Episodes

by Christopher Priest

Genres: Literary Fiction; Science Fiction

Synopsis

Christopher Priest is one of the most acclaimed writers of both SF and literary fiction at work today. Here, for the first time in almost twenty years, is a collection of his short work. Largely previously uncollected, ranging from the horrific to the touching, the science fictional to the realist, these stories are a perfect demonstration of the breadth and power of Priest's writing. Eleven stories are included, along with commentary and reflection from the author. Within these pages you will discover the stage magic-inspired horror of 'The Head and the Hand', the timeslip accidents of 'futouristic.co.uk', the impossible romance of 'Palely Loitering' and the present-day satire of 'Shooting an Episode'.

Release date: July 11, 2019

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 300

Sample

 

First

This is a book of episodes, short and long stories, each unconnected with the others except by way of authorship. Most of the stories have never been collected in volume before, but two of them appeared in an earlier book, published four decades ago, another in a long-forgotten story collection, even earlier, in 1972. They were indicators of the direction in which my writing was then developing. Because the stories in this book have been chosen to represent the range of what I have been doing for most of my time as a writer, all three of them should be here.

They and the others are unchanged from when they were first published, but because everything in life moves on and develops, not least of which for a writer is an interest in and knowledge of language and style, I have done a little polishing here and there. I hope it will be invisible, and not indicative of some motive to make the stories seem better than they were at the time.

Each story is presented in three sections. The story itself sits in the middle, but there is a Before section, which describes informally how the story came to be written, in some cases noting circumstances that were relevant, and what I had in mind as I was working out what to do with the story. Then there is the After section, perhaps even more informal in manner, and this describes how the writing of the story went, where it was published, what if anything happened as a result of it.

The intention is to try to convey an insight into the writing of short stories, the context from which they have arisen. I usually write short stories when I’m between novels, although in one needlessly disruptive case, described when its turn comes, I had to break off from a novel in progress to write a story.

Novels are of course a long haul. I need a basic minimum of six months of concentrated work to complete a novel, but have managed that only occasionally. Most of them have taken much longer. The Prestige and The Separation were both endurance tests – the former because I had a pre-school family, the latter because of the amount of research that was necessary. For a large part of the time while writing a novel the outcome is never certain, and there is an ever-present danger of something going wrong – sometimes it can be a failure of nerve, but most often the taking of a misguided direction with the story or the characters.

Short stories have the advantage to a writer of seeming doable within a manageable period of time – even if they have to be abandoned or put aside for any reason, the loss, the sacrifice, is of a few days or weeks of work, rather than several months.

Even so, at least one of the stories here took longer to write than at least one of my published novels. No generalization about writing is ever completely true.

These stories are, for want of a better word (and I have searched for a better one), fantastic in kind. That is to say they do not deal with the normal, the familiar, the daily grind, the historical, but take that for granted and stretch credulity, test the reader’s assumptions about what is real or experiential. I make no apology for this, because for half a century I have been putting into practice the belief that the fantastic is a crucial if often misunderstood element of literature.

The various images and situations of the fantastic, of science fiction, are now so widespread as to seem banal. Science fiction has become huge in Hollywood, for instance. It’s hardly worth mentioning that some of the biggest box office successes in the last three or four decades have been recognizably science fiction in type (Hollywoodistas call it ‘sci-fi’): the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, for obvious examples, but those are just the most famous. The world of movies has been fascinated by spaceships, alien invaders, monsters, robots, etc., for most of its existence. One of the first feature films ever made, Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), mixed surrealism, special effects and science fiction. Computer gaming draws heavily on the presumed images and clichés. Superheroes in comic books go in for extreme versions of the standard science-fiction tropes. Advertising, television shows, computer software, consumer electronics, internet graphics, industrial design, architecture, magazine illustrations – the visual and metaphorical references to the fantastic are endless.

Oddly, though, one thing has not changed at all in that half century, my half century of writing. Fantastic literature itself is still largely unappreciated beyond a small but consistently intelligent readership. Criticism from outside is usually general, based on perceptions of the form rather than what it should be: an assessment of particular titles or, more importantly, the work of individual authors. Because of this inexactitude it is therefore treated as a genre with its own self-enclosed rules, assumed to be subject to special standards that do not apply to general literature, thought to be aimed at an audience of nerds or computer geeks or sensation seekers.

