At the end of the course I’ve taught for the past three years, I offer some more general advice for existing-as-a-person to my students (who are studying “Digital Management”, and I am teaching them about technology.

I put up a single slide with the word

Read

which is advice you will have heard from countless Successful Entrepreneurs and Busy Executives, who tell you the importance of books, and then tell you all about these popular cognitive-science books they’ve read, or Books About Business.

I then replace it with this slide:

Read fiction

and usually say something like

Read fiction. I don’t mean “read sf to have ideas about the future.” I mean “read any form of fiction, genre or no”. Fiction allows us to have other ideas, live other lives, see other perspectives. It allows us to escape and re-consider the world from outside ourselves. It allows us to think at lengths and timescales that we may not from day-to-day. It is a shortcut to containing multitudes; to other minds.

Anyhow.

I was reading the The Atlantic writing about how they are publishing more fiction, and that put me onto this excellent quotation by Alice Munro. I like it a lot because it conveys to people for whom fiction is a linear thing, a narrative that starts and plot happens and then stops, the other thing that happens when you exist inside fiction, and why you might reread books. I will be using in future:

A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

(From her introduction to her own Selected Stories, 1996.)

How about this for writing, from James Salter’s The Hunters, his 1956 novel about fighter pilots in the Korean war. Cleve is an Air Force captain; he’s taking off on his first mission from his new posting.

Cleve dressed himself slowly to reduce the time he would have to spend standing around and taking little part in the talk. He was not fully at ease. It was still like being a guest at a family reunion, with all the unfamiliar references. He felt relieved when finally they rode out to their ships.

Then it was intoxicating. The smooth takeoff, and the free feeling of having the world drop away. Soon after leaving the ground, they were crossing patches of stratus that lay in the valleys as heavy and white as glaciers. North for the fifth time. It was still all adventure, as exciting as love, as frightening. Cleve rejoiced in it.

Salter goes from the ready room to flight inside a paragraph break. And how he describes it! His flying descriptions do become slightly more ‘technical’, in the sense of defining what is happening, when combat occurs, but he’s almost completely uninterested in the technical interactions of flying. He wants to show intent – what Cleve is doing, not what his plane is doing. (His plane, incidentally, is an F-86 Sabre, though it will only ever be referred to as a ‘ship’ throughout the novel, and the MiG-15s of the North Koreans will be reduced to nothing but ‘MIGs’.)

Beautiful; not quite ‘spare’, but stripped down to only that which is necessary to tell the story, about how a man feels in the air. The rest of the book is continuing to be as good.

Cor, this format’s a blast from the past, eh?

Matthew De Abaitua’s The Destructives is the third in the very loose trilogy that began with The Red Men and IF THEN. I loved The Red Men, and found IF THEN hard going (albeit somewhat intentionally. It was… a very sad book, and it conveyed that in all the ways one can.)

I think the third book is possibly my favourite of the three; it is not sad but it feels angry in a powerful, motivating way. It also made me laugh a lot, and like all of De Abaitua’s books, I loved the writing, the tangible feel of it. I read it in paperback meaning it had genuine dog-ears, which also meant I did not transcribe them for a very long while. And now, in a quiet moment, I have.

The book is much, much more than the sum of these quotations; it’s not hugely long but it’s big in all the good ways. You don’t need to read the previous two to read it, though The Red Men may be most similar and IF THEN will prove most illuminating about the Seizure itself.

Anyhow: some lines I underlined, sometimes for the writing, sometimes for the ideas contained. (And all the ideas I didn’t have space for: bloodrooms, more on Long Thoughts, more on emergence, more on ‘soshul’, just what weirdcore is.)

p.46: Theodore goes to visit a colleague.

Pook wore black-framed glasses, his dark hair was flat and neat, his muzzle and upper neck were invariably dark with the beginnings of a beard. He was younger than Theodore by two years, yet he was already a professor, due to this success of his long thought We Are Spent: Fifteen Reasons Why We Should Splice the Human Genome to Create New Consumers. The Moral Arguments Involved Will Surprise You.

p.52: Theodore explains the significant of a clock to Maconochie.

"The clock on the wall has roman numerals. The vases are tapered. It's a show home to evoke Pre-Seizure middle class codes concerning authenticity. Authenticity in the standard two categories: to evoke a usable past and to signify closeness to nature."

p.64: Theodore encounters an AR cat.

