Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

It’s taken me a long time to get to a point where I don’t actively hate myself. And though, of course, that’s positive, that’s nice, that’s good, that’s rock solid and a significant improvement on where and how I felt for many, many years (especially how I felt that I was “meant to”/”should” feel), what that also means is that the remaining major hurdles between a miserable life I feel I deserve and a sustainable life I actively want to live in are more obvious.

I have carved out ways to perform, to maintain some kind of writing practice (recently it has just been this blog, but I’ll get back to a more regular publishing and/or editing practice again, eventually, I’ll get there, I’m sure*), I’m doing a small amount of exercise at least twice pretty much every week**, I’ve got a pleasant little home life full of entertaining living things (and also a tank of doomed fish (currently just one uh oh) that I’ve kept as a karmic lightening rod since I gained a child), and I’ve been reading some great books on the regular.

I haven’t been watching films as much as I’d like to be, sure, and I’m not getting out to see as many live shows as I’d like to (though I probably watched a year’s worth during my week and a bit in Edinburgh this August!), but I’m definitely doing better than previously; I haven’t re-integrated language study into my life, which is something I’d like to do, and though obviously I’d prefer to be living somewhere with better weather and access to beaches, the performance opportunities afforded me by living in London (arguably) would feel like a serious counterweight to that were the majority of my time here spent doing things that didn’t actively make me feel bad. Yes, because the thing that I haven’t fixed, really, at all, is what I do with those key central hours of the week; the ones that are spent exchanging time and energy for money.

And the stink of that has got to the point where it needs – severely, sincerely, soon – to be addressed.

–///–

Children of Ruin is a sequel to Children of Time, which is not a time travel novel.

Grand (I don’t think that’s a technical term, but if it is I don’t know how to apply it) space opera, that first novel is about the far future second human colonisation of space (post massive civilisational collapse and then rebuild), encountering the legacies and technologies of that first outward expansion. (Essentially: giant, hyper-intelligent spiders living on a terraformed planet on the other side of the galaxy.)

This second novel opens in a way that feels very similar to the first; humans in far space, beginning to terraform a planet in order to make a new human habitat as their homeworld becomes less and less liveable. As in the first novel, a potent technological virus is sent out from warring Earth to destroy all digital systems, however, due to an octopus-related system shutdown, one of the spaceships is spared destruction, and (some of) the terraforming crew live to look at and begin work on the TWO potentially-habitable planets in the solar system they’ve arrived at.

What looks set to happen, then, is a similar story to the first, but with octopuses instead of spiders. But that isn’t what happens, as – instead – the humans find alien life on one of the planets and – alas, alack, alas – it’s the bad kind, a combination of the alien virus in Pluribus and the alien spores in Prometheus, an alien microorganism that takes over a body and transforms its heart and mind and soul into something else, something sinister, something destructive…

And then, sailing on towards this sinister alien-infected planet in the far future, is a starship of mixed human and giant, hyper-intelligent spider crew, looking for more aliens, more artifacts of the previous human attempts at interstellar settling and, of course, for anything else of interest. And they find here – as well as the bad aliens – a spaceship-living community of highly complex and very technologically advanced octopuses. Or octopi. Or octopodes. Octopus plural; pick whichever suits you best.

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For readers who don’t know, although I receive maybe three to ten complimentary books to blog about on here annually and (lesson learned, I won’t do it again) have permitted donations in exchange for coverage in the past, TriumphOfTheNow.com doesn’t afford me sufficient income to pay for anything I need to (materially) live; it usually breaks even as a website (though not every year), and a handful of times (though less so since I got less attractive (i.e. bald and over thirty) in the photos) has garnered me some nice chunks of (always American) cash… But it’s not my “job”, and couldn’t ever realistically earn me much more than it does, even if I spent 40 hours a week at this. So, alas, I have to do other things.

And the thing that I’ve always done, since I was a teenager, around study and creative pursuits, is work in hospitality, because it’s a frivolous and (in theory) low stress thing I should be able to do while holding daylight time and mental space to do things that actually matter to me – or at least are fun.

Unfortunately, though, as time has gone on, I have ended up accidentally rising through the professional ranks of hospitality, and am – once again – in a position where the hospitality work I’m doing isn’t mixing cocktails in the evening for 30 hours a week while writing poems in my head to jot down in a voice note on the way home, and now it’s admin-heavy, boring, pointless and morally ambiguous*** work in the catering sector. I absolutely hate it.

Especially, with time, the supposed peers I have encountered and worked with are not people who are peers of mine, which they were a decade, half a decade, ago. Thrilled recently when Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I couldn’t keep the excitement in, yet no one in the space I was working with cared, none of them knew who Anne Carson was and – crucially – more than one of them didn’t know what the Nobel Prize for Literature was.

How am I supposed to feel like a valid person when I’m spending time in working environments when my values and experience of the world are so misaligned from the people around me?

And I know that this sounds a little silly and exaggerated, but I suppose it just really emphasised to me the problem and the error of where I’ve ended up; maybe the students waiting the tables at the events I’m working at care about the Nobel Prize for Literature, but the other people running these spaces mostly seem to be people who have actively – as opposed to very very passively – chosen to be doing this work.

