A Very British Apocalypse

Post-apocalyptic narratives form a significant part of British science fiction, particularly following the end of the Second World War. The legacy of bombed-out cities, rationing, and the mass-mobilisation of a whole nation for war provided a fertile environment for the sci-fi writer: the utopian ideas of much inter-war science fiction being replaced by a more disillusioned and hardened nihilism.

In post-war British science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction seems to be broadly divided into two distinct types; the so-called ‘cosy catastrophe’ fiction, in which pockets of humanity survive some destructive event and are able to pull together and survive relatively unchanged, while the other type of post-apocalyptic fiction takes a much more nihilistic strain, in which the psychology of humanity is transformed, and which raises questions about the malleability of the human psyche. 


In his novel, The Drowned World, J.G.Ballard explores the effects of a world transformed due to the melting of the solar ice caps upon the surviving members of humanity. The novel’s central characters find that their whole psychology is transformed through their interaction with the changed landscape of the world; a landscape in which the risen sea levels have ‘drowned’ the cities of Europe and North America, turning them into tropical lagoons. The central characters are part of a scientific survey team, sent to study these new lagoons. When the other members of the survey team leave, three of the characters remain behind, content in the isolation of their new environment. The central character of Dr Kerans becomes obsessed with the psychoanalytic relationship he feels to the environment, seeing its regression mirrored in the regression of his own humanity: ‘Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs.’



Ballard seems to suggest that the apocalypse acts as a kind of release for humanity’s subconscious desires: the apocalyptic event reverses the relationship of man to his environment, so that the environment is no longer shaped by him but rather he is shaped by the environment. Thus freed from this state, man is able to pursue his subconscious desires without fear or care of social ostracism. Throughout the novel, and much of Ballard’s work, there is a tension regarding this ‘liberation’ of the human psyche from social norms: while his environment acts on the one hand as a means of disengaging man from society, on the other hand it reduces him to a near-bestial condition, which suggests that man's conception of humanity may be less a social construct and more a reaction to his environment.



The Drowned World
Special Collections (Uni of Leeds)



Similarly, in The Death of Grass, John Christopher presents a terrifying portrait of a future humanity that, through a desperate desire to survive, has abandoned much of the morality that defined it prior to the apocalyptic ‘event’. In this instance, the event is a virus that has wiped out nearly all the crops in Asia and Europe, causing widespread famine. The novel follows the struggles of two friends, John Custance and Roger Buckley, and their families, as they make their way north from London to Custance’s brother’s farm in the Lake District. Their journey takes them through an England rapidly descending into anarchy and chaos, as the population grows increasingly desperate for food.

 
Throughout the novel, the central characters are forced to confront the reality of the need for survival that their changed environment has forced upon them. Much of the tension derives from whether the characters can continue to maintain a sense of civility and humanity, or whether they will succumb to the survival-of-the-fittest laws of nature that they witness around them. Christopher’s post-apocalyptic landscape is one in which barbarism quickly replaces civility, suggesting that, for Christopher, the instinct for survival is stronger in man than the impulse to act morally. Indeed, a turning point in the novel occurs when the protagonists, having run out of food, kill a family just for their bread. In crossing this line the protagonists leave behind any semblance of their previous morality; their need to survive changes their psychology from the civilised and human to the instinctive and animal. In this respect the apocalypse, as with The Drowned World, becomes a psychological event, in which humanity is placed in a cycle of de-evolution.


In contrast to this bleak post-apocalyptic view of humanity, John Wyndham presents a more hopeful vision of the ravaged future in his novel The Day of the Triffids. The cataclysmic event that begins the novel is the rendering of the vast majority of the Earth’s population blind, due to a meteor shower that nearly everyone witnesses due its beautiful display of colours in the atmosphere. The novel’s central protagonist, Bill Masen, was unable to see the meteor shower as he was convalescing in hospital due to a triffid attack that necessitated his eyes being bandaged. As he wakes and wanders around London, he finds the city descending into anarchy, as people desperately clamour blindly for help and food. In these scenes, The Day of the Triffids does closely resemble the panic-driven anarchy witnessed in The Death of Grass. However, whereas the latter novel depicts humanity in a state of regression, The Day of the Triffids suggests that this regression is not necessarily universal, and that by holding on to vestiges of civilisation, humanity could find a way to survive and rebuild. 

