Interzone 251 (14 page)

WOLVES

Simon Ings

plus author interview

THE GOSPEL OF LOKI

Joanne M. Harris

EMPRESS OF THE SUN

Ian McDonald

NEWS FROM UNKNOWN COUNTRIES

Tim Lees

THE BLACK DOG EATS THE CITY

Chris Kelso

THE ARROWS OF TIME

Greg Egan

SHOVEL READY

Adam Sternbergh

FIDDLEHEAD

Cherie Priest

HIVE MONKEY

Gareth L. Powell

BEYOND THE RIFT

Peter Watts

THE COPPER PROMISE

Jen Williams

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

Jonathan McCalmont

Gollancz tpb, 304pp, £14.99

reviewed by Paul Kincaid

Conrad’s father has devised a jacket studded with sensors that allows blinded servicemen to see again; his best friend, Michel, gets into trouble for taking inappropriate photographs; Conrad himself gets into the new industry of Augmented Reality which can affect everything we see, and eventually brings this technology to the work of a major film maker. Everything in this stunning novel is about perception, or failures of perception. In the opening pages, Conrad is disturbed by the sight of his girlfriend’s artificial hands, the consequence of crash that happened when he failed to see oncoming traffic. Later we learn that, as a child, Conrad disposed of the murdered body of his mother just so his father wouldn’t see. What we see shapes what we make of the world, but our perceptions are easily deceived. I don’t know that Conrad is an unreliable narrator, but what he perceives isn’t necessarily the truth.

And what he perceives is a world quietly running down. We are in a near future where technology is starting to make up for so much: artificial hands, artificial sight, augmented reality. But technology cannot compensate for other failings. Conrad’s father’s groundbreaking work on restoring sight brings no adequate financial recompense; eventually he is forced to give up his own researches to take a job with someone else, and so begins a downward career path that eventually sees him on the breadline. His failure stands for the economic problems we see all around in the background of the novel. Meanwhile, the environment is itself failing. When he and Conrad are children, Michel is obsessed with the end of the world. When we first encounter him as an adult, he and his wife Hanna are effectively building an ark, while he writes a novel about a flooded world. The novel is a success, the ark is abandoned, but by the end of
Wolves
the flooding has started.

A flooded landscape has long been a staple of British catastrophe fiction, and Ings recalls that tradition in this novel. But he twists it: we don’t see the aftermath of catastrophe but its beginning, and only a brief extract from Michel’s book hints that the heavy rains and swollen rivers may actually lead to such an effect. But catastrophe is there nevertheless, in lives increasingly detached from a world that isn’t fully seen. Our first understanding of what augmented reality can do comes when Ralf, the technical wizard who is to be Conrad’s business partner, gives him a demonstration and suddenly Conrad can no longer see the furniture he knows is in the room they occupy. It is a metaphor that hangs over the entire novel.

How much does Conrad fail to see of his psychologically damaged mother, his increasingly distant father, the obsessive and vaguely threatening Michel, the sexually available Hanna? What other word but catastrophe could you put to the way so many things are falling apart in small ways? Near the beginning of the novel, a house in the country is trashed during the course of a party; near the end, Conrad and Michel trash the childhood home they once shared. It is a novel about despoiling things because we don’t see they are there. In haunting prose that often recalls the work of M. John Harrison, Simon Ings has produced a work that is surely going to be one of the novels of the year.

Well I’ve always been impressed by the Zen stricture that if you meet the Buddha on the road, you should kill him. If you think you have the answer, it’s time to formulate a different question.

Plus, I believe novels exist to explore all those parts of life that aren’t repeatable or testable – which is why I have a huge amount of time for books which are about “ordinary life”, and no time at all for book series. I just don’t see the point of it. If you want to work in television,
work in television
, for crying out loud, stop cluttering up the shelves.

All those important opinions aside, however, publishers shape writers’ careers more than the writers like to admit; I never much liked my original sf publisher and since the feeling was mutual I went off and did something else. Later I got drunk with an agent who thought I could write pop science. It turned out he was right. After that the chance popped up to ghost for one of the Davos set. I’ve never not leapt down a rabbit hole. The hope is that if you’re good enough, a coherent set of values and concerns will emerge over time, and across a body of work that’s been engaged with your life as you’ve lived it. And if that identity
doesn’t
emerge in public consciousness, and Radio 4
isn’t
beating a path to your door well, who cares? You’ll at least have
had
a life.

Okay, you’re formulating a different question, but I wonder why that change of direction takes you back to one of the hoariest forms of British sf, the catastrophe?

The millhouse that sits at the heart of some of
Wolves
’s darker flashback scenes is John Wyndham’s old place – I grew up near there. The whole business of imagining catastrophe as an escape from the rich and scary Real is pretty much a gentle extrapolation and embellishment of my teenage friendships. My work is much more personal, much more autobiographical, than people give it credit for. Everything in this book is true besides the events. The generic aspects reflect my reading as a kid, rather than any pressing need I feel to enter into dialogue with “the genre”. God forbid.

And while you say you hope for something coherent to emerge over time, is that what you really expect? Doesn’t changing the question work against that?

What are you suggesting – that we each have
one
coherent personality – one that’s available to consciousness, and can be elucidated by answering
one
correct question? That’s Facebook thinking. The personality of a body of work has its own integrity that unpacks itself over time. It sure as hell isn’t going to jibe well with the author’s Important Opinions.

