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Inish Carraig with Naomi Foyle
180 Plays2 years ago
This month we're joined by the award-winning British-Canadian author, poet and essayist Naomi Foyle, to talk about Inish Carraig, the alien-invasion-cum-prison break thriller by our very own @Jo Zebedee.
Among the topics we cover is the quintessential "Norn Irishness" of the book, conveyed without ever lapsing into cliché, but yet acknowledging the unique history and culture of the place in a subtle and different manner. We also talk about the physiology of alien species, robots, the gothic setting, and the different identities and representations the book plays with.
Elsewhere we also discuss the possibilities and processes that enable writers to access Arts Council funding (England only) to further their writing careers. Specifically we talk about adapting one's own work for other media; Naomi recently adapted her own Gaia Chronicles quartet of SF novels into a multimedia stage show, Astra, featuring cutting-edge puppetry, acting, music, and technical effects, and she discusses the mammoth effort this has entailed.
@The Judge corners us with another fascinating talk, this time about privacy. Her Honour also relates her winning entry from the July 75-word challenge, The Eternal Scapegoat, and (we think) Sally Rooney is having trouble with the accuracy - and the characters - of her latest, er, science fiction epic.
Next Month
In September's episode we'll be talking to fantasy author Juliet E. McKenna about Hope Mirrlees's 1926 prototypical fantasy novel, Lud-In-The-Mist.
Index
[0:00:00 - 55:30] Naomi Foyle Interview Part 1
[55:30 - 56:42] Voicemail 1
[56:43 - 1:12:33] The Judge's Corner
[1:12:38 - 1:13:45] Voicemail 2
[1:13:45 - 1:14:53] Writing Challenge Winner
[1:14:54 - 1:15:35] Voicemail 3
[1:15:37 - 2:00:44] Naomi Foyle Interview Part 2
[2:00:45 - 2:02:49] Credits and Close
Recommended
Transcript
Welcome to Kronscast
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome along to Kronscast, the official podcast of SFF Chronicles, the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community. I'm Dan Jones. And I'm Christopher Bean.
Jo Zebedee's Alien Invasion Novel
00:00:27
Speaker
Today we're talking about a book that's straight out of Kronston, the Northern Irish Alien Invasion Come Prison Break in Ishkarag by Jo Zebedee. Jo is one of the queens of Krons and a friend of the Kronscast when she joined us in February to talk about Katsuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun.
00:00:44
Speaker
The novel follows the crime and punishment of teenager John in a Belfast left decimated after invasion by not one, but two alien species who have no love for each other. When John sent to the alien prison in his carat for a crime he doesn't even know he's committed, he's plunged into a web of deception and conspiracy which threatens the existence of the human race. But if the aliens think Belfast is going to lie down without a fight, they don't know Belfast very well.
Guest Naomi Foyle Joins the Discussion
00:01:10
Speaker
Joining us today to talk about Inshkarag is the award-winning British-Canadian author, poet and essayist, Naomi Foyle. Naomi's many publications include three poetry collections and five science fiction novels, The Cyberchiller Soul Survivors,
00:01:27
Speaker
and the four-book eco-science fiction series, The Gaia Chronicles, all published by Joe Fletcher Books. In 2022, the first book of that series, Astra, was adapted into a multimedia theatre production, also called Astra, after Naomi won funding from Arts Council England. The production, designed and directed by Raven Kalyana of Puppet Revolution, has won the Brighton Fringe
00:01:53
Speaker
ONCA Green Curtain Award for work that engages with social and environmental challenges. Naomi lives in Brighton and is reading critical imaginative writing at the University of Chichester. So Naomi, welcome along. Thank you so much, Dan and Chris. It's great to be here. You know, I have this very long time connection with Belfast, which I first visited in 1994, and I had the great
00:02:22
Speaker
good fortune to appear with Joe at the Belfast Book Festival in 2017. So this is just a delightful opportunity. Thank you. Well, it's wonderful to have you because I know how busy you are at the moment. So, you know, finding a bit of time in your schedule at the moment must be, well, must be pretty difficult. So we're very pleased to have you along.
00:02:44
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, actually, just this weekend, I was syncing British Sign Language to like an audio track and a film track, you know, it's like, which I wasn't, as part of the film editing process for Astral, we've got a documentary of the programme. So it's sort of like every day is kind of just asking me to do something new and, you know, actually wonderful. But
00:03:08
Speaker
It was really nice to take a couple hours on the beach this afternoon with the book and reread it and make some notes and then come back and do a little, do a little tour of Belfast really on Google Maps just to check out some of the place names and just revisit some history. So thank you. Thanks again. Well, that's so cool actually. I didn't think of doing that with Google Maps, but I think it's
Belfast and Coexistence Themes
00:03:34
Speaker
Is it the first book that we had on talking about a real place that's set in a real location? Chris? Sorry about that. No, it might be. Did you just see that hand raised? I just clicked that by accident. Sorry. I don't have a question to ask. Please carry on. Okay. Well, go on then Naomi. Tell us why did you pick English Karak?
00:04:00
Speaker
Well, I find it really interesting that Jo says it's a book about Northern Ireland, but not about the troubles. And I just
00:04:14
Speaker
I just want to unpack that a bit, because I just think in a sense, it's just such an easy allegory to make. And yet, obviously, when you read the book, it's a very different kind of situation. There's these two alien races or species that have come. And I think that what she's trying to do really with the characters, the human characters in the book, is show the diversity of the population of Belfast.
00:04:42
Speaker
and the sense of coexistence that has always been there under the sectarian violence. And so she talks about Belfast as a post-conflict city and Northern Ireland as a post-conflict nation.
00:05:00
Speaker
And I think it's in terms of the Greece peace process and any kind of conflict resolution to kind of get to that stage and be able to explore it and to see human beings perhaps trying to work together against a common threat, but perhaps not succeeding very well as we might see because in a way because of the legacy of all the divisions, particular to Belfast. So she had this very rich, I suppose,
00:05:29
Speaker
place, bristling with tension that she even exploited in a way for her own story. But at the same time, I think that you can't totally divorce the troubles from it because they were just, in terms of a place being occupied, in terms of colonialism, that's just such a part of the alien invasion narrative. And
00:05:53
Speaker
And so it's just fascinating to kind of look at what she's doing that's different, look at what she's doing that's moving that along, that's evolving, I think, that connection.
00:06:02
Speaker
It's a very strange thing. When we had Jo on as a guest, we did chat about Inish a little bit, and I think it's worth... I can't quite directly quote her, but I can paraphrase what she said. And forgive me, Jo, if I'm putting words in your mouth here, but she said, well, as you said, she didn't want to write a book that was explicitly about the troubles, but she did want to write a book that reflected the history and the culture of Northern Ireland.
00:06:27
Speaker
And when she was publicizing, she said, no, no, no, it's not about the troubles, not about the troubles. And then after a year or so of people saying, oh, the parallels with the troubles with you got two alien races and they have no love for each other and they're at each other's throats. And there's clearly some sort of long tribal sort of history there that we don't really get to see.
00:06:48
Speaker
And she thought, yeah, well, okay, I did kind of bring it out there.
Character Dynamics in Inishkarag
00:06:53
Speaker
And it's an interesting thing, isn't it? Even though, as writers, you may want to take something in a particular direction. And we've said this before, as soon as you let the thing loose onto the wider world, the wider world, then projects its own interpretations and its own understanding and its own
00:07:15
Speaker
its own experiences onto the text and takes away something else. And so I think in the end, she sort of, she came to accept the fact that it did for a lot of people reflect the troubles, you know, quite simply. And if you're on the face of it, there's not, it's not an analogy of the troubles. And Joe was very explicit about that. You can't say that there are two alien races that the Zello and the Barathna
00:07:43
Speaker
It's not like one of them is an avatar for the Catholics and the other one is an avatar for the Protestants. It doesn't work like that. There's a whole history that we're not party to as the reader. They just don't like each other. There's clearly no love lost between them. But
00:08:03
Speaker
It does, as you said, Belfast, Northern Ireland is colonised, the earth is colonised, and humans are relegated to a sort of bystander status. Yeah, and they have to work together. And what we see is, especially, I think, the character of Nita, Nita Sastry, who's a native Belfastian of Indian heritage who is
00:08:31
Speaker
empowered, inspired by her grandmother's stories of Indian independence and Gandhi, for example, as well, and the power of organized struggle and the way that you, you know, you don't leave, you don't let people down, you carry on. And about women at that time who were also, you know, taking a leading role in the independence movement. So Tara Rani Srivastava was mentioned, who I looked up and
00:09:01
Speaker
She was an Indian freedom fighter and part of the Gandhi's Quit India movement. And she was on a march to raise the Indian flag and shooting erupted and her husband was shot and she carried on only to raise the flag, only to come back and find that her husband had died. And she remained part of the independence movement until that was achieved. So we see how that's kind of motivating Nita.
00:09:31
Speaker
And I think, you know, from my time in Belfast, I know that, you know, there was a Fortnite magazine which I published early reviews in and was co-edited by Martin Crawford. He edited the supplements. And he did a supplement on, you know, multiculturalism in Belfast, which is kind of a hidden story because it's so much focused just on the supposedly two communities. But there are so many communities there.
00:10:02
Speaker
So, in terms of the, sorry, in terms of the aliens, I didn't really see the, I saw the aliens more kind of as the, in a way, maybe more like the states involved, you know, so there's the Protestant community, but then there's also, there was also the British army, you know, so, you know, you could see the Zello with their armour, you know, and initially, you know, it seems like they're the occupying force and the Baratheon and all this kind of shadowy,
00:10:31
Speaker
the shadowy figures who eventually emerge. And with promises, with promises of technological advancement, could you see them in relation to the Americans? I don't know. I think that's probably stretching it a bit. There's certainly a pluralism. There's certainly a lot of pluralism at play in the
00:10:58
Speaker
in the book because it's, while our central character is John, the teenager, who's thrust into an extraordinary and an extraordinarily dangerous situation beyond his understanding, really, and he's forced to A, survive, B, figure out, A, survive, B,
00:11:22
Speaker
escape the prison to which he's been sent and the prison is an Inish Karak, which is essentially a sort of a big ingot of metal, liquid metal, which is plopped into the sea off the coast, the northern coast of Northern Ireland. So he's got to survive it, break out of that and see, figure out what the hell is going on. And D, he's also got to
00:11:47
Speaker
rescue his, or possibly rescue his sister, but which all makes him sound like a bit of an action man, but he's not. He's sort of a very scared, pugnacious, you know, and I think he's a pugnacious teenager, but he's scared and he doesn't really know what's going on, and he can't do it all by himself. So we have these cast of characters. We've got John, his friend Taz,
00:12:12
Speaker
who spends most of the novel in varying states of sickness, then there's, yeah, the poor guy. I mean, he does not have a very good time if it does task, does he? There's Carter, the policeman who also takes it upon himself to be a sort of diplomatic representative of the
00:12:33
Speaker
Is it the Galactic Council? Yeah, that's it. Then there's Nita. There's Sergeant Phillips, who's a kind of right-hand man to Carter in the army. There's the governor of the prison. There's a local gangster, Gary McDowell. And there's Josie, John's sister, and Ryan. And all of these people, not all of them are tugging in the same direction for sure, but
00:12:58
Speaker
John can't do this all by himself. And there is a strong sense of pluralism running through the book, I think, that in order to, well, let's use your phrase, Naomi, in order to struggle against the forces that are containing you or constraining you or oppressing you, then you can't do it on your own. You have to join up with other people.
