A sense of place is important in fiction. The author Will Self observes that ‘all really great fiction is in some sense about place’. In science fiction and fantasy, we talk about worldbuilding, the techniques required to convince the reader of the imaginary situation and setting of the novel. A sense of place is different from world-building, although it can compliment it. Place provides theme, tone and limits to the action. My science fiction performs minor violence against places. It warps places according to my imagination but the sense of place remains intact.
The motives of the imagination are unclear. Necessarily so. My imagination is like my cat: we live together but I don’t know where it goes at night and it’s entirely indifferent to my needs.
A sense of the inner city London borough of Hackney informed my first novel The Red Men. I took great pleasure – too much pleasure, perhaps – in making strange robots walk its streets. The first chapter of The Red Men was made into a fantastic short film ‘Dr Easy’ that draws its power from this beautiful dysjunction between a robot and a down-at-heel edgeland in Hackney.
Science fiction gives me license to disrupt places with my imagination. Marking territory by remaking it. Iain Sinclair used a quote from The Red Men in his magnificent survey of the area in Hackney: The Red Rose Empire, stitching my novel into the tapestry of the London imaginary and by doing so, he gave it an erg or two of reality. When the corporate logo from The Red Men was graffitied by some unknown party on the wall of the local shopping centre, I felt the thrill of the imaginary slipping into the actual.
I structure my science fiction according to location shifts. The novel I am currently writing The Destructives (scheduled for publication in Spring 2016) moves from the university of the moon to the asylum malls of Earth and then out to Saturn’s moon of Enceladus. This structure is dictated by my need to internalise places. Folding them into myself and then remaking them.
In science fiction, the writer has to do this even if the place is imaginary or one they will never visit.
To write scenes set on the moon, I stared at maps and photographs of the moon to try to get a sense of what the Romans called the genius loci, the spirit of the place. In big cities, that spirit changes from street to street. But on the moon, I imagine the whole devasted rock reverberates with one mood. The more particular I am in my description of the moon, the more the psychology of my lead character takes root. Not because he is like the lunar surface. Rather, in describing its craters and defined shadows, I can explore what repeated exposure to that place does to him, how it accentuates aspects of his character.
Place in the novel is not a merely a stage. Place flows in and out of character in a process that emulates how we ‘use the world and its objects to bring part of ourselves to life’, as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observes. A description of a place is also a description of the inner life of the characters who live there.
My new novel IF THEN (Angry Robot, out 1st September) began with a vision of a long trench freshly cut into the soft curves of the South Downs in Sussex, England. The trench has new barbed wire, has just been dug by machines in the future, and is waiting for the soldiers of the First World War to return from the past to populate it.
In IF THEN two places are forced to co-exist: the South Downs are partially transformed into the parched, raw landscape of Suvla Bay, the site of a landing by Allied troops during the Dardenelles campaign, otherwise known as Gallipoli or the Canakkale.
I know the South Downs well but to write about Suvla Bay required research, so much research that by the end of the novel, I could draw a detailed map of the area and battlefield from memory.
Gallipoli seemed an appropriate landscape to undergo this internalisation because it has been referred to as a Country of the Mind. What does that mean? Well, it means that what occured in the battle cannot be imagined by physically going to the place, but rather by visiting it imaginatively in the histories and accounts written about the battle. Yes, I could have taken a research trip to the real Suvla Bay in Turkey. Instead, I chose to build my sense of that place out of the memories of the men who fought there. The hallucinations they suffered due to thirst and sleep deprivation – rocks bending under the pressure of madness – became as important a descriptive detail as the type of vegetation that grew on the mountains sides upon which they fought.
Matthew De Abaitua’s novel IF THEN (Angry Robot) is out in the UK and US in September. He can be found at www.harrybravado.com and is @MDeAbaitua on Twitter.
As a first time SF novelist, I have difficulty balancing science with imagination. Any suggestions? I taught physics for many years and have a tendency to try explaining the science rather than using my imagination.
Reality and imagination, always hand in hand. Nice article