There’s something jagged in the structure of
Wolves
, constantly moving backwards and forwards in space and time. Was this always part of your plan for the novel?

Wolves
doesn’t actually have that complex an architecture: there are two chronologically coherent timeframes – the “before” and the “after”, if you like – and I bounce the reader from one to the other at regular, lawful intervals.

The jaggedness has another source entirely, and that’s the desire to cover thirty-odd years of future history (or alt history, or whatever you want to call it…) entirely through the subjective experience of one character. My protagonist, Conrad, ventures an opinion now and again, but by and large the world is seen through his immediate consciousness. You don’t get that very often in sf, because the perceived need to “build a world” keeps dragging you out of your characters’ head. I was determined not to fall for that. (I
despise
worldbuilding.)

You can’t get away with that, all sf is a form of worldbuilding, and the fact that you stick within Conrad’s head doesn’t make it any less worldbuilding, surely.

I absolutely can get away with this – to the extent that I hardly know where to begin taking down your objection. For the sake of brevity let’s just define the row we’re going to have by saying that “worldbuilding” and “making things up” are not synonymous concepts.

Given the amount of flooding we’ve had, both last year and this, it seems almost disturbingly apposite. Was the novel written in response to these new weather patterns?

Funnily enough I recently asked the same question of Chris Priest in connection with
The Adjacent
. My answer is the same as his: not at all.

But of course, it depends on what you mean by “response”. I lifted a lot of that imagery from dreams I’d been having, mostly around my mother, who was dying at the time, and (cf. Freud) about the river near where I grew up. I think any writer remotely in touch with his own life will be playing with the weather a whole lot in the coming years. How can you possibly write about the world and
not
factor in climate change? Kudos to Ian McEwan, by the way, who’s been quietly mongering the weather for the whole of his career.

The problem is that I don’t think you can write anything without the present seeping in and affecting it. I was just wondering how consciously the present was shaping your future.

 think a better way of putting this might be: which bits of present reality are we avoiding by projecting them on the future? There’s remarkably little in SF that doesn’t have its real-world, present-day analogue. SF prides itself on its thought-experiments but very, very few of the challenges, dilemmas and nightmares it throws up are unprecedented. Read more history. Read more anthropology. This is a point Thomas Disch made again and again in his career, not that many of us listened. Is
Wolves
set in “the future”? I’m honestly undecided. The question is more psychological than anything.

Actually I’m making an assumption that the novel is set in Britain, but there are no place names. You use terms like “Middle” when referring to the city, which jars us from familiarity. And while our first visit to Michel and Hanna clearly takes us to Dungeness, you have displaced it to the north. Given that the flooding changes geography, is this loss of sense of place deliberate?

I wanted to write about a genuine technology, Augmented Reality, without getting tramlined into some dreadful dot-com satire. As I was writing, I found that adding a time or a place would immediately have the scene wilting like a lettuce. I quickly realised that the only way to tell truths about AR was to pull the technology out of the real word entirely, and run it through an entirely personal thought experiment. Of course doing something like that has all sorts of inadvertent consequences, which you can capitalise upon in the second draft. The floods, the weather, the shifting coastlines – all that came out of explorations of AR.

One of the major themes in the novel is perception, from restoring the sight of blinded servicemen to film-making to Conrad’s work in AR. I know that a few years ago you wrote a book about the eye, so is the whole idea of perception something you find yourself coming back to all the time?

Yes, though I have no idea why. If this life of ridiculous side-projects ever does cohere into something, my bet is it’ll resemble a peeled eyeball from the 1970s.

Has your work on
Arc
 changed your own perceptions about science fiction?

Many years ago – the night Princess Diana died – I was fleeing an SF convention at 120mph in a hired Vauxhall Vectra, chanting “Never go back. Never. Go. Back.” And the happy fact is, I never have to. In the years since, “SF” has ceased to mean anything: the young writers I meet now are co-opting its drivers, its preoccupations and its techniques without the slightest desire to “be science-fictional”. (Yes, yes, I know there’s a “core genre” out there, but it’s got all the cultural currency of a caravan club; a Robin Reliant Users’ Group; the readership of Escort. It’s not dying. It’s
dead
. Someone tell Ann Leckie.)

For the last couple of years I’ve been editing
Arc
, a journal of the future by the makers of
New Scientist
(arcfinity.org is the blog). Almost no-one I meet – and this includes writers who came up through the genre – gives a fig for what SF is. Everyone’s busy trying to see what this amazing toolkit – literary machines that saw us through the Cold War with our humanity bruised, twisted, but more or less intact – what all this strange, mostly Seventies technology can
do
.

I agree with you absolutely on this, but I still find myself endlessly wondering about this “literary machine”. Is it now taking a distinctively different shape, and what might that shape be?

I think of that machine as a curious, dialectic combination of avoidances and exaggerations. It understands that fiction exists to
investigate
reality, not reflect it. (Reflect it
how
, for heaven’s sake?) It’s escapist
and
engaged, reminding us that “realism” is the biggest literary flimflam of all. You don’t need SF to pull this trick off, of course – Cervantes managed quite well without it, thank you. But SF is one way – a good way – of keeping the spirit of burlesque alive. Underneath all that chromed, oh-so-rational motley, there’s a beast licking its chops.