Tag: ghost stories

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The Past Is Not Past: A Manifesto

“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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My first eligibility post – 2017

I confess it feels almost un-British to draw attention to my own work, but it is the season when people are considering what’s eligible for various awards.

I’ve not had much out in 2017, while slaving in the book caverns. But – hey – if not me, who?

So, for your consideration, I humbly offer:

When I Close My Eyes (Interzone #271, July/August 2017)

Interzone 271

I was pitifully proud of this, and so pleased to get my first story in the UK’s premier SF magazine. It’s my ‘hardest’ SF story yet – with a bereaved astronaut trapped by a rockfall in a cave on Titan, encountering some fragile but peskily well-organised Titanian aliens. (But he’s helped out by a ghost, so it’s not that hard SF!)

It’s eligible for Hugo and WSFA awards (and BFS – but I’m not canvassing!)

How to be Invisible (Cold Iron – Ghost Stories from the 21st Century, IRON Press, UK June 2017)

coldiron

You’ll have to search this out, but I was pleased to get a berth in an intriguing collection of ‘modern’ ghost stories, published by the small but enterprising Iron Press, from England’s chilly but beautiful north east. The story concerns a man who quite literally fades away from shame and guilt.

Eligible for Hugo and British Fantasy Award.

 

There you go. This time next year, I hope to be pestering people about my forthcoming novel, Fifty-One. But that’s not (quite) out yet!

 

 

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How to be Invisible – New Story in Cold Iron

New from Iron Press is Cold Iron – Ghost Stories from the 21st Century.It’s edited by Peter Mortimer and Eileen Jones.

Sadly, I wasn’t able to be at the launch, which took place at midnight on Saturday 10th June, in the atmospheric St George’s Church, Cullercoats. But I am pleased and honoured to have a story in the book.

It’s a short and sad tale, called How to be invisible.

I don’t write many of them these days, but I’ve always had a soft spot for ghost stories. I remember a job interview once, when the panel picked up on the fact that I wrote fiction in my spare time. When I said I wrote ghost stories, I was very pointedly asked why. As if this quirk made me unsuitable for responsible employment.

I think I rambled. It didn’t seem sufficient to say, ‘It’s what I like’. I distinctly remember at one point advancing the thesis that ghost stories were a metaphor for the way in which the present is shaped by the past. So they were a perfectly logical pursuit for someone with a history degree. * I don’t think I had ever thought about that before the words tumbled from my nervous lips, but even now I think it’s mostly true.

Most of what I write falls into two broad categories: ghost stories or science fiction. And I think the two genres are fuzzy mirror images.

In most ghost stories, events in the past reach into the present. Nothing can ever be said to be finally over and gone, especially where powerful emotions and bad deeds are involved. So, when you write a ghost story set in the present, you are inevitably also writing about the past.

Science fiction is a bigger and woollier beast, given the range and diversity of its settings. But I think it is generally recognised that the most powerful SF stories are metaphors for issues in our own times. So, while SF may be set in the future (or sometimes in the past, or a parallel timeline), it resonates when it is really about the present.

When Ursula Le Guin wrote about the fantasy city of Omelas, with its happiness dependent on the misery of a single unfortunate child, she was saying something about inequality and injustice in our own world. When Samuel Delany wrote about sexless spacers in Aye and Gomorrah, does anyone think he wasn’t really writing about sexuality in the 1960s?

Perhaps this begs the question of why I don’t just write about the past or the present, if that’s what I mean. I’ll have to think about that.

Having said all that, I’m not entirely sure How to be Invisible is actually a ghost story. But don’t tell Iron Press! You can in any case read plenty of proper ghost stories, with a modern twist, in the book, which is well worth your time.

If you want to buy a copy (and you should!), Cold Iron is available here

[*I got the job!]