Top Ten Best Ghost Stories Ever?

It is rare that SFX magazine and I even remotely agree when it comes to ‘best of’ selections. This is hardly surprising as whatever SFX’s perceived readership might be, I’m fairly sure it’s not me – I’ve never been especially interested in media sf or fantasy, or gaming for that matter, and to glance at SFX is to see a world in which books seem barely to figure. But equally, ‘live and let live’ seems to be a good credo with which to work; sf and fantasy come in so many forms these days I refuse to complain about the lack of attention to literature any more.

Nonetheless, you may imagine my surprise when I found that I pretty much agreed with the SFX top ten best ghost stories ever, at least in terms of those I’m familiar with (and it would of course be churlish of me to observe that all these stories have coincidentally received film adaptations, some better than others).

10 – M.R. James – Casting the Runes

 9 – Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol

 8 – Peter Straub – Ghost Story

 7 – Susan Hill – The Woman in Black

 6 – Edgar Allan Poe – The Tell-Tale Heart

 5 – Stephen King – The Shining

 4 – W.W. Jacobs – The Monkey’s Paw

 3 – Jonathan Miller (M.R. James)– Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You (film)

 2 – Henry James – The Turn of the Screw

 1 – Shirley Jackson – The Haunting of Hill House/The Haunting

I’ve not read either the Straub or the King, though I really ought to (and in the case of the King, I now realise I was put off by the fatal combination of Kubrick and Jack Nicholson).

The inclusion of M.R. James is always likely to please me, though it’s interesting that the second is the Miller film adaptation of ‘Oh Whistle And I’ll Come toYou, My Lad!’ which is a fine piece of work in its own right.

Likewise, ‘A Christmas Carol’ is guaranteed to please; it’s still a wonderful story. My current favourite adaptation is the version with Patrick Stewart as Scrooge (though Alastair Sim and Michael Hordern have turned in excellent performances over the years). But as SFX also notes, Dickens’ best ghost story is undoubtedly ‘The Signalman’ (also filmed, and well worth watching. It is available on Youtube).

The Woman in Black is more problematic. My first acquaintance with it was when I saw the stage adaptation in London, way back when it first opened. It was a wonderful piece of melodrama and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The novel seemed flat by comparison; it seemed to me that Susan Hill was too self-conscious about her influences (a view I’ve seen no reason to change with her subsequent ghost stories, at least one of which is simply an overextended version of James’s ‘Mezzotint’). ITV’s adaptation, written by Nigel Kneale, was equally terrifying, and even the reading recently broadcast on Radio 4Extra was extremely frightening. I even confess to certain hopes for the new Daniel Radcliffe film, too, but the odd thing about this novel is that it really does seem to work better in practically any other medium than the original.

Poe’s ‘The Telltale Heart’is an interesting choice; I’m not sure I would regard it as a ghost story in the classic sense of an external haunting, but as a psychological haunting, it would be hard to beat. One might say the same about Henry James’ ‘The Turn of the Screw’, and it is the classic example of the Todorovian hesitation (‘The Innocents’ is a genuinely terrifying film version, while Benjamin Britten’s opera of ‘The Turn of the Screw’ is a wonderful thing).

I was a little more surprised by the inclusion of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’; I hadn’t realised it was still that well known as a story, but I’m glad it is. I remember hearing the story when I was young and it has always stuck with me. Good stuff. But there is an immense pleasure in seeing Shirley Jackson top the list with The Haunting of Hill House, which is an excellent story, and genuinely scary.

So, at some point I must read the Straub and the King.

The Weird – Homework

Short commons these last couple of days as I’ve been busy with other things and haven’t had the necessary space in my head to write criticism.

Today, a group of links for you, as markers for material I want to come back to, some time in December. Part of my underlying project in reading my way through The Weird is to revisit my own understanding of terms I have thrown around without giving them much thought over the last thirty-odd years, terms like ‘supernatural’, and ‘ghost’, and so on. I think, from some of the things I’ve already said, it’s perhaps becoming clear that in the past I’ve had an aversion to the term ‘weird fiction’, although I seem to be more comfortable with the way that Jeff and Ann use it in The Weird, perhaps because I’m practising some sort of ostensive understanding based on their selections, which so far chime with my established taste for “something fantastic that isn’t epic fantasy but for which ‘ghost story’ is not a great term either”. Catchy definition, don’t you think? I can see it being employed with vigour in English departments the length and breadth of the land, can’t you? No, I didn’t think so.

