John Dickinson

Last month I went to see Avatar, along with however many million others. I found it much as friends had said: beautiful, but predictable.

Well, fair enough. If you are going to risk that much money on a film, maybe the last thing you want is a plot that is difficult or challenging for the audience. Bring out the good old formulas, because you know they work, and let the public roll in. You can tell a derivative story with great verve (though I don’t think they did so this time).

But let’s look at the story a bit more closely. It’s interesting precisely because it was pitched to be ‘safe’ and to have the broadest possible appeal. It tells us something about ourselves.

First, there’s the ecological message. The good guys live in harmony with nature, with a mystical reverence for their surroundings. The bad guys are rapacious corporate types, mining ore and blasting trees. In the end the world nature-spirit decides the issue. This is not a new myth, but these days it’s definitely main stream. At one level it is silly – even cynical. We’re sitting in our heated or air-conditioned cinemas watching the result of a massive technological effort, and what it says to us is that we must get back to beautiful Mother Nature, (who in the real world is a cold and bloodthirsty bitch and not at all nice to her children.) But stories are dreams, and dreams can have truth even when they are silly. At a time when more and more of us accept that we must change to balance the ecology of our world, this is the story we want to hear.

And where, by the way, is the old frontier-pioneer myth? The bold explorer setting out to conquer new lands? We don’t tell that one any more.

But some things don’t change. In one of those early scriptwriting conferences, one of the Avatar crew will have said, ‘And it’s got to end with a battle’. A nice heroic battle, with lots of special effects and the good guys winning at the last moment against impossible odds. It’s a must. Hard-wired into our souls, still, is the thirst for crisis and blood. We can turn a lot of things around. We can accept that the bad guys’ army should look and sound very like the US military (who didn’t notice that reference to ‘Shock and Awe’?) and that the good guys are twice human height and blue-skinned and by the way look a lot like the First Nation tribes of America. But they’ve got to fight. They are the gladiators. We are the audience yelling in the stands. What does that say about us?

Maybe there are a few things about Nature we haven’t forgotten.

So while all these other things have been going on, what’s happened to Gilbert? My draft novel The Keys of Cleary has had a bit of a rest since the summer, but last month I got together with David and Hannah, my editors, and together we looked at some reader’s reports.

The readers had issues. Some of them just didn’t like Gilbert (fair enough - he’s definitely not your dashing heroic romantic hero). Some didn’t get his motivation. Some thought the mystery wasn’t mysterious enough, or at least not central enough. Somebody thought the central chapters were too longwinded (Hey what?!) And some liked it but had various points anyway.

Readers can’t be wrong – not about how they react to the book. So we definitely needed to do something. Possibly quite a lot of things. The question was, what? I wondered aloud about introducing a second storytelling voice – a female, to balance Gilbert’s rather coarse and brutal way of seeing things. The others sucked their teeth. Maybe, they thought. It would be quite a lot of work, but…

Then David played a trick of his, that he’s done to me before. He got me to tell the story.

Right, I said. It’s about this guy Gilbert who’s the warden of a castle in Wales, and his lord dies and the inheritance is disputed, and Gilbert can’t decide who is the true heir, but he remembers that there’s this riddle that he can pose…

Ah, said David. Stop.

There’s a problem there – in the normal story of this kind, the hero has to solve the mystery. But in this case, the hero is in the position of setting the mystery, so the normal lines of the story don’t quite work. And the central problem the readers may be having – although they haven’t identified it as such - is they don’t really feel they know what’s going on.

Hannah said she’d felt the same. Until it got to the first murder. Then she knew where she was…

So maybe (I said, sounding like I was working out 2+2=4 for the very first time) we need to emphasise that Gilbert also has to solve the riddle himself. Maybe we bring forward the flashback scene in which Gilbert first hears the riddle. Even make it the first chapter…

And light dawned. That was the answer. Just simplify the storytelling. Get the back-story and put it to the front. Make it easier for the readers to work their way in. By this one device we should be able to address most of the issues about likeability, motivation, mystery etc etc etc.

So that’s what I’m doing now. Writing a new first chapter, and then going through and adjusting things so that the story flows properly from its new starting point. It shouldn’t take too much work. And it’s a whole lot easier than introducing an entirely new voice. The lesson is, tell the story in the simplest way. In this case, just tell it in the right order.

(It’s even possible that David saw this as the answer all along. But if he did he didn’t say so. He got me to suggest it instead. Wouldn’t surprise me. He’s like that, the old…)

Snow has hit Britain in the very week in which my novel about an extremely cold place is officially published. Can I be sure it is not my doing?