…the cat yawned, eyes closed, and the twitching of its ears resumed. But they did not loop. Not right away. The cat's data stream was ongoing, and it was a rich stream of data. For a quantified family, being able to slip on a sensesuit and experience what their cat had been up to that day was a selling point of the technology. The mother and daughter were hidden from him. But the cat – white whiskers, tiger-striping, green iris and sharp oval pupils – the cat was open source.

p.74: Thedore explains the past.

"The cat could be a user interface to guide us through the archive," suggested Theodore. Then, noticing their unfamiliarity with the Pre-Seizure term of user, he explained how people used to be thought of as users in regard to technology and not the other way around.

p.88: Theodore reminisces about Pre-Seizure advertising to women.

He loved the paradoxes of Pre-Seizure culture: on the one hand, building up an iconicity of self-control around images of thinness and athletic discipline, and on the other, unpicking that self-control to create necessary doubt and need. It must have been maddening to live through.

p.89: one such advert.

The two women – the one holding the mobile had blonde hair, her friend had brown hair – constituted a unit tagged as Caucasian Duo. The blonde, being the active one making the loop, was the leader. If there had been a third woman, Theodore knew from other artefacts of the period that it would have been her responsibility to be ethnically diverse.

p.164: the problems of branding.

"A small agency needs an aggressive name. I'm working on a short list: We Are Your Enemy, The Violators, Black Box."

"Lengthen your short list."

p.168: legacy "tech" culture.

"Repeat after me: 'We're all very excited to be working with you on this project.''"

"Excitement is the wrong word."

"It's part of the ritual. The Magnussons are old-fashioned tech entrepreneurs. We have to express excitement. Unless you have a preferred synonym. Would you prefer to be passionate about working on this project?"

p.174: types of silence available to the modern execuitve:

Patricia responded with Pretend Concern, one of the seven types of silence available to the modern executive. Procurement would have expected Pretend Annoyance or even Pretend Contempt in reaction to her own miserly pantomime.

p.184: without too many spoilers, an algorithm:

In the early 2020s, the small port of Newhaven had been acquired by an investment fund with an algorithm as a board member. Putting the algorithm on the board had been a publicity stunt, a way of advertising the fund's dedication to the algorithm as the mover and shaker of the age. But over time, the junior staff created a name for the algorithm, a birth certificate, a national insurance number, a university degree, a passport from the dark net, soshul dashed out by bot, and from that forged documentation, were able to reverse engineer a citizenship recognised by the broken government bureaucracy. The algorithm became a citizen.

p.191: a memory of one of Pook's lectures

Pook invariably started chuckling to himself at this juncture, taking the opportunity to make a joke he made every year during the seminar on Novio Magus: "The emergences sought to solve man's existential crisis by combining two questions underlying all soshul: am I going insane and if so, what should I wear?"

p.208: Dr. Easy and Theodore go to a pub.

Pubs were old-fashioned to normalise the consumption of alcohol. By surrounding drinkers with evidence that people had always drunk, the pub reassured its customers that their alcoholism was a timeless quirk.

p.217: Dr. Easy acquires a car.

"I did not steal it," said Dr. Easy. "I merely exploited the car's emotional simplicity. This model hankers after danger and adventure, and I promised it both."

p.292: on life and language on Europa.

The blue ice of the lakebed ruckled into a chasm. Through this fissure lay Oceanus, the largest ocean in the solar system. Largest, ocean, solar system – words were too human and too meagre. Off-Earth, language, like biological life, did not take. Only mathematics and emergence seemed native to strange moons, gas giants, and space.

p.319: Theodore is somewhat damaged by his exposure to weirdcore:

"I'm sorry that what you said doesn't upset me. Or offend me. I'm not indifferent to you. It's just…" he tapped at his scars again… "Everything you say makes sense but no one gives a shit."

p.364: Patricia's "executive armour" deploys:

Her armour was designed to contain angry shareholders and break-up employee uprisings: the fishers had knives, but Patricia had riot control.

p.378: Reckon is angry:

The lesson her father learned in the Seizure was that power will conceal its true intent for as long as possible so that its victims remain passive and even compliant in their own destruction. Rarely are we granted the mercy of a confrontation.

p.385: on artificial intelligences and kindness.