As already noted, the term “weird” is derived from the critical writing of H P Lovecraft, in particular, Supernatural Horror in Literature. I have read it, but a long time ago, and I need to revisit it fairly soon. I mention this because of this piece by Erich Zann on a blog called Hideous Thing (which seems to have died almost before it got started, more’s the pity) which queries the use of the term ‘Weird’, with reference to what Lovecraft may or may not have meant in using it: a useful corrective.

And finally, we have Scott Nicolay’s Dogme 2011 for Weird Fiction, a personal manifesto, which I hope to read against some of what I’ve already been looking at.

I’ll come back to these nearer Christmas, but in the meantime, happy reading.

Thinking Aloud – Really, I shouldn't …

Earlier in the year, I allowed my irritation with John Mullan’s dismissive attitude towards genre and his ongoing sanctification of literary fiction to spill over into my blog, and made an attempt to pick apart his antipathy towards genre, by which he meant, so far as I could see, stuff he didn’t like. In some ways, I’m sympathetic as, on one level, I tend to define genre as stuff I do like; I think, though, that what irritated me then was not so much Mullan’s general defence of literary fiction, which was about as robust as a piece of damp tissue paper, and almost too easy to take down were one so inclined, but the smug pleasure he seemed to take in representing his tastes as the only true measure of literary judgement. It might be that he actually took more pleasure in watching us froth at the mouth as we danced all over his wrongheadedness than he did in being wrongheaded in the first place. On the basis that I couldn’t figure out who among us was being the most jejune, I decided to withdraw from the taxonomy wars and get on with writing criticism instead.

The Weird – The People of the Pit – A. Merritt

When I think of A. Merritt, I think of pulp fiction inevitably. If Ugolini’s story was leaning in that direction, ‘The People of the Pit’ puts us squarely in pulp territory, but geographically somewhere very vague, above the Yukon, perhaps in Alaska. All we really know is that it’s somewhere in the North. The vagueness is deliberate, of course, enough to make you think the place might be real, enough to make sure you couldn’t find it if you wanted to, and mostly to cover up the fact that it doesn’t exist at all, layer after layer of contrivance and verisimilitude, supporting and undermining one another simultaneously. It’s irresistible.

The Weird – The Vegetable Man – Luigi Ugolini

Again, Luigi Ugolini is a name new to me, but ‘The Vegetable Man’ seems to fit very squarely into a late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century fascination with South America and what might lie hidden in the forests of the Amazon – lost civilisations, lost cities, lost tribes, lost knowledge. there is an interesting tension at the outset between the narrator, Benito Olivares, the self-styled young scientist and pioneer, educated, urban, and the uncharted jungles of the Amazon. The Amazon is ‘impenetrable’, but he ‘penetrated the virgin forests’; it is not difficult to see that Olivares is out to prove himself, forcing himself onto the forests, in order to wring ‘countless secrets out of that vegetable environment’. [S]cience’, he says, is ‘a matter of faith and martyrdom’ (97). Olivares’ engagement with his environment is one of struggle, and violence, against a jungle that not surprisingly fights back. The religious and sexual undertones point to forcible conversion and rape rather than any mutual engagement. Olivares’ scientific endeavour is a single-handed recapitulation of the explorations of early European visitors, enacted this time against the plant kingdom. The alert reader knows already that this encounter is not going to end well for Olivares. The question is, given the fact that he is narrating, how is it going to end?

Science Fiction Foundation SF Criticism Masterclass 2012

Class Leaders:
Edward James
M. John Harrison
Kari Sperring

The Science Fiction Foundation (SFF) will be holding the sixth annual Masterclass in sf criticism in 2012.

Dates: June 22nd, 23rd, 24th 2012.

Location: Middlesex University, London (the Hendon Campus, nearest underground, Hendon).
Delegate costs will be £190 per person, excluding accommodation.
Accommodation: students are asked to find their own accommodation, but help is available from the administrator (farah.sf@gmail.com)

Applicants should write to Farah Mendlesohn at farah.sf@gmail.com. Applicants are asked to provide a CV and a writing sample; these will be assessed by an Applications Committee consisting of Farah Mendlesohn, Graham Sleight and Andy Sawyer. Completed applications must be received by 28th February 2012.