00:13:23
Speaker
Well, it was very interesting to look up the, you know, just a few place names, street names that she does drop in there. So Old Park Road seems to run through Ardoyne or perhaps is one that borders it, I'm not sure, which is a Catholic working class area in northern, in north Belfast. But that area itself is bordered on the west with Crumlin Road, which is largely Protestant. So it
00:13:50
Speaker
So that area and Old Park Road itself is considered an interface area. So that explains why in the book John, who's Protestant, is best mates with Taz, who's Catholic. And interestingly, looking back, I found a reference to peace groups working even in 1969 along the Old Park Road district. And there will be volunteers from both those communities
00:14:20
Speaker
going door to door to try and persuade people not to join in the violence. So I don't know if that was deliberately chosen. Just a simple Google kind of brings that up as this hidden subtext really.
00:14:37
Speaker
She did say that the majority of people in Belfast are sort of moderates in the middle. You know, they want to get on with their own lives and you have extremists on both sides or in both communities. And it's a strange situation in as much as the other, from the perspective of whichever community you happen to be in Belfast, it's not
00:15:06
Speaker
It's a strange situation because the other looks exactly like you. It's not, you know, they don't have a different skin colour or a different accent or they don't have a different way of speaking or dressing. It's exactly the same. And yet everybody knows everybody and everybody knows which side everybody is on. So it's a very strange
Alien Societies and Symbolism
00:15:30
Speaker
dissection of the community. And it's, I mean, in that sense, it's not the same as what's going on in Inish Karak. And if we think about the aliens, they are, we don't get many physical descriptors of the, the Zello so much. We get quite a lot of the Baratna, don't we? Yeah, I think that this Zello is being insectoid. I'm not quite sure why they seem like praying men to assist me, armored men praying men. Yeah, it could be, couldn't it? Yeah, they're supposed to be quite armored, aren't they? Yeah.
00:15:59
Speaker
And then the Baratheon of these kind of canine, but also sort of king rat-like creatures who've got this werewolf inability to stand on their hind legs. I always, I imagine, Chris will know the answer to this. What's the creature on Hoth from Empire Strikes Back? Do you know the ice thing? What's it called? A wampa. A wampa. I always thought the Baratheon would look a little bit like that, but maybe a little bit snoutier. Yeah.
00:16:28
Speaker
They've got these long claws, don't they? The clacking of their claws is constantly referenced. I think the impression I get is there's going to be a mystery about the Zello in terms of how they look because they're this sort of shaded, veiled alien invader race, whereas the humans have to work and the GC so much with the Barafna.
00:16:50
Speaker
that and we get them so much in the plot in the narrative that they have to be described but also to give there's elements where even though they're meant to be these mediators there's this uh sinister when they're introduced um on the art you know as the art collecting him on the island this wave of gray it's almost as if they're a hive mind of uh you know just like this this carpet of
00:17:16
Speaker
of fur coming rather than these individual dog-like aliens. And this is kind of sorry, go on. No, no, go on. Yeah, I found that incredibly creepy. I mean, it was this sort of nest of vermin really kind of swarming and
00:17:32
Speaker
quite sea like as well. Yeah, I agree that I think it's really important for them that because it introduces a juxtaposition that these people are meant to be or these beings are meant to be as mediators to a certain extent, but the way they're described is in no way pleasant, whether it's the the clause or the size or the way the way they move, but also where they speak as well. That's harsh. Yeah.
00:17:57
Speaker
harsh commands. But the but also for us, you know, man's best friends, you know, the phrase of the dog, and these are meant to be very, very much like dogs. But actually being incredibly like, we're not talking about a wookiee here, you know, Chewbacca, we're talking about something that's completely alien, you know, without going for a pun, that in such an unpleasant way that is meant to be some kind of police.
00:18:23
Speaker
And you're right about the hive mind as well. It is revealed a little bit later on that they are operating kind of as
Human and Alien Interactions
00:18:33
Speaker
one. It's not explicitly stated, but they are governed by, what would you say? It's like they're all governed by the same operating system, if you could call it that. And yet at the beginning, the Zello, which are more
00:18:47
Speaker
more alien in appearance if they've got this kind of, you know, Guwazi insectoid appearance. And so they look more foreign and other, an alien, than the Barathena, which kind, and in the Barathena you get the sense that there's a kind of physical
00:19:05
Speaker
uh familiarity that they're that they you know they that that sort of thing could possibly exist on earth as a kind of sasquatch type thing but the the zello don't but at the beginning of the book you get this scene um after okay so quick plot pretty see taz and john go to the top of uh the hill overlooking the town the city and they
00:19:29
Speaker
unleash this, they tip out this tin full of fine dust, which turns out to be a lethal, a virus lethal to the Zello. And one of the Zello, this insect kind of creature, brings in its dead child to the, is it to the police station at the beginning? Brings in its dead child, which is not the act of a hive-minded creature.
00:19:56
Speaker
There's a tenderness to that moment that the police officer thinks back on later, definitely. Although they are frightened of the Zellow and have been oppressed by them, because the Zellow, when they arrive, they don't appreciate or understand or at least pretend, you know, perhaps not to appreciate that human beings are sentient. So there is billions of people die when the Zellow first arrive, but then the Galactic Council establishes that human beings are sentient.
00:20:25
Speaker
And there is a sense of the Zellow perhaps trying to make it up to us. But in the meantime, the Baratheon also have their eye on Earth because of the rarity of life-giving planets. So the theme of colonialism expansionism is really driving the book. I think it's also a Gothic book. I think many science fiction novels are also Gothic novels.
00:20:54
Speaker
Frankenstein onward, really. But I mean, when you think of the wall of the world, you know, when the narrator discovers, you know, what actually the Martians are feeding on, you know, this, you know, the vampiric nature of that. And, and, you know, there are so many Gothic tropes in Inish Carig with the castle. And it's kind of a haunted castle in a way. The instructions don't seem to come from speakers. And of course, the walls, they're not alive, but they're metal and
00:21:22
Speaker
and fluid and encasing like an agrarian poem, you know, story. So I think there's an argument today, it's a book in maybe in the global Gothic, which is, you know, emerging, well, it's established genre, but it's kind of emerging as one in which writers of the global majority use Gothic tropes to explore the, you know, from the horrors of colonialism and slavery and kindred, Octavia Butler,
00:21:53
Speaker
So there may be a way in which Jo is doing that as well. I like the idea of it being a Gothic novel, not just with the sort of the liquid metal castle of the prison itself, but also the farmhouse, the remote farmhouse that Josie has to escape to. Yeah, the night voyages. Yeah. And even when we first meet, you know, John in his house, you know, that's a ruin, isn't it?
00:22:24
Speaker
Yeah, well, yeah, most of the city is in ruins. Yeah, it's completely decimated. So in a gothic novel, whether it's War of the Worlds or Wuthering Heights,
00:22:38
Speaker
the other place is supposed to be sort of strange and decimated and other and not quite as it should be. But we're actually starting in medias res and to a certain extent you're starting in that place of things being not quite as they should be with Belfast. There's a lovely
00:22:59
Speaker
A lovely line in the very first chapter which really kicks off that sense of things being not as they should be and it's John licking his lips or salivating something along those lines about a recipe that's going around the houses for stewed cat. It's something like that.
00:23:22
Speaker
and you think, okay, well, yeah, things are clearly, things have clearly gone wrong if this 15 year old lad is thinking, oh yeah, stewed cat for dinner, that sounds good. So yeah, I think the prose, Joe's prose is also, it lends itself to that sort of HG Wells classic science fiction. It's very sparse. It's very clean. There's very little fat on this book. I mean, Chris, you were saying that they're actually
00:23:51
Speaker
There could be more, couldn't there? Yeah, I mean, it's very short and I'm enjoying it so much that I want more. You know, I think, I know Jo, I know what's how, you know, we all know what her style is like and how she is very efficient and effective. And she's so focused on character, you know, that is her passion in writing is bringing these characters to life.
00:24:20
Speaker
Um, and I, I, and you're on a, you are, you, the minute you start reading, you hit, you know, you hit 60 miles an hour and that's it. You're just on this very fast narrative and, um,
00:24:34
Speaker
And I think, well, you could, I'm quite happy we twice the length. I'm not talking about changing the story or adding more story, I just mean the description of the environment and what... Well, yeah, there's a strong sense of place. There could be more about...
00:24:51
Speaker
the Northern Ireland. I would love to read more about this ruined Belfast. Yeah. Yeah. I just think it puts you in that world so quickly and so completely, so immediately from the first page that it's like going on a train so fast. You want to see more, but you're on the ride really quickly for this story. So I'd be quite happy to read something twice the length. Well, we already touched on it, but I thought there was room.
00:25:21
Speaker
It's a funny thing. I would have loved to have read a bit of background on the two alien races and why there's such enmity between the two, the Zello and the Baratheon. So, you know, what's the history there? Why do they hate each other? In a sense, it doesn't matter because for the story that Jo's telling about John and Taz and Josie and Nita, it's kind of irrelevant because from their perspective, why should they care? As a reader,
00:25:49
Speaker
think what this there's a there's a whole mine of content and a whole mine of character development and world building that you could that you could uh that you could strip out there but she chooses to just you know deliver the story and in its not not it's uh it's bare essentials but there's there's very little extraneous stuff there which is kind of clever in a way because it gives her that sort of scope for
00:26:14
Speaker
Well, for people to speculate, but it also gives her the scope for potential sequels as well. Well, I think that's something that's been talked about on Crohn's is, I think, Juliana.
00:26:25
Speaker
Julian was another published author. I think she's pressuring Jo to do Inage 2. I think it's her. I don't want to put words in her mouth, but I can see why. And yes, whether... It's a rich world, isn't it? Or a potentially rich world. It is very well put together in a short, what is essentially a pretty short novel, isn't it? Well, especially as she also writes space opera, you know, the world building could take us out, you know, off world really.
00:26:53
Speaker
to discover more about the Zello and the Baratheon and the planets that you know deck on that the Zello had to leave because they can no longer nurture their hatchlings there. I think the Baratheon's motives are a bit more shady. It seems like they're just they're compared to the Nazis at one point aren't they?
00:27:12
Speaker
They just seem to be into Congress for the sake of it, but who knows? Unless I miss something, I'm not altogether sure. Well, the fascistic element definitely does chime with the idea that they are of, if not a hive mind, they are all of
00:27:31
Speaker
one driving ideological principle, which is... What's that? Indoctrinated. Yeah, they're either... Either they are literally a hive mind and it's not... I don't remember it being explicitly clear, or yeah, there is some sort of deep ideological indoctrination going on there that makes them this... I love your phrase, this sweeping carpet of furry, horrible animals coming over the rocks.
00:27:59
Speaker
Well, that's their canine. They could also be led by the Alpha. Yeah, the pack. Yeah. And it's interesting, isn't it? Just watching the Brian Cox show on Mars, and he ends with these philosophical reflections on the origins of life and the questions that we might be able to answer eventually from looking for life on Mars. For example, did life come from Mars here?
00:28:28
Speaker
or from here to Mars, or did it arise individually on both places? And if so, and it's very similar, does that mean that life given in the Goldilocks zone will always kind of emerge in similar ways?