The Day of the Triffids
Special Collections (Uni of Leeds)

The group of sighted-survivors that Masen encounters at a London university show a determination to rebuild civilisation by establishing a colony in the countryside, with the long-term aim of rebuilding the population by having sighted men take more than one ‘wife’. Although this idea initially appals Masen and his partner, – indeed, it causes another group to split off and form their own colony – he begins to realise that in order for humanity to survive, personal sacrifices have to be made. It is this rationalistic response to the apocalypse that suggests that, rather than instinctively de-evolving, by working together to maintain an idea of ‘society’, mankind could survive. However, this is not to say that everyone’s vision of society is necessarily a desirable one. At the end of the novel, Masen, his partner, and some other survivors, find their peaceful existence on an isolated farm disrupted by the arrival of a group of soldiers who represent a despotic new form of government that is trying to establish itself throughout the country. This group, which seeks to forcibly split up the survivors at the farm to put them in charge of blind survivors, represents the reactionary aspect of humanity; the rush to socio-political extremes in times of panic.

Wyndham’s novel ends on a note of defiant optimism: the characters escape from the soldiers and head to a colony on the Isle of Wight, where we learn that humans have begun to rebuild and plan for the future. Indeed, the novel ends with Masen declaring there will come a day when ‘[we] will cross the narrow straits on the great crusade to drive the triffids back and back… until we have wiped the last one of them from the face of the land that they have usurped.’ Wyndham’s defiant challenge to the apocalypse finds its origins in the siege-mentality of Second World War Britain, where a population facing daily bombing raids, food shortages, and the threat of invasion refused to be broken. In this respect, The Day of the Triffids perhaps presents a more realistic portrait of the British response to crisis, as under the strain of war the population remained united and civilised.

Unlocking the Uncanny in the Rue Morgue

In The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud suggests that the literary qualities of ‘uncanny tales’ give rise to new forms of ‘uncanniness’, noting that this type of fiction ‘is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life’.

In his story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allen Poe presents the reader with a mystery that seems to defy any rational explanation: the murder of Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter in a room locked from the inside and on the apparently inaccessible fourth floor of their building. The circumstances of the murders render the crime itself an uncanny act, and the nature of the mystery is further compounded by the inability of the witnesses to make sense of the overheard language used by the killer, as they argue about his nationality. What this seems to highlight is the association of foreign-ness with the uncanny: the fear of the unknown is also extended to the fear of the foreign. All the witnesses claim to know which language the killer was speaking, despite none of them being able to speak the languages they claim to have heard: ‘The shrill voice was that of an Englishman’, and ‘Spoke quick and unevenly […] it is the voice of a Russian’. At the time of the story’s publication France was engaged in various rivalries with Great Britain and Russia, and so this association of foreign-ness with criminal activity is suggestive of the fear of invasion from within by something alien and therefore uncanny.

The notion of invasion from within is crystallised in the idea of the locked room. The locked room symbolises both sanctuary and prison. Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter live apart from the rest of the neighbourhood, rarely conversing with anyone else and are said to be rich; ‘The two lived an exceedingly retired life – were reputed to have money’. Their ‘retirement’ from society is reflected in the sanctuary of the locked apartment: ‘The shutters of the front windows were seldom opened. Those in the rear were always closed, with the exception of the large back room, fourth floor’. However, this disengagement proves to be their undoing, as the locked room fails to provide Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter with an escape route from the killer. Poe thus deprives his characters of the sanctuary they have attempted to create by introducing the uncanny element – the killer.