Thinking Aloud – A Different Kind of Weird

The grand plan for this evening was to write about the new dramatisation of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen which ran on Radio 4 this afternoon. I’d been looking forward to this all week; Radio 4’s previous dramatisation, done some 25 years ago, so far as I can remember, lacked a certain something as the child actors were not terribly good, and tended to put ... the emphases ... in … all the wrong places (though the adults weren’t too bad, particularly the actor playing Gowther Mossock).

As it turned out, today’s programme also lacked a certain something. It lacked the entire Earldelving sequence, the part where Colin and Susan, aided by Fenodyree and Durathror, make a terrifying journey through narrow tunnels under Alderley Edge, pushing and pulling themselves along on their stomachs, constantly at risk of becoming trapped. It is a tour de force of storytelling, the single best sequence in the entire book, the moment when you know just how good a writer Alan Garner is capable of being. I still find it very difficult to read, except for that wonderful moment of relief when they escape, finally, into daylight, and meet the Stromkarl sitting on the Goldenstone.

The Weird – The Hungry Stones – Rabindranath Tagore

I have in the past read Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World (1916) his novel about the beginnings of the Swadeshi movement, which reflects his own attempts to reconcile the influence of Western culture with a desire for Indian independence from Britain, but so far I’m unaware of having read any of his short stories.

Putting aside any considerations of the weird for a moment, what struck me first was how like some of Kipling’s Indian stories it seemed to be, superficially at least, though this story, published the same year as The Home and the World, is at least one generation younger, perhaps two. Kipling himself wrote some extremely good ghost stories and other supernatural tales set in India, though the Indian characters were, inevitably, positioned as inherently unknowable, the engagement with their cultures throwing up things that were finally incomprehensible to the civilised white man. It is easy to dismiss Kiping as being racist and jingoistic but that’s too simplistic. Kipling saw India with a child’s wonder, in many ways, mixed with homesickness, nostalgia, but he was also part of a system that ‘knew’India through cataloguing and classifying it, through administering it. I suspect, in part, Kipling’s Indian stories were a struggle to reconcile these two very different parts of his experience. His ghost stories tend to achieve explanation and closure, although at times the hauntings can be grotesque and very immediate.

The Weird – The Spider – Hanns Heinz Ewers

Hanns Heinz Ewers was a German horror writer, and the introduction notes that much of his work has a decadent feel to it. Yet what strikes one immediately about this story is that it seems more like a detective story. A series of inexplicable suicides in the same hotel room, on a Friday afternoon, between the hours of five and six, brings a young medical student, Richard Bracquemont, to the Hotel Stevens, determined, so he says, to solve the mystery, and claiming particular knowledge that will enable him to do so.

Thinking Aloud – The New Sherlock Holmes

I’ve been listening to Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime these last few days, following Antony Horowitz’s new Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk, the first novel officially endorsed by the Conan Doyle estate.  It is very enjoyable so far as it goes, even putting aside the problems of abridgement, but that is the big question: where does it go?

Thinking aloud …

Paper Knife has been getting a lot more traffic recently, so welcome to anyone who has started reading regularly in the last few days.

My main reading discussion project at present is Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird – all of it, discussed in bite-size portions, or at any rate, one or two stories at a time. I’ve no idea how long that will take me, but at the rate of two or three posts a week, I imagine I’ll be finishing up in late January (or I may go mad over Christmas and write lots; we shall see).

However, Paper Knife isn’t just about weird fiction, or even the fantastic, or even genre fiction, so don’t be surprised if posts on other literary topics pop up from time to time.

Before moving on, however, I should mention that I’m not the only one undertaking a ‘Weird’ reading project. Des Lewis has a similar project on the go, with the latest instalment here.

The Weird – Meyrink and Heym

Having spent the last few post dealing with the work of old reading friends, this post sees me moving into less familiar territory. I recognise Gustav Meyrink’s name from The Golem, of course, but Georg Heym’s name and work are unknown to me so far. Or, rather, and I suspect this is much nearer the truth, I may have encountered both writers in the past and kind of … well, glided past them. My younger self, for all that she loved exuberant and exotic language – with writers like E.R. Eddison, it’s hard to avoid, was rather less fond of exotic imagery, oriental fantasies, tales of cruelty, and so on. She would have found Kubin’s ‘The Other Side’ intensely disturbing, for example. She wanted security in her reading, and Tolkien, ghost stories, and so on, provided that because they operated within historical and metaphysical frameworks that she understood.