Narrative and World-building Balance
00:28:42
Speaker
So maybe this idea that we've got this sort of dog-like race is not really out of this world. Literally. Yeah. So all the kind of the fascinating
00:28:56
Speaker
I think it's quite instructive from a writer's perspective that you can you can build a world without building the world down to the last atom and you can still build a perfectly functioning setting functional setting for a
00:29:15
Speaker
a story that works very well, and you don't have to build it right down to the last Lego brick to make the reader immersed in that world and immersed in that story. And it does, I think it does happen. We see it quite a lot on the board, certainly, Chris, that especially the more inexperienced writers get, and I was guilty of this, get so hung up on the world building that you forget that, as Joe said,
00:29:44
Speaker
make it, you know, where are your characters? If your characters are well rounded and put together...
00:29:49
Speaker
and the plot is there, they're there to service the plot, then you don't need to go into the nth degree world building. But I suspect that's because a lot of people who write genre fiction, especially a lot of male writers, you know, that their start to all this was perhaps being setting up Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and developing that world and background. A lot of the fantasy talk that goes on in Crohn's about world building, it's
00:30:19
Speaker
It's, I don't want to say masturbatory, but sometimes when I'm listening to some of the questions that are being asked, it's like, this is irrelevant. This isn't even narrative, let alone story. This has nothing to do with the character. It's just for you. And it's not actually even for the story by the sounds of it, of the story you want to tell. So it's about finding that balance.
Gender and Cultural Themes
00:30:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think the difference between men and women here is, and it'd be interesting to hear what you think Naomi, that men are, you know, this is a huge generalisation, but men are more likely to be interested in things and how things work and women are more interested in people, more likely to be interested in people and how people work or tick.
00:31:07
Speaker
Do you think that's a thing, Naomi? I think, I mean, there's something there. What do you think? I think it is a thing, but the causes of it are still really unknown, you know, really. Because we just, we're soaking in gender stereotypes, really, and we absorb them so early on from, you know, from the moment we're born, and we're slapped in pink or blue, or, you know, and we grow up seeing whoever is caring for us, we see how they behave in our society, we're so exposed to the media. So, you know,
00:31:37
Speaker
And you're punished if you deviate. If you're a boy and you're sensitive and interested in people, you're punished socially. And if you're a girl and you're interested in, I remember actually being quite good at sort of technical drawing when I was about 10 or 11. And I would just be condescended to by the teacher.
00:32:06
Speaker
you're good at that, like, surprised, you know, that I could draw two straight lines and erase, you know, erase the corner, you know, so. So there wasn't, you know, certainly we didn't feel like I was being encouraged to do it. I mean, this is back in Canada back in the 70s. But so I don't I think the jury's probably out on what the cause of it is. But yeah, you know, when you look at the way that certain professions break down, you know, I've gone into rooms at the university, which have got, you know, kind of wandered into a
00:32:36
Speaker
being lost into a class on early childhood development, and it was all just full of women. There were no men studying or teaching it. The causes for that, again, there can be encouragement rather than this reinforcing the prohibitions. That's really what we need. Experiencing hundreds of decades of patriarchal
00:33:03
Speaker
global patriarchy it's it's almost as if it's forcing people well it is forcing you know gender uh male and female gender into certain roles that is luckily being changed now as a teacher in London I see a lot of change in terms of young people's approach to gender whether it's trans uh non-binary uh you know whatever um but you you think
00:33:28
Speaker
in terms of culturally, if you're in a patriarchal society, you're going to start adopting those things by default, just because it's what you're brought up in. And it's an even more so when it's a colonial situation, because in the colonial situation, the people who are colonised are gendered feminine, and then there can be then there is usually a kind of an overcompensation, you know, because you have to resist and that and going down the path of the violent resistance,
00:33:58
Speaker
just seems to be the natural way of doing it because you're being violently oppressed. It's one of the natural. It's a bit like the dichotomy between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. There's sort of yin and yang, different approaches, but they're both, I suppose you would say they're both natural reactions to the situation at hand, segregation, Jim Crow, et cetera, et cetera.
00:34:28
Speaker
the Martin Luther King model would always be to advocate diplomacy, judging people by content of the character, not by the colour of their skin, whereas Malcolm X wanted to literally fight back. And both of them are, I mean, it's almost like you could almost say,
00:34:47
Speaker
It's almost like a mythological dichotomy, you know, and we've talked about this a lot on the show where you have a character who you have two different characters that represent different paths, but in actuality, what they're representing are the two different paths that any individual can take, which way you're going to take. And in a sense, Anita's kind of like that, isn't she? You know, which path is she going to take? She's pretty
00:35:14
Speaker
a rough kid by all accounts. She's not top of the class. The stereotypical British Indian female teenager would be to be top of the class, very bookish, and that is not neater at all. She hangs out with the bad kids. She's nicked a few cars. She's
00:35:35
Speaker
She set a few things on fire. She steals things and she puts together a sort of ragtag crew of kids, doesn't she? Yeah, she has leadership qualities very much. And also she's trying to protect her grandmother as well. So she's doing this also to bring back food for her grandmother. Yeah, and I think that she's
00:36:04
Speaker
a way with the being the baddest, you know, the baddest girl in class, is also part of this, I think, this uber masculinity as well, you know, that that gets inculcated, I think, in places where people are
00:36:22
Speaker
are exploited and their rights are abused. It's funny. They need to resist, you know, because you can't show mercy. You know, if you if you're, you know, you have to be ruthless, you can't show mercy.
Resilience and Colonization
00:36:34
Speaker
And in the end, the problem with the colonisation process is your own mind becomes colonised and you and you may not be able to show mercy to yourself.
00:36:44
Speaker
So it's a very damaging process. There's a neat sort of contrast with John when he's incarcerated. He is a pretty belligerent, pugnacious boy and he's very angry.
00:37:02
Speaker
for, well, for obvious reasons, for what's happened to him, for what's happening to his family. He doesn't know what's happening to Josie, and I forget the name of his younger sister. I forget the name. Somebody remind me. Sophie. Yeah, there you go. And he's worried about them. He's angry about being incarcerated for reasons that he doesn't entirely understand. And
00:37:24
Speaker
Let's talk about some of the, there is a bit of world building so let's talk about the prison itself. He's put inside this cuboid type box which monitors his heart rate and every time it elevates above a certain level to indicate his frustration or his anger or his rage goes getting out of control then he is dealt a short sharp shock.
00:37:51
Speaker
until he's brought back into line. And he has to learn control. So whereas Nita is sort of acting out of character or out of expected character, out of stereotypical character in order to forge this leadership or bring out her leadership qualities and help her grandmother and also help John and Taz when they're in the prison, John has to go kind of the other way. So they're both sort of subverting the expectations that you might have for that sort of character.
00:38:20
Speaker
So John has to play down what you might call the sort of masculine teenager trope. He has to learn control, he has to learn self-sacrifice, and Nita goes the other way. She has to learn how to act, she has to learn how to put herself out in the world, and again probably defy expectations of her. And she actually teaches John the trick, isn't it, of calming himself down, which is really what you have to do to be able to
00:38:49
Speaker
survive in the prison because as soon as you get angry, I don't want to explain how that happens, but as soon as you get angry, they're on you, they know. And so she teaches in that and she's obviously learned how to do that herself. Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting as well because he starts off, he's enthralled in a way to the big man, isn't he?
00:39:12
Speaker
McDowell. McDowell, yeah. The gangster. Yeah, the gangster. He's taking a nasty piece of work. Yeah, he's working for him. You know, it's a survival, but he's also starting to admire him, I think. And what kind of want to be like him. And so there is, well, I think that's about masculinity. I think you mentioned a patriarchy earlier. And that's what happens if the patriarchy is is corrupted, and you don't have
00:39:37
Speaker
You don't have the noble king. You don't have the good man at the top. You have a nasty, violent thug like Gary McDowell at the top. Then that's your role model, isn't it? That's the figure that you suppose that you've got to emulate in order to get to the top because he's at the top. But there is no difference when he is, when they're in the prison and her character is introduced and he's, him and Taz are shocked to see her.
00:40:08
Speaker
when they have a bit of banter, he explains. Sorry, not explains, but he thinks he's looking. He mansplains. He looks up. I'm joking. Yeah, he does. He does. And I think one of the reasons is because going back to this fact that she's, I mean, I think she's a more nuanced character and possibly more interested, more interesting than John, because of the intersectionality between being this minority as a woman being a minority, a Southeast Asian.
00:40:38
Speaker
and then also having to balance the expectations of her family so you got the soft side of the one to nurture the traditional cultural heritage side of her and then you got this other side which is wanting to escape and and revolt and leave and it shouldn't really be a case of.
00:40:53
Speaker
sticks in our minds because she's a girl and it doesn't stick in our mind that John is a boy. The nearest we get with that is John, you know, this mention of him working out in the gym and not being able to join the teams and stuff to sort of shore up his masculinity. Yeah, he wants to play. Is it rugby? He wants to play. I can't remember. I think it's just team members, teams at the moment, teams at the
00:41:19
Speaker
know the bell I'm referring to is like didn't make the team so. Yeah I'm sure it was rugby that was mentioned but yeah. But I think she's got a much harder fight on her hands and I think it's a nice reflection even though we've already established that Jo's not specifically going on a pack. Hold on, hold on a sec.
00:41:34
Speaker
the Joe, sorry, what still isn't going on about, about the troubles, because there's an intersectionality of people living in Belfast, people living in the north, that Joe has talked about so often, and the, and you know, it's so nuanced, and so complicated, and this transition zone as well, and all of that kind of stuff. And then you've got somebody who's outside of that, but still having to live inside of that, who is Southeast Asian,
00:41:59
Speaker
and has all those different cultural capital as well. And that's what I mean about her having to juggle a lot more and be a lot more canny and assimilate a lot more in a culture. It's kind of a leveller, isn't it? The situation that they find themselves in. It's almost like a reset.
00:42:14
Speaker
So they come out of it. Yes, if you talk about the pre invasion scenario, I think that that holds true. But in the in the in the invasion scenario, they're kind of reset because the Zello when they invaded. Yeah, they didn't say. Yeah, there was no she Southeast Asian. He's a he's a white Belfastian native. It doesn't matter. They're all they're non sentient until the Galactic Council rules. Actually, they are sentient. They're, you know,
00:42:44
Speaker
they can think for themselves. But it levels the playing field, not in a good way because the whole city is reduced to rubble, but it means that they do view each other as equals. And he does look up to her, absolutely. And I think that's because she's more, like you said, she's got so many, she's got more facets to her character and she's integrated them in a healthy way, in a way that's helping- Or imprisoned.
00:43:13
Speaker
Yeah, they are in prison, but they're in prison, obviously, under false pretenses. Yeah, I know. But they, she's able to put herself together. She's not just a mindless thug in the way that Gary McDowell is.
Character Growth and Relationships
00:43:26
Speaker
No, I mean, it goes back to that idea of solidarity, really, like, really, you know, I mean, in a prison, you could, everyone could just be out for themselves, you know, obviously notoriously wouldn't really be trusting a lot of people in prison. But somehow, you know, because of her background,
00:43:43
Speaker
because of the legends that she's absorbed, not mythic legends, but legendary people in the Indian independence movement, the stories she's been told. She's got something to live up to and she knows that you don't abandon people, you stick with them to the bitter end. She shows a great courage really, and there's times when she could escape, but she doesn't.
00:44:07
Speaker
Well, and that's essentially, that's eventually what John does with Taz as well. I mean, he sticks by him. Taz is at the beginning of the book where the two lads tip out this lethal dust virus that incapacitates the Zellows. You figure out that it's been engineered to kill off the Zellow.