I have always hoped this would change, but it never has. The inference of sameness is patently flawed, because it lumps the good work with the bad and does not recognize the middle ground. Literature is the product of individuals, almost always working alone. Those who speak up against the generalization therefore find themselves in the wrong argument, because a defence of the whole has to include a defence of the mundane and the frankly indefensible.

Fantastic literature is therefore regarded as genre fiction. The OED usefully provides two definitions of the word in its non-French usage.

The first says that a ‘genre’ is a style or a category, a kind of art, music or literature. Use of the word in this sense makes identification easy but also implies a taxonomy, a summing up of what it is without going into particulars. The label is handy. It is thought to serve, Janus-like, a dual role – an encouragement to those who like to read it, but also a warning off to those who do not wish to know.

But the OED offers a second definition: ‘genre’, as a modifier, denotes a term for paintings of a certain type, that of scenes from ordinary life, typically domestic or realistic.

As has been pointed out by Ursula K. Le Guin, a supreme writer of the fantastic, the phrase ‘realistic scenes of ordinary life’ neatly describes the subject matter of the realistic or general literary novel.

Paradoxically, when ‘genre’ started being used in the critical lexicon of literature, it was applied to certain types of fiction at a slight remove from absolute reality: detective stories, spy thrillers, romances, Westerns, sea stories, and so on, were all called genre fiction.

Because these categories actually do have clear boundaries, they are limited by them. If a gunman in the Old West sees the error of his ways and becomes a social reformer in the slums of Chicago, the book is no longer a Western; if Hornblower falls overboard and drowns it is no longer a sea story; if a doctor and nurse spend long hours of overtime in A&E it is not a romance.

The fantastic is different. It is indefinable and free of boundaries, with no restrictions on place or time – it can be located in the realist here and now if needs be, but also anywhere in the world or universe, real or imagined, past, present or future. There are no expectations about style and internal rules are few. The fantastic includes shallow and meretricious hackwork, but also the work of fine literary writers – Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, J. G. Ballard. Margaret Atwood, winner of multiple awards, has not only written several fantastic novels, but a book about science fiction. The culminating works of Doris Lessing, Nobel Laureate in Literature, were resolutely fantastic in nature. Kazuo Ishiguro, another Nobel Laureate, has written at least two fantastic novels, and has fantastic elements in others.

All the best literature exists and survives outside definitions. That which is uncategorizable, unrepeatable, inimitable, will break all the rules but outlive its contemporaries forever. Regard such twentieth-century fiction as Dubliners, Cold Comfort Farm, Catch-22, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, L’étranger, Animal Farm, The Catcher in the Rye.

I make no such high claim for the stories in this book, but from reading them you will probably discern that very few of them conform to the standard expectations of science fiction. Looking over them, I think only two of them come close to what many people think of as SF: ‘An Infinite Summer’ has people from the future taking an advanced kind of photograph, and in ‘Palely Loitering’ there is talk of a starship – but both of those stories are wistful love stories in romanticized settings, and the gimmick is in the background. One other story is a sort of extended gag about science-fiction gadgets. The rest are what I prefer to think of as speculative fiction, where strangeness is something that is perceived or encountered or imagined, and is not set off by aliens invading in UFOs or mad professors building super-weapons. None of that is interesting to me, not back then when I began writing, or now, while I continue.

One of the under-regarded strengths of the science-fiction idiom, something almost unknown in the larger literary world, is that it has always been an active market for the writing, selling and publishing of short stories. When I began trying to sell stories professionally, there were three regularly published magazines that specialized in science fiction or fantasy – they were sold on ordinary bookstands. I first discovered them displayed in a WH Smith branch in an Underground station in London.

Although soon after I started writing the three were reduced to two, the lost one was in effect replaced by a series of anthologies of previously unpublished fiction: four a year from a major paperback publisher, with national distribution. All these markets for short stories operated what is called these days an ‘open submission’ system, which meant that anyone who cared to could submit material. That is how I began: typing out my faltering first efforts, putting them in envelopes and sending them in. Most came back after an agonizing delay – one or two did not. I was paid eight guineas for my first story (which in fact was at the time more than my weekly wage).

All those magazines and anthologies, long ago, have of course ceased to exist, but they were replaced by others, and they in their turn have come and gone. At the time of writing there are two regularly published print magazines of fantastic fiction in the UK, which will accept stories from new or unknown writers, as well as printing material from established writers. Interzone and Black Static are not easily found on bookstalls, but they are regularly published and distributed, they accept subscriptions and can be located online. Both magazines are superbly printed on good-quality paper, with an emphasis on striking design and beautifully executed commercial art. They run a range of intelligent essays, reviews and features as well as several stories, in every issue.