More overtly transgressive work was problematic, and for years I simply didn’t have the reading skills to deal with it. It is to be hoped that things have improved over the years, but I am acutely aware that my reading tends to run along well-marked Anglocentric pathways. Part of the reason I’m carrying out this extended reading is to challenge myself with unfamiliar approaches to writing, and to read work from other countries. 

The Weird – How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles – Lord Dunsany

Back in my misspent youth, to judge from the pile of books I still have, I read a lot of Lord Dunsany. I still remember The King of Elfland’s Daughter but the short stories seem to have vanished from my memory like strands of mist evaporating in the morning sunshine. Consequently, I have no idea at present how typical ‘How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles’ might be of his output, but if much of the rest is anything like this, a reread is in order at the earliest available opportunity.

News, news, news!

Tonight's post is rather brief as I've had a busy day at work. However, I do have a piece of very important news to share. 

I am joining the team at Weird Fiction Review as its regular book reviewer. I was honoured to be invited to join and am delighted to accept. My first column will appear in January, and thereafter on a semi-regular basis. 


Details about submitting books for consideration can be found here. 


Tomorrow, I'll be writing about Lord Dunsany's 'How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles'.

Friday evening housekeeping

It has been a busy week here at Paper Knife, trying to get my Weird Reading project off the ground, but I’m pleased with the way things are going, even if I have been going slightly cross-eyed from the reading. I’m taking a break from story criticism for a couple of days, just to let some of the brain cells snap into place, but there will be a new story post on Sunday evening.

If you haven’t already spotted it and are looking for more weird fiction-related material, let me just point you at the Weird Fiction Review, the latest project from Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (do these people never sleep?), and a repository of all sorts of weird goodies. Seriously, I think this is going to become a valuable resource for people who want to expand their understanding of the weird in fiction, or who just want a taster before committing themselves to The Weird itself.

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I have also made a few appearances on the interwebs this week. The Locus Roundtable, in which I sometimes participate, has been discussing Formative Reading Experiences here and here. I appear briefly in both parts, but the discussion is generally fascinating, for the reassurance it offers in places that my early reading experiences were by no means unique, but particularly for the differences in reading experiences between, most notably, the US and UK, and the generational differences.

And I also have a review up at Strange Horizons, this time of Mira Grant’s Deadline, the second in the Newsflesh Trilogy. I am unimpressed. When the third and final volume comes out, I may well do an in-depth piece about the trilogy for Paper Knife.

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Meanwhile, I have been thinking about other bookish things; in this instance, about book collecting. I have a number of friends and acquaintances who ‘collect’, by which I mean they pay rather more attention to editions than I do, to first editions, first printings, advance reading copies, and things of that ilk. Collecting seems to go with the territory if one is dealing with obscure authors, or publications of an earlier era, but I am never quite sure if it is the same as that first edition ‘thing’ that people have.

Would it be bad of me to say I don’t quite get it? To be fair, I have literally never been able to get the first editions themselves, mostly as a result of never having had that necessary combination of money and the time and energy to trawl bookshops. Or rather, it seems to be more a matter of temperament, or it was in the days before internet book-buying. I used to find the thought of a secondhand bookshop utterly overwhelming if I was looking for something in particular, and an utter pleasure to flit around if I wasn’t. And I’ve had my minor triumphs, including Hope Mirrlees’ other novels, which I gather are worth a bob or two, though I’ve never seen a hardback of Lud-in-the-Mist.[1]

In the end, I suppose for me it is about text. I am quite happy to have a text to read; the need for first editions only comes into play if I am writing academically and need page references. And possibly, probably, I just don’t have the temperament of a collector. I’m an accumulator, who builds micro collections of authors and topics when I need them for research, but that is about it really. And yet I have this sneaking suspicion that in some mysterious way I am missing out, and I have no idea on what. Someone may care to explain the thrill of it to me.

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I’ll be adding another innovation to Paper Knife in the next few months, namely a rolling bibliography of my book reviews and articles. I’ve been meaning to do this for years, and the longer I’ve left it, the more daunting the project has become. I have no idea how many pieces I’ve produced since I started reviewing in 1984 (Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, seeing as you ask, and I enjoyed it very much). This is likely to be as much a voyage of discovery for me as it may be for some of you! Anyway, keep an eye on the tab labelled ‘Bibliography’ and see what I find.