00:44:31
Speaker
And Taz inhales some of it at the beginning of the book. And thereafter, throughout the book, he's in a bit of a bad way and he doesn't have a very good time of it. But John sticks by him and he learns that I'm not going to leave you behind. Whatever happens, I'm going to stick by you. How much of that do you think is guilt because of the collaboration?
00:44:53
Speaker
Um, it's, it's, I would say it's a, you know, it's a strong, there's a strong sense of guilt, but also determination. Yeah. I think the survivor guilt as much as anything else. Well, he's, he's not well liked when he, uh, they called him a shit lover or something, don't they? That's Carter, isn't it? Yeah. Carter's always thinking of nuance. He's a very interesting character because he's a liaison, you know, officer in the police force.
00:45:20
Speaker
you know, with the Zellows. So he's kind of in a way, in Belfast terms, you know, he's probably damned on both counts, you know, so he's got this some, yeah, I mean, he's called that because he's seen as totally a collaborator. But in the novel, you know, he's actually quite, you know, he's a very sympathetic character. And we don't trust him to start with a tall. And then, you know, they realize that actually, he is on their side.
00:45:46
Speaker
And that's a kind of, you know, I think that's a post-conflict character to have in a book about Belfast really, you know, kind of a sympathetic, in a way, collaborator. It's good writing, isn't it? Because you could quite easily, you could write the book not having the Carter point of view, the Carter perspective, and just have him as this kind of shady other character.
00:46:13
Speaker
sitting on the other side of the fence. But the fact that we do get his perspective, and we do get the fact that he's a sympathetic character, and what he's doing is a very, very difficult job in treading a fine diplomatic line between not just the two aliens, but also the Galactic Council and the humans who are caught in the middle, which is
00:46:36
Speaker
It sounds like a horrendously difficult job to do, very stressful. And he does sound like a guy who's taking its toll on him. And yet again, he finds a soft spot for John and Taz because of the unjust manner in which they've been incarcerated.
Cultural Identity and Humor
00:47:00
Speaker
And so he takes it upon himself to use his position to try and figure out what's going on on their behalf.
00:47:07
Speaker
And that leads to another one of the lovely sci-fi tropes, which of course are the kettlebots. The kettlebots. Yes, we must mention the kettlebots. Oh, how can we forget that? Yeah.
00:47:17
Speaker
So they're kind of like little R2-D2 little drawings, aren't they? That's exactly what I thought. And somehow the boys are allowed to take them into prison with them because they've got the national curriculum on them. I love that. I love the fact that they are so... I mean, I'm an unapologetic huge Star Wars fan and immediately as I read them, that just became two R2 units in my mind.
00:47:43
Speaker
And they are well, they do have significance as well. They're not just there to, you know, for the cutesy value to sell soft toys. They they do have. Yeah, I mean, it's.
00:47:56
Speaker
I guess it's a smart move to have the kettlebots in there because they do act as that kind of lifeline for the lads. I think the curriculum, obviously the curriculum thing is a smokescreen and there's something else going on there, but it also gives the two lads, I guess, a human lifeline, even though the kettlebots themselves aren't human,
00:48:22
Speaker
It is, you know, about our relationship to devices and the potential of the development of AI and all those kinds of, you know, they've got an Alexa quality to them as well, don't they?
00:48:32
Speaker
And a dog-like quality, which is sort of a comparison to the Barathna, when the first thing they do is when their owner, or not their owner, but you know, when Taz falls asleep, his bot falls asleep in his lap like a dog. And I was like, well, you know, you've just been reading about these vile dogs running around on this prison, but
00:48:53
Speaker
You've got this other theme of dogs being very passive and loyal and sweet with these robots. So it's a really interesting theme to play with. Right. Is there anything else we want to mention about Inish?
00:49:08
Speaker
think we're coming up to the halfway point. I've got a couple of notes, they're not sort of in place but one thing I wanted to talk about just in case, we're so used to Jo that some of the listeners might not understand the title and I know she's talked about in terms of publishing and marketing it
00:49:28
Speaker
it being, I think there was some kind of hurdle there in terms of the name, which is why it says an alien invasion. It has a subtitle, doesn't it? It says an Inish character. And yeah, an alien invasion story set in Belfast, something like that. Yeah, something like that, isn't it? Yeah. And the Inish obviously is a, I'm not sure if it's an Anglicised spelling or the Anglicised spelling is INS, but meaning Ireland. And, and I think
00:49:56
Speaker
you know, it's it further feeds into this uncompromising view that Joe has of I'm going to be writing stories that are culturally important to me in terms of my heritage. And, you know, I think it's great that it's that's done. It's not. And also it's a great it doesn't matter whether you know what it means or not. It's a great title. It's it's, you know, yeah, it does make you think, what is it? What the hell is that? Yeah. What's up with that?
00:50:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think she's done a great, made a great choice there but also the only other thing I really wanted to bring up was an element of Stockholm Syndrome where again that sort of
00:50:40
Speaker
feeding into the troubles and people getting involved in fights that have nothing to do with them and getting inserting their oars in. And there's a really interesting line when John is, no, Carter and, oh, what's his name? The Phillips? The soldier? Yeah, yeah. When they're playing snooker,
00:51:06
Speaker
And they're talking about, one of them, it's just an aside, one of them saying, you know, he's smoking and he said he misses the smoking ban. And it was really funny to sort of think about giving up your dominion, your sovereignty in a vertical. Sovereignty is probably not the right word to use in this case. But to aliens,
00:51:31
Speaker
you know, and sort of thinking this is what the good they've done, knowing where the story is going to go. So it's just, there's just a lot of little flourishes like that through it, which I really enjoyed picking up on very emotional, very human flourishes about the human condition, you know, and it really made me think, I read that line, I said, Oh, my God, these guys have got Stockholm syndrome, in terms of the, you know, they're being colonized, or this is what you're going to do, we're going to mediate it, we know the right thing to do. And really, they don't, they just got more powerful weapons.
00:51:59
Speaker
There's also a lot of humour in the book, isn't there? There was a great line when John and Taz are first incarcerated. John's given an orange t-shirt. Yeah. And there's a green. He says, oh, the other one get a green one. Yeah. He says, I wonder if they know if I'm a prod. Does Taz get a green one? I wonder. Yeah. Which is really funny. Sorry. Were you going to say something? No. Yes. But I think I cut you off. Yeah. What it was.
00:52:29
Speaker
I mean, the Inish karrag, obviously meaning the kind of karrag is rock, isn't it? So there's, yeah, it's good, you know, it's good to know, it's good to look things up, you know, I mean, I look that up. And it's, yeah, actually, the book I have is, I think it must be early, so I'm putting it up to the camera so you can see, but anyone listening can't.
00:52:49
Speaker
But mine doesn't have the subtitle. So I think I think that is the first edition that you've got. I'm pretty sure she did have it reprinted with a slightly different cover. Yeah, because it's a person on the cover, isn't it? Crouching, crouching young man on the cover on a blog. And I don't and she said she would.
00:53:10
Speaker
I don't know. Do you know if she's found that it's helped sales to have a human being? I don't know. I don't know. That's a really interesting question. If you put a human on the cover of your book, does it make any difference to sales?
00:53:22
Speaker
That's the one thing I think about Kindle, because you know, you can't look at the covers properly. I just have a basic Kindle, black and white Kindle, you know, I know there's those Kindle fires now. But I really, sometimes, I know we all men have played down the book cover, you know, books covers, but Inish has such a idiosyncratic, you know, subtext, subject.
00:53:43
Speaker
that it reflects on the book cover, but you can't really see it very well on mine. But on mine. I think even if you don't know what Inish Karak means, the book design is quite evocative. Yeah. And you can kind of tell what's going on, even if you don't know what Inish Karak means. And it does kind of tell you if you read through the book anyway. Yeah, I mean, you've got to be a little bit, you know.
00:54:06
Speaker
Yeah, you've got to take a punt sometimes on these things, haven't you? It's clearly, I mean, I think it's clear, but then I can't, you know, that's me, I don't, I can't speak for other people. No, you know, study Yates anymore, the leisure industry, you know, I mean, at least people should recognize the word Inish, I would think, you know.
00:54:24
Speaker
I'd consider our wrists slapped. Yeah, but also I've been now. I'm forced to study it, really. I mean, you know, rather than perhaps, you know, you're a poet. You're a poet, though, aren't you? So of course you're going to admonish us for not knowing enough Yeats.
00:54:44
Speaker
Well, the other thing is a lot of the members on Crohn's are American and a lot of what the topic that comes up quite a lot in whether it's book discussion or writing discussion is, oh, be careful not to use certain brand names or certain things because people will in inverted commas throw the book across the room.
00:55:03
Speaker
because they don't know
Comedic Interlude with Special Agent Blacksox
00:55:04
Speaker
what you mean. And it's like, well, no, apart from the fact that that's how you learn, Kindle has, you know, you can select the word and it'll just bring it up on a dictionary and tell you what it means. So there's no excuse to dumb down your prose. And it's certainly not if you're talking about something which has reflecting a cultural heritage, you know, you have to nail it. I think that's a good place to take a break. Okay, we'll join Naomi a little bit later in the show.
00:55:32
Speaker
Hello, SSF Chronicles! My name is Special Agent Blacksox and I'm an indomitable galactoid. I'm ringing to see if you could talk a bit of sense into the author Sally Rooney. I think she's only a writer's. She's making all the ongoing's dressed like they're in a 1970s disco. Like, why would the inhabitants of Flint wear flares? Have you seen the shape of their bodies? And the temperature never drops below 800 Celsius there. Take it a chaffing, the poor creatures.
00:56:00
Speaker
And I thought they were supposed to be the good guys. What? Who are you talking to? I'm not. It's not my story. It doesn't matter whose story it is. You're an author and the fashion in the universe is out of date. But I didn't write that.
00:56:21
Speaker
I wouldn't write that! Will the two of you just be quiet? I'm on the phone. Sorry about that SSF Chronicles. Could you tell Sally to sort out the clothing in the Indominal Galactoids of Splarn series? All the characters are unhappy. Especially the Tom Gagan. It doesn't even have shoes on its anterior fronticles.
00:56:42
Speaker
Hello. Welcome to the judges' corner with me, Damaris Brown. Last month I talked about issues of privacy, which we need to understand when we write about real people. So this month, as part of my series on legal matters, which we can use in our stories, I thought I'd look at how we can use laws relating to privacy in our world building.
00:57:04
Speaker
One problem when discussing privacy is determining what we're actually talking about. One privacy scholar noted that definitions have included freedom of thought, control over one's body, solitude in one's home, control over personal information, freedom from surveillance, protection of one's reputation, and protection from searches and interrogations.
00:57:24
Speaker
I'll start with what is perhaps the oddest definition, having a private space for oneself. In practical terms, real privacy of that kind was rare in the medieval Western world. The poor lived cheap by jowl with their neighbours, with the entire families crammed into one room. And while the rich might have larger buildings, only slowly did they remove themselves from communal living into solars or smaller apartments for themselves.
00:57:49
Speaker
with their servants eating and sleeping elsewhere. And the idea of corridors, rather than having rooms leading to rooms, came later. Even royalty was surrounded by people at all times, with little real privacy while undressing and using commodes, and their women folk were expected to give birth in a room full of people. In fact, from the late 17th century, it was deemed necessary, though not, alas for this talk on law's illegal requirement,
00:58:16
Speaker
for births within the English royal family to be witnessed by politicians, men of course, and that continued, albeit gradually modified into only the Home Secretary in an adjoining room, until the 20th century. Her Majesty the Queen, then Princess Elizabeth, was, with the birth of Prince Charles, the first royal mother to be free of this humiliating tradition in 250 years.