Nor are these alone. In the Before and After essays about each of the stories you will notice a recurring theme: which is that several of the first story appearances were in anthologies of original fiction. In most cases, my own involvement came about because the editor or publisher invited me to submit, but as far as I know none of these books was a closed shop for established writers. The intention to publish an anthology, and its progress as work goes along, is almost always reported online, in blogs and social media – any new writer seeking a market, and who is prepared to carry out a little online legwork, will find several markets open for submissions.

Here then are some episodes arising from and between the work of a novelist.

Christopher Priest

Isle of Bute, 2018

 

Before – ‘The Head and the Hand’

Although the stories in this book are not intended to be samples from a retrospective album, ‘The Head and the Hand’ is one of the earliest stories here. I wrote it at the end of the 1960s when I was in my twenties – even noting that makes me now drift mentally back fifty years, a distance that still astonishes me when I have to realize how long I have been a writer.

Like all the others here, this story has another story behind it – not a great revelatory exposition, but a mix of personal recollections. I look back on old relationships, the place I was living in, the almost invariable struggles with the difficulty of staying financially afloat. I am of course intermittently nostalgic for the youthfulness now lost, and glad I came through the problems associated with that. In every case I recall memories of my concerns with the art and craft of writing, as those have always involved me. They are reflected in the title I gave the story.

The story behind ‘The Head and the Hand’ is this. In the late 1960s I moved to a rented ground-floor apartment in a beautiful Victorian villa on the edge of the village of Harrow on the Hill. (The suburban town of the same name was just up the road.) Perched high on the eponymous hill, Harrow School dominated the area – the house itself, at the bottom of the hill, was almost entirely surrounded by the wide expanse of playing fields belonging to the school. A small gate at the end of the back garden opened into the fields, and we who lived there were permitted to stroll across the peaceful sward, provided none of the pupils was actually out there at the time. The grounds were surrounded by mature trees, many of which shielded the area from the main road that ran along one side, making it into a huge and almost unknown island of greenery in a busy London suburb. It was large enough for several cricket pitches to be marked out. It soon became for me the place where I could think hardest and most creatively, where I could stride around unseen, talk to myself without being overheard, work out ideas for stories.

This almost idyllic writerly existence had, of course, a few snags attached to it, and in the case of the apartment the main disadvantage was that the elderly landlady, and her only slightly less ancient siblings, lived in the upper floors of the same building. They had old-fashioned ideas about the status and social undesirability of tenants, whom they clearly saw as representatives of an underclass. Naturally, I was deemed to be one. Perhaps it was the long hours of typewriting I went in for, or that I had a car I parked in their drive, or most of all the fact that I had long hair, but I became a target for snooty comments and general condescension. I wanted only to have a home where I could be private and secure, and concentrate on my work.

One day during the summer of 1969, working in my office at the back of the house, I became aware of a sporadic loud screeching from outside, interspersed with shouting voices and crashing noises. After a while I went out to the front to see what was going on. It turned out the landlady had employed a team of tree surgeons to pollard the two large lime trees that stood next to the drive. As the branches came away they were tossed deliberately in the direction of my car, which by the time I arrived was half-buried under the mass of leaves and branches, with several scratch marks plainly visible. I found the man in charge of the team – he told me that they were waiting for their truck to turn up and had been instructed by the landlady that in the meantime they should throw everything over my car. ‘She told us it shouldn’t be parked there,’ he said, sounding half apologetic, half amused. ‘We thought it was a bit odd, but she insisted.’

After that he and the other tree surgeons aimed the branches away from my car, but many dents and scratches had been made on the bodywork. After the men had left, and for the weeks that followed, the shorn stumps of the trees stood starkly outside the house, and to me they somehow seemed symbolic of an uncaring wish to control the natural environment for particular and (as I saw them) vengeful reasons.

Of course, the trees quickly regenerated and looked much healthier, and I later realized that mature trees benefit from being pollarded from time to time, however drastic and extreme the immediate results appear to be.

The incident gave rise to a series of reflections about trying to shape the world as you wished it to be rather than as it really was, and eventually, by way of the usual convoluted thought process, the horror story that is ‘The Head and the Hand’ was the result.