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[1] And here I must tell my terrible Hope Mirrlees story. I loved Lud-in-the-Mist to distraction when I was an adolescent, wondered if Hope Mirrlees was still alive, assumed she wasn’t. I happened to be reading the Death Notices in the Oxford Mail one day, by chance, and noticed the announcement of her death. She had been living in my home city all along. But I still had no idea where. More recently, I have discovered she was living no more than a couple of miles away from where I was brought up, and within a mile of Tolkien’s house. and that is the great lost opportunity of my life.

The Weird – Casting the Runes – M R James

I may as well say here that M.R. James is my favourite writer of ghost stories; indeed, with a few noble exceptions, most of them actually written by friends or associates of James, or emerging from the same period, most other ghost stories seem like pale imitations by comparison. There is also an awful lot of pastiche James around, and to my mind very little of it comes anywhere near James’s own work. It is a curious thing that James does invite this impulse to emulate and yet, even with all the classic elements of a Jamesian ghost story in place, they invariably can’t quite capture the tone; something is always just every so slightly ‘off’.

Which is perhaps ironic because that sense of something being slightly ‘off’ is an important part of James’s work, the sense of ‘offness’ gradually gathering, growing, until it cannot be ignored, at which point, something genuinely dreadful bursts into a world that is theoretically very stable, very grounded n the here and now. ‘The Mezzotint’, a particular favourite of mine, works on the principle of tiny, accumulated details, interspersed with small moments of terror, yet the double audience of the reader and the main characters remain safely, and powerless, at a distance. ‘Lost Hearts’, another of my favourites, signals heavily to the reader that something quite dreadful is about to happen, but this is set against the professional ignorance of the servants who suspect that something is wrong but who dare not question their master, and young Stephen, who is the innocent asker of questions.

The Weird – Sredni Vashtar – Saki

I cannot actually remember a time when I didn’t know this story. I must have come across it in an anthology when I was ten or eleven, and I have a dim memory of an eccentric English teacher reading it in class, for ‘Sredni Vashtar’ echoes in my mind as speech rather than as words.

Revisiting it for the purposes of this exercise, I’m struck once again by Saki’s economic use of words. This is a very short story, yet it contains such depths. So much is inferred, so little said, yet the story unpacks itself before our eyes, like some sort of wondrous space-saving device that unfolds at the press of a button

The Weird – The Willows – Algernon Blackwood

I never much cared for Algernon Blackwood’s work when I was younger, and I’m not honestly sure how many of his stories I’ve ever read, with the exception of ‘The Wendigo’ and ‘The Willows’, both of which have been regularly anthologised through the years.

Reading it once again, I can see immediately why I never warmed to this story. M.R. James’s stories are, for the most part, set in clearly defined spaces, public and private, inside and out, and even when his characters do venture into the countryside, it remains a world of clearly defined edges: fields, footpaths, land owned definitively. The liminal space of James’s world is often found in tiny moments that the reader might easily miss, and the critical actions almost always take place indoors or in confined spaces. The supernatural intrudes into conformity, so to speak.

In contrast, ‘The Willows’ is marked by the overwhelming generosity of its landscape. It overflows every boundary, literally as well as figuratively, erasing physical and psychological landmarks as it goes. Containment comes in the form of, first, a canoe, and then an island in the flood, shrinking as the waters rise, and while it still represents sanctuary of a sort, this is by no means guaranteed. (One might argue this is also true of James’s stories but there is a sense that even as the supernatural challenges his characters on domestic home ground, that very domesticity provides a place from which to fight back).

The Weird – The Screaming Skull – F. Marion Crawford

The next four stories in The Weird – F. Marion Crawford’s ‘The Screaming Skull’, Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’, Saki’s ‘Sredni Vashtar, and M.R. James’ ‘Casting the Runes’, all of which I am already familiar with – form a group which I have in the past mentally tagged as ‘ghost stories’, by which I meant that they contained something identifiably supernatural, though in the case of ‘Sredni Vashtar’ even that is debateable.

Of the four stories, ‘The Screaming Skull’ is perhaps the closest in form to a traditional ghost story, in that a murder has been committed, and some sort of supernatural force seeks both recognition of that fact and also, perhaps, retribution. Indeed, the story even employs the traditional format of the first-person narrator, the witness testifying to the haunting, and to the unravelling of the story. But there the similarity ends. Instead of a straightforward account of events, taken in chronological order, culminating in either an act of discovery or of restitution, the reader becomes privy to the inner turmoil of the narrator, Captain Charles Braddock, as his worldview is comprehensively destabilised.