00:58:41
Speaker
Lack of privacy within the home was accompanied by a lack of privacy between neighbours, especially in small communities where everyone knew everyone else's business. And in the UK, there has never been an equivalent of the Jewish rabbinical law, which makes it an offence to look into someone's house, or even to build windows that might do so.
00:59:02
Speaker
I've seen it said, repeatedly, that as early as 1361, English law effectively created a right of privacy in this respect, since the Justices of the Peace Act provided for the arrest of peeping toms and eavesdroppers. Well, no.
00:59:19
Speaker
Power was granted to restrain offenders, rioters and all other barreters, and to pursue, arrest, take and chastise them according to their trespass or offence. And the act later talks of rioters or rebels, and the highways of the realm being disturbed. The statute was aiming at bigger fish than voyeuristic neighbours.
00:59:42
Speaker
However, it did bring into being the concept of people being bound over for breach of the king's peace, and to that extent it may well have been used to penalize peeping toms, since such behaviour once discovered would undoubtedly have created such a breach. But I suspect that in most cases locals would have taken the law into their own hands, perhaps through a skimmington ride, a noisy cavalcade by which villagers would enforce communal morality outside the legal system.
01:00:10
Speaker
If so, this would have been in contrast to medieval Sweden, where listening at doors or peering into homes was lauded as a means of bringing sinners to justice.
01:00:22
Speaker
From the idea of privacy within one's house, it is a short step to the sanctity of the house itself, privacy in the sense of preventing others from entering without consent. There is no legislation and little or no case law here in England until we get to 1604, and a judgement which set out how and when a sheriff could enter a building and execute a judgement,
01:00:44
Speaker
with Sir Edward Cook's famous assertion that the house of everyone is to him as his castle and fortress.
01:00:53
Speaker
This judgment is regarded as pivotal in the birth of privacy law, giving rise to what in America is known as the knock and announce rule, whereby police can't force an entry unless and until they have identified themselves and requested admission. However, in reality, while the courts might have leaned towards the protection of the home as between ordinary citizens, if the state was involved, then restrictions were few. And irony of ironies,
01:01:20
Speaker
As Cook lay dying, his own house was searched on the orders of the King, and his legal writing seized as being seditious and dangerous.
01:01:31
Speaker
Excise laws in particular provided for licensed invasion of premises. In 1662, this allowed officials armed with general, that is, non-specific, writs, to enter and go into any house, shop, cellar, warehouse or room or other place, and in case of resistance, to break open doors, chests, trunks and other packages, and to seize and impound illegal goods.
01:01:56
Speaker
Nonetheless, the phantasm of the Englishman's hallowed home had taken root, and William Pitt in 1763 in a speech in the House of Commons about yet another excise bill declared, The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance toward the forces of the crown,
01:02:13
Speaker
It may be frail, its roof may shake, the wind may blow through it, the storm may enter, the rain may enter, but the King of England cannot enter. All his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.
01:02:28
Speaker
Fine words, though wholly accurate since the King's forces regularly did enter houses at the time, notably seeking seditious material and causing destruction and mayhem as they went. However, the judiciary was also captivated by the vision, and two years later, in a case concerning a warrant for the search and confiscation of seditious papers,
01:02:50
Speaker
The court again trumpeted the sanctity of the home, holding that a warrant issued by the Secretary of State had no legal validity, and officers who relied on it were liable under the tort of trespass.
01:03:04
Speaker
Stirring sentiments such as Pitts had an even greater effect in America, where general writs of assistance were used by the British to search the buildings of suspected smugglers. John Adams, later to be the second President of the United States, believed that discontent over the writs and arousing legal oratory about rights, liberty and an Englishman's home sowed the seeds that led to the War of Independence.
01:03:30
Speaker
Indeed, such was the concern over the writs that the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, dating from 1792, provided that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated.
01:03:50
Speaker
and no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized." So, by the late 18th century, the US and UK have some protection for privacy, not only for premises, but over documents when it comes to the seizures of papers by the state.
01:04:14
Speaker
The general confidentiality of paperwork was certainly accepted well before that. Under the Swedish Code of 1734, it was an offence to harm or shame a person by opening private correspondence, reading it, allowing it to be read, or divulging its contents.
01:04:30
Speaker
But although in England it had long been understood that some private matters had to remain private, medieval office holders might be required to take oaths of secrecy, there was no general right of privacy for communications, and no legislation prohibiting the interception of correspondence, and cases relating to the proposed publication of letters in the 18th and early 19th centuries were determined on the legal basis around property and copyright.
01:04:59
Speaker
Then in 1840, we get a judgment extending the right of privacy to circumstances where there is a prior relationship and a duty of good faith. In granting an injunction to stop the publication of copied artwork etchings, the law chancellor said it was
01:05:16
Speaker
An intrusion, an unbecoming and unseemly intrusion, offensive to that inbred sense of propriety natural to every man, if intrusion indeed fitly describes a sordid spying into the privacy of domestic life.
01:05:33
Speaker
But I can't help thinking that the fact the case was brought by Prince Albert consort to Queen Victoria had some bearing on the verdict. Nonetheless, the tort of breach of confidence was born, and is still an important part of English privacy law as I discussed in my last talk.
01:05:51
Speaker
By 1840, the first cameras had been invented, and the rise of photography created another aspect of privacy to concern the public, control over one's image. A seminal article by American jurists in 1890 linked it with a rise in journalism, stating that, instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life.
01:06:17
Speaker
They should also have castigated that other bugbear of the modern era, advertising, which was involved in the first case to come to court over an unauthorised use of a photographic image in New York in 1903. A young woman's photo had been used without her consent to promote the products of the Rochester Folding Box Company.
01:06:38
Speaker
She won at first instance, but the Ferrari which arose when the company went on appeal led the state to create a specific right of privacy, the first in the US. It may also have swayed the Georgia Supreme Court two years later in another case of a photo used in advertising without consent, which held that there was a right of privacy deriving from the common law and constitutional values.
01:07:05
Speaker
As the 20th century progressed, new technologies continued to bring new invasions of privacy. From wiretapping in the US in 1928, the Supreme Court rejected the claim it was illegal since there had been no physical intrusion and nothing had been taken, through to upskirting with smartphones in the UK, not made a criminal offence until as late as 2019.
01:07:29
Speaker
States had been collecting information about its citizens for millennia, with rules as its dissemination. As long ago as 1776, Sweden required all government-held information to be used only for legitimate purposes. And when the first UK censuses were taken in 1840, it was on the basis that they would not be released to the public for 100 years.
01:07:53
Speaker
but now living in an information society in which personal data is collected not only by the state, but by every organisation with which we interact. And governments have responded with legislation to help preserve our privacy with such regulations as GDPR in the UK and in EU. And after centuries of little or no law, there is now a mountain of it. So how to bring laws about privacy into our writing?
01:08:23
Speaker
For those of us writing quasi-medieval or early modern fantasy, there are slim pickings if we're looking to copy laws that actually existed hundreds of years ago. Nonetheless, it's worth considering what might be the effect on your world if the, and Englishman's home is his castle, had been a matter of legislation, or if the prohibition on looking into your neighbour's house created a criminal, not merely a moral offence, and how your characters might be caught up in legal proceedings as a result.
01:08:54
Speaker
If your fantasy is set in the Georgian period, you have more to play with. The general writs giving state officials effective carte blanche to enter and rip houses to shreds looking for smuggled goods or seditious writings are surely a real gift for scenes, especially if you have a lawyer like the Bostonian James Otis advising your smugglers exactly what the officials can and can't do.
01:09:17
Speaker
And since there's a strong relationship between the advance of technology and laws relating to privacy, if you're writing Victorian steampunk, consider how your levels of technology might act to invade privacy and what laws your states might need to create to protect its citizens. Alternatively, what freedom is given to allow your tech companies to do whatever they want, regardless of the privacy implications? And how does that affect your characters?
01:09:45
Speaker
As for science fiction, consider the issue of privacy post-mortem. Why should legal rights end at death? If living people have a right to privacy, why not the dead in order to avoid tarnishing their memory or disturbing their grieving family? What effect would laws of that kind have on your future world?
01:10:03
Speaker
and under current EU law, there's a right to be forgotten, so that information about someone can be removed from the public record. If in your world such a law is taken to extremes, what might that mean when someone can't discover if a putative business partner was once convicted of fraud, or a would-be husband was a serial rapist?
01:10:23
Speaker
And particularly if your science fiction is leaning towards the dystopian, just consider where we are now, living in a surveillance society. And it's not only the state doing the snooping. From stores recording your shopping habits and using CCTV, even facial recognition technology, to your neighbours with their smart doorbells, which record not only who comes to the house but who passes, to Siri listening to your conversations.
01:10:49
Speaker
Will your state repeal or privacy laws? Will your characters be watched in their homes? And who will benefit from the surveillance, the state or the technology companies?
01:11:01
Speaker
Think also about how your society reacts generally. Sometimes it appears that at present there's not merely a surrendering of privacy in our lives, but among some there is a headlong, lemming-like rush to dispense with it altogether. Consider the growth of reality TV, the vacuous performing for the mindless, where exposure is embraced and attention-seeking perceived to be more valuable than discretion, and privacy is irrelevant.
01:11:27
Speaker
Will the laws we have regarding privacy be dispensed with altogether, if people just don't care?
01:11:35
Speaker
In 1948, the UN Declaration of Human Rights set down that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence. But of course, there's an implied caveat there with that word arbitrary. The right of privacy, however expressed, is always in a state of tension balanced against the broader public interest.
01:12:00
Speaker
Most people accept that we need laws that affect our private lives, not least for the prevention of crime and apprehension of criminals, matters which affect not just individuals but the community as a whole. And it's where and how you draw the lines between the private and the public which will give up to your world building.
01:12:22
Speaker
As always, I've relied on a number of helpful articles in my research for this talk. Too many to acknowledge here, but I'll give full details in posts on the Crohn's. Hello again SSF Chronicles. Agent Black Sox here. The Zambolians of Drum Skipper Model are running out of margarine, and Sally Rooney won't do anything about it. Hello Dan. Chris.
01:12:53
Speaker
Can you hear me? I'm stuck in some sort of spacecraft with two aliens who seem to think I control the universe.
01:13:00
Speaker
Just a writer? It's not a spaceship. Can you two be quiet back there? I'm making a phone call so I'll do the talking. You don't hear me interrupting either of you on the phone, do you? Unless it was in the plot, was it Sally? What plot? What are you talking about? You're not fooling me, Sally. You know fine well that special agent Black Sox is talking about. Just like you know fine well.
01:13:26
Speaker
Some boomerians can't eat butter. Just be quiet and parry. Hello, SSF. Could you ask Sally to take another look at Drumski Bemelbabel? Not a full re-edit. Just some more margarine. Why don't you ask me yourself? Well, can ya? No.
01:13:47
Speaker
It's time to go down to the writing challenges now. The July 75 word challenge was on the topic of the outsider and the genre was open. The winner was our very own Damaris Brown with her entry, The Eternal Scapegoat. The Eternal Scapegoat. The verdicts are foregone conclusion. Sentence too. It's a small town. Innocence is irrelevant.
