Experiment With Destiny

Experiment With Destiny

Part I

Published by Blue Rider Arts © 2014

Cover art adapted from ‘Jon Dowey: Self Portrait in Gethsemane’ Oil on Canvas (1984)

Foreword (A Retrospective)

I HAVE wanted to be a writer ever since reading JRR Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
as a boy and being held spellbound as Frodo encounters the Black Rider on the road at the start of his journey and, later, as they escape the clutches of the Ring Wraiths by crossing the Brandywine River on the Bucklebury Ferry. From that moment on I knew I wanted to master and wield the compelling descriptive powers of the written word, use them to weave fantastic worlds and ensnare the imaginations of readers…as no cinematography ever can.

I have always been an avid reader, thanks to the encouragement of my parents, captivated by the magic of Maurice Sendak's
Where The Wild Things Are
, and Dr Seuss’s fantastical worlds and characters, making my way along the well-trodden literary paths of Enid Blyton’s
Famous Five
and Tolkien’s
The Hobbit
before my prepubescent awakening in the opening chapters of
The Fellowship of the Ring
. After my conversion on the road to Rivendell, my early attempts to conjure up literary worlds of my own were, as you might imagine, childish derivatives of either Tolkien or George Lucas (
Star Wars
and television sci-fi classics such as
Dr Who
were by then my staple viewing diet).

As the 1970s drew to a close and my interests were becoming increasingly more political and sociological – my reading horizons broadened by the likes of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and JG Ballard – I began to explore less fantastical and futuristic worlds and themes within my own writing and developed a taste for the dystopian ‘alternative realities’ that might, with twists of fate and history, be just beyond our peripheral vision.

Just days before Christmas 1980, for family reasons utterly beyond my control, I arrived back in Wales after spending most of my formative years in the Outback of Australia. It was my first British winter since my parents emigrated ‘Down Under’ in the late 1960s, and Wales was also gripped in a ‘winter of discontent’ with rising unemployment and social unrest. All around me I could see and feel the unacceptably high cost of Thatcherism yet – despite the brutal impacts of monetarism – the Lady wasn’t for turning. My passion for politics – first ignited when the Queen’s Governor General, Sir John Kerr, sacked Australian Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975 – was well and truly ablaze by the early 1980s. My education disrupted and my hopes of employment nil, angry and directionless, I dropped out and opted for the ‘New Age Hippy’ lifestyle of Quixotic tilting at authoritarian windmills, rather than constructively fighting the system…either from within or without.

The works of Orwell, Huxley and Ballard were now, in Thatcher’s divided Britain, more alive and relevant to me than when I first read them in Australia, and I began to add new literary fuel to my reactionary counter-culture fire – Anthony Burgess, Michael Moorcock, John Fowles, Hunter S. Thompson and, now my all-time favourite, Philip K. Dick.

If
The Lord of the Rings
was my inspiration to take up writing,
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
was my clarion call to journalism. I began to take the first tentative steps toward a career in newspapers, in the mistaken belief that the pen was mightier than the sword (I later realised that the people with the swords tend to own those with the pens!). My creative writing, after several years of stuttering between styles and genres, also started to take shape.

It was around this time that I set aside whatever more traditional ‘sci fi’ project I was working on and began writing
Picnic on a Frozen River
as a short story entry to submit to the Ian St James Awards which, unlike other short story competitions, boasted a generous 15,000-word limit as well as equally generous cash and publication prizes. The setting – British Eurostate, in the early years of the 21
st
Century – was inspired by the endless debates during the years of build-up to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty about whether or not the UK should stay within Europe as the other member states moved from the ‘Common Market’ to the European Union and, critically, toward monetary union. Also hotly debated at the time – just as today – were the impacts of global warming and the question of our unsustainable modern lifestyles creating irreparable climate change.

I am not, and have never been, a ‘Eurosceptic’, but at the time I started writing
Picnic on a Frozen River
I was deeply concerned about the long-term sociological damage being caused by Thatcherism and her ‘let the market dictate’ approach to capitalism. The rich were indeed getting richer and the poor, much poorer. I could also see the relentless march of Americanised globalism and consumerism in an Orwellian atmosphere of Cold War ‘double-speak’ that tried to persuade the unwitting masses the only alternative was Soviet world domination and bleak uniform poverty. Like many, I was horrified by the unchecked dominance of global super-brands and their incursion into even the most remote and far flung corners (and cultures) of the world, closely followed (or pre-empted) by the imposition of pro-American governments, democratic or otherwise.

Those opposed to Maastricht, and I did not necessarily count myself among them, predicted a ‘United States of Europe’ run by faceless Brussels bureaucrats who would be unable to harness the economic critical mass of the Old World conglomerate because of centralist red tape and, without the sanctity of sterling and sovereignty of self-determination, we would all allegedly sink like cumbersome stones into a sea of European bankruptcy. There was also speculation that the cashless society was rapidly approaching, and global banks would soon be managing all transactions – however small – electronically…in cyberspace (as coined by another literary hero of mine, William Gibson).

And so my British Eurostate was born – a bleak dystopian globalist world run by distant and anonymous Eurocrats where run-away technology could only be afforded by the privileged few; where your electronic identity was your passport to survival and where the economic underclass who could not afford such an identity (echoes of the ‘Poll Tax’) disappeared, disenfranchised and destitute, into the derelict industrial and retail wastelands – abandoned to the unforgiving elements of the meteorological struggle between global warming and the onset of another ice age.