The Weird – The Other Side – Alfred Kubin

My knowledge of European weird and fantastic fiction is scanty, to say the least, and I haven’t, so far as I know, previously encountered Alfred Kubin. Based on this extract, I am already eager to read the rest of The Other Side, and I am curious as to how this extract fits into the broader picture.

Here we have the city of Pearl.  We’re told that Pearl is ‘strange and oppressive’ in the introduction, but given no clue as to what form that strangeness and oppression might involve. However, we quickly learn that there is some sort of political struggle under way, and that Pearl’s inhabitants are also succumbing to ‘an irresistible sleeping sickness’, something that is implicitly linked to the political situation. An inexplicable desire to sleep often suggests either an unwillingness to act, or else an extreme retreat from a situation as it is; either way, one speculates that the sleeping disease is a communal response to the situation. It is notable, for example, that animals have not been affected; also, at least some animals seem to work alongside the humans.

But the sleeping disease is only a precursor to what comes next, though perhaps the catalyst, given that sleep is the relaxation of the grip of the conscious mind on the world. The sleeping mind can run riot in dreams, and at the same time, while the people sleep, the rest of the inhabitants of the Dream Realm (surely no coincidence there) also run riot, with animals of all kinds, the unseen denizens, suddenly becoming vividly visible, with plagues of insects sweeping through, large carnivores invading the houses. The presence of animals, literal as it seems to be, is inevitably also a symbolic embodiment of the fear of the townsfolk. Kubin’s narrator is very matter of fact about these invasions, and in that matter of factness perhaps lies the deepest horror. The factual recounting of this invasion, this sudden and ongoing super-abundance of animals renders the abnormal normal momentarily, before the reader mentally overbalances, trying to deal with the thought of suddenly finding fourteen rabbits in one’s bed, or snakes everywhere.

The encroachment of nature is, in science fiction, usually a more gradual process, but nonetheless is usually a signal that humanity is no longer in the ascendant. People vanish from the picture, buildings gently begin to decay; there is something picturesque, almost nostalgic in the return to pre-civilised conditions, with maybe a few people hanging on, living once more in sympathy with nature. In ‘The Other Side’, however, the speed of the changes, their simultaneity, is part of what makes this so terrifying, accentuated by the way that the human inhabitants of Pearl accept the situation, perhaps because they can do nothing else. 

After the invasion of animals comes the ‘sickness of inanimate matter’, the decay of building materials, textiles, ceramics, those things that we invest so much in, without which life seems impossible. And the next threat is to life itself, as the narrator realises when he stops to consider the fate of his own body.

Is he assailed by madness as he runs through the palace, seeking Patera, to plead for his life? Or does madness lie in believing in the existence of Patera in the first place? Can one place all one’s hope in such power? The narrator’s realisation is that, effectively, it doesn’t matter what he does: ‘I took strength in the consciousness of my own impotence’, and this is the point at which he shuts out ‘doubts and anxieties’. This is where the extract finished, and I find myself wondering what will happen to the narrator; what will he choose to see or to ignore in the future, having calmly recounted everything so far. Indeed, what are the other inhabitants of the Dream Realm seeing?

This is an interesting story to start this collection, particularly the matter-of-fact tone of the recounting of extraordinary events, and the moment when the narrator realises he can no longer simply observe and narrate, but is a part of the story too, the abstract becoming personal. What does it all mean? It is unclear, except insofar as the whole extract is obviously a metaphor of sorts for the collapse of a regime, society, civilisation, a strange mixture of hope and despair.

For more about The Other Side, try this review by Paul  C Smith, and also read this blog post at Solar Bridge

The Barthesian Spaceship

I was having tea with a friend on campus on Thursday, and in the course of a long and very enjoyable discussion of science fiction, he mentioned a short piece by Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, ‘The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat’, which I’d not read before.

I can’t quite remember the context for this but I think we were probably talking the way in which so much science fiction, despite being presented as outgoing, exploratory, looking to the future, and all that, is very enclosed, conservative, reinforcing or imposing conventional values, and there was also an excursion into discussing issues of taxonomy again. Paul March-Russell commented on the situation of the spaceship heading out to the frontiers of space, both exploring the universe but also containing within itself the status quo, and mentioned this piece by Barthes.