[Reckon] could not imagine an immortal species like the emergences knowing kindness. The emergences had the wiring for consciousness but they were immune to time. Love is made out of time; that is, love is experiential and our emotions the connection to that experience. It followed that if the emergences were immune to time, they were also immune to love.

It is a very good book.

I’m pretty sure that the best book I read last year was Helen Macdonald’s H Is For Hawk.

It’s easy to say that now it’s won the Samuel Johnson award, and probably appeared on a pile of end of year lists. Well, good: sometimes popular things are popular for a reason. I am glad it has achieved such recognition.

A few times when I’ve explained the book to people, I enthuse: “It’s this wonderful, big book about grief, in which following the very sudden death of her father, a woman decides to train a goshawk.”

“Wow,” says the other half of the conversation, “that sounds incredible.”

“I mean,” I say, “worth pointing out she’s a very experienced and knowledgeable falconer.”

“Oh,” with a twinge of disappointment.

Disappointment! As if trying to train one of the larger, most unpredictable birds of prey wasn’t remarkable enough. (And, as the book proves in its study of TH White’s The Goshawk, what damage the untrained amateur can do). It turns out that it’s precisely because Macdonald knows her field so well that the book has turned out so well. It turns out there a few things expertise cannot always overcome; one is a living thing with a mind of its own, and the other is ineffable sadness.

I also usually caveat it when I recommend it. It’s a more difficult book than I think it may initially seem.

It’s about nature, red in tooth and claw; a bird of prey needs to be taken hunting, and Macdonald treats that topic with care, and thought, and there’s a lot of different angles to it. But the bird is going to hunt, and once it’s big enough, you can’t avoid that topic.

It’s about TH White, a man I knew little of when I began (other than that he wrote The Sword in the Stone) but gosh, it turns out he was not an easy man, and he did not have an easy life.

But mostly because it’s about grief, which is a tough and horrible topic, and the book is a remarkable treatment of that because of how little it explicitly talks about it. Rather, the grief runs through everything like a vein; it’s the why at the bottom of some sequences, the of course waiting for you at the end of a tough chapter. Macdonald is unflinching in a portrayal of herself several (about seven now) years ago, and if the book doesn’t bring the pain of any of your own grief to the surface again, then it still may bring the pain of compassion for someone you cannot help up. It’s a book written in the past tense, but the present tense within the book is heart-wrenching, and there’s nothing you can do.

It’s not all difficult, though. Macdonald is a marvellous writer – her experience in writing poetry shows through, not just in the beauty of her prose, but also its sparseness. Some of the passages I highlighted were simply for the language. Mabel – the goshawk – is this rich, wonderful character; not even a character, because she’s real, but she comes to life on every page, the changes in her as she grows minutely observable.

It’s a particularly lovely book about what living in Cambridge is like – living around the University, but also living in that cold town on the edge of the Fens that most students don’t see outside of, or see outside termtime.

And it’s a lovely book about the English countryside. Not just because it’s charming – it is, at times, but it’s also raw, and honest, and talks well about the history of land, and the strange magic buried in that writers such Robert Macfarlane also touch upon.

I’ve read it about twice this year – once, in a cottage in France, barely doing anything but turning pages, and then again, in tandem with my Mum as she read the copy I gave her for her birthday. It’s still a treat, and I still dive in, in part to be thrilled by the prose, but then inevitable to find some little inner truth that calms and settles me.

It’s hard to talk about, because it’s a book that’s inevitably hugely personal to the author, and I do not know them at all, but you have to engage with something when you read, and sometimes compassion overwhelms you. So: anything not directly quoted is opinion about people in text, and not people in the world. But regardless:

I can’t recommend it enough. Below, as usual, are the points I underlined in my copy.

Location 390:

I remember a teacher showing us photographs of the cave paintings at Lascaux and explaining that no one knew why prehistoric people drew these animals. I was indignant. I knew exactly why, but at that age was at a loss to put my intuition into words that made sense even to me.

Location 397, on reading the falconry canon as a child:

Being in the company of these authors was like being dropped into an exclusive public school, for they were almost entirely written a long time ago by bluff, aristocratic sportsmen who dressed in tweed, shot Big Game in Africa, and had Strong Opinions.