Well, yes probably I can. But sometimes novels do seem eerily prescient of events in the real world. My father’s bookThe Poison Oracle (1974) involves the hijack of a Japanese airliner. I remember how awed we were when, a few months after publication, a real Japanese airliner was indeed hijacked. I’m sure many other authors have similar stories. And when disasters happen that they’ve already imagined in their books, they feel uncomfortably like Bruce Almighty and probably want to go and hide under their beds. But it’s only to be expected. It’s an author’s job to think of things that might happen. It would be extraordinary if some of them didn’t.

The invention of something like the World Ear wouldn’t be extraordinary at all. It’s not hard to look at the current state of technology and draw a few lines into the future. Some corporation somewhere may already be working on it. Indeed there was a moment this autumn when there was a spate of news stories about experiments in getting a computer to read thoughts, and I started to fear that my ideas about how the World Ear would work were going to be obsolete even before the book was published. But we’ve a way to go before that kind of machine-assisted telepathy becomes real.

Meanwhile the weather outside is very definitely real. Snow falls like fireworks from branches in the sun. Ice and slush compete to cover the roads. The schools are shut and Pippa hasn’t been getting into work either. Four of us have shared the house all week. And although the boiler, thank God, has been mended after its breakdown, we’ve had something almost as catastrophic happen instead. The study computer has developed a power problem.

The captain has gathered all hands on the bridge. “The situation is grave,” he says. “There are four of us, and only one working computer.” A deathly silence follows his words. We all know what this means. Ready access to a computer is essential for the happiness of each and every one of us - except for Pippa, who just needs it because she’s working from home. We’re talking rationing here. We’re talking about children hovering hopefully at our elbows as we type, just in case we’re about to get up from our place and make a cup of tea (in which case Vrooom! Child in seat, and not to be dislodged even by the pouring of hot tea down the back of their neck.) These days everything worth having comes to us through a screen, it seems.

I don’t think the World Ear is far away at all.

‘They made the wrong choice,’ said one of my early readers of WE. She is a highly intelligent and strong-willed person, and I know why she said it. I’m sure that if she had been in the same position as my characters at the end of the novel, she would have gone in a different direction.

A certain amount happens in this story. There is dispute, physical danger and shocking discovery. But it’s primarily a psychological novel, and the climax is a moment of choice. If you are confronted with an overwhelmingly collective society – the WE – and it threatens to absorb you, what do you do?

The character called Lewis wants to preserve freedom at whatever cost. He wants to establish his own society, based on liberal principles, no matter how poor or difficult life is going to be outside the society he is trying to escape. He wants this to be a Mayflower story. Mayflower-type stories are powerful. They crop up again and again in story-telling. In science fiction they may get blended with the Adam and Eve myth, as the small band of colonists arrive on a pristine new world.

To the character called Erin the WE is even more horrifying than it is to Lewis. It means the death of her free will, and without free will no relationship with God is possible. Her response to the dilemma is prayer. But it’s not a response that the others can share, and therefore it is not decisive. Even an idea as powerful as God is powerless if held by only one person.

Paul, who chooses with them, is a child of the WE. And May has a child of her own coming, and must choose for two.

In the end the story is about whether there is any point being on your own. It’s about what you do when everyone else has gone off in a direction you don’t agree with. How you decide what ‘we’ means, and when, and why. And – this is the thing about reading – when the characters make the choice, the readers may make it too. They are free to choose their own way.

The book starts with a massive idea about something that has happened on Earth to billions of people. But it’s set at the edge of the solar system and the cast numbers just four. This is a story about someone who travels from one extreme to another: about what he finds and what he learns.

What he finds is isolation. He is no longer part of the great “We” of Earth. He becomes an “I” instead, and it is not a social “I”. He becomes suspicious, paranoid, to the point where his fellow crew members have less meaning to him than a computer image of an ape-man and the thought of a dead colleague. It is a story about loneliness, and return from loneliness. That’s why it is set in the most remote and terrible place I could imagine.

The isolation of the setting is important. So is the cold which surrounds it – because cold is an image for death. And the cold gave me a lot more trouble than the isolation. It is easy to say to the reader “imagine you are so far away from Earth that the Sun looks like a star.” The mind can picture that and shudder. It is less easy to describe a cold far more intense than I or anyone else has ever experienced from themselves. I talk of frozen nitrogen and methane crystals, but to the reader that’s just another type of ice and another type of snow - no big deal. I wrote purple passages about how the astronauts were living on a tiny pinnacle of warmth while the temperatures plunged away into the abyss all around them – and I took it all out again, because it was all more laboured than it was worth. I can’t tell the reader what it would feel like to be exposed to a temperature of -240° Celsius, because anyone who was would simply freeze on the spot. (I did have a rather ghoulish conversation with an astronomer about what would happen to a human body that froze like that and was then dropped, however gently, onto a hard surface. Eeee. ) But, ay, I did my best. And the cold is there, I hope.