01:14:15
Speaker
It's less disturbing, less disruptive, less distasteful to blame someone who doesn't fit, someone already in the wrong. Wrong colour, wrong accent, wrong tribe, wrong beliefs. They hang their victim at dawn. But his spirit is already in another man, trudging ever onward. To another town, another false accusation, another mob, another lynching.
01:14:44
Speaker
Always for the one true crime. Being different. Hello, SSF Chronicles! I don't know what you did earlier, but Sally Ruby has gone wild! She's gone to turn me and Don Malgalacti to splotch into a story about modern romance. And she wants us to live in Dublin! And there'd be no such thing as Italian food. Wait, hold on. I love...
01:15:12
Speaker
Lasagna, and there's no way I'm gonna live in Dublin. Yeah, me neither.
Return to Main Discussion
01:15:18
Speaker
Dublin's a kick. It's not fair. You shouldn't just decide stuff like that without asking us. Will there still be pizza? Only with anchovies. Yuck. Don't worry, black socks. Nobody's gonna read it. I wouldn't be so sure.
01:15:38
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Cron's Cast. We're here with Naomi Foyle, the novelist and the poet and now a theatre producer, I suppose, with the adaptation of your novel Astra. And I understand that has been keeping you exceedingly busy for the last few weeks and months. And it's almost finished its run now, hasn't it? So tell us about Astra. Tell us how the experience has been.
01:16:07
Speaker
Well, it was just an absolute miracle that we got funding after trying for really five years. Rayden Caliano, my collaborator and I first approached Arts Council England
01:16:20
Speaker
four or five years ago, had a preliminary discussion with them, went away, thought about things, the pandemic hit. We applied to the Canada Council and were knocked back. Then we gathered our forces again, we strengthened the application, we made it into an application for a theater piece that would involve
01:16:49
Speaker
community discussions that would bring people together from different communities because the show is very much
01:16:56
Speaker
about issues that concern, well, I think they concern us all with climate crisis, but also about migration and displacement and racism and disability. So I think they feel like there's lots of people working on lots of things and we tend to be quite fragmented. People in the environmental movement might need a lot of persuading that actually what's happening in the global south and what's happening to black people in this country is related to the environment
Adapting 'Astra' for Theater
01:17:26
Speaker
of causes that they're fighting on. Because the show is about those intersection of all of these issues, we wanted to reach out to people and get them together in the room and get them talking to each other as well. So we built in food and community outreach into the application and
01:17:47
Speaker
We were thrilled to get the money, but at the same time, there wasn't really a lot of time to put on a show that we hadn't even written yet. Actually, it's an adaptation of all four of the Gyre Chronicles. Also, it's the whole series. No, it's the whole series.
01:18:06
Speaker
in 70 minutes. We know that is not long enough because that's all the audience feedback, which has been great because usually people tell you, you've got to shrink your work down. That's incredible because I assumed it was the first book and I've read the first book. I haven't read the other three. I've read Astra and it's quite, as I suppose,
01:18:29
Speaker
It's not very surprising for the first book in a four book science fiction series it's quite heavy on exposition and world building so i thought well how do you how do you strip out all that to adapt into something that's performative but the whole four books in seventy minutes that's insane how does that work.
01:18:50
Speaker
We stripped it down in terms of the characters for sure. So Astra has quite a large family, but in the play she has just the one mother and the one sibling. And then Lilt, who's now called Lilt, is Lille in the books, is the sort of the catalyst character, the stranger who comes into town and that's things. And then moving into
01:19:19
Speaker
moving into, you know, when she moves into non-land, you know, again, that's a massive cost. And those characters, I do need to be developed. A lot of the non-landers are really only cameo roles and they need, they need to be stronger. Well, can you do, can you offer a precis of the, of the plot then, because you're going into non-landers, which are set up as kind of the antagonist right at the beginning of Astro, but obviously things are not, not as they seem.
01:19:45
Speaker
So it's set in a post-fossil fuel parallel Mesopotamia. So the names are all different, but the geography and a lot of the cultural references will be recognizable as Middle Eastern. It's inland, it's between two rivers. Although you could see parallels to Israel-Palestine, it's not set in that geography, it's not set in that location. It's drawing on
01:20:12
Speaker
ancient Sumerian myth because I felt that that was a really, you know, literally Ur, you know, the city-state of Ur, literally kind of Ur mythology for the Abrahamic religions. The goddess Inanna, she emerges as, you know, she develops and evolves, you know, over the centuries with her myth of going to the underworld and
01:20:33
Speaker
and being stripped of all her glamour and power by her sister, Queen of the Underworld, and then having to be rescued and finally emerge to find that her husband has stolen her throne. She becomes Persephone, she becomes Esther in the Jewish tradition.
01:20:53
Speaker
and and Christ as well and she's a warrior as well so she's also kind of akin to Aisha in the Islamic tradition so you know I thought that that was she was kind of a unifying energy and she so her story animates really propels you know Astra story and so hence the setting and
01:21:18
Speaker
It's set up as a, at the beginning, it's set up as a utopian story, isn't it? Yeah. Although, you know, as a knowing reader, you can very, very, you can very quickly see the cracks in the facade. Well, it's also very much about the environmental movement here, you know, in the sense of, you know, we kind of have this kind of, you know, utopian communities, but any
01:21:41
Speaker
any community that sets itself off from others, no matter how wonderful it may be, you know, just runs the risk of excluding others and actually kind of hardening. So, you know, there's a kind of an... It ossifies. Also, you know, this idea of the Islanders who have established their nation, which is a walled nation on what was toxic land that they've regenerated.
01:22:11
Speaker
and now are preventing the original inhabitants from returning, so that the non-landers who were amassed around the war, around the borders.
01:22:20
Speaker
An asterisk journey takes her from this naivete to knowledge about, you know, the history of her country and also about her own personal family history. And this takes her on a journey to nonland, to again, you know, it's a story of solidarity, to try and kind of overcome this chronic division, you know, to try and generate some kind of sense of common ground in unity.
01:22:48
Speaker
between the two societies. So tell us a little bit about the... Well, actually, what came first? Was it the application for funding or was it the adaptation process? We did the application for funding first. We didn't do anything until... And this was with Arts Council England. Arts Council England, yeah. I don't think it's very well known. Obviously, this is for theatrical production, but they do offer grants for literature and for writers. I don't think it's...
01:23:18
Speaker
entirely well understood that they offer money for people to write. In fact, Jo, Jo Zebedee, she has tapped into funding from Northern Irish Arts Council. Yeah, she's got good funding stream. Yeah, yeah, she does very well, actually. She's very knowledgeable about that sort of thing. Arts Council England operates in a slightly different way. And I'm not an expert on it. So I'm not going to
01:23:43
Speaker
go through the nuts and bolts, but perhaps you could let us know what your experience of applying for the funding, what you had to do, what the hoops you had to jump through and why it was worth it. Well, this is actually the third grant I've had from Arts Council England. I think the first one was for my first poetry collection. And what I did with that was I actually applied for some of the money for me, but some of the money for a mentor.
01:24:09
Speaker
who was my MA tutor at the time. So it was a pretty small grant really on the scale of things and half of it went to him and half of it was for me. And I think, you know, if you're applying for your first grant that can be a good way of going about it.
01:24:26
Speaker
I think, because, you know, you're involving someone who's already quite, you know, as the mentor figure, what might well be very well known to the Arts Council. And then my second grant was for Astra, the novel, actually, and it helped that I had had the first grant, and it was a slightly larger grant, I think I got nearly 2000 for the first one of which I got half, and then I got about 3000 for Astra. So
01:24:56
Speaker
And Joe Fletcher wrote me a letter, I think, for that. So I did have a contract in place. Sorry, Naomi. I just lost connection there. Did anybody else lose connection for... No, no, we were fine. Oh, sorry. I lost connection for 30 seconds. Okay. You carry on and I'll stitch it together later. Okay. Yeah. So I was just saying that, you know, the first one that I got, I applied for money
01:25:24
Speaker
for a mentor and I think that kind of lends some authority to the application and then the second
01:25:31
Speaker
The second grant I got, I already had a contract in place. And that can seem really frustrating when you're an emerging writer and you go to the Arts Council and they're like, well, you need to have a contract. And you're like, well, why can't you just give me the money so I can write the book and then get a contract? Because I'm going to get a contract unless I've written the book. But it is the way that it works.
01:25:59
Speaker
It's frustrating, but once you've kind of done that groundwork and you've got that connection, then it is very well worth applying to arts counseling. And it was also one of the things that they do is they have grants for artists to kind of try different genres. So poets have had grants to write their first short story collection, for example. So if you are an established writer, that can also be a good way. And then
01:26:29
Speaker
For a theatre grant, it's obviously a larger grant, and you've got a lot of people to pay, there's a lot of costs. And I think it helped that I'd had these two before, that the books were written, that they themselves had funded one of the books. And I had some help as well. Because I'm autistic, I had some help with access support for writing the grant because
01:26:58
Speaker
it's the kind of you can't see the woods for the trees. You know, you're talking about Astra in the world building, I am very detail oriented, but I was just getting lost in the application. And so, you know, I was able to hire someone who could kind of, you know, focus the ideas really, because you've only got 3000 characters sometimes in this box. So that definitely helped me a lot. And it was someone who had experience with writing for theater grants.
Artistic Impact and Funding
01:27:22
Speaker
So
01:27:23
Speaker
you know, kind of anticipate things that I wouldn't necessarily I wouldn't have anticipated. I suppose when you're writing a proposal, you'll you have to consider the impact of the work that you're that you're applying to do or that you're attempting to create. I haven't completed a proposal for from the Arts Council, but I do work with
01:27:46
Speaker
proposals for engineering projects in my day job and the impact is one of the things that is the most important as deemed by the evaluation panels. So I wonder, from a writer's perspective, from somebody who's
01:28:03
Speaker
Undertaking a theatrical production, I can more easily understand where the impact might be because you're drawing together a wider pool of people. You're going to be able to present it in a manner that it reaches out to.
01:28:18
Speaker
at least one type of community, but the, you know, the, the community at large. Um, and it may be raising, uh, awareness of certain sociological, environmental, et cetera, et cetera, issues as well. So I can understand that with the theatrical production, when you're talking about, when we're talking about literature, how do you understand the impact that a piece of work could have if you're applying for funding?
01:28:46
Speaker
Well, I suppose you have to say what you hope, the impact that you would hope it would have. I mean, when I look back at Astra, and I honestly can't remember if I said this or not, but the science fiction feel of female science fiction writers was really dominated by feminist dystopias. And I wanted to write something different. There is a dystopia, but it's not pitting men against women. I wanted to write something that was actually more about colonialism.
01:29:15
Speaker
And I also wanted to write something that wasn't about, you know, catastrophic world ending, but was something that was kind of post-apocalyptic in which we showed ourselves, you know, humanity trying to recover and trying to regenerate.
01:29:29
Speaker
And I wanted that to be inspiring. I mean, I just written, you know, I've written Soul Survivors and I, you know, which is really bleak. And I just felt, I actually don't really want to write just another really, really dark book, you know. Yeah, Soul Survivors is a cool book, but it's, yeah, it's pretty, pretty dark. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I think in terms of the impact, you can also say what, you know, what the impact is for you as a writer, how it will help your, your writing develop, you know, don't
01:29:58
Speaker
people when they're filling out those kinds of applications or if you're applying for postgraduate work at universities, we, when I say we, because I'm looking at those kinds of applications as well.