Location 429, on encountering White’s The Goshawk as a child:

This was a book about falconry by a man who seemed to know nothing about it. He talked about the bird as if it were a monster and he wasn’t training it properly. I was bewildered. Grown-ups were experts. They wrote books to tell you about things you didn’t know; books on how to do things. Why would a grown-up write about not being able to do something?

Location 463 – Macdonald talks to a former U2 pilot, who revealed he read The Once And Future King during the boring parts of getting to altitude and back down again. The cadence of the prose:

…the solitude of the pilot in the spy-plane, seeing everything, touching nothing, reading The Once and Future King fifty thousand feet above the clouds – that makes my heart break, just a little, because of how lonely that is, and because of some things that have happened to me, and because T. H. White was one of the loneliest men alive.

Location 467, in which White describes his early plan for The Goshawk:

It ‘would be about the efforts of a second-rate philosopher’, he explained sadly, ‘who lived alone in a wood, being tired of most humans in any case, to train a person who was not human, but a bird’.

Location 602

Independence – a state of being self-contained – is the only generosity, I thought, the only charity we can claim of a living creature. We must have nothing to do with another’s bones; that is our only right – to have nothing to do with them. The bone must be the axis of a globe of intrusion-proof glass. One could not say, watching a hawk: ‘I ought perhaps to do this for him.’ Therefore, not only is he safe from me, but I am safe from him.

Location 928

In the 1950s, in a small research station in Madingley a few miles north of where I lay, a scientist called Thorpe experimented on chaffinches to try to understand how they learned to sing. He reared young finches in total isolation in soundproofed cages, and listened, fascinated, to the rudimentary songs his broken birds produced. There was a short window of time, he found, in which the isolated chicks needed to hear the elaborate trills of adult song, and if that window was missed, they could never quite manage to produce it themselves. He tried exposing his isolated fledglings to looped tapes of the songs of other species: could they be persuaded to sing like tree pipits? It was a groundbreaking piece of research into developmental learning, but it was also a science soaked deep in Cold War anxieties. The questions Thorpe was asking were those of a post-war West obsessed with identity and frightened of brainwashing. How do you learn who you are? Can your allegiances be changed? Can you be trusted? What makes you a chaffinch? Where do you come from?

Location 1218

Nothing was wrong with the hawk. She wasn’t sick. She was a baby. She fell asleep because that’s what babies do. I wasn’t sick either. But I was orphaned and desperately suggestible, and I didn’t know what was happening to me.

Location 1489

Despite the eccentricity of a hawk on his fist, what White was doing was very much of his time. Long walks in the English countryside, often at night, were astonishingly popular in the 1930s. Rambling clubs published calendars of full moons, train companies laid on mystery trains to rural destinations, and when in 1932 the Southern Railway offered an excursion to a moonlit walk along the South Downs, expecting to sell forty or so tickets, one and a half thousand people turned up.

Location 1580, after Helen begins walking Mabel in Cambridge to get her used to people:

I am beginning to see that for some people a hawk on the hand of a stranger urges confession, urges confidences, lets you speak words about hope and home and heart. And I realise, too, that in all my days of walking with Mabel the only people who have come up and spoken to us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks, people on holiday. ‘We are outsiders now, Mabel,’ I say, and the thought is not unpleasant. But I feel ashamed of my nation’s reticence. Its desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn’t entirely normal.

Location 1614 – this is a cracking part. Macdonald discovers that lots of the 18th and 19th century literature around goshawks by and large describes them as irritable, difficult women (the female goshawk is larger than the male, and generally preferred for hawking). By now furious, she continues going back in time, and finds that earlier writers were much more sensitive to their hawks (and perhaps also their women):

…reading further back I find that in the seventeenth century goshawks weren’t vile at all. They were ‘sociable and familiar’, though by nature ‘altogether shye and fearfull’ wrote Simon Latham in 1615. They ‘take exception’ at ‘rough and harsh behaviour from the man’, but if treated with kindness and consideration, are ‘as loving and fond of her Keeper as any other Hawke whatsoever’. These hawks, too, were talked about as if they were women. They were things to win, to court, to love. But they were not hysterical monsters. They were real, contradictory, self-willed beings, ‘stately and brave’, but also ‘shye and fearfull’. If they behaved in ways that irritated the falconer it was because he had not treated them well, had not demonstrated ‘continuall loving and curteous behaviour towards them’. The falconer’s role, wrote Edmund Bert, was to provide for all his hawk’s needs so that she might have ‘joye in her selfe’. ‘I am her friend,’ he wrote of his goshawk, ‘and shee my playfellow.’

