The Seal Cub Clubbing Club

The sun came out (eventually) for The Seal Cub Clubbing Club’s album launch at Rockscape on Saturday afternoon, which was good news for the audience in this open-air amphitheatre. Before it began, I was stood outside, propping-up the blackboard advertising the event rallying some passers by to come in (fairly unsuccessful) but as soon as the band began playing, the place began to fill. Intrigue often gets the better of people and in this case, people were very obviously impressed. Many of them stayed for the whole afternoon to listen to the band’s innovative surreal pop sound interspersed with some readings by lead singer Nik (that were accompanied wonderful sythnesised background music and gentle guitar strums) and by the special guest authors, Frank Cottrell Boyce (who read a fantastic short story about aliens, the Pope and the Bisto gravy advert jingle!), Ramsey Campbell and Zoe Lambert.

Frank Cottrell Boyce

The Seal Cub Clubbing Club set out to create their own mini-festival of music and literature and succeded in their mission: it was a unique and eclectic event; the audience were relaxed, listening to the songs and readings, eating their picnincs and drinking beer; and in true festival style, there was even a spot of rain.

The amphitheatre festival goers

Murphy, Michael and Deryn Rees-Jones, ed., Writing Liverpool: essays and interviews (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), pp. 288 + xi.

Writing Liverpool is a collection of twelve essays and six interviews that aim to survey the artistic output and ‘distinctive literary voice’ of Liverpool that Michael Murphy and Deryn Rees-Jones, in their introduction, claim ‘only began to emerge in the 1930s – at precisely the time when the city experienced a sudden and rapid decline in economic fortune’ (1). Published in 2007 it is ‘intended to mark the beginning of what promises to be a new period in the history of the city and its environs’ (2), coming at a time when Liverpool, as we know, had already become a centre of artistic attention as a consequence of its award of Capital of Culture in 2008. Indeed, the editors claim when reflecting upon Liverpool’s famous ‘community spirit’ and its ‘history of social disharmony rooted in religion, race and class’ that ‘The year 2008 may offer an opportunity for the city to pull together; it may equally put previous fractures under renewed strain’ (25). Perhaps this review itself comes at a good time, pointing out as it does a book that allows us to cast a retrospective eye over the last year in the context of its artistic output over the last eighty.

The introduction to Writing Liverpool contextualises Liverpool’s literary output by outlining its central position in the propagation of the slave trade and by indicating that ‘the city was from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century more associated with trade than art’ (1). This is claimed to be the main factor for Liverpool’s ambivalent multiculturalism. With the influx of diverse cultural groups such as Irish, Asian, Chinese, African, Jamaican and American groups new ideas and experiences flow through one of England’s major ports and begin to influence the artistic output and identity of the city. From the 1930s and more obviously in 2008 it has become more and more difficult to pin down a coherent voice and a stable identity for Liverpool.

These diverse influences are insightfully examined in many of the essays. The influence of the American Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or the ‘Wobblies’, on George Garrett’s writings and his political activism is examined in Joseph Pridmore’s “George Garrett, Merseyside Labour and the Influence of the United States”, where he claims that ‘Liverpool’s status as a thriving port ideally situated for trade between Britain and the United States made for a lively (and often illegal) traffic between the two countries’ (33). In Paul de Noyer’s “Subversive Dreamers: Liverpool Songwriting from the Beatles to the Zutons” de Noyer acknowledges that ‘though it’s undeniable that the transatlantic seaport was unusually accustomed to jazz, blues and country influences’ from America he identifies the main factor in the Beatles’ and Merseybeat’s distinctive sound as residing in Liverpool’s status itself: to be from Liverpool was to feel ‘a certain self-consciousness about the city’s identity, [which] was to be at one remove from standard English reality’ (241). Andy Sawyer in “Ramsey Campbell’s Haunted Liverpool” notes that Ramsey Campbell’s experience with images from American science fiction and horror pulp magazines, ‘fused with others from cinema and prose fiction, seemed to express and exploit his inner fears’ (167) and he makes much of the influence of the American H.P. Lovecraft’s work upon the formation of Campbell’s own style, which eventually becomes rooted in the potential horror of Merseyside’s landscape.