The revelation that the killer is in fact an escaped orang-utan, who climbed to the fourth floor, and was trying to imitate its owner shaving when it cut the throat of Madame L’Espanaye is arrived at by a process of logical deduction. The central protagonist C. Auguste Dupin works out that the grip of the killer is too broad to be human. In Dupin, Poe applies a methodical, almost scientific, approach to deduction that would prove to have a significant impact on the development of the detective story, particularly influencing Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes series. Dupin’s method of deduction is described by Poe as ‘the extent of information obtained; [lying] not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation’. Indeed, this is borne out in Holmes’ famous quote that, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’. In the case of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Dupin arrives at his deduction through a combination of observation (when questioning the orang-utan’s owner about the murders he notes that his face ‘flushed up as if he were struggling with suffocation’) and prior knowledge of orang-utans’ behaviour, gained from studying a written account by a zoologist.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue laid the foundation for the modern detective story, in which the emphasis is placed squarely upon analysis and deductive reasoning. The element of excitement derives not from what is unknown, but what is gradually revealed through close analysis. In this respect, the detective functions much like the psychoanalyst: his role is to unravel the mystery – the uncanny element – through a process of reasoning. It is, perhaps, no surprise that the ‘locked room mystery’, which finds its origin in Poe, became so popular with writers of crime fiction: the locked room serving as the ideal tool for the unpicking of the psyche.

In the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Speckled Band, a young woman is found dead in her locked room, her dying words, ‘it was the band, the speckled band’ offering an intriguing mystery. The ‘speckled band’ is revealed to be a deadly snake, which the young woman’s stepfather placed in her room through a vent connected to his room, with the intention of claiming her late mother’s inheritance for himself. The symbolism of the snake is obvious – the forced intrusion into the safety of the daughter’s room by a threatening masculinity providing the uncanny element.

The legacy of the ‘locked room mystery’ can be seen in such diverse works as Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and perhaps most famously in The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr. Other variations including H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch-House have SF elements, which is a testament to Poe's wider influence on genre fiction prior to the introduction of labels like crime fiction, science fiction and horror.

N.B. ‘Murder in the Library: An A-Z of Crime Fiction’ (18 January-12 May 2013) at the British Library provided the inspiration for this post in its recognition of the significance of Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue and the subsequent popularity of the ‘locked room mystery’.  

Futures Past: SF History in Leeds, P.3 David I. Masson

The University of Leeds Library's Science Fiction collection largely originated from two sources. The first was Professor Cyril Leslie Oakley, who began in 1971 to present his own extensive collection of science fiction literature to the Brotherton Library (he will be the subject of a future post). The second, a major source of the collection's printed books, was David I. Masson, Curator of the Brotherton Collection between 1955/56 and 1979. Prior to that he had worked at the University as an Assistant Librarian, and been the Curator of Special Collections at the University of Liverpool, which now holds Europe's largest catalogued collection of SF material. 

David I. Masson (1915-2007)

However, Masson was also a published science fiction writer. In his 23 years at Leeds he wrote some of his most well known short stories, including ‘A Two-Timer’, the tale of a seventeenth-century man’s revulsion at the twentieth-century world he finds himself in and ‘Traveller's Rest’, originally published in 1965 in New Worlds magazine. Set on an alternate Earth where time varies with latitude, the story can be read as an allegory for the futility of war, and was probably influenced by Masson's own experiences serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War. These, along with five other stories, were collected in The Caltraps of Time, published in 1968. All reflect his deep personal interest in linguistics and literature; ‘A Two-Timer’ is told entirely in 17th century English, and another story, ‘Not So Certain’, is about a linguist's exploration of alien phonology.

Masson came from a distinguished family of academics and thinkers. His father, Sir Irvine Masson, was a Professor of Chemistry at Durham and Vice-Chancellor at Sheffield, while his great-grandfather David M. Masson was Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh. A friend of Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, he wrote and published a 6-volume biography of John Milton.