I have colleagues who literally went to university to learn how to do this job that I’m doing by accident. And that in itself makes me feel very low and very alone. I always saw university as an opportunity for expansion, rather than contraction. And I felt like other people used, to, too; and maybe that isn’t true any more, given how much more it costs than it did when I took on a burden of debt I will likely never pay off?

Also, in the spaces I’ve been working the last few years, I almost always have to dress conservatively, and I certainly can’t express any opinions about anything that matters, both of which peel away the opportunities for any landed sense of self…

I am not, alas, aligned (though can sometimes pretend – by omission rather than lying – to be so, which I absolutely hate doing).

What, then, does a person like me do for money?

I’m not so arrogant and/or unrealistic as to think that I can figure out a way to get bill-covering levels of cash from writing and/or performance, though obviously I would love to. I know I’m a weird and odd acquired taste and would prefer to continue to be that, rather than chase the kind of wider popularity and middle-of-the-roadness needed to sustain a steady and useful creative income. I don’t care if the creative work I do is a “hobby”. But what I do care about is how the non-creative labour I do for 40-50 hours a week (and I really don’t want to be doing more than that, ideally fewer) makes me feel.

And if it makes me feel bored, and disrespected, and useless and pointless and vacuous and complicit in sustaining systems that I think are morally reprehensible, then I cannot stick with it, especially when it continually oozes out of the hours I’ve assigned to it and causes me to miss opportunities that, bluntly, are less shit.

But, what does a person like me do?

I think the solution in the short term might be just crashing back down through hospitality to an entry level bartending job somewhere I can walk or cycle to within 15 minutes of my flat, but I think being a little more ambitious than that is probably sensible at this point in life; but I honestly have no idea…

I can make myself sound competent and experienced in the work that I do, but I don’t really want to do that, as the work that I do doesn’t interest me. I have specialised by accident, passively, without intentionality and so I don’t even know what “skills” I have, let alone the “skills” that I have which are transferable, useful, positive and productive.

I suppose there was a time, yes, when I was interested in flavour; in food and wine and cocktails and, yes, I had a moment a few days ago when I felt – for a few full minutes – genuinely happy, and it was while eating a plate of simple, yet delicious, food (spinach stirred through with barely cooked garlic and even less cooked preserved lemon; it was simple and divine and perfect), while my beautiful, perfect child played and babbled and talked at me and an album I’ve non-ironically loved since I was a teenager played in the background (The Heart of Saturday Night by Tom Waits). I am a simple person, it doesn’t take much to make me happy. But it also, the reverse, doesn’t take much to make me despair. And I find myself being moved to the latter multiple times every single day, whereas those fleeting moments of happiness are rare.

–///–

In this sequel to his space novel, we have, then, the opportunity for Tchaikovsky to create multiple worlds. Not only has he continued with evoking the expanding-in-complexity planet and society of giant, hyper-intelligent aliens who now live side-by-side with future humans, but he has his society of octopodes, and he has, too, his alien intelligence…

This novel is far more sinister, with this insidious and evil-seeming intelligence controlling – or maybe not controlling, or maybe pretending to not be controlling – almost all that happens around them. As it encounters and destroys human lives and then hyper-intelligent octopus lives, it is sinister and terrifying… yet, as the novel builds, any satisfying way of neutralising the threat feels more and more out of reach…

The novel, actually, is often about translation. It’s about the digital intelligence controlling the spaceship of the human-spider expedition seeking to find ways to translate human emotion into her digital experience; it’s about the humans and spiders seeking better ways to speak to each other, generations after first contact; it’s about the humans and spiders seeking ways to communicate with the octopodes, who use the changing colours of their skin more than they use words or numbers or data to exchange information… It’s about communication. And its failure; and its success.

It’s engaging and thoughtful, scary and imaginative. There’s a third one in the series that I have a copy of. I’ll read it. Yes. I’ll read it soon, probably.

–///–

What, then, do I do?

I don’t read things that are as engaging as I’d like; there is a joy in well-executed high-concept genre work, yes, but it doesn’t open up the world of thought and experience; a tell is that I’m writing more about myself than I am about the book; though sometimes, here, that means nothing. Sometimes the book is the thing. Sometimes I am.

But… but… The times in which it is me needs to be more focused, I think. It seems childish or needy to yearn for self-respect, self-knowledge, self-hood; but, yes, that is where I am.

I need to plan for life in a way that moves beyond planning just for how to make space for creative pursuits; I need to plan how to make space for self-respect in moments that are far away from productivity, or outputs I can look at and be proud of.

The emotive swell following a good gig lasts a few days, yes, and permits me to coast a little easier through dark days of meaningless tedium, but the lift doesn’t last forever, and the good gigs aren’t all that frequent, and the too-much-work means that the rehearsing and the writing isn’t happening as it should, so it all… just…gets… harder…

I don’t know. I need to sit with it, I think. I need to focus. I need to find out ways to just, ah, live.

Yes. Yes I do.

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

* Though maybe not soon, unless I drop the performance practice and take the evening or three a fortnight that would currently be spent at/travelling to a gig, and instead go and nurse a couple of soda waters while wearing noise cancelling headphones in a late-open cafe or pub somewhere and sit in front of a laptop and bleed. And then edit and email things out to magazines and publishers and literary websites, which is the bit that I’m really not doing at all and haven’t been for years…

** As discussed before on TriumphOfTheNow.com, I reserve watching premium television (the only kind I watch, really) for when I’m doing cardio. I’m currently static bