INTOTHEDARKLINGWOOD

DAVID HAMBLING catches up with legendary SF writer Brian Stableford to talk about his long career and the interplay between science and strange phenomena.

Toward the end of 2019 DAVID HAMBLING caught up with the legendary British science fiction writer and talked to him about his long career and prodigious output, the interplay between science fiction and strange phenomena, and even a fictional reporter from Fortean Times…

Brian Stableford is a veteran of the British science fiction scene, as author, essayist, translator and editor. Last year saw the half-century of his first book Cradle of the Sun, first published in 1969. Despite producing 464 books so far, Stableford regards his output as “rather meagre,” based on Anthony Trollope’s calculation that an author should be able to write at least eight full-length novels a year. (“Trollope was only a part-time writer,” notes Stableford).

Fortean themes suffuse much of his work, including a recent trilogy begun with Spirits of the Vasty Deep , set in Wales and featuring (what appear to be) mermaids and sea serpents.

The Fortean Times itself has also appeared – in A Darkling Wood, the lead character is an entomologist investigating woodland threatened by developers, and is shadowed by an FT reporter seeking sensational material. “You can’t have run completely out of ethics working for Fortean Times?” demands the exasperated scientist. Of course there really is something nasty in the woods and weird science is involved, inspired by Stableford’s background in biology.

On the way the novel explores one of Stableford’s other interests – ‘scholarly fantasy’, those parts of accepted science where imagination runs ahead of the facts.

Were you ever a reader of Fortean Times?

I fear that I only saw the occasional issue of FT back in the days when I could still read print fluently, but Bob Rickard [who founded FT in 1973] and I used to write for the same fanzine back in the 1960s and I met him once at a science fiction convention.

“Much of what is real only comes to seem dull when it becomes familiar”

Hazard, the scientist in The Darkling Wood, states that “The truth is dull while scholarly fantasies are colourful.” Is this your own view, or were you setting him up as the character who says: “There are no such thing as vampires…”?

The character is required by the plot to adopt a sceptical stance; my own outlook is also sceptical, in a thoroughgoing sense – which is to say that I doubt many things that most sceptics would assume to be true. I take it for granted that most recorded history is misinformation or disinformation, all biography and all psychology being speculative fiction and all autobiography being calculated mendacity. Much physics is probably true, but that doesn’t prevent it being full of scholarly fantasy, without which it could not function.

Science might once have been dull, but now we have people like David Attenborough, backed by the formidable apparatus of the BBC Wildlife unit, who can wow the world with intensely colourful visions of the world. Or is the programme just scholarly fantasy with good production values?

Scholarly fantasy often attempts to be more picturesque than the proven reality, but some strives conscientiously to be dull in the hope of seeming more credible. Much of what is real only comes to seem dull when it becomes familiar. David Attenborough is a thoroughly admirable man, a conscientious and enterprising observer on the side of the angels, and his pictures certainly aren’t faked, but the selection made for exhibition and the rhetoric surrounding them in the interests of narrative construction and propaganda obviously introduce a good deal of ideology, the moral and aesthetic judgments of which can neither be true or false.

How would you say science fiction, and our attitudes towards the unexplained, have changed in the decades you’ve been writing?

I’ve always been fascinated by the manner in which literary fantasies, scholarly fantasies and lifestyle fantasies have interacted throughout history, and speculative fiction is a useful way of interrogating those interactions. The “science fiction” label has been adulterated to the extent of meaninglessness, and the written genre seems to have lost the small effect that it might have had in the role of stimulating imagination and thought when I started writing in the 1960s; as for attitudes to the unexplained, most people are philosophically allergic to it and always have been, which is why there’s such a thriving market in aesthetically satisfactory “explanations”.

I think of my own work as “metaphysical fantasy,” which tries to imagine what the world would have to be like in order for various motifs of the imagination actually to exist, and tries to extrapolate other consequences of the hypotheses I come up with. It’s not a game that interests many other people, but I’m an old age pensioner who gets paid just for breathing, and writing occupies the time separating me from the crematorium in a suitably absorbing fashion, which is all I ask of it.

The characters in Darkling Wood mention “X-Files Syndrome” – the way evidence of strangeness vanishes at the end of each episode. And of course it strikes in the book… are phenomena in biology sometimes frustratingly elusive in real life?

By “X-files Syndrome” I meant to refer to a problem of narrative construction that afflicts series fiction in which there is an assumed responsibility to leave the fictitious world essentially unchanged, in order to aid the reader/viewer in the pretence that the world-within-the-text is the lived-in world. Biological phenomena can be very elusive, though, because they suffer terribly from the uncertainty principle. Being active, biological systems tend to be affected by the process of observation – the discoveries of microscopy, for instance, have always been haunted by artefacts introduced by the preparation of slides. In the human sciences, of course, almost all behaviour is a product of being observed, scientifically or otherwise, just as most “news” only happens in order to be reported.

What do you think would happen in a situation like the one in the book’s Tenebrion Wood in real life – would there be a proper scientific investigation, or would the story only make it to the pages of Fortean Times?

In real life, an essentially elusive phenomenon like the one featured in the story would be very difficult to investigate, as the observations Hazard is able to make are difficult to share with other observers, who would have a lot of latitude to interpret them. Most people reject novel observations that don’t fit in with their preconceptions. If only they’d laughed at Galileo he’d have had an easier time of it, but alas, they called him a heretic and put him in prison, in order to defend their fatuous convictions against the evidence. Faith is the deadliest form of mental illness.

It is always difficult to pick favourites, but out of your own ‘metaphysical fantasies’ are there any favourite speculations that you have particularly enjoyed?

My most enduring fascination has always been the further possibilities of life – the future evolution of life on Earth and the stranger possibilities of life there and elsewhere. My next novel, The Revelations of Time and Space, due from Snuggly Books early in 2020, sketches out an entire speculative future for life on Earth and in the Universe, picking up and extrapolating ideas from earlier novels, most significantly Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations (Borgo Press, 2009).

The problem with texts like that, of course, is integrating such extreme ideas into stories with human characters, and linking essentially trivial human problems with the far-reaching notions – which necessarily raises such questions as what relevance our lives could possibly have in the great scheme of things. If I’ve achieved anything in my career as an SF writer, that’s where the achievement lies – or where the ambition lay, at least.

In the past, biology was a fruitful field for scholarly fantasy – dragons, sea serpents, mermaids and the elusive yeti. Is this a field that might still produce some surprises?

Biology has indeed been a fruitful field for scholarly fantasy, and still is, including but not limited to the fascinations of cryptozoology. I certainly hope that there might be more genuine surprises in store as we learn more about the diversity of life on Earth – to which, of course, we might be able to make contributions of our own.

We appear to be entering an era where experts are ignored and scepticism about science is at an all-time high. Would you agree with this, and where do you see us going next?

I don’t think that scepticism regarding science is at an all-time high; my acquaintance with the speculative literature of the past suggests that it’s always been strong and stubborn. Nobody, including scientists, ever wants to be confused by an inconvenient truth when they’ve already made up their mind, and the natural reaction to having your prejudices challenged is to dig your heels in.

One problem with contemporary science is that the truth has turned out, on conscientious investigation, to be very complicated and really rather odd, defying “common sense” in many different ways. Thus, a blanket denial of its pretensions becomes psychologically attractive to many people, just as exaggerated faith in science becomes psychologically attractive to those who think they can and do understand it – thus the argument tends to become polarised. As to where we’re heading next, we’re heading for disaster – everybody knows that apart from professional liars and optimists.

Your writings have covered an astonishing half-century of scientific development, from the first man on the Moon to the cyber era, a period which has also been a remarkable one for speculative fiction. Would you see it as a golden age, or is it all subjective?

I don’t know about a “Golden Age” – tricky notion – but the last half-century has certainly seen spectacular developments in science and technology that have changed the world more in a few decades than all the previous centuries contrived to do. In my youth, when the microchip had yet to be invented, the possibilities now inherent in electronic technology were literally unimaginable, and nobody could begin to foresee what possibilities might develop from the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA and the subsequent “cracking” of the genetic code. Those two areas of discovery have helped to promote a spectacular leap in social evolution, whose consequences will continue to unfold for a while yet, until we contrive the collective suicide that we are all trying so hard to commit...