Location 1639 – Macdonald discovers that Mabel likes playing with her, tossing a ball of newspaper around the living room:

An obscure shame grips me. I had a fixed idea of what a goshawk was, just as those Victorian falconers had, and it was not big enough to hold what goshawks are. No one had ever told me goshawks played. It was not in the books. I had not imagined it was possible. I wondered if it was because no one had ever played with them. The thought made me terribly sad.

Location 1866

My vision blurs. We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost.

Location 2091

Being a novice is safe. When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe any more. Being an expert opens you up to judgement.

Location 2156

It struck me then that perhaps the bareness and wrongness of the world was an illusion; that things might still be real, and right, and beautiful, even if I could not see them – that if I stood in the right place, and was lucky, this might somehow be revealed to me.

Location 2395

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

Location 3043

I was furious with myself and my own unconscious certainty that this was the cure I needed. Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.

Location 3124 – Macdonald goes to the doctor. I remember this train of thought well:

He says it will make things better. Which is ridiculous. How can this grey and mortified world be washed away by little dots and lines? Then I start to worry that the drugs will make me ill. Even more absurdly, I panic that they’ll stop me thinking clearly. That they’ll stop me flying Mabel. That whoever I’ll become under their chemical influence will be so strange and alien she won’t fly to me any more.

Location 3257

The American writer and ecologist Aldo Leopold once wrote that falconry was a balancing act between wild and tame – not just in the hawk, but inside the heart and mind of the falconer. That is why he considered it the perfect hobby. I am starting to see the balance is righting, now, and the distance between Mabel and me increasing. I see, too, that her world and my world are not the same, and some part of me is amazed that I ever thought they were.

Location 3322

From the top I can look down and see the whole of Cambridge. The light today is beguiling. The rooftops and spires seem within a hand’s grasp; a chess-set town glittering among bare trees, as if I could pick up the brute tower of the university library and move it six places north, set it down somewhere else.

Location 3697 – also, from a remarkable section, about the nature of what ‘England’ is. Even our nature – hawks, deer, squirrels – are all imports from other cultures, countries and times. The whole passage was too long to underline, so I just chose this:

Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale.

I couldn’t put this down.

I’m a fan of Harrison’s writing, so I might be biased, but this enthralled me. Much of his work veers between Fantasy, SF, and magic realism. This is at most only a little of the latter: a hazy set of tales spread over a year, from the perspective of a man – “Mike” – moving to the north to leave a failing relationship, and finding solace on the side of rocks and in the company of climbers. Not a failing relationship, actually, so much as a dwindling one. Nothing stops or starts here: things just fade in and out.

There is a plot, for sure, told in fits and starts, but threading ever-forward. And yet the magic of the book is in the telling. In some ways, it’s very plain prose – and yet it unpacks in your head, like dense poetry. It’s told with a very narrow depth-of-field: some scenes, some people are perceived acutely; others just float by, either out of Mike’s focus or ignored, either unconsciously or not. And, every now and then, out of the mist, the text just leaps out. I underlined quite a bit; I’m not sure how much sense it’ll make out of context.

It probably helps that I read most of it on holiday in the Peak District, not far from many of the places the gang are. “We’re just here in my book,” I’d say, as we drove along, and I thought about Mike, and Normal, and Sankey, and Gaz, and Mick, falling off walls, sheltering from the rain, arseholing along in a Robin Reliant.

It’s special, for sure. I’m not a climber, but am outdoorsy enough to understand some of the perspective – and, when I lack it, to remember the vested men and women extended on Malham Cove, and imagine who Mike is talking about.

Very much recommended.

Two things I’ve noticed about a lot of things I’ve been reading recently: their formats, and their topics.

