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With ‘Out of This World’, the British Library has crafted a comprehensive, interplanetary journey through Science Fiction, perhaps the most inventive and ingenious of storytelling genres, but also one of the most derided.   I genuinely loved the British Library’s previous exhibition ‘Evolving English’, a far-reaching, interactive and multimedia exploration of how we communicate, and my visit to ‘Out of This World’ proves to be every bit as enlightening.

Visitors are subjected to ancient and forgotten texts, as well as beloved classics, in addition to interactive installations and audiovisual media. The curators aim to explain that SF, although accused as being a low-culture twentieth century phenomenon, is in fact a genre storytellers have used to discuss issues and ideas as far back as the 2^nd century AD. An illustrative example is Lucian of Samosata’s ‘True History’. Dated at circa 170AD, the novel satirises travellers’ tales by detailing a trip to the moon. The work is considered by many as the first piece of SF ever written, and the author drew upon mankind’s fascination with the unknown and alien. Words seem futile devices when it comes to describing the book’s singularly odd illustrations of dog-faced men fighting on winged acorns.

Similarly strange is the story of how Edward Bulmer- Lytton’s 1871 novel ‘The Coming Race’ inadvertently provided inspiration for the name of a popular beef drink. The book’s hero travels to a subterranean utopia populated by a race of angels who sustain themselves on ‘Vril’, a fluid and latent source of energy. A opportunist marketing team decided to appropriate the ‘Vril’ affix for their beef extract product, hoping the it would provide the product with connotations of energy and lustre found in the novel, and ‘Bovril’, as we know it today, was born. A bold move, although I suspect even the product’s manufacturers would have to admit it hasn’t maintained the associated qualities of potency to this day.

Representative of how the genre can provide opportunities to speculate and discuss issues in a distanced but no less yet direct manner is Lous-Sebastien Mercier’s ‘The Year 2440’. The hero of the 1771 novel is a Parisian who falls asleep and awakes in 2440. Written in the period leading up to the French Revolution and in a context of social unrest, Mercier depicts a future enlightened France, complete with radical political, social and scientific change. A chapter the writer added fifteen years later described a device which predicted the advent of the hot air balloon.

As well as explorations of accepted SF staples such as Arthur C. Clarke and H.G. Wells, and an insight into how creators of comic superheroes utilized science and mutation, there are also detours to more obscure interpretations of the genre, such as Japanese Manga’s contribution to the genre, ‘The Adventures of Robo-Cat’. ‘Clay/9000’, a most informative robot, kindly lectured me on the Polish visionary Stanislaw Lem, and an installation encouraging visitors to design and draw aliens is also an inclusive touch, in an exhibition which believers and non-believers of the art of Science Fiction alike will enjoy.

Out of this World is at the British Library until 25^th September.

Rob Fred Parker

Vonnegut's mind at work. Illustration by Rob Fred Parker.

Seeing as it is science month here at Litro, what better time to take a look at one of the most influential, funniest and perhaps wisest writers to have wrestled with science in his books: Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Vonnegut wrote many novels, all brimming with ideas and characters hopelessly battling ingrained flaws in their personality and psychology, tied together with a ceaseless warmth and trademark wit; as he admitted in 2005’s A Man Without A Country, he thought ‘any subject is subject to laughter’. When I spoke to up-and-coming writer Joe Dunthorne about Vonnegut, he commented his admiration stems from the author’s “uniquely, relaxed tone of his prose. He makes you want to go for lunch with him. Maybe even breakfast. Plus, he makes jokes without using punchlines. He makes death funny, and also, not in the least bit funny, at the same time”. Vonnegut’s style is incredibly conversational, and his novels read as if they were dictated in one go, yet have proved greatly memorable and enduring. As American author Dave Eggers notes, Vonnegut’s books are ‘very personal novels disguised as allegories disguised as science fiction’. Vonnegut uses elements of science fiction to study humanity and the plight of its flawed but hopeful citizens. For instance, many of his novels revolve around the human struggle to accept the linear nature of time, exploring pre-determined destinies versus free will.