So there are the two extremes: the “We” and the “I”; the warm Earth and the frozen moon. And the question – can we find our place between them?

Take a transmitter and receiver, such as you might have in an ordinary mobile phone. Minaturise them and implant them in your body. Add a small processor, and tiny speakers that function by resonating against the earbones. Add artificial lenses over your eyes, on which you can project a look up display like a fighter pilot’s, that you control by pupil tracking. And now you can talk to anyone, anywhere. You have your internet connection with you wherever you go. You can look up anything you want, any time. It’s always on. Neat? This is the device I call the World Ear. It doesn’t seem very far away.

It would change us completely.

No, I’m not talking about an artificial telepathy. I’m not talking about a huge computer that controls us all like chess pieces. I’m talking about an apparently small step-change in the way we communicate. Communication has made us what we are. We learn who we are and how we fit in by talking to others around us. Communication makes specialisation of roles possible. It has made civilisation possible.

So imagine - you never have to work anything out for yourself any more. Wherever you are, whatever you need to know, you just run a search for the answer. You’re never alone in your head. Depressed? Run a therapy routine. Having trouble keeping track of all your connections with other people? (We’ve evolved to expect a maximum of one or two hundred members in our group - the size of an ancient cave clan, maybe.) But you can run filing and organisation programmes now, no problem. Like an intelligent e-mail address book, say. Now you can make it thousands.

Messages are getting shorter. Language is changing into symbols that you can use on your look-up screen. And children are growing up using this thing. They don’t need to learn to speak any more. There’s far more knowledge, but you don’t need to know it. It’s always there when you want it to be. So you can focus more. Specialisation is increasing. Fields are narrowing. Expertise deepening. What’s the effect of that?

I used to work in a large organisation. I had various roles, but in essence what I was doing was always the same. I gathered information, processed it and passed it on to those who needed it next. I didn’t make decisions. I helped prepare them. And that was true, essentially, for everyone else – even the people who thought they did make decisions. All they did was apply a set of rules to any given situation. By the time it got to them, the decision was pretty well already taken. It had been taken by the process. And responsibility was similarly divided. That’s what role specialisation does. If something goes wrong – if the organisation commits a crime – it’s no one person’s responsibility. (OK, someone may have to go, but they go kicking and screaming because they’re convinced, in their own minds, that it isn’t fair that they should be scapegoated. And it isn’t. The fault was never theirs alone).

So, in this future of ours, there’s less and less individual decision-making. There’s less and less individual responsibility. The average human is acting not like someone who thinks for themselves, but like part of a much larger process, accepting information, reacting to it and passing their reactions on. And somewhere down the thousands and thousands of connections, the reactions assemble into thoughts. Thoughts of a collective intelligence. A brain. We’re all neurons now.

Far fetched? Not at all. ‘Man is not an individual. He is only a cell in an everlasting body, and he is dimly aware of it.’ That was George Orwell, writing long before the internet was invented. And Hobbes conceived the Leviathan while observing the events of the seventeenth century. There has always been a ‘We’ as well as an ‘I’. What makes it possible? Communication. All I’m talking about is what happens when we increase our power to communicate. In this novel I’ve done that by means of the little device called the World Ear. The W.E.

The book was written and the title chosen before my attention was drawn to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, published in English in 1924. I have only my ignorance to blame, for Zamyatin’s work is an important early dystopian novel, inspiring Orwell’s 1984 and influencing many others.

I did look for another title (Cold Eden seemed a possibility, although this again was not original.) But nothing else captured with such short, stark simplicity the theme I wanted to write about - the place of the individual in the larger group. So We it remains. I, too, owe a debt to the great Russian. And I don’t feel bad about that. Not with Orwell’s footprints before me on the road.

Orwell and Zamyatin wrote in the context of the early and mid-twentieth century, which saw the rise of powerful totalitarian states founded on the argument that “we” – the people as a whole – were far more important than “I” – meaning you, the individual. That “We” fed itself upon show trials, purges, mass murder, and war. Against it, the “I” had no appeal. It was terrifying. “If you want a picture of the future,” Orwell wrote in 1984, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.”

In the twenty-first century, those clouds have parted. The worst dictators are dead. Their armies are defeated or have rusted away. But the “we” is of course always with us. It has to be. We (ahem) would never achieve anything if we were only a collection of random “I”s. So where does the balance between “we” and “I” now lie, in our comfortable, liberal, if slightly bankrupt societies? And what seeds have we sown that could transform it?

