Ex libris: 5 books that shaped Exo

Turns out I don’t own a copy of Roadside Picnic

Many books and authors influenced the writing of my first novel Exo. I’m going to talk about five of them that encouraged me to make it weird.

Let’s start with the oldest book and work forward.

Flatland

Edwin Abbott’s Flatland from 1884 is more of a thought exercise than a tale. In fact, it was originally conceived as a satire of the rigid conventions of Victorian society rather than a way to think about multiple dimensions, and as such it was nearly forgotten. Albert Einstein changed that when his General Theory of Relativity posited the four dimensions of spacetime and the world had to find a way to think through his equations’ implications for the universe. Flatland is about what life is like on a two-dimensional plane for the various shapes that exist there and what happens when one of those shapes, a privileged square, encounters a three-dimensional entity, a sphere. He can see only a circle, albeit one that, extraordinarily, shrinks and expands as its passes up and down through his limited plane of existence. One of my characters in Exo uses Flatland to try and explain what happens when living, breathing three-dimensional life encounters higher dimensional shapes such as hypercubes and Klein bottles. These are impossible for us to fully visualise and in consequence difficult to write about coherently. How could I present this to the reader?

The House on the Borderland

This 1908 ur-text of weird fiction remains one of the pinnacles of the cosmic horror genre, possessing writers as disparate in style, sensibility and fundamental humanity as HP Lovecraft and Terry Pratchett. William Hope Hodgson’s found manuscript details the opening of a deep pit by an old house in rural Ireland, and the eldritch swine-horrors that rise out of it to attack the old-man narrator and his dog. The old man is also granted terrible visions of a distant alien world and what seems to be the collapse of the solar system itself at the end of time. Despite the title, this is not a haunted house story, though the building itself, which is circular (more geometry), is rather strange. But it is a tale about confusing and threatening places, thresholds, that haunt those living beside them, which is something I wanted to capture in writing Exo. The Caul, the transformed and deadly ocean on my future Earth, is as much a presence inside the heads of my main characters as it is in their day-to-day lives surviving along its shores.

Solaris

When I initially wrote Exo it was set on a distant exo-planet and the book that most overshadowed its writing was Solaris. Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 story tells of the crew of a research space station trying, and failing, to understand the vast oceanic alien intelligence on the planet of Solaris. Lem didn’t think human rationality was up to the task of successfully communicating with an extraterrestrial intelligence and his brilliant metaphor for our solipsism was to have the oceanic entity respond to the research station’s aggressive probing by sending the crew disturbing visitors. These visitors are the simulacra of dead loved ones plucked out of the characters’ own guilt-ridden heads. The idea of a vast entity that refuses all our attempts to understand it and also being haunted by that failure was an idea I wanted to work into Exo. But I wanted my characters to make progress too, though any such understanding would only lead to further questions, the sense that the more you knew the less you understood. When I later adjusted the story’s setting to Earth (and Exo turned from being short for exo-planet to short for exodus), I used this sense of being haunted by past mistakes to inform the penitents – the last, desperate denizens living on a defiled and depopulated Earth.

The Drowned World

Is this the first modern climate change novel? JG Ballard’s prescient 1962 post-apocalyptic story – of a world where rising temperatures have sunk the continents and driven humanity to the cooler poles – tells of scientists attempting to understand and the opportunistic seeking to exploit a mutating Earth. Ballard writes novels that get under my skin psychologically. They unsettle me and can put me in a depressed moods for days (the best remedy is an immediate dose of Terry Pratchett). Ballard’s characters and narrators report events in plain, deliberately flat prose with the detached, clinical tone of a doctor’s diagnosis. This unshowy, distanced storytelling concerning the breakdown of everything is the polar opposite of the declarative, highly emotional writing that is currently in vogue. There are no certainties here, only the sense that our time is past. For Exo, I wanted to make the world hostile to my characters. The sea would be less an existential physical threat than an actual deadly presence. No one, other than the deranged, should feel at home here.

Roadside Picnic

Like the disturbing alien visitation zones it describes, the weirdness of 1972’s Roadside Picnic by the Russian Strugatsky brothers has slowly bled like a stain across the more avant-garde regions of the traditionally conservative science fiction genre. In their novel, unnoticed-by-us extraterrestrial visitors have briefly come and gone, leaving behind beguiling but dangerous artefacts which the greedy and desperate seek, relying on stalkers to illegally enter these zones and scavenge what they can bring out. Sinister figures want to exploit the destructive powers exhibited by these artefacts. Others have more immediately selfish desires. No one succeeds in finding what they are looking for, but everyone is corrupted in some form – physically, psychologically – through their contact with these zones. This idea of being drawn to something that must in some way destroy or corrupt who or what you are was central to Exo. The motives of the scientists, who risk their lives returning to Earth, cannot help but be suspect. Are the penitents who are compelled to break quarantine in search of their own desperate truth to be pitied, condemned or celebrated? We all have a flame that we are drawn to and some of us can’t resist getting too close, despite the danger.

These five books by dead male writers are just some of the titles I returned to or considered during Exo’s long gestation. What unites them for me is the sense of entering uncertain territory, of strange vistas opening up around you. That’s why I read science fiction – to feel the top of my head being gradually but determinedly unscrewed.