 

The Head and the Hand

On that special morning at Racine House we were taking exercise in the grounds. There had been a frost overnight and the grass lay white and brittle. The sky was unclouded, and the sun threw long blue shadows. Our breath cast clouds of vapour behind us. There was no sound, no wind, no movement. The park was ours and we were alone.

Our walks in the mornings had a clearly defined route, and as we came to the eastern end of the path at the bottom of the long sloping lawn I prepared for the turn, pressing down hard on the controlling handles at the back of the carriage. I am a large man, and well-muscled, but the combined weight of the invalid carriage and the master was almost beyond the limit of my strength.

That day the master was in a difficult mood. Though before we set out he had clearly instructed me to wheel him as far as the disused summer lodge, when I tried to lift him around he waved his head from side to side.

‘No, Lasken!’ he said irritably. ‘To the lake today. I want to see the swans.’

I said to him: ‘Of course, sir.’

I swung the carriage back into the direction in which we had been travelling and continued with our walk. I waited for him to say something to me, because it was unusual that he would give me untempered instructions without qualifying them a few moments later with a more intimate remark. Our relationship was a formal one, but memories of what had once existed between us still had an influence on our behaviour and attitudes. Though we were of a similar age and social background, Todd’s career had affected us considerably. Never again could there be any kind of equality between us.

I waited for his mood to change.

In the end he turned his head and said: ‘The park is beautiful today, Edward. This afternoon we must ride through it with Elizabeth before the weather gets any warmer. The trees are so stark, so black.’

‘Yes sir,’ I said, glancing at the woods to our right. When he bought the house, the first action he had taken was to have all the evergreen trees felled, and the remainder sprayed so that their greenery would be inhibited. With the passage of years they had regained their growth, and now the master would spend the summer months inside the house, the windows shuttered and the curtains drawn. Only with the coming of autumn would he return to the open air, obsessively watching the orange and brown leaves dropping to the ground and swirling across the lawns.

The lake appeared before us as we rounded the edge of the wood. The grounds dropped down to it in a shallow and undulating incline from the house, which was above us and to our left.

When we were about a hundred metres from the water’s edge I turned and looked towards the house and saw the tall figure of Elizabeth moving down towards us, her long maroon dress sweeping across the grass.

Knowing he would not see her, I said nothing to Todd.

We stopped at the edge of the lake. In the night a crust of ice had formed on its surface.

‘The swans, Edward. Where are they?’

He moved his head to the right and placed his lips on one of the switches there. At once, the batteries built into the base of the carriage turned the motors of the servos, and the backrest slid upwards, bringing him into a position that was almost upright.

He moved his head from side to side, a frown creasing his eyebrow-less face.

‘Go and find their nests, Lasken. I must see them today.’

‘It’s the ice, sir,’ I said. ‘It has probably driven them from the water.’

I heard the rustle of silk on frosted grass, and turned. Elizabeth stood a few yards behind us, holding an envelope in her hands.

She held it up, looking at me with her eyebrows raised. I nodded silently: that is the one.

She smiled at me quickly. The master would not yet know that she was there. The outer membrane of his ears had been removed, rendering his hearing unfocused and undirectional.

She swept past me in the peremptory manner she knew he approved of, and stood before him. He appeared unsurprised to see her.

‘There’s a letter, Todd,’ she said.

‘Later,’ he said without looking at it. ‘Lasken can deal with it. I have no time now.’

‘It’s from Gaston I think. It looks like his stationery.’

‘Read it to me.’

He swung his head backwards sharply. It was his instruction to me: move out of earshot. Obediently I stepped away to a place where I knew he could not see me or hear me.

Elizabeth bent down and kissed him on his lips.

‘Todd, whatever it is, please don’t do it.’

‘Read it to me,’ he said again.

She slitted the envelope with her thumb and pulled out a sheet of thin white paper, folded in three. I knew what the letter contained – Gaston had read it to me over the telephone the day before. He and I had arranged the details. We both knew that no higher price could be obtained, even for Todd. There had been difficulties with the television and other media concessions, and for a while it had looked as if the French government was going to intervene.

Gaston’s letter was a short one. It said that Todd’s popularity had never been higher, and that the Théâtre Alhambra and its consortium had offered eight million euros for another appearance. I listened to Elizabeth’s voice as she read, marvelling at the emotionless monotone of her articulation. She had warned me earlier that she did not think she was going to be able to read the letter to him without breaking down.