Look at the screen on which this is written. Consider what lies behind it. All those connections, all that information.

Think about how you use it.

…And fast forward fifty years…

WE comes out in January. It’s my first science fiction novel, set not very far into the future – say the second half of this century, so that all the technology is still recognisable and plausible and hasn’t transformed into substitute magic. Inter-stellar travel is not possible. The action takes place on a tiny moon on the edge of the solar system, where gravity is one-tenth that of Earth and the average surface temperature is about forty degrees above absolute zero.

Just think about that for a moment.

The sky above the moon is dominated by a giant planet, as big as two fists held together at arm’s length. On Earth, you can cover the moon with the tip of a finger. The forces on that planet are massive – winds of hundreds of thousands of miles an hour, an ocean deep enough to drown the Earth and hot enough, at its lower levels, to poach it. But you can’t reach it and it can’t reach you. it’s just up there, looking down on you. The sun is so distant it appears to be the size of a bright star.

(All this is for real, by the way. The planet is based on Neptune and the moon on Triton, though I don’t use those names in the book.)

It takes years to get here. The costs are enormous. In the low gravity the human body sheds most of its weight-bearing muscle and the bones become brittle. Once here – do you ever think you’re going back? So why come here in the first place?

That’s what the novel is about.

About a month ago (see “Stepping Back”) I finished the first draft of one novel and, to clear my mind a bit before revisiting it, I began another. Something completely different. Something funny, in fact.

I’ve always been a bit shy of writing humour. I think my first three books had about one joke between them. I’ve tried a bit more with Keys of Cleary (see “Comedy”). And what I’ve found is that if I set out to be funny- planning the scenes in advance, so he drops his trousers and she pours a bucket of custard over his head and they fall down the stairs – what I get is stuff that ought to be funny but isn’t. The really funny bits just come. From somewhere. Don’t ask me where. I don’t know until they hit me. I may think of a key line the day before I type it. Or it may just happen as I type. It’s like juggling blindfold.

But it is coming. Strangely. There’s something every couple of pages. It might be a play on words. It might be a character acting very much in character (slightly bizarre characters are a very rich source of comedy. And an easy one. You just keep them doing what they do.) It might be a dollop of good coarse lavatory humour, just delivered in a way that the reader doesn’t quite see coming, but when it comes – splat – it’s perfect.

And it’s fun. It’s fun to write stuff that makes you smile. It’s so much fun that I want to go on doing it. I want to write this novel to the finish. And never mind the poor, noble fantasy that I’ve put aside, now shouting at me from the document folder saying ‘hey – haven’t you stepped back for long enough already? What about me?’ There’s a trade-off between creativity and discipline. Right at the moment I just want to ditch the discipline and run off and have a wild fling with creativity.

One thing that nags at me as I write though is – am I trying too hard? Is all this comedy getting in the way of the story? What if, instead of making the reader laugh, I’m going to bamboozle them with so much madcap stuff that in the end they sigh and put the book down? How do I tell?

There’s only one way. Sooner or later I’m going to have to step back.

Time’s Chariot is a science fiction novel with a strong element of detective fiction. A future society has developed time-travelling technology. The technology is under the monopoly of a College, charged with making sure that the lessons of the past can be observed and used without history being disturbed. But rogue elements are up to something sneaky. Their tentacles penetrate high into the organisation and far back into the past. And our misfit hero – an officer of the College - is bent on defeating them.

Ben Jeapes is another of David Fickling’s authors, and David expects his writers to have a certain something (though we say it who shouldn’t). He looks for what he calls ‘narrative’, which I think means he expects us to tell a story capably in the good old way without too many gimmicks or wanderings. Now, I have to confess that I struggled with Time’s Chariot to begin with, partly because there’s a large cast of characters with strange names and it took me a while to sort out who was who. But then the story woke up, the game got afoot and I’m now reading with real pleasure.

The challenge with a time-travelling novel is how you deal with the paradox – the moment when someone goes back and changes the past in a way that affects a part of the story that’s already been told. It’s tough to do, because story-telling is by nature linear with a beginning, a middle and an end in that order, and a successful story must follow that pattern even if it doesn’t appear to. The easy way is not to have any paradoxes, or to invent reasons why they don’t happen. That seems to me to be a cop-out. In Jeapes’s story, paradoxes clearly can happen. So far they’ve happened off stage. You learn about them in asides from the main characters. We haven’t yet experienced one up close. But I’m reading on in hope. I have a theory that the bad guy whose death was faked at the beginning really will die in that incident, and has been dead for five thousand years before the main story began. Let’s see…

PS. Yes, there was a paradox. But it wasn’t what I expected!