Nor is the examination of cultural influence upon Liverpool’s own distinctive voice limited to America. Sandra Courtman examines how ‘recent black arrivals to Liverpool joined with descendents of Irish immigrants to create a forum for creative expression’ while also recognizing the paradox that ‘there were feelings that the racial divide in Liverpool was intractable’ (195) in “‘Culture is Ordinary’: The Legacy of the Scottie Road and Liverpool 8 Writers”. She notes how the FWWCP encouraged ‘the racially and ethnically excluded to meet and write about a liminal existence’ (196) and how the ‘Scottie Road writers’ group acts as a powerful conduit for this disaffection’ (198). Courtman’s essay then moves towards a discussion of the founding of the Liverpool 8 group, ‘with contributions from Cheryl Dudt, of Asian descent, and Liverpool-born black, Levi Tafari’, who is interviewed in this collection. She notes the relationship between the Scottie Road and Liverpool 8 community writing groups and quotes David Evans’ comment that ‘The two groups remained distinct however, though whites came into the L8 group’ (203).

The theme of the liminal is the subject of Ralph Crane’s essay “The Liminal Presence of Liverpool in the Fiction of J.G. Farrell where he also highlights ‘the humour that pulses through the veins of the city’ and ‘the idiosyncratic ways of seeing things that are characteristic of the Liverpudlian, [which] are evident in all Farrell’s writing’. Farrell himself left Liverpool for Ireland at an early age yet retains a connection with the city as ‘Liverpool was the gateway to England he passed through in September 1948′ and through ‘the Liverpool-Dublin ferry [which] would remain a presence in his life and also in his fiction’ (90). Indeed, in the subsection entitled “The empire triptych: Liverpool as a gateway to empire” Crane examines Farrell’s questioning and critique of empire and colonialism from a liminal or third space, ‘an ambivalent position, somewhere between colonizer and colonized’ (96). Farrell is himself connected to another Liverpool writer also discussed in this collection: he read the manuscript for Beryl Bainbridge’s A Weekend with Claude, which was published in 1967 ‘and thereafter Farrell laid claim to having discovered Bainbridge’s talent’ (91). Bainbridge’s own life and work is discussed in Helen Carr’s “‘Unhomely Moments’: The Fictions of Beryl Bainbridge’ where Carr draws attention to the fact that her work has been overlooked in academic circles because ’she has never written in ways which fitted in with what was fashionable at a particular moment’ and claims that ‘Bainbridge is undoubtedly a writer of the Liverpool diaspora, but so far that’s not been a critical category’ (79).

The six interviews included in this collection allow a wide range of writers to give a voice to their take on Liverpool and to articulate the variety of perspectives on a contradictory city. Willy Russell, interviewed by John Bennett, claims that ‘I think that the first writers who come to mind are those from a spoken/sung rather than literary background’ (229) and so draws attention to the essential relationship between the city and the formation of a distinctive voice, claiming as he does that ‘There is something to do with the nature of the spoken language in Liverpool that is as the sky and the light must have been to the impressionists’ (229). Michael Murphy’s interview with screenwriter and novelist Terence Davies extends this range of voices by exploring how his working class Catholic family background and his then unrealized homosexuality influenced his style and is variously expressed in his approach to and in his writing itself. In Dave Ward’s interview with Liverpool-born Levi Tafari, of Jamaican descent, Tafari reflects upon his personal experiences as a member of the black community and he states ‘I think there is a lot of racism here. The black community is still looked down upon and vilified to some extent’ (255). He comments on the rich oral traditions of the Irish, Black and Chinese communities (the last two the oldest in Europe) and argues for an inclusive and personal view of cultural experience when he explains that ‘I don’t divorce myself from the other sides, because I always say that I’m tri-cultural: I have an African root with a Jamaican heritage and a British experience’ (255).