I’ve been reading a lot of shorter things. I think that comes down to having a lot on, and not always being to devote the brain-cycles (even if I have the time) to large, ongoing works. So I’ve been diving into short stories – notably, George Saunders’ most recent collection – and the Kindle Single, which appears to be reviving the novella for the early 21st century.

50-100 pages is a really nice length for fiction – longer than the ultra-tight focus of a short story, but still confining enough to give it a focus that novels don’t always have. It also means you can finish something in a single hour, which is, I think, why I’m warming to these so much: I get the satisfaction of finishing a lot of fiction without committing to the emotional and time demands of a novel.

But going beyond the format, I began to see echoes in the content.

Towards the beginning of the year, I read Nicholas Royle’s First Novel. I’m a big fan of Royle’s fiction; I can never tell if I’m in a minority, or if it’s just underrated. This might be my favourite book of his yet. Perhaps the most unsettling, too. It is very aware of its status as fiction, and yet the tale of an author who teaches creative writing at a redbrick university begins to feel like it’s slipping into an autobiographical mode… until it lurches, and you begin to worry for Royle’s own sanity – which is, of course, part of the point of that perspective; he’s playing with you, and completely in control of the fantasy of the novel. The way it jars with what we know of reality is part of what makes it work.

The frequent trips to sit in parking lots on business parks reminded me a lot of Marc Augé’s non-places, and as I say that, I realise that all these books and stories are about unplaces of one kind or another. The parking trips interrupt the flow of the narrative, punctuating it with emptiness. these episodes set the increasingly unsettling tone, which the main narrative picks up and runs with in the final act, and you realise that whilst various events of the plot were red herrings and blind alleys, the tone of events up to this point has been very carefully focused on producing a singular sensation.

It’s a similar conceit to Nic Roeg’s direction of Don’t Look Now: whilst the A-plot marches forward, the bodies dredged from the Venetian canals serve primarily to set tone – Venice, beautiful Venice, becomes unsettling and unpleasant, all dark alleys and a serial murderer on the loose. The murderer is seemingly unrelated to the A-plot, and yet in the final act, Roeg brings this background action into the foreground… only to prove how unrelated it is in the closing scenes. I know Royle is an admirer of Roeg, and there’s something of Roeg in his plotting.

What’s really stuck with me, though, is the depection of familiar spaces to the point they become unfamiliar. That also emerged in Keith Ridgway’s The Spectacular, a Kindle Single about a literary author trying to construct a pulpy thriller around the Olympics to finally earn some money. The character’s obsessive research begins to take him down some strange routes, and as he begins to emulate the terrorist (if only in his imagination), the shape of the world changes; he sees it differently. By the end, when the plot takes a sharp 90º turn, the author decides he may as well roll with it; reality has shifted far enough in his head. Rod has written about this book before, and I loved it – very topical, somewhat strange, and depicting 2012 London (very familiar to me) as if it were a foreign country.

That notion of the familiar and the unfamiliar then came to a head in M John Harrison’s Autotelia works – firstly In Autotelia, featured in Arc 1.1, and then Cave and Julia, available as a Kindle Single.

Autotelia is another country, and they do things differently there. It is not just foreign; it is the most foreign; actions, events, emotions; all are different in Autotelia. A place one goes to feel different. It is abstractly distant – connected not geographically, but through some kind of transition zone; it is a place you can go to but it doesn’t appear on a map. And as such, it manages to be familiar and unfamiliar all at once; ageographic, ahistoric. Unfamiliar histories leak out of it. (It also bears a little resemblance to Christopher Priest’s Dream Archipelago, and it’s no surprise that The Affirmation was one of my favourite books from last year, and one that has already become dear to me).

It helps that Cave and Julia is written in Harrison’s wonderful, sparse, prose. I’ve been reading a lot of his work recently, and am growing to love his use of language, his knack for description in such little space. His blog is worth a subscription – fragmented prose leaks out of it, and the quotations and excerpts stand shoulder to shoulder with blogposts and even short fictions; it becomes hard to tell which is which, which is old, which is new, and is better for it.

And: I think, based on things written in a variety of places, there’s some degree of social overlap between these writers; Harrison and Royle seem to know one another, I think.

I mainly wanted to jot this down because, over two months, I kept going back to similar spaces in similar short fictions, similar notions touched on in different stories by different writers with very different intents, and I wanted to jot them down – because if you like one, you’ll probably like the others. A series of stories all, in their own ways, about unplaces.