David Masson died in Leeds in 2007.

This post adapts text from the booklet Visions of the Future: The Art of Science Fiction by Paul Whittle and Liz Stainforth.

Free Issues of Astounding Stories Online

Astounding Stories of Super-Science,
January 1930. From Project Gutenberg.

I've mentioned before my interest in preserving and promoting the Science Fiction collection at the University of Leeds. Photographing the cover artwork of SF periodicals (Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories so far), published between 1927 and 1936, has formed part of this work. These are soon to be made available online - watch this space - but in the meantime Project Gutenberg have gone one step further, recently making 20 whole issues of Astounding Stories of Super-Science free to download from their site. First founded in 1930,  Astounding Stories, latterly Analogue Science Fiction and Fact, would go on to become one of the most popular (and longest running) science fiction magazines, considered by many enthusiasts as the best of its genre.

The new additions, published between January 1930 and August 1931, are among a growing number of vintage sci-fi publications available from Project Gutenberg. These magazines are listed as out of copyright because for the first two years they were published in the USA without a copyright notice. However, for each of the covers I've digitised at Leeds, I've had to seek permission from the artist's estate.

  

You can access e-versions here, posted by Piotr Kowalczyk on the Ebook Friendly site, which as you might guess have also been formatted for Kindle and Tablets. Alternatively, you can access directly from Project Gutenberg here. Enjoy!

Digital Damages: The Future's Pixelated!

Imagine a future where our historical archives are prone to unexpected deterioration and sudden, severe changes in appearance. Sounds more like the plot for a dystopian science fiction story than a worrying and imminent reality. Nevertheless, this is the situation that digital preservation professionals are increasingly met with. Towards the end of last year, the point was raised by Barbara Sierman in a blog post when she asked 'Where is our Atlas of Digital Damages?' In other words, how do we document evidence of corrupted files, colour damage and pixel loss in digital images and objects? In response, an Atlas of Digital Damages was launched via Flickr, a crowdsourced group where people can upload examples of their dodgy digitalia (see example below). 

An example from the Atlas of Digital Damages

 This issue seems especially relevant at a time when the digitisation of rare and fragile materials is being promoted as a method for preserving and providing access to collections. Being interested in collections myself, particularly (for the purposes of this blog) in science fiction collections, I've viewed digitisation in a similar light when photographing rapidly disintegrating SF periodicals from the 1920s and 1930s. Although digitisation seems to offer preservation options, it's perhaps not yet well established enough to offer permanent solutions, which is why many digital preservation projects are currently underway to develop better preservation standards.

And in fact the idea of finding permanent solutions to preservation problems, digital or otherwise, is somewhat misguided anyway. As David Lowenthal writes in The Past is a Foreign Country:

Preservation itself reveals that permanence is an illusion. The more we save, the more aware we become that such remains are continually altered and reinterpreted. We suspend their erosion only to transform them in other ways.

If we can only slow, rather than halt the passage of time, what would be deemed an acceptable stage of deterioration? With books and manuscripts, their manifest age lends them a sort of authenticity or authority. Conversely, damaged computer files more often highlight the perceived ephemerality of digital information. Lowenthal's notion of transformation also re-focuses the question of digital preservation back onto the object and identifying the important aspects of the object in the digital realm. How do we define the authentic look of the digital object? How do we distinguish the original and what would be the effect of losing it? And does the concept of an original digital object even make sense? The Atlas of Digital Damages presents the opportunity to begin thinking about some of these concerns, and how we might address them in the future.

Employment of Time (excerpt)

I recall one weekend, aged 8 or 9, going with my father to his place of work. An occurrence not necessarily out of the ordinary - I have a series of recollections of my mother refusing to leave the car, constantly complaining of the smell (my dad worked in sewage) and generally not looking very pleased at all to have her weekend imposed upon her husband’s work ethic. Anyway, she wasn’t present on this occasion. I think my brother was, but he has no part to play in this story so might as well be left out.