When she had finished, Todd asked her to read it again. She did this, then placed the open letter in front of him, brushed her lips against his face and walked away from him. As she passed me she laid a hand on my arm for a moment, then continued on up towards the house. I watched her for a few seconds, seeing her slim beauty accentuated by the sunlight falling sideways across her face, and strands of her hair blown behind by the wind.

The master waved his head from side to side.

‘Lasken! Lasken!’

I went back to him.

‘Do you see this?’

I picked it up and glanced at it.

‘I shall write to him of course,’ I said. ‘It is out of the question.’

‘No, no, I must consider. We must always consider. I have so much at stake.’

I kept my expression steady.

‘But it is impossible. You cannot imagine granting any more performances.’

‘There is a way, Edward,’ he said, in as gentle a voice as I had ever heard him use. ‘I must find that way.’

I caught sight of a waterfowl a few yards from us, in the reeds at the edge of the lake. It waddled out on to the ice, confused by the frozen surface. I took one of the long poles from the side of the carriage and broke a section of the ice. The bird slithered across the ice and flew away, terrified by the noise.

I walked back to Todd.

‘There. If there is some open water, the swans will return.’

The expression on his face was agitated.

‘The Théâtre Alhambra,’ he said. ‘What shall we do?’

‘I will speak to your solicitor. It is an outrage that the theatre should approach you. They know that you cannot go back.’

‘But eight million euros.’

‘The money does not matter. You said that yourself once.’

‘No, it is not the money. Nor the public. It is everything.’

We waited by the lake for the swans as the sun rose higher in the sky. I was exhilarated by the pale colours of the park, by the quiet and the calm. It was an aesthetic, sterile reaction, for the house and its grounds had oppressed me from the start. Only the transient beauty of the morning – a frozen, fragile countenance – stirred something in me.

The master had lapsed into silence, and had returned the backrest to the horizontal position he found most relaxing. Though his eyes were closed I knew he would not be asleep.

I walked away from him so that I was again beyond his hearing, and strolled around the perimeter of the lake, always keeping a watch for movement on the carriage. I wondered if he would be able to resist the offer from the Théâtre Alhambra, fearing that if he did there would never be a greater attraction.

The time was right – he had not been seen in public for nearly four and a half years. The mood of the public was right – for the media had recently shown their old interest in his exploits, criticizing his many imitators and demanding his return. None of this was lost on the master. There was only one master, one Todd Alborne – only he could have gone so far. No one could compete with him. Everything was right and only the participation of the master was needed to complete it.

The electric klaxon I had fitted to the carriage sounded. Looking back at him across the ice I saw that he had moved his face to the switch. I turned back and went to him.

‘I want to see Elizabeth,’ he said.

‘You know what she will say.’

‘Yes. But I must speak to her.’

I turned the carriage round and began the long and difficult return up the slope to the house.

As we left the side of the lake I saw large, white birds flying low in the distance, headed away from the house. I hoped that Todd had not seen them.

He looked from side to side as we moved past the wood. I saw on the branches the new buds that would burst in the next few weeks. I think he saw only the bare black twigs, the stark geometry of the naked trees.

In the house I took him to his study and lifted his body from the carriage he used for outside expeditions, switching to the motorized one in which he moved about the house. He spent the rest of the day with Elizabeth. I saw her only when she came down to collect the meals I prepared for him. In those moments we had time only to exchange glances, to intertwine fingers, to kiss lightly. She would reveal nothing of what he was saying or thinking.

He retired early and Elizabeth with him, going to the room next to his, sleeping alone as she had done for five years.

When she was sure he was asleep she left her bed and came to mine. We made love at once. Afterwards we lay together in the dark, our hands clasped possessively. Only then would she tell me what she thought his decision would be.

‘He’s going to do it,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen him as excited as this for years.’

 

I have been connected with Todd Alborne since we were both eighteen, casual friends at first, then closer, then competitors, rivals, friends again. We took our knocks against each other, some from sport, some from occasional skirmishes, but mostly mental or emotional confrontations. We met during a European holiday – our parents had known one another and chance brought us together one year while were in the south of France. Though we did not become close friends immediately, I found his company fascinating and on our return to England we stayed in touch with each other.

The fascination he held over me was not one I admired, but neither could I resist it: he possessed a fanatical and passionate dedication to whatever he was doing, and once started he would be deterred by nothing. He conducted several disastrous love affairs, and twice lost most of his money in unsuccessful business ventures. He had a general aimlessness that disturbed me – I always believed that once he was somehow channelled into a direction he could control, he would be able to exploit his u. . .