So, in ‘The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat’, Barthes considers the work of Jules Verne, suggesting that Verne ‘has built a kind of self-sufficient cosmogony, which has its own categories, its own time, space, fulfilment and even existential principle’. This ‘existential principle’ is ‘the ceaseless action of secluding oneself’. Barthes’ example here is Verne’s The Mysterious Island:

in which the man-child re-invents the world, fills it, closes it, shuts himself up in it and crowns this encyclopaedic effort with the bourgeois posture of appropriation: slippers, pipe and fireside, while outside the story that is the infinite, rages in vain. (65)

Certainly, this gives us the ‘world within the world’ of the spaceship, taking the values of the explorer/coloniser with him wherever he goes, indeed like the nautilus or the snail, but I was also struck by how this image appears in stories such as, for example, The Wind in the Willows; it would describe Mole’s home and Rattie’s, both of them close and snug, with bunk beds, and drawers, and everything neatly to hand. Or, to take another example, the portrayal of Cavor’s spaceship in the film of The First Men in the Moon, with all that wood panelling and little drawers and cupboards. I can only immediately think of one example in ‘girls’ fiction’, oddly enough, and that is Maria’s little bedroom in The Little White Horse, which is not to say this is a specifically masculine thing, but I can’t help feeling Barthes had a point when he talked about the ‘man-child’.

And, oddly enough, I also find myself thinking of Charles Darwin, and all his gear, squeezed into the confines of Fitzroy’s cabin on HMS Beagle, and the way he functions as both explorer and social normaliser, his primary reason for being on the ship to act as gentleman-companion to Fitzroy, who feared the effects of too much mental solitude.

A little later, Barthes makes another telling comment:

Verne in no way sought to enlarge the world by romantic ways of escape or mystical plans to reach the infinite: he constantly sought to shrink it, to populate it, to reduce it to a known and enclosed space, where man could subsequently live in comfort: the world can draw everything from itself; it needs, in order to exist, no one else but man. (66)

As Barthes suggests, in Verne’s work, and we can extend this to other writers quite easily, I think, the ship is the symbol of departure, of appropriation through that departure, but also emblematic of closure and enclosure. Verne’s ships are, according to Barthes, ‘perfect cubby-holes’ (66), and while this perception may change with more modern ideas of what ships might be, the cubby-hole still persists, the small womb-like space of safety. And what else is a space ship if not an ‘egg-like fullness’ (65)? Yet, for Verne, and this picks up the point about spaceships, ‘the vastness of [the ships’] circumnvigation further increases the bliss of their closure, the perfection of their inner humanity’ (66).

The Nautilus, in this regard, is the most desirable of all caves: the enjoyment of being closed reaches its paroxysm when, from the bosom of this unbroken inwardness, it is possible to watch, through a large window-pane, the outside vagueness of the waters, and thus define, in a single act, the inside by means of its opposite. (67)

In other words, the spaceship can sail on forever, with its occupants safely enclosed in their own time and space, constantly othering the outside, never engaging with it, instead enjoying a ‘smooth, round universe’ (68) inside the ship.

‘The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat’

Roland Barthes Mythologies (Selected and translated from the French by Annette Lavers)

London: Vintage (1993)

The Weird and Me

I never followed the discussions on the ‘New Weird’ when they were going on across the internet, perhaps because I had never really been entirely clear what the old ‘Weird’ was, and I hadn’t really got time to go and find out at that point. It has, though, always troubled me that I didn’t, which is part of why I am embarking on this mammoth blogging project; to work my way to some sort of understanding of what ‘weird’ means, and then think about how it informs my reading of the fantastic. Somehow it feels long overdue. I’ve read fantasy for as long as I can remember but I’ve never really sat down to theorize about it before. This represents a considerable challenge, and I’m looking forward to it.

The Weird – first thoughts

I swear the postman looked distinctly happier after offloading a copy of The Weird into the porch earlier this week. It is by no means a small book. Indeed, it looks like a textbook, and that is a compliment. I would rather like to teach a course that might use it. And I like that tag line: ‘A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories’. As a child, I loved huge, bulky collections of stories, books that I could vanish into for hours, and this has something of the same feel about it. It also, though more in content than design, reminds me of Alberto Manguel’s Black Water, an anthology that had a huge effect on my reading  when it first came out. I have a feeling that The Weird is going to do something similar, not so much in terms of steering me towards new writing, though I anticipate that a certain amount of that will happen, but because I hope it will provide an opportunity for me to revisit things I’ve been reading over the years, to reassess my understanding of the weird and the fantastic in fiction.

Having seen the size of this anthology, my concern is how best to deal with it. A normal-sized review is not going to do justice to individual stories, and I know already that there is a lot I am going to want to write about. So, the plan is this. I shall over the next month or two post about the stories as I read them, one or two each day, depending on their length, and do a certain amount of theorising as I go, in the light of the Introduction, and also other articles of Jeff VanderMeer’s that I’ve read recently, in his new collection of non-fiction, Monstrous Creatures. Of the anglophone writers, I’m familiar with most of the names, and a good number of the stories (and in a number of instances, other stories from the same writers), but what really excites me about this collection is the material from non-anglophone writers. I am very much looking forward to exploring names that are new to me. I’ll take the Fore- and Afterweirds (wincing slightly at the pun) at the end of the reading, for reasons I’ve not yet fully articulated to myself, but it just feels right.

Review – Paintwork by Tim Maughan

Tim Maughan –Paintwork.

The three short stories which comprise Paintwork are all set in a future that in some respects feels as close as tomorrow, but a longer moment’s consideration of the technology that is almost a normal part of everyday life suggests that this future is perhaps not quite as close as one initially thought. It can be difficult to find an appropriate balance between the ‘gosh-wow new stuff’ approach and the fact that it should mostly be a normal and unremarked thing to the stories’ inhabitants, if not to readers. Post-Neuromancer, there is the danger when using themes such as augmented reality, street art or manga, this that authors are rehashing the same old ideas, using past cultural cues in lieu of new content, to evoke a sense of the futuristic. For the most part, Maughan lets the technology speak for itself but doesn’t always quite avoid the intrinsic self-consciousness that comes with such territory: the debate as to how much should the author divulge, how much should the reader be left to figure out is sometimes a little more visible than it ought to be.

Of the three stories, ‘Paparazzi’ suffers most from this. The quasi-anonymous John Smith is reduced to taking an assignment to gatecrash a beta version of new online game, and needs to spend a lot of time learning the game. It is a not unreasonable reworking of the modern advertising practice of creating a story where a story doesn’t exist but too much time is wasted in setting up the scenario, which isn’t a story itself, while the payoff is slight. I’d like to believe that ‘Paparazzi’ is in some way performative of its theme, but the fact remains that it is the weakest of the three stories, for all that it contains a pertinent nugget of observation about the way in which the press both manipulates and is in turn manipulated.

Instead, let us turn to ‘Paintwork’ itself and to ‘Havana Augmented’, both of which, among other things, explore the idea of art and the environment in which it occurs, and most importantly, with the nature of artistic integrity. ‘Paintwork’ itself is about the making of art, and what it is that makes it authentic. Is it craft or is it result that matters? And following that, is the satisfaction to be gained from doing it properly personal or something more than that?

These are the questions that 3Cube, a ‘writer’, has to grapple with during the course of the story. The meaning of ‘writer’ has obviously shifted since the present day. Cube’s ‘art’ is as much coding and stencil-cutting as it is pictorial (3D, even, given the technology at his disposal). He takes a pride in his various skills, and in doing things the ‘old-fashioned way’. However, all this is called into question when his newest set of artworks are sabotaged almost before they’ve been witnessed. It would spoil the story’s denouement to go into much more detail, but it revolves around a fascinating set of dichotomies about art as inspiration or product, about the fashion in technologies, whether art is somehow more worthwhile if you go about it in one way or another.

What distinguishes Cube from his fellow artists is something best characterised as a romantic streak. He is engaged with the notion of art as a way of achieving personal transformation, and as having the power to transform others, while most of the artists he knows seem to regard it as a commercial enterprise. Maughan seems to be suggesting that this is the artist’s quintessential dilemma, no matter what the medium he works in, and this idea spills over into ‘Havana Augmented’, which is a joyful and outrageous story of young games programmers who have moved a virtual game into the augmented reality of their spex and are now playing Rolling Iron through the streets of Havana. Inevitably governments and big business become involved, and I can’t deny that the story’s ending smacks somewhat of the fairytale, but in the end, why not? 3Cube is criticised by fellow artists for being too optimistic, for seeking the beauty buried within the grim, trying to remind people that there is hope of something better, and for Paul and Marcus, there is a similar prize at stake in their dealings with the outside world.

In all, Paintwork is a very enjoyable and thought-provoking collection of stories about the place of art in the future. For further details about Paintwork, go here.

Disclosure notice: ebook of Paintwork provided, unsolicited, by Tim Maughan