Writing Liverpool explores the diversity of culture and experience in Liverpool from the 1930s without shirking from an illuminating contextualising impulse that connects these writers firmly with the city and its surrounding landscape and to the history that makes Liverpool what it is today. It uncovers the complexity of the connections between Liverpool and its immigrant population along with the accompanying spread of ideas and shows how writers express their experiences with the city from the troubled liminal spaces between stable identities. The editors comment on this in their introduction when they suggest that Liverpool ‘becomes a projection of all that remains undealt with in the continuing negotiation of what it means to be English’ (11). It looks backward from a pivotal moment encapsulated by its Capitol of Culture status, surveying eighty years of writing from a range of perspectives and yet it still looks to the future:

if writing from Liverpool is to continue to matter it will need to re-invent itself in ways that at present appear as indistinct and fragile as the city’s budding transformation from a place that is a shadow of its nineteenth-century self to a city that has ambitions to command the attention of Europe and the wider world. (25)

Writing Liverpool proves itself to be relevant and searching and I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in the city’s claims, printed on T-shirts and other Liverpool merchandise, to being the ‘centre of the artistic universe’. There is no better time than now to read it as we reflect on the city’s response to the 2008 award, ponder its possible repercussions or involve oneself in the project of re-inventing Liverpool.

Posted by Chris Pak

Phil and I discussed the likelihood of the end of the world before breakfast on Wednesday morning. What if the CERN scientists were wrong and the collider bang did cause a new cosmos to burst out of the ruins of our old one? And what if that kept happening over and over again in a weird 14 billion year loop? We get this far and they say nothing much’ll happen and then they collide the particles and BANG! Up we go again. 

I waited around until 8.00am (when Phil assured me it had happened ‘and everything seems ok.’) Then I set off for The Reader Organisation office, listening, en route, to the Today programme on Radio 4 where (after we heard of the Cabinet having been to Birmingham: wonders, wonders, signs and wonders) we got Andrew Marr in the Control Room at CERN. It was a magnificent piece of radio. Everything seemed so very tentative yet also mildly possible, like the early days of Tim Henman’s Wimbledon career. Something just might be about to happen: something for which we have been waiting for thirty years. We were all cheering. But we realised, too, in our hearts, that maybe it wouldn’t happen. But then perhaps it might. Let’s cheer. Let’s hope it will. Let’s hope. The scientists (as they each spoke they turned out to be a wonderful mix of Ulster, Welsh, English and French) might just manage to bring off what was being billed as the most important scientific experiment since the early Apollo programme.

Which was what it reminded me of as I sat in my traffic jam and listened. Did I really sit on a parquet floor in a primary school assembly hall with 200 other under-11’s and watch ‘one small step for man…?’  I think I did but it is all so long ago… Life is long. And very short. I listened to what Marr called ‘the atmosphere so tense you could it with a … laser beam’ and I could see the grainy black and white pictures, and hear my grandfather mocking ‘It’s all in a studio! The Yanks have mocked it up! It’s anti-Communist propaganda!’

Later Andrew Marr wondered if Big Bang day would get kids fired up about physics. I think, despite my grandfather’s perfectly reasonable doubts, that it was the Apollo programme that got me interested in Science Fiction. I couldn’t get interested in real science because of the maths or rather my paralysing fearful innumeracy but I did read John Wyndham aged about 11, finishing The Day of the Triffids by torchlight way into the night because I simply could not stop reading and then it went on: Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Silverberg. Until at some point I got bored. Later, Joanna Russ and Ursula K. le Guin resurrected my old SF interest when, in my early twenties I went through a period of reading only women but after that I forgot all about my early love, until Doris Lessing introduced me (via ‘Some Remarks’ at the beginning of Shikasta) to the biggest daddy of all Sci Fi books: Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon. 

For Big Bang Day, Big Bang Week, Big Bang Year, this is the man to read. He is the biggest. Cosmology? Infinity?  He’s got it by the billion squared. He tells our human story from the primordial soup days to the way past the end of the our universe, and many other universes.

But he doesn’t think of it as Science Fiction, just fiction. In the Preface to the 1930 edition, Stapledon writes:

This is a work of fiction. I have tried to invent a story which may seem a possible, or at least not wholly impossible, account of the future of man; and I have tried to make that story relevant to the change that is taking place today in man’s outlook.