01:30:11
Speaker
You know, we want to know, you know, we want to see you taking yourself seriously as an artist as well. I suppose the difficulty, sorry, I suppose the difficulty of, from my perspective in understanding this is that as a writer, you're a loan operator, you operate by yourself.
01:30:32
Speaker
if you're working in the theatre, as we said before, there's a large pool of people that you have to pull together to make the thing work as a writer, you're on your own. So when you're looking when you're making the case to advance something, you're saying I want to advance myself, which obviously there's nothing wrong with that. But it strikes me as something that when filling out a grant proposal or grant application, there's, you know, how do how do you
01:31:03
Speaker
How do you portray that in a way that is amenable to the evaluation panel? Well, you talk about your development as an artist.
01:31:15
Speaker
You know, you might want to experiment with form, you know, in a way that you haven't done before. You might want to respond to certain reviews or criticisms or positive reviews even. You know, I think some kind of evidence really that your work is already having some sort of impact. But you might want to surprise your readers, you know.
01:31:39
Speaker
you might want to develop what you've done in one context and take it into another context. So, I mean, I think, you know, they're juries that are, you know, that's what they do. They look at artists' work and statements and they take art seriously. So, the fact that you're talking about developing your work is exactly what they want, you know, what they want to hear, that you have a kind of a conscious sense of where your work is now and where you want it to go.
01:32:05
Speaker
That's good to know. So tell us how the play has been playing, how it's been received, how has it been run and how the experience has been for you? Well, it's been just a complete whirlwind. There is actually a kind of a windstorm in the play about halfway through and it feels a bit like that quite often because it's just
01:32:27
Speaker
been nonstop. You know, we wrote the script, had script consultations with Raven and with Hassan Muhammad Ali, who's our dramaturge. Then it turned out
01:32:37
Speaker
that we needed to hire 14 vocal actors, which I didn't realize when we were writing, you know, when we were actually writing the application that we wouldn't just be about having puppeteers on stage, but the whole script would be recorded. Puppeteers don't speak at all. Everything is on this recorded soundtrack together with the music. So we had to audition them and then hire them and then record them and all that happened very quickly.
01:33:07
Speaker
you know, like, you know, like 10 people coming in on a day and working for 12 hours, you know, and then and then another day of working for six hours kind of mopping up, it we just did not have the time, you know, to do anything in a more kind of leisurely way, you know, not the PPC. And then and then rehearsal started. So we were also auditioning the performers, the puppeteers,
01:33:34
Speaker
and we had eight rehearsals including the dress rehearsal which was an open dress so it was kind of like a show.
01:33:40
Speaker
So for the performers, that felt more like a show and not really a rehearsal. So you could say we had seven rehearsals. So there were a lot of things that are in the script that weren't able to end up in the show because it's multimedia and production. So we have tabletop puppets, which are maybe about, I don't know, less than two feet high. I was going to ask about the puppets. I'm intrigued by these.
01:34:07
Speaker
the puppets and the puppeteers. How does that, yeah, tell us more about them. Yeah, too, Raven's made six beautiful tabletop puppets for what I would call kind of the central characters of this iteration of the story. And then because they're simply what, you know, it takes about a week to make one of these absolutely gorgeous puppets with a wooden frame and an armature and then the cloth and then the clothing that all gets stitched, you know,
01:34:36
Speaker
It's nothing off the rack here. She's made all the clothing and the hair and everything. So six weeks on that. And then for these other, actually there were 14 actors, but they played about 18 characters. They're all shadow puppets.
01:34:55
Speaker
So there's a ziggurat in the center of the stage, which was Raven's brainwave right at the beginning. It's kind of sketching the ziggurat, so this Mesopotamian stepped temple that turns. So it turns upside down and on its side. You can see inside it at times. Sometimes there's a cloth over it. So it's a green, lush hill. Sometimes it's a sand dune.
01:35:21
Speaker
sometimes it's a prison or the neuro hospice. So that's a very versatile piece of stage, you know, this is the set. And then to the side, one side of that is the shadow screen with the puppets and hand drawn backgrounds. And then to the other side is a
01:35:39
Speaker
a tall screen, which is supposed to be a phone screen, which at the moment we weren't really able to exploit to the extent that we really wanted to. We had a lot of ideas for that, for projections for that, that we just couldn't do at this stage. And then we also have on stage Sumaya Sitheab, who is our British Sign Language interpreter, and she plays a role in the show, in that she plays the goddess.
01:36:09
Speaker
and interpret. So the idea is kind of that she's in a way listening in to all these human interactions and she's kind of taking them into her body, you know, with the sign language. And she's obviously interpreting for deaf audiences. And she's had amazing feedback because people
01:36:29
Speaker
you know, people basically saying she brings so much emotion to the show because, you know, the puppets, they're not puppets that move their faces at all. I find them very evocative in their movements. But a lot of people need to see, you know, expressions on someone's face. And so Sime is doing all of that, and she's dancing to the music as well. And
01:36:49
Speaker
This is an example of what we were trying to achieve with integrated access. So access isn't just like something that's bolted on for those people over there. You know, it's something that's integrated into the show that brings resonance and magic and meaning into the show for everyone who can access it.
01:37:07
Speaker
Well, you said, yeah, you've described it as a multimedia or it's been described as a multimedia production. And I was going to ask about that, but I mean, you've described that beautifully. It really does sound quite innovative, you know, in the best sense, in the best artistic sense. It's quite innovative, very, very inclusive and quite broad and plural as well. It's unfortunately, by the time this episode goes out, I think the run will have finished.
01:37:36
Speaker
and we're recording this in late June and I think as you said there's one production, one show left to go but it is being filmed isn't it? So where would people be able to see it?
01:37:49
Speaker
Well, I think if you want to see it, you could email us. The film itself is not a work of art in itself. We just didn't have the time or the budget to do that. So for example, Sumaya is in a box in the corner because it's the most accessible way of her being present in the film. Her primary role is to interpret for deaf audiences.
01:38:14
Speaker
But because of that, you then don't see how she's integrated into the show. But we didn't really have time to think, well, what other solution is there? And I think we would really have had to film it very differently from the start to...
01:38:30
Speaker
to encompass that. So, for example, so we're not seeing this as a film that will, you know, be on just available for anyone to see it's it's for us to show to people who are interested, you know, may have specific interests in the in the themes of the show. So we will be doing a screening for disability arts online.
01:38:55
Speaker
for their audiences, their members, because we'd like to get their feedback on how the access is working for them and also on how the story is reflecting in Disability Activism, which is what the second book song is largely about, an uprising of disabled youth in the refugee camp.
01:39:15
Speaker
So we are very much inviting feedback. So if you're interested in watching it because you think you'd like to engage with it and engage with us and give us some feedback, that would be brilliant. And if you have a group, if you have a group that would
01:39:31
Speaker
you think would be interested in it, then please email us. We're basically going to keep it private and show it to people who do have an interest in helping us develop it because it's really at a seed stage compared to where it could go. It needs to be longer.
01:39:51
Speaker
So many of these elements need to be developed and could be developed in really exciting ways. So it's almost like you could consider it as being a kind of proof of concept for something larger. So my email address for the project is info at Astra theater or one word with the
01:40:14
Speaker
British spelling of theatre, re.earth, e-a-r-t
Interdisciplinary and Digital Influence on Poetry
01:40:19
Speaker
-h. Well, we can put that and any links into the episode literature when it goes out. That'd be great. Thank you. And I just want to mention the audio description as well, because we also had audio description that was written in the voice of a character. So people can listen to this on headsets while they're watching the play. And it describes what's happening visually.
01:40:41
Speaker
for visually impaired people but because it's in the voice of the character it also adds to the world building and the depth of the character and the emotion. I'd like to talk to you afterwards simply because
01:40:56
Speaker
As a performing arts teacher, I have done a lot of site-specific and prominent performances working with funded applications and getting students involved in seeing those kind of works. We used to take them to the Bush Theatre quite a lot, so I used to teach down the road. And this interdisciplinary approach you're discussing, and it just sounds so intriguing, so interesting, I'd really love to see more.
01:41:23
Speaker
Well, you're very welcome to see it. In fact, I will invite you to the industry sharing, which is on Friday, which is for theatre professionals. So you're very welcome to come to that. So it's kind of an example of sort of a targeted group that we're doing a sharing with. But, you know, sharing is very simple to do. And, you know, I just have to play it and
01:41:43
Speaker
set up a Zoom meeting. So I'm perfectly happy to do shareings. But what we're not doing is sort of charging money or doing it in venues or any, you know, I mean, we could do it in a venue, I suppose, on the same kind of principle. No, it's great. The use of the headphones as well, we've done productions where the audience have had the headphones on and everybody's had a different story as they've walked through the, you know, the process. So it's exactly the kind of stuff I'm really interested in. I'd love to, I'd love to see it.
01:42:12
Speaker
Great, great. Well, I'd love for you to see it. Oh, that's good. I've got a free free invite. I wanted to I know time's getting on and I wanted to talk to you about your poetry as well, because it's there's a very few few of our members on the website on the Crohn's forums who are poets. There's probably two who are particularly that's their passion. And then there's a lot of people who write limericks and dog roll and call it poetry like myself. But
01:42:42
Speaker
I wanted to ask you, give a sense of what the sort of poetry industry, like is it, I assume, is it a ghettoized area of the internet or of publishing? How do you go about subbing, you know, your poetry? Do you have to create an anthology, you know, your own collection or whatever? Or is it an open core? Is it just the same as long form or short fiction?
01:43:11
Speaker
Well, you know, as with everything, the internet has changed things massively. So when I was sort of coming up, what you did was you, yeah, you sent your individual poems out to magazines. And then when you had built up a good repertoire of published poems, you would put together a pamphlet.
01:43:29
Speaker
So sort of up to about 24 poems and you would approach a pamphlet publisher. And then your first collection could include all of the pamphlet poems. That was fine to be published them in a collection, which would be a longer piece, which might be with the same publisher or with a different publisher. And it was basically a case of sending it out, waiting, waiting, which it still really is.
01:43:59
Speaker
The two things that have changed in the last 10, 15 years are A, obviously with the internet, so much more.
01:44:08
Speaker
so many more you know outlets and venues and in a way it's quite nice because you know once it's published on on an internet journal it's up forever you know you can share it really easily with people so there are great advantages to that and also the other thing that's changing now is that there are so many small presses
01:44:31
Speaker
that really can't afford to do what they're doing. It is such a labour of love. You know, I work at a small press, Waterloo Press, and we have a variety of different kind of funding streams. But we've moved into a hybrid model, which is
01:44:46
Speaker
you know, basically where the poet or the short story writer or the novelist, the writer contributes. And usually that's by buying copies of their book. And so I don't find it's an exploitative model because in fact, especially with poetry, it's really the poet who will sell the books, you know, especially in the pre pandemic and hopefully new COVID times as we're getting back out into live venues, you know, you will take you would have a reading and you will take your books and that's when people will buy your book.
01:45:16
Speaker
Do you perform your poetry? Yeah, I love performing my poetry. When we spoke with the literary agent Ed Wilson a little while back,
01:45:26
Speaker
And we were chatting about social media and he said that things like TikTok, there's huge poetry sub community, subculture on TikTok. And it's resulted in the few people that exploded to TikTok stars. It's resulted in the explosion of poetry sales in the manner that he said that in the manner that poetry publishers only three or four years ago could only dream about. So they're all of a sudden because of the performative nature of poetry.