These ideas are central to Slaughterhouse-Five, the writer’s 1969 novel and perhaps his most famous work. The book primarily draws on the Allied bombing of Dresden, which Vonnegut witnessed as a prisoner of war. At first believing his recollections would morph easily into a best-seller, he soon realised ‘there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre’, and the resulting book was finished twenty three years after his return from the army. However, Vonnegut’s descriptions of Dresden’s horrors are evocative, and even pungent. When anti-hero Billy Pilgrim and his fellow POWs surface from a subterranean bunker, they find the bombed city just like the surface of the moon, human bone meal brittle underfoot and the ‘bodies rotted and liquefied, the stink like roses and mustard gas’. What makes the novel more than just a detailed depiction of war, and at all readable is Vonnegut’s singular wit and humanity, which makes SH-F so ultimately memorable. And that’s to say nothing of the inter-planetary time-travel.

Inspired by Vonnegut’s haunting war flash-backs, Pilgrim is a passive time-traveller, “in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next”. As if that wasn’t enough, the poor Optometrist is abducted and held hostage on the distant planet Tralfamadore. The natives believe him a fine human specimen, but find his time-travelling unremarkable; after all, they see the past and future simultaneously, and “where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti”. Tralfamadorians destroy the Universe whilst experimenting with new fuels for flying saucers, an event they claim is unavoidable, because “the moment is structured that way.” When Pilgrim attempts to explain this, or any other lesson gleaned from his troubled existence, to those close to him, he finds them unwilling to listen. Pilgrim is a misunderstood and lonely man, and the novel speaks about loss of communication, and the undignified process of ageing, which, Vonnegut tells us, is unbearable yet inevitable; much like war.

During the BBC’s 1983 Arena documentary on the writer, Vonnegut comments: “As an anthropologist, I learned to stand outside of my own society. People have said that I am like a Martian visiting the earth”.  This approach to life can certainly be seen in Vonnegut’s second novel, 1959’s The Sirens of Titan, which Salmon Rushdie voted it as the one book everyone should read before turning 21. Set against the backdrop of the Martian invasion of our planet, its central character is omniscient Winston Niles Rumfoord. After crashing his spaceship just outside Mars, Rumfoord exists as ‘wave phenomena’, simultaneously on any number of planets, in the past, present and future. He states he can see the ‘rollercoaster of his life’, but is powerless to change the course; “everything that ever has been will always be, and everything that ever will be always has been”. By following the plight of an unwilling yet powerless time-traveller, the novel explores the futile brutality of war, how humans try to justify or repress it’s horrors, and the loneliness caused by the disintegration of the extended family .Thereby, it presents ideas central throughout Vonnegut’s work, notably his 1969 novel Cat’s Cradle.

Cat’s Cradle was written at a time in which the world was obsessed with the destructive fire of the atom bomb. However, as the author comments in the BBC’s 1983 Arena documentary about his career, ‘the whiz-bang science fiction device of Cat’s Cradle is ice-nine’, a substance which threatens end life by irrevocably freezing every object in comes into contact with. The novel also provides a detailed account of the religion Bokononism. The contradictory and eccentric teachings of leader Bokonon muse upon ideas of serendipity and fate, particularly within the concept of a karass, which is a group of people unwittingly drawn together by a predetermined destiny.  These themes are found throughout Vonnegut’s work, and are central to his later novel, 1973’s Breakfast of Champions. With this book, Vonnegut is trying to clear his mind ‘of all the junk in there … to make my head as empty as when I was born onto this damaged planet’. The junk, in this case, happens to be every object of note the writer has ever seen, which is drawn and explained, every advertising motto he has ever heard, characters from former books he wishes to ‘set at liberty’, and reams of his own anxieties. The novel details the destructive meeting of two characters, the already familiar Kilgore Trout, and Dwayne Hoover, a man who is haunted by his mother’s suicide, and whose ‘body was manufacturing certain chemicals which unbalanced his mind’. Hoover descends into violence when he interprets one of Trout’s books as a message from the creator of the universe, convinced he is the only person on the planet with free will.

Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (first edition cover, Delacorte Press).

