“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
— William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
The bones of the past
In a years-ago job interview, I was surprised when an interviewer picked up on the reference at the bottom of my CV to writing fiction.
“Tell us about these ghost stories,” he said.
Unprepared, I muttered something mock-profound about ghost stories being a metaphor for the way the past affects the present. It seemed to suffice: I got the job.
Someone once asked me why so many of my stories are concerned with the way actions have consequences over time, memories persist, and the bones of the past poke through into the present.
Things happen. People make choices. Relationships end. Political decisions are made. People die. But their consequences don’t end there.
I studied history at university and have retained a fascination with the way the past affects the present. If you know where to look, the present is full of remnants of decisions and experiences from decades or centuries ago. Buildings, institutions, borders, traditions, memorials, family stories, even apparently ordinary places contain layers of earlier lives.
If the past could speak
When I started writing fiction, it was natural to ask what would happen if those buried layers of the past could speak to us.
My first published story, On The Fishermen’s Path*, was essentially a ghost story. I have often returned to the theme. Ghosts are quite literally the past refusing to remain past. In truth, I’m less interested in ghost than the question: What happens when the past has unfinished business with the present?
Actions have consequences
I don’t just write ghost stories. Most are science fiction. At first glance, history, ghost stories and science fiction look like very different interests. But what connects them is my fascination with the way the past continues to exert pressure on the present.
The common thread is consequence across time.
That fascination looks different in science-fiction clothing. My stories have explored grief and the power of memory; time travel and alternative realities; technological or scientific changes whose consequences unfold later; choices that produce unexpected futures.
I never consciously tried to express that theme through my fiction. But when I look back, I can see it recurring.
In Sort Code, a couple find themselves bounced in and out of different periods of the past. In When I Close My Eyes, the first astronaut on Titan is haunted by memories of his dead wife. Fifty-One puts a timecop from the future into wartime London, where falling in love forces him to choose between changing the future and letting someone die. In Vincent’s Penny, Sebastian is rescued as a boy from a bleak life of poverty and abuse by a mysterious, powerful stranger, who grooms Sebastian for a very dark and dangerous form of “greatness”—one that weaves through time from the sixteenth century to Blitz-era London.
Other stories have approached the idea through alternate realities, grief, memory, or the consequences of choices made long ago. Perhaps this is why I keep coming back to ghosts, even when I’m ostensibly writing science fiction.
And back to ghosts
It’s probably no accident, then, that my next novel is a ghost story.
The Wrong Ghost takes the idea in a particularly literal direction: darkness from the past intrudes upon a family in the present. Someone thinks they are being haunted. They are, but that’s not the biggest problem.
The novel grew out of a 2013 story, The Other Woman**, that stuck with me, and was given wings by the discovery of the history of a house near mine, with a sad story attached.
Ghosts, history and stories about alternate realities all allow us to ask the same question in different ways:
How much of the past are we really able to leave behind?
That question has been following me for a long time.
*On The Fishermen’s Path, Pan Book of Horror, 1986
**The Other Woman, Urban Occult anthology, Anachron Press, 2013
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