To romance of the future may seem to be indulgence in ungoverned speculation for the sake of the marvellous. Yet controlled imagination in this sphere can be a very valuable exercise for minds bewildered about the present and its potentialities. Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds. To romance of the far future, then, is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values.

…The activity that we are undertaking is not science, but art; and the effect that it should have on the reader is the effect that art should have.

‘The human race in its cosmic setting.’ I loved that – the enormous size of it.  

It was an amazingly lucky stroke for me as a young post-grad to discover that Olaf Stapledon–despite his exotic northern name–had been a lecturer in the Extension Studies programme at the University of Liverpool. Not only that, but all his papers had been donated to our very own Sydney Jones Library. Not only that, but they had not (I’m talking 1983) yet been catalogued. Not only that, but when I arrived breathless with excitement in SJL Special Collections, some of them hadn’t even been lifted out of the original, dusty, old cardboard boxes Olaf himself (probably) packed them into before carrying up to his attic. Some of the boxes had string round them. I undid it, thinking: he tied this careful knot.

Reading through that stuff (almost all of it totally unrelated to my PhD thesis) was an experience of immense magnitude. It was like getting involved with a ghost. There he was–everywhere and in all sorts of ways–but I couldn’t see him or touch him, though I could sense him, feel him and hear him but then I couldn’t quite feel him or hear him. Yet he was in my mind. I knew him. 

One day I found a letter, hand typed on one of those old sit up and beg typewriters, from H. G. Wells, and there was H. G. Wells’ signature in heavy ink, and (as I remember it) it was a kind letter, praising (was it? My memory isn’t too good) Last and First Men but not praising it with huge generosity and, I think, a little egotistically drawing Stapledon’s attention to something Wells had himself recently published or written. I remember it as being on hotel notepaper. It was a wonderful moment, holding it, with the box in front of me, and no one telling me not to touch it. Two great giants of Sci Fi seemed before my eyes. Yes, I think I saw them. Both dead, they were in some sense present. 

There’s an awful lot we can’t see. Think of all that dark matter: we don’t even know what it is, only that it is most of what’s here. Three cheers for the particle colliders then and for more people taking ‘A-level’ physics. They are going bring a little more of that darkness into the light.

Posted by Jane Davis

Chris Pak was born and grew up in Hong Kong and is currently completing an MA in Science Fiction Studies at the University of Liverpool. Apart from sf and music his interests include postcolonialism and environmentalism which he plans to study at PhD level later this year under an Allott Graduate Teaching Assistantship.

Solaris was written by Polish author Stanislaw Lem in 1961 and has since been regarded as a science fiction classic. It has been adapted for film twice: in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky and in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh. While the Fabe & Faber edition I read for this review takes its cover art from the 2002 film it is perhaps no surprise that a reading of the book provides quite a different experience from the film; Lem himself has said that he never liked the first and was unenthusiastic about the second. Coming to the book after having watched the 2002 adaptation I was unprepared for the magnificent focus on the planet Solaris and the way in which the psychological examination the narrator, Dr. Kris Kelvin, and the motives behind the ideal of the scientific quest for knowledge are built around this foundation.

Solaris is a planet orbiting two suns, a red and a blue, whose surface is covered by a single “ocean” that has been the subject of debate in “Solarist studies” for a century. The problem is no less than the question of life and consciousness: if the sea is organic is it conscious and, if so, can it be communicated with and understood? The confrontation with Solaris forces scientists to continually re-evaluate the assumptions that inform their understanding of the universe: first that of the possibility of life on a planet orbiting two suns, for they discover the sea is indeed organic, then the conditions necessary for the development of consciousness and finally the possibility of making contact with and understanding something so utterly different.