On this particular trip, in one of the offices my father set up some apparatus: a television, VHS player and a home video camera (VHS) mounted on a tripod. He played a video on the television, checked the sound levels, and started recording on the camera.  We left the room and occupied ourselves for the next hour or so - For me this usually involved riding down a hill on my skateboard.  I never stood up on this hill as at the time it seemed very steep.  Instead I would lie down on my chest, much like a surfer or a skeleton-bobsledder might lie, or perhaps, in later years when I’d become too large for the skateboard, in the way a Vietnam war veteran who has lost the use of his legs might sit on a skateboard - calves folded under thighs, using my hands to paddle along. I should also mention here, that this hill was excellent for sledging, and was, due to it’s location on a sewage works, a private ski-slope of sorts. After the recording was complete we returned to the office, dismantled the equipment and went home. I remember the film being Short Circuit 2.

Over the intervening years, on several occasions I’ve spoken to my dad about this trip. He says he doesn’t remember ever having made a copy of a film, and has no recollection of the specific event outlined above [Though almost any of this may be a false memory -  from the recording of the film through to my memory of my father failing to recall having done so, the skateboard (which had a ninja printed on it’s underside) and that hill were both most definitely REAL and TRUE].

The lack of corroboration from my father doesn’t really concern me, the memory seems such a strong one for me because it was a little out of the ordinary while for my dad it was just a typical weekend trip to work (there were a lot). Recently while I was thinking about this memory, it struck me that this may have had an impact on my later interests,  my own (art) practice, my writing things such as this thing you’re reading now, and even my job (I photograph and scan things in a library), but the idea of somehow condensing the seed of all future developments into this one event on a weekend from childhood is too simplistic to bear any interest or to glean any real meaning from.  What I do find interesting in this memory is the real-time-ness of the experience, the scale of the passage of time  in the undertaking of this analogue recording, the 1:1 ratio of it all, the fact that the recording of something will take the time it will take to occur - you know, like in real-life.

[A few years after this Short Circuit 2 incident, I recall my brother bringing home a copy of Predator 2. Upon further questioning it was revealed to me that this copy was created not by the screen/camera setup outlined above but in a Double-Decker video recorder (made by Amstrad?) which still took an analogue real-time duration to record, but provided the operator the opportunity to watch something else while the copying was being done. A development in technology which blew my mind at the time.]

It’s interesting to think of the 1:1 ratio now, these days, when it’s possible to digitally copy time based media very quickly indeed. It would seem that the transition from analogue to digital in these media has affected the very nature of our relationship to them.  The shift in the user experience of these digital media has precipitated the erosion of it’s relationship to our attention: that because things are so readily available, abundant, and free, they become somewhat more diffuse or disposable, providing the user the opportunity to graze or browse rather than immerse. Instantaneity means experiences can be cherry picked for immediate gratification. I’m uncomfortable with this kind of relationship as I’m sure a lot of other people are too, but I tend not to answer my phone (and subsequently don’t call people back), and I take a long time to reply to text messages or emails.  Why should this be the case when everything is so readily available? 

Perhaps it is precisely because of this abundance and availability that postponement becomes a seemingly reasonable manner in which to communicate.  I have several draft responses to emails where the intent to respond is most certainly there, but the actual response, the part that matters, isn’t. I’ve been sent emails from friends with links to youtube videos that I don’t get around to watching in their entirety, or .mp3s that I download then never listen to. Recently I received a .pdf copy of Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson. I know because I download it, it’s on my desktop, though I have never had a look inside [However, in the course of writing this, I’ve since had a brief look, so you’d best discount that last sentence]. I’d like to argue that this is a matter of technology, that if I owned an iPad or Kindle, that I’d of course read it straight away, and this would be precisely because of the availability and malleability of the media, but I’m not so sure. Likewise, if I had a comfortable room where I could listen to these mp3’s on a good stereo, of course I’d listen to them. But perhaps it’s just that I never seem to find the time, because, to do so I'd have to care enough about these ephemeral items, and because they don’t have any weight - they don’t exist through time expended (on my part) in accessing them - I don’t give them any intellectual weight.  Maybe this is a side effect of having grown up alongside these technological developments - I still have hundreds of CDs, untouched in years, at my parents house - I wonder whether I’ll ever listen to them again - DVDs that I meant to get round to watch but just never-managed-to-find-the-time. Maybe the cause of this is an internal confusion of what exists and what doesn’t, that because these are here in an instant I can get them anytime, however much I know that anytime roughly translates to never.