01:45:56
Speaker
and in some instances a poem can only be a few lines, it lends itself very well. This ancient, ancient art form lends itself extremely well to something as instantly consumable as TikTok. Have you tried anything like that? I do a little bit on Facebook, and I occasionally do a little bit on Instagram as well, but I have found that I just
01:46:22
Speaker
I don't know. Lately, I really just haven't had the time. I haven't even written a poem since Astra kicked off, let alone I haven't even really had time to be on social media about Astra. And I suppose I still really like books. I like the feel and the smell of them. And I like the privacy of reading. I like the intimacy of reading.
01:46:47
Speaker
I'm ambivalent about social media myself. I think what Ed was saying was that the performances on social media were actually driving sales of physical books. Yeah, it's probably something I'm just not up to speed on really. I've done a little bit, but I think it would be something that I have to sit down and you have to
01:47:14
Speaker
I think people have to plan it. I think social media is, I'm like you Naomi, in terms of it's not something I particularly want to engage in for my writing, or maybe not just business wise, but just in general, it might be a generational thing, but also it just seems
01:47:36
Speaker
And especially for somebody who's neurodivergent, it's hard to sort of put yourself in that space and create this mask for yourself. And to a certain extent, although we've got democratized publishing these days in terms of self-publishing and small presses and the submission process through the internet instead of printing out reams, there is a part of me that wonders
01:48:00
Speaker
if I would rather it went back to how it was in the 70s and 80s, just so I could, I could not have to get involved in making a website and tweeting stuff that I don't believe in or what you know, not that Yeah, and actually make a living out of writing. Yeah, exactly. That's true.
01:48:17
Speaker
But I do feel we've got this new generation coming up who are really familiar with things like TikTok and Instagram and making it work for them in a way that isn't, oh, look, here's just me tagging every different category of literature in this post in the hope that I throw something at the wall and it sticks. There is some expertise in these social media young people coming up.
01:48:40
Speaker
And I think we're going to see a lot more published authors employing people, you know, that being included in their own budget to do that for them because it is unavoidable.
01:48:55
Speaker
Yeah, I know. And I can really relate, you know, being autistic that, you know, I would, you know, Twitter, I would spend like hours, you know, I might be a slight exaggeration, but, you know, there's no way I could have a dash off a tweet. And so I would then end up thinking, well, I could just be spending that time, you know, in a kind of more of a state of reverie, really, and
01:49:17
Speaker
I think of Facebook as like a party, and I don't really want to go to a party every night. You know, I'd like to go to a party on a Saturday, basically. So, you know, it's great to go to Facebook and chat with people, but I can't handle multiple chat boxes at all. So, you know, I think you're going to ask me about my favorite poem.
01:49:41
Speaker
Yes. Have you? Well, I'm just thinking of an Emily Dickinson poem, and she's one of my favorite poets. And maybe it would be, you know, slightly tongue in cheek to say this one is my favorite, but it's very apropos. So it's I'm nobody. Who are you? I'm nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us. Don't tell. They'd advertise, you know. How dreary to be somebody.
01:50:10
Speaker
How public, like a frog, to tell one's name the livelong June to an admiring bog. That's action. Is that informed by your autism at all?
01:50:23
Speaker
the choice of it. Well, it's interesting, you know, because of having a late diagnosis, you know, kind of going looking back over my life. And that poem was actually on the wall in one of my grade school classes, and I memorized it, it meant so obviously meant a lot to me as an undiagnosed autistic kid. Yeah, it's very interesting to hear you just off, you know,
01:50:45
Speaker
being able to just reel it off like that because that's the other pull with poetry is you don't get that. There are books that will stay with you and there are books that will live in you but there are poems like that
01:51:01
Speaker
that become part of you and define so much of your aesthetic. Especially, I mean, for me, my mind is Adelstrop, Edward Thomas poem called Adelstrop, which I absolutely adore. And it's just a short poem as well. But it's just all about the sort of pastoral, you know, view. And that is how I write. I'm always trying to write about the natural world, even though mostly I write horror. And I've,
01:51:27
Speaker
I've often wanted to be able to write poetry, but I can't because I could try. But it just seems like such a higher level of technique involved than writing novels or short stories. Do you find it easier to write a novel save than a poem?
01:51:52
Speaker
No, I think I wish with the novels that I could write them more like poems in the sense that you didn't have such kind of the pressure of the contract and you know you could put it away for a few years and then come back to it. Especially when you write four novels and you don't when you've written the first one you have no idea what the last one's going to be. I actually thought that
01:52:15
Speaker
The Guy Chronicles would be a trilogy when I started. So, you know, with the benefit of the hindsight, you know, the kind of the revision process, because the reason, you know, the only way that poems really get to be good as poems is if they are really revised and revised. So, but I do, I do love the flow of novel writing. I do love the flow of the story and the way that
01:52:36
Speaker
it's always seemed to me that that last sort of fifth of the novel kind of writes itself because you're just tearing down the hill and the characters have just got their own momentum and there's always been something joyful about that for me. So it's a balance.
01:52:56
Speaker
balance of writing novels and poems for you. Yeah, and I put poems in the novels, you know, there's a rapper and there's hymns in Astra. They're a bit tongue in cheek, really, but you know, I did enjoy writing them. And then there's us. I don't want to give too much away too many spoilers, but there's a character who loves poetry and quotes a lot of poetry as well later on.
01:53:21
Speaker
So I do think everything I write somehow is, you know, is a poem. Yeah. So what we like to do is ask sort of compulsory reading. So a genre title that you find is compulsory for genre fans.
Genre Recommendations and Creative Tools
01:53:42
Speaker
But I wonder if maybe we should be asking you if also for compulsory poetry collection or something or poet.
01:53:52
Speaker
Um, it's very, uh, it's, it's, it's strange one, isn't it? Um, I think.
01:54:07
Speaker
this question either stumps the guests or adds another half an hour to the show. When we asked Ed and he just gave us like 20 books. It's a really, really stupid question and I know it is and I know where it's born from, it's born from this infection on social media to have listicles and articles and they'll look what's your best Star Wars film, what's the worst Star Wars film, what's this, what's that and but it just
01:54:33
Speaker
Since we've been doing this podcast, I've really got some good titles from it. It's purely selfish from some of our guests. It's for the podcast. And it's become a thing now, so you got to keep that. No, you can't just stop it now. Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm going to say, you know, I've already mentioned Kindred Octavia Butler, but I, you know, I just think Octavia Butler is, you know, Octavia Butler and she's going to be on so many people's lists that, you know, maybe
01:55:02
Speaker
Well, also, well, the one I'm thinking of also is G. Willa Wilson, who's also, you know, obviously very well known, but I teach Out of the Unseen. And I just think, you know, when there is so much Islamophobia, it's really good to have a novel that actually has like two niqabi characters, you know, two women who are covered. And, you know, so it really, with my students, it really opened their eyes to a world that they hadn't really considered. And
01:55:31
Speaker
and maybe change the view things so as well as being like a really great great you know
01:55:39
Speaker
book, as a science fantasy novel, you know, I've quite liked science fantasy, I suppose, I've written quite a bit of it. You know, where we have the fantastical elements, the supernatural elements, the idea of myth, the kind of the questioning of, of, you know, metaphor, which in that book is kind of is also questioned by a religious character as well. So yeah, and then the
01:56:07
Speaker
whole idea of this sort of cyberspace as a space where things, you know, as a real space, a space where things happen and, you know, it's almost but also like a kind of psychic space. So I really like that book for that reason, for all those reasons. Yeah. Thank you.
01:56:29
Speaker
Um, I did, I see the times getting on. I think, I don't know if it's, I just wanted to ask you about the tarot cards because, um, but I don't know if that's a bit, if that's going to be of any interest to, um, to anyone, but you or me. Um, do you, can I ask you what do you use the right away? What, what, um, what deck do you use?
01:56:51
Speaker
I use the Crowley. Okay, I know the Alistair Crowley ones, yeah. I guess what I'm trying to steer is I use mine a lot in my writing, not as divination tools or as subjects in my writing, but the pictorial pip cards can be so helpful in terms of
01:57:13
Speaker
character development or scenes. So you can take a tarot card out and look at it and it will have perfect, like three of coins. Okay, so I can write this little 75-word story about mastery or whatever it might be. Is there any link with your writing and the fact that you read cards? You know, I haven't done a lot of writing based on the tarot and I think that that was partly because when I was
01:57:44
Speaker
working as a professional tarot card reader, I always had this great sense of sort of the sanctity of the reading and the privacy, you know, there were so many stories I got, I got told. So, so somehow it somehow it always remained like a separate, mysterious realm that I kind of wanted to protect a bit. And
01:58:10
Speaker
Though, you know, I know that birthday letters, you know, the Ted Hughes collection, that's supposedly based on the, you know, the journey of the tarot. There's been quite a lot of analysis of that. And, and I think it's Helen Ivory's written about the tarot. There's definitely tarot, you know, Rachel Pollock, obviously written poetry about the tarot. There's a lot kind of out there. I'd never myself
01:58:36
Speaker
You know, just woken up and kind of said it's time to do that now. You know, I recently wrote a sequence based on the Greek alphabet, for example. So, you know, it wouldn't be unusual for me just to decide to, you know, take a pre-existing structure and write poems about it.
01:58:51
Speaker
But for some reason, I suppose, I just like the idea of the tarot exercising, you know, maybe I would just want it to, you know, be more powerful than me. And, you know, though I think, you know, no doubt working with it creatively would only enhance that. But I think it's purely spiritual, a purely personal spiritual experience. I think we'll leave it there. I have no idea you're a tarot card reader. Why have I missed that? You kept that under lock and key.
01:59:21
Speaker
It's on my website, actually, but I used to do it every weekend out on E Street here in Brighton until actually the recession really, really hit that. And then I moved into higher education and then into teaching. Oh, wow. Fascinating. But I still do read cards occasionally for some long term clients.
01:59:43
Speaker
They're so cool.
Closing Remarks
01:59:45
Speaker
Well, thanks ever so much for joining us today, Naomi. It's been really, really cool to talk to you. Really fascinating. Really interesting. It's been wonderful to talk to you both. Thank you, Chris and Dan. Well, okay. Thanks. And we'll see you soon, hopefully. The conversation will continue and you'll see Astra, because you're invited too, Dan. You're not getting out of it.
02:00:04
Speaker
No, I hope I don't want to get out of it. No, I'd love to see it. It'll be fun. It'll be fabulous. Thank you. Yeah, do send that along. And I will put that in the episode literature as well. So if anybody wants to get in touch because it sounds like it could be of great interest and importance to probably quite a lot of people.
02:00:23
Speaker
I hope so. I hope so. We're already, you know, getting a lot of very, very moving comments in the in the audience. Q&A. So it does feel like it's striking. I know two dramaturges who two of my friends who would love to love to go. So I'm going to pass the details to them as well. Thank you. Fantastic. Perfect. Okay, thank you. Bye bye. Bye bye.
02:00:58
Speaker
This episode of Bronzecast was brought to you by Dan Jones and Christopher Bean and our special guest Naomi Foyle. Additional content was provided via Damaris Brown, Brian Sexton and Jay Starlivan.
02:01:10
Speaker
Special thanks to Brian Turner and all the staff at Grunz, and to you for listening. Don't forget to join the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community at sffofcrunicles.com. Join us next month when our special guest will be the author Juliette Mckenna, who will be talking to us about Pope Mirelli's 1926 fantasy novel, Blood in the Mist.
02:02:57
Speaker
You know.