Picnic on a Frozen River
began as a parody of some of the conceptual performance art lauded at the time – the idea that technique and craft were somehow superfluous and that ‘concept’ was all that mattered…a case of substance over style, if you will. During a discussion with a close friend and fellow artist, Zino Pece, I suggested that I could adopt a ‘conceptual’ approach to writing and create a plot, characters and situation based on the flimsiest of ‘concepts’, inviting readers to ‘read in’ their own fanciful interpretations of what the author was trying to say. We were both fans of the German avant-garde rock group, Faust, and we chose the title of a song from
Faust IV
because of its stark, simple visual appeal –
Picnic on a Frozen River
.

The challenge was that I write a story to encapsulate the concept of a ‘picnic on a frozen river’ with sufficient ambiguity to leave the reader in conjecture about the message(s) I was trying to convey…a bit like John Fowles’
The Magus
. At the same time, Zino would paint a ‘picnic on a frozen river’ with his favoured approach (he was, at the time, a fan of the abstract expressionists). I decided that my short story should incorporate a very literal ‘picnic on a frozen river’, almost as a red herring to disguise the more hidden layers of conceptualisation, and so the plot challenge was created…a basic classroom composition exercise to end up at the point of someone having a picnic on a frozen river. Drawing from childhood inspiration – this time television’s
Catweazle
rather Tolkien – I wanted the central character, Marcus, to feel completely out of place and time, much as I did in Thatcher’s Britain. Like Catweazle, Marcus wanted to ‘fly through time’ to a better and more civilized age in which he could feel at home.

And so
Picnic on a Frozen River
was born…the first of my numerous attempts to satisfy my inner craving – forged a decade earlier and a hemisphere away – to become a writer in the footsteps of Tolkien. While it undoubtedly owed much to my many literary and artistic heroes, as does everything I have written since, it was the first work to elevate above mimicry and stand on its own two feet as something that deserved to be read, and published. I had finally found my voice as an author. At 12,900 or so words, it was well within the requirements for the Ian St James Awards and duly submitted.

Imagine my anticipation when the response came! The judges’ comments read: “An original and passionately told tale. Very strong ending. The author possesses an impressive imagination and the ability to identify with another world and the people in it. An excellently crafted story. Passed to second stage.” And then the conclusion: “Didn’t quite make it to the finals”. I was both dismayed and yet encouraged. I don’t recall if Zino ever finished his ‘Picnic’ painting.

As with so many of these things, they seem to take on a life of their own and I began to dream up new characters and stories to inter-weave with Marcus’s tragic tale and breathe the depth and complexity I wanted to create in my writing, with the unforgiving context of British Eurostate providing the ideal dystopian canvas. Having started with a Faust song title, I decided to stick to the formula and so followed:
On The Way to Abamae
;
The Sad Skinhead
;
I’ve Got My Car And My TV
;
Jennifer, Your Red Hair’s Burning
;
Eat your Fruit But Don’t Take Roots
; and
It’s A Rainy Day, Sunshine Baby
. I freely admit that – unlike Picnic – these later works were more a case of choosing the song title to fit the story. I wanted to add layer upon layer of inter-connectivity and inter-dependence – one of the themes I have continued to explore in subsequent writing. As the stories developed, I realised that a common thread was emerging. Each of the characters, however different, were trapped in a world they did not fully comprehend or feel they belonged to…and each was trying to change, or experiment, with their destiny. I couldn’t find a Faust title to fit the overall tome, so Hawkwind’s
Experiment With Destiny
did the trick. (I enjoyed the irony that so many of Hawkwind’s song titles were drawn from sci-fi novels I’d read in my formative years.)

I did not set out to create a trilogy, but as I began the final instalment of my first full-length novel I quickly realised that the much more involved and autobiographical nature of Susan’s tale –
It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Baby
– would unbalance the rhythm and flow of the other six components. Instead, I decided to use the 7
th
section within
Experiment With Destiny
more as an epilogue to create a ‘taster’ complete with a clear link to the original catalyst (
Picnic on a Frozen River
) and a way-marker for what was to come within Susan’s own self-contained novel (
Autumn in Fabis
).

As the 1980s ended and the 1990s began, with Thatcherism showing no sign of abating despite the Lady herself’s ruthless and unceremonious exit at the hands of her own people, my fledgling career as a journalist helped to hone my writing skills and sharpen my political, sociological and cultural awareness. Like so many writers, I found my calling and ambition frustrated by rejection after rejection from publishers and agents alike…but also like so many, I persisted and completed
Autumn in Fabis
while sifting through the numerous rejection letters for
Experiment With Destiny
that dropped through the letter-box. With
Autumn
finally complete, and suffering a similar fate to
Experiment
, I began writing
Giggy Smile
(another Faust song!) purely because, having created monstrous Ivan in
The Sad Skinhead
I found I could not let him lie. I wanted to explore the themes of: ‘are monsters born or created’; and ‘can they be redeemed?’. It seemed only natural, following the pattern of the earlier instalments, to return to the inter-connectivity and inter-dependence…so we see the bleed-through of
Eat Your Fruit, But Don’t Take Roots
into the final book.

About a third of the way into writing
Giggy Smile
I was given some advice by a leading literary agent who suggested that, although the
Experiment With Destiny
trilogy was indeed publishable, I needed to find a ‘break-through’ plot as a debut author and
Experiment
was not it. At the time of writing,
Giggy Smile
remains unfinished. In the years since I have spent searching for that elusive ‘break-through’ plot –
Zeros & Ones
,
Next Big Thing
,
Lifeform
and
Mrs Windsor’s Island
all coming close…but, as they say, no cigar. Now my hope rests with
Satellites
, the latest step on my own epic journey that began when I first read the opening chapters of
The Lord of the Rings
. The advent of e-publishing and the success of Kindle now means I can self-publish, albeit in a much more modest fashion than I’d once envisaged, and so my most recently completed work –
Mrs Windsor’s Island
– was ironically first to ‘reach the market’.