Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

Simon Bestwick’s new novel for Solaris, The Feast of All Souls, continues a long tradition in genre writing – one, as he explains here, that goes back a lot further than you might expect…

How do you tell a ghost story when you don’t believe in ghosts? Or when you don’t believe in everything that the existence of a ghost would normally imply – God, religion, an afterlife?

There’s always been an overlap between horror and science fiction; if they emerged as distinct genres in the nineteenth century, it was as different branches of the same tree. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, although rooted in the Gothic – and one of horror’s most instantly recognisable ‘brands’ – was nonetheless a vehicle for Shelley’s political and moral speculations on the possibilities of technology – which is about as science fictional as you can get. It wasn’t unique among her work, either – her later novel The Last Man prefigures dozens of other post-apocalypse novels (including M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901) and Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885).)

H.G. Wells, that most rationalist of authors, was not averse to flirting with the paranormal in his work, but his contemporary, William Hope Hodgson, blended horror and science fiction with gay abandon.

In the head-spinning The House On The Borderland, the occupant of a lonely house in Ireland is besieged by an army of hideous ‘swine-things’ while the he and house hurtle through time and space (Wells and Hodgson were correspondents for a time, and it’s interesting to compare Hodgson’s descriptions of time travel – where the passage of day to night speeds madly up into a flickering blur – with those of Wells’ Time Traveller.) And in Hodgson’s magnum opus The Night Land, related by a seventeenth-century narrator as a vision of the distant future, the sun has died; the Earth is left in perpetual darkness, with the last human survivors confined in a metal pyramid.

Sadly, Hodgson was just one of countless talents snuffed out in the carnage of the First World War – he was killed by a German shell at Ypres only seven months before the Armistice was signed.

A decade later came another author, H.P. Lovecraft, who despite his galloping racism produced a brand of supernatural horror fiction for those who didn’t believe in the supernatural. Long before Arthur C. Clarke devised his Third Law to state that technology becomes indistinguishable from magic beyond a certain level, Lovecraft had created entities as potent and terrifying as any Old Testament God – more terrifying, in fact, as to them humanity was little more than a colony of insects or microbes. But Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath et al were to be explicated not in terms of mysticism or faith, but those of science – albeit the kind of science that suggests what we’ve taken for reality is in fact a partial and transitory understanding of it at best.

Between the deaths of Hodgson and Lovecraft, Spiritualism grew in popularity, as those bereaved by the Great War and the Spanish flu pandemic that followed it tried to come to terms with their loss. There were some moves to apply some sort of rational understanding to the concept of an afterlife, reflected in a few stories of the time, and the occasional novel such as William Sloane’s The Edge Of Running Water, but on the whole the ghost story remained connected squarely to the past, to folklore and to faith. (Indeed, that might partly account for its lasting appeal.)

But one writer would marry the ghost story and the scientific – a Manxman who’s now remembered as one of television’s most original and influential writers: Nigel Kneale.

Kneale didn’t sever the supernatural from its connection to folklore to replace it with a connection with science – rather, he synthesised the two. In Quatermass And The Pit, (1958 (TV series), 1967 (film)), the Devil is the psychically-generated avatar of an insectoid alien species, whose outline resembles a horned man; cold iron, the age-old weapon against the supernatural, is the means by which the apparition is ‘earthed’ and dispelled.

Kneale approached the ghost story itself in 1972’s The Stone Tape, in which a room in a long-abandoned manor house that acts as a psychic tape-recorder, capturing events that occurred centuries before, becomes the obsession of a scientific researcher seeking to create a new recording medium. (The play gave its name to a concept, popular in some paranormal circles, known as the ‘Stone Tape Theory’.)

Horror and science-fiction continue to cross-pollinate, with books on either side of the genre divide borrowing from the other. My new book is one small contribution to a tradition started by some of the giants of the field I read in. I’m proud to be a part of it.

The Feast of All Souls is published December 1 by Solaris; click here to order from Amazon.co.uk