Breakfast of Champions finds the writer building up an elaborate, complex tale then puncturing it. Sick of traditional fiction and its artificial resolutions, Vonnegut resolves ‘to shun storytelling’ in order to ‘write about life’; “let others bring order to chaos. I (will) bring chaos to order, instead”. He destroys any semblance of fiction, writing himself into the novel (as he did previously in Slaughterhouse-Five), and stressing how both of Trout and Hoover are projections of what he fears he will become. At one point he tackles the subject, in dialogue with himself; “This is a very bad book you’re writing”, I said to myself. “ I know”, I said. “You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did”, I said. “I know”, I said’. The novel studies how the suppression of experiences or emotion (on the part of Hoover), and a lack of company (on the part of Trout), cause the brain and body to malfunction.

1997’s Timequake finds Vonnegut tampering with the conventions of typical novels even more frantically. Vonnegut tells us in the book’s introduction that he found himself “creator of a novel which did not work, which had no point, which had never wanted to be written in the first place”.  Having spent a decade on this book, he eventually finished a second draft, which was “a stew made from (the novel’s) best parts mixed with thoughts and experiences” accumulated during his lifetime.  The story essentially revolves around ‘a sudden glitch in the time-space continuum, (which)made everybody and everything do exactly what they’d done for the past decade, for good or ill, a second time’, lasting for a decade.  Exhibiting his disillusion with ‘happy ending’ fiction, the characters in Timequake, as in real life, ‘don’t change, don’t learn anything from their mistakes, and don’t apologize’.  The book takes the whole world as it’s canvas for an exploration of how humans struggle to accept the linear process of time and ageing, but always comes back to the author’s own life, with specific reference to his own anxieties about whether the depressive qualities he inherited from his mother will lead to his own suicide, and whether his fate is predetermined in this way.

Vonnegut did attempt suicide in 1984, but recovered to live and finish a number of other books, dying in 2008 a cranky but beloved Humanist. Although he wrote in 1991’s ‘autobiographical collage’ Fates Worse Than Death that ‘you cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed’, he frequently admitted that for him, writing, like all forms of creativity, was a ultimately positive exercise, and helped ‘make his soul grow’. He proved that it is possible to write very personal books about serious subjects that can also be greatly relevant to others and highly readable. He wrote in Timequake; “I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit”. Judging by how valued his books are to this day, it is certainly safe to say that he achieved this mission.

Rob Fred Parker

Iain M. Banks

This month Litro will be dedicating our latest issue and many of our features and news to the theme of science. To kick off our Science-themed April, we have an exclusive Q&A with the highly acclaimed and successful writer of contemporary and science fiction, Iain M. Banks. Read on to find out more out his guilty pleasures, which authors he thinks are underrated and why you should be wary if you get a job offer from Gourock Town Council…

What is your earliest childhood memory?

Getting my tonsils out when I was three!  I can even remember the colour of the skirt my mum was wearing when she and dad dropped me at the hospital.

What makes you happy?

Well, apart from the obvious stuff like being with my beloved:  the widespread redistribution of wealth (from rich to poor, so I’ve basically been deeply disgruntled for the last thirty years), hill walking, a good book, good comedy, completing something I’ve been working on, wine, curry, a neatly executed overtaking manoeuvre…. lots of things.

When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

Primary Seven.  I was eleven.

What are you reading at the moment?

Nothing, or my own latest novel, however you want to look at it (I don’t read fiction when I’m writing and anyway only have time for New Scientist, Private Eye, the Guardian and New Humanist).

What advice would you give to a first time writer?

It’s all about the three “P”s:  practice practice practice.  Writing is like everything else; the more you do it the better you get.  Perseverance makes  it more likely you’ll succeed, too, as does luck, though I’ve no idea how you develop that.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?

Still occasionally reading car magazines even though I sold all the fast cars and mostly drive a diesel Yaris.  Actually, the soft top Mini is probably a guilty pleasure too, as we don’t need two cars.  Come to think of it we don’t totally need the Yaris as we live next to a railway station. Durn!

How do you relax?

Relaxed is my normal state.  If I want to un-relax I do something crazy like visit London.

What is your favourite book?

I don’t really have one.  (I’m rubbish at being asked to compile lists, too – sorry.)

Which author is underrated or deserves to be better-known?

In a bizarre way, Terry Pratchett. Most of all, as a novelist, Alan Moore.  The man’s a genius.  Check out Voice of the Fire.

What’s the worst job you’ve had?