This text is an excerpt from the piece Employment of Time written for the exhibition of the same name curated by my friend Pernille Leggat Ramfelt. It has been (very minimally) adapted. The full text can be found here.

Brontës Forerunners of SF Fan Fiction?

In honour of the Stanley & Audrey Burton's current Brontë exhibition, 'Visions of Angria' (7 January - 23 February 2013) and the recent conference, 'Re-Visioning the Brontës', I thought I'd attempt to explore the (admittedly tenuous) link between the Brontës and science fiction. The possibility first suggested itself to me after a visit to the British Library's 2011 exhibition, 'Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it'. The show featured Brontë juvenalia, including Emily's Gondal Poems, Charlotte's The Foundling and Branwell's map of Glass Town. Of the decision to include these items in the exhibition, curator Andy Sawyer wrote:

The Brontës are well known authors with no apparent association with science fiction but their tiny manuscript books, held at the British Library, are one of the first examples of fan fiction, using favourite characters and settings in the same way as science fiction and fantasy fans now play in the detailed imaginary 'universes' of Star Trek or Harry Potter [...] I hope the exhibition at the British Library will challenge what people think of as science fiction and show that it is not a narrow genre.

The idea that the Brontës' early writing could be viewed as a form of fan fiction is an interesting one. Many of the stories did feature their childhood heroes, including the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon (Bony), later reincarnated by Branwell as Rogue or Northangerland. The present of a box of toy soldiers to Branwell in 1826 is often cited as the initial source of inspiration for the Angrian sagas. Each sibling selected a soldier and named him after someone featured in Blackwood’s Magazine, an early literary influence on the children. The fact that these characters and environments featured so prominently in the imaginative worlds of the Brontës could be equated with a form of fandom, and perhaps also with a sort of escapism, usually more associated with fantasy than science fiction.

Autograph manuscript, 1835
by Patrick Branwell Brontë
Special Collections (Uni of Leeds) 

In the context of the exhibition, a strong connection was made between science fiction and other literary genres, indicative of a desire to make broader claims for a form that has historically fallen prey to marginalisation. Therefore, the decision to include well known literary figures such as the Brontës presents a challenge to common preconceptions about science fiction. The link to fan fiction is an acknowledgement that the genre has always had a symbiotic relationship with its readers, both shaping and being shaped by popular culture. Moreover, in the case of the Brontës, there is a cyclical aspect to the the fan fiction phenomenon, since the sisters' novels have gone on to influence many popular fan stories and re-writes, the most famous recent example being the Twilight trilogy.

However, questions remain about the potential dilution of the science fiction genre in an attempt to broaden its scope; there are unique characteristics in SF which, contrary to the escapist drive latent in some fantasy fictions, can bring societal and political issues into sharper focus. As Fredric Jameson writes: 'SF (thus) enacts and enables a structurally unique "method" for apprehending the present as history', offering us a glimpse of how our current situation arises from a particular set of cultural or historical circumstances.

The 'Visions of Angria' exhibition highlights rarely seen manuscript material written by Branwell Brontë from the Brotherton Library Special Collections. The rich and complex world of landscapes, characters and events written whilst Branwell was still a teenager, has been ‘brought to life’ by illustration students from Leeds College of Art’s Visual Communications course.