Harrison is often called a “writer’s writer”, a compliment that can cut both ways. How does he feel about this? In reply he describes the “practice crag” found in almost every Peak District town or village. “It may not be much higher than this room,” he says, “but every single way of getting to the top of it will have been worked out over 50 or 60 years.” At the same time, there will always be “some last great problem that nobody’s solved. The guy who will solve it may not be the best climber in Britain, but the best climber in Britain will turn up one day in the summer to watch the local guy who can do it. And I always wanted to be that local guy, as a writer. To be that technical, that familiar with a certain locality, and within those terms, able.”

From M John Harrison, a life in writing, by Richard Lea.

I’m reading a lot of Harrison at the moment – and anticipating Climbers a great deal. This struck me firmly, especially as I think about my own creative process.

This has stuck with me for much of the end of last year. I copied it out to email it to someone, and thought it worth keeping.

Raymond Chandler writing to Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, 5th May 1939:

“When we were talking about the old Action Detective magazine I forgot to tell you that I learned to write a novelette on one of yours about a man named Rex Kane, who was an alter ego of Ed Jenkins and got mixed up with some flowery dame in a hilltop house in Hollywood who was running an anti-blackmail organization. You wouldn’t remember. It’s probably in your file No. 54276-84. The idea, probably not at all original to me, was so good that I tried to work it out on another tyro later on, but he couldn’t see the point of putting the effort into something he knew he couldn’t sell, preferring to put the effort into nineteen things he thought he could sell and couldn’t. I simply made an extremely detailed synopsis of your story and from that rewrote it and then compared what I had with yours, and then went back and rewrote it some more, and so on. It looked pretty good. Incidentally, I found out that the trickiest part of your technique was the ability to put over situations which verged on the implausible but which in the reading seemed quite real. I hope you understand I mean this as a compliment. I have never even come near to doing it myself. Dumas had this quality in very strong degree. Also Dickens. It’s probably the fundamental of all rapid work, because naturally rapid work has a large measure of improvisation, and to make an improvised scene seem inevitable is quite a trick.

And here I am at 2:40am writing about technique, in spite of a strong convinction that the moment a man begins to talk about technique, that’s proof he is fresh out of ideas.”

from The Chandler Paper: Selected Letters and Non Fiction 1909-1959

Ursula le Guin was recently interviewed in Vice Magazine. It’s an interesting interview – an interview at times a little on the back foot, but honest in their reactions to the responses, which deserves much credit.

But really, it’s all about le Guin’s responses, which are wonderful. And in particular, this response, when asked about the “immense scale” of the many worlds she’s made, and whether or not she really had, in fact, created so many worlds and cultures:

No, no, thank you for saying so, Steve, but if I really had, I would admire myself tremendously. I would be in awe of my own staggeringly great mind. What I did was give the illusion of there being all those different worlds. That’s called art, or fiction, or something. The rule is, you only invent what you have to. And that’s pretty much what’s right in front of the reader. Let’s say it’s an ansible. I do not, in fact, invent the ansible. I do not explain how it works. I cannot, but shhh. I simply present the device as working, and as coming from a society which is far in advance of ours in science and technology, having spaceships that can travel nearly as fast as light, et cetera. And this background or context creates expectation and softens up the readers’ credulity so that they’re willing to “believe in” the ansible—inside the covers of the book. After the ansible had been around for a while, I invented the man who invented it, Shevek, in The Dispossessed. And he and I played around with some pretty neat speculations about time and interval and stuff, which lent more plausibility to the gimmick itself. But all I really invented was a) the idea of an instantaneous transmitter and b) a name for it. The reader does the rest. If you give them enough background/context, they can fill in the gaps. It isn’t just smoke and mirrors. There has to be a coherent vision of how things hang together in that society/culture/world. All the details have to fit together and be thought through as to their implications. But, well… it’s mostly smoke and mirrors. What else is any fiction?

Well, indeed. She has a wonderful, wonderful grasp on the nature of fiction and sf; it’s a great interview.

“‘Police business’, he said almost gently, ‘is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get – and we get things like this.'”

Raymond Chandler, The Lady In The Lake