Grass cutting for Gourock Town Council one summer in the early Seventies. I thought the motorised mower’s exhaust smelled bad until I ran over the first dog poo…

What is the most important thing life has taught you?

Never accept a job cutting grass for Gourock Town Council.

Iain (M.) Banks was born in Fife in 1954, and still lives there. His controversial debut, The Wasp Factory, was published to great acclaim in 1984 and since then he has written 25 other novels; both mainstream fiction as Iain Banks, and science fiction, set in the universe of the Culture, as Iain M. Banks. His latest Culture novel is Surface Detail, available from Orbit in paperback from 26^th May, priced £8.99.

Nina Melero

Litro Magazine Editor Katy Darby discusses genre fiction, literary influences and horror story tradition with Spanish writer, Nina Melero.

If you would like to read Nina Melero’s story, ‘Dirty Intentions’ please click here.

Nina Melero is a translator and writer. She teaches Spanish and Translation Studies at Kingston University and at the University of Westminster. Her publications include research articles on applied translation theory and literary translation as well as short stories, some of which have been awarded literary prizes (Art Nalon Letras 2007, Planeta Jóvenes Talentos 2005 and 2007). Tenebrario is her latest collection of short stories. Nina is currently completing her next book, Messiah 2.0, a cyberpunk novel about inhumanity and the non-human.

Why do you choose to focus on genre writing and do you think it’s hard to get horror/chiller stories in front of mainstream readers?

Well, I wouldn’t say that I consciously decided to write a book of a certain genre. The process was different – I didn’t plan to write a horror book, but the stories which were born in me when I was writing the book happen to deal with topics which some people may associate with ‘horror’. All the stories are constructed upon the same idea: they present extraneous elements which suddenly invade our everyday life, intruding into our comfort zone and forcing us to remember how little we actually know and understand about the world. However, my aim when I was writing the stories was not so much to ‘scare’ the reader, as to explore some of the topics that I personally found disturbing. And the only way to find out what I really feel and I think about them was to write these stories. To be honest I am not very sure how accurate it is to define all the stories in the book as ‘horror stories’.  However, I guess it makes it easier for future readers if we help them identify what they could possibly enjoy reading (or not) by trying to define the content of a book in general terms. And ‘horror’ is certainly a very broad term.

I remember that Juan Rulfo, the Mexican writer, once said that one day he had gone to the library to look for a book he wanted to read, but he could not find it anywhere. So he decided to write it himself. I guess that is what happens to me sometimes – I try to write what I think I would like to read.

What does the genre of horror mean to you, personally? What frightens you?

I think that ‘horror’, has traditionally been considered a ‘minor’ genre, especially in Spain. Sometimes we seem to forget that horror is one of the oldest genres in the history of literature. The horror tale is as old as human thought, and it is present in the folkloric tradition of any culture, anywhere in the world, feeding on people’s natural fear of the inexplicable and the unknown – that which cannot be controlled. If you think of it, ‘horror’ is an essential part of books such as the Greek Iliad or even the Bible. We also need to consider that the belief in the supernatural is the basis for any religion, so in a way it is a universal value.

In general, I think that if we can define literature as the description of human passions, then the attraction and repulsion that fear provokes is not to be underestimated as a literary topic.

As for what scares me personally, well, I am sure your readers won’t have the time or the patience to read the whole list … [Laughs]. Because the list is long, from empty bathtubs to cats that stare at you for too long. There are lots of absurd things which scare me, which I guess is something positive, because I think that in order to write horror stories you need to be a bit of a ‘scaredy cat’ [Laughs].

Not a lot of English readers will be familiar with Spanish horror fiction: do you consider yourself to be writing inside our outside a Spanish (or other) horror tradition and if so, can you tell me about that tradition and those writers?

Well, Spain, unlike English-speaking countries, does not have a long tradition in horror literature. Nevertheless, in the last two decades there has been an unexpected emergence of the genre, especially in cinema. As you know, many of the latest Spanish films belong to the horror genre –The Others, Orphan, The Orphanage, REC; etc. The critics have labelled this current ‘the New Spanish Horror Fiction’. However, ‘horror’ fiction in Spain is not a totally new phenomenon, and it is not only related to film. From the 80s there are many writers, such as Pilar Pedraza and Cristina Fernández Cubas who have been regularly publishing modern horror fiction, and who have been received with enthusiasm by both the public and the critics. So, there is not a long tradition in this genre in Spanish, but I think it is increasingly becoming more popular among both readers and writers.