Solaris continually defies not only understanding, but analysis. The monsters of this science fiction text are spectacular phenomenon such as the eruption of formations from the sea that, when examined, are revealed to represent in spatial terms complex mathematical equations through the flowering of their architectural structure that illustrates or directly contravenes the laws of physics. Is the ocean aware that it does this? Their efforts to explain these phenomena are continually subject to anthropomorphism, the scientific project imagined not as a march towards understanding but a slower ‘stumbling, one- or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us’ (178). The planet remains incomprehensible. We learn of Solaris and some of the previous expeditions through several sequences of Kelvin reading and thinking about the scientific works about it. Through this device the sheer bulk of the knowledge of Solaris is ironised by contrast with the little actual knowledge they have of it. Yet despite learning very little about Solaris itself this extended confrontation with the alien reveals to us something about our own humanity. Solaris does what the best of science fiction does well. Through encounters with the undeniably Other we get a glimpse of those characteristics that we hide from ourselves.

The book opens with Kelvin describing his departure from the ship Prometheus in a shuttle to Station Solaris. Isolated from Earth, then from the Prometheus on a journey alone in space, then in a station on an alien planet with only three other researchers the foundations for a psychological examination of our narrator and the two other scientists, Snow and Sartorius, is set. When he arrives all is not well. His mentor Gibarian is dead and he is faced with inexplicable behaviour from supposedly rational scientists. Tapping into the brooding apprehension that is the Gothic hallmark the breakdown of order and the mystery that permeates the opening of the book reads as if it were a horror story. Snow refuses to explain what has happened and Kelvin begins to question their sanity as he tries to establish the facts behind their situation at the station. The appearance of an apparition forces him to question his own sanity and what follows is an initial triumph whereby Kelvin uses scientific means in order to establish, ironically against hope, that he is indeed sane.

Station Solaris is being visited. These manifestations, dubbed ‘Phi-creatures’ by Snow, manifest as people from the unconscious memories of the scientists’ pasts. Kelvin is visited by a manifestation of Rheya, his young wife who, ten years ago, he drove to commit a desperate suicide. He cannot escape her; she is compelled to follow him and is able to return when sent off the station. Snow and Sartorius are visited by their own ghosts that cause them to isolate themselves from each other in order to deal in their own way with these reminders of what is hinted at as even more tragic pasts. Rationally Kelvin must admit that the Rheya he sees is not the Rheya he knew–is not even human–but this knowledge is under siege by the emotional force attached to his memory of her.

These manifestations are products of the ocean, for what motive no one can say. It becomes clear to the scientists that it can read their minds and create perfect human bodies and, ironically, they begin to suspect that the ocean is using these figures as tools to study them. These phi-creatures are not aware of their creation and believe themselves to be the people they look like, albeit with the memories of the mind that they were created from. It does not take long for Rheya to discover that she is not human and can have no existence independent of the planet Solaris. What follows is a heartrending sequence of denial and the struggle against her very nature. Kelvin, tormented by the memory of his dead wife, his ejection of the first manifestation of Rheya into orbit in a shuttle around Solaris and the emotional pressure of this manifestation, is plunged into an irrational apathy and becomes detached from reality.

Solaris is a book that examines the fundamentals of our existence and place in the universe. It questions the divergence between the arts and sciences by illustrating the propensity for scientific explanation to rely on an ‘anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us’ (178) while accepting that, despite the way that objective reality is filtered through the human senses and understanding, it must still bear some relation to that reality. It questions the project of the colonisation of the universe through an overarching scientific knowledge, ‘The Myth of the Mission of Mankind’, when the darkness of the individual mind has not yet been adequately examined and faced (181). Finally, it asks us to consider how far the scientific urge for contact with an alien Other is the displaced yearning, in religious or poetic terms, for a redemptive meeting with something that transcends the limits of man and could flood human understanding with a knowledge that is properly incommunicable. Ultimately, the great achievement of Solaris is the way in which, upon finishing the book, all these questions remain juxtaposed and oscillate unanswered while this state of unknowing is held open in a shift from hope, implying a looking backwards to a negation or lack, to expectation, leaving the future somewhat ironically open and expansive to the ambivalent possibilities of a universe of ‘cruel miracles’ (214).

_____

Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem, is published by Faber and Faber.

Posted by Chris Pak