greater confusion. The result of all this savagery is an unravelling, not merely of the world, but of the universe. Despite the beauty of Ken Liu’s translated prose, this is a profoundly pessimistic series of books.
The lasting impression I took from them was of a wild, overgrown, ravaged city; life rampant and uncaring, and the whole of human invention and creativity just a miniscule rash hidden within one of its minor folds. They are beautiful, they are immense, and they are terribly, terribly cold.
Of everything I’ve read in the past few months, these two books are my favourites. That is not simply because they are rooted in fellowship, rather than in conflict, or that they are the only two books whose characters felt like my friends by the time I had finished them, although they are. It is rather that they are complete within themselves, both as individual books and as a pair, and they are not like anything I have read before.
That is not to say that they are some sort of exotic SF that has somehow found a way to reinvent the entire genre. No major element within the tapestry of which they are made is entirely original to anyone who has read, watched or played science-fiction themed art over the last two decades. There are spaceships, a war or two, oppressive social conditions and alien species: lots of alien species.
Rather, their distinctiveness lies in the fact that these are determinedly civilian stories. They focus upon how people make sense of their lives, their friendships and their identities, rather than upon how they assert themselves through power or quest or battle. In fact, the only war action in either book is observed from the point of view of civilian contractors and only as they flee from the barbarity. The characters are victims and bystanders, without responsibility or agency, and the war is an interruption to what matters to them: how to live and be true to yourself while respecting and valuing the differences between yourself and others.
The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet is set aboard an engineering ship, Wayfarer, captained by a human, Ashby, who, besides his pacifism, is the closest character to a classic SF hero in either of the books. The lead character, Rosemary, is fleeing something, and in any of a hundred books I have read, it would have been lost love or a terrible mistake, but in this one, it is a more compelling detail, which I can’t reveal without spoiling the plot. Largely, the story is about Rosemary’s process of winning the acceptance and love of her shipmates, but that makes it sound trite. What elevates Rosemary’s adventure is the mirror provided by the different species who make up the crew.
Chief among them is Sissix, an Aandrisk. Aandrisks are a reptilian species whose family relations are based upon adoption and preference. Because they are an egg-bearing species, they have no natural affinity for their biological parents and their loyalties are, therefore, dictated by choice. Their social glue is sex, which is handled in the book with a poetry and joy that rises above what any male author would have made of it. Besides Sissix, we meet half a dozen other species of ‘sentient’, until human characters become what they are in the politics of the book’s ‘Galactic Commons’ universe: a minority group who are tolerated as just one exasperating element within a wondrous, metropolitan galaxy.
Successful alien characters are not rare in science fiction, but I think I have seldom read a book in which the interactions between so many species are handled with such panache or such convincing enjoyment. The book gave me the feeling I had when I first began attending gigs and festivals; of a world that is brighter than the one I inhabit, with more interesting people, who seem to be okay with having me around. Becky Chambers has managed to create a universe epitomising that rarest of literary phenomena: convincing optimistic science fiction. And then, as you finish the first book, full of love for the new universe you have encountered, and rush enthusiastically into the second one, she goes dark, and it gets even better.
Image: Becky Chambers
A Closed and Common Orbit
It is not, strictly speaking, a sequel. Instead, it is like a spin-off which, for the first couple of chapters, left me feeling disappointed, as I grieved for the fellowship, good-will and sexiness of the Wayfarer crew. Avoiding plot spoilers for the first book is difficult here, but suffice to say that one character is uprooted from the crew in the care of a minor character from The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, and has to adjust to living a very different existence. In flashback, the character who mentors her is revealed to have suffered a terrible childhood. This upbringing has left an emotional debt that has yet to be paid.
I can’t be much more specific without spoiling your enjoyment, and I really, really wouldn’t want to do that. A female hero who is driven by childhood terror has become a ghastly sexist trope in anime, game design and bad male SF (particularly of the ‘kick-ass babe’ variety), but this book is completely removed from those awful exploitations. Becky Chambers writes about pain because that is a part of the human (‘sentient’) experience, but she manages never to lose sight of the redemptive power of love, however deep she goes into the horror of being unloved. There is nothing trite or contrived-feeling about her stories and neither are they overworked. She writes with a sure touch, using detail only to advance her stories or to enrich her characters and settings, but never getting bogged down in self-indulgence. She is a writer you can trust, and her greatest theme is friendship. I want to be her friend.
In the photo above, you can see the point that marks the start of Binnel Bay. We walked to just before the Point, and then, thoughts of beer and chips calling, made our way back, before climbing back up the Undercliff Path to The Buddle Inn,((
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