I don’t know if my texts are related to what other Spanish authors write, but this current is something that I certainly find interesting.

Who are your literary influences (English/Spanish/other)?

It is difficult to say what authors have influenced my writing, and I think my readers will definitely be in a better position to answer that question. What I can tell you is which writers I do enjoy reading and which books have been important for me as a writer.

If I think of it, the three books which have impressed me the most happen to be short stories as well.

The first one is of course Metamorphosis, the story of Gregor Samsa, who as you know turns into a giant insect overnight. That is probably one of the best stories I have ever read. I particularly like the way in which Kafka creates ‘monsterness’ without describing anything. For in Metamorphosis, the monster, the giant insect, is not described at all, only suggested, and it is rather the absurdity of the situation and how people react to it that makes the story a ‘horror story’.

The two other short stories which for me represent what ‘good writing’ and ‘style’ are, are Company, by Samuel Beckett, and The House of Asterion, a short story by Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote the story from the perspective of the Minotaur.

I read with interest about the significance of the ‘tenebrario’ in Catholicism: ‘tenebrous’ in English means dark and gloomy, shadowy: do you see those qualities in your stories? Do you try to include light as well as darkness?

Yes, the word is related to darkness. As a matter of fact, ‘Tenebrarium’ is the name of an object. It is a ritual candelabra used during Easter. It has many branches, and it is not the custom for the candles it holds to remain lit throughout the religious ceremony; instead the candles are put out in a rite to conjure up the darkness. I thought the name was suitable for the book because it provoked many interesting associations. The book is however not only about the darkness, but also about how we face up to it, about the candles we use to fight against the darkness.

And, as the readers may have noticed, most of the stories present characters that may be alone and very confused by the absurd situations they have to face up to, but they are not destroyed by the darkness – rather, they learn from it.

I’m fascinated by the final story in the book, The Last Line, partly because it plays around with metafictional ideas (a character in a story who is literally disappearing bit by bit) but also because it draws on the life and work of a very famous British writer, Saki. I assume you’re a fan of his but how did you get the idea to write this story and is the piece a homage to Saki in style as well as content?

Yes, Saki is one of my favourite writers – an author I had been missing out on until relatively recently. Some years ago, when I was working at the University of Exeter, I visited a town called Exmouth and saw a plaque on a house which said ‘Here lived English writer Saki’. I didn’t know who he was, but grew curious about his name. Then I discovered one of his stories, Sredni Vashtar, and fell in love with his way of writing.

The idea for the story you mention, The Last Line, came to me while I was reading a book about his life, which explained how he was writing something when he was killed in a trench during World War I. He was having a rest with some fellow soldiers and someone was smoking a cigarette. It seems that according to some versions, his last words before he was shot were ‘They are going to see us, put that bloody cigarette out!’, and then a sniper shot him. So I kept fantasizing about what he was writing at that moment (and wondering how someone could be writing in such a situation!). We will never know because his notebook was lost, so I decided to imagine the character he might have been writing and to create it myself. In my own story, The Last Line, I made that character interact with other characters Saki actually wrote, the ones who were read and will never die because they were published and they became famous.

What are you working on right now?

At the moment I am working on a novel about us, about humans, as an animal species. The novel is set in a threatening future time, when we suddenly cease to be the only species considering itself superior to others. I wanted to explore the topic of our relationship with the non-human. With non-human, I mean anything which is not us, be it an animal, or a creature of any kind. By imagining our species in a context where our identity as ‘rational, superior beings’ is challenged, I came across many unsolved questions, and my way to address them was to try and write a novel about them. The title is Messiah 2.0, and I hope it will be ready soon.

This interview was conducted on Monday October 18^th at the launch of Nina Melero’s short story collection Tenebrario, available (currently in Spanish only) at the European Bookshop. To find out more about Nina and her work, please visit her website at www.ninamelero.com. To buy her book, please visit the European Bookshop’s site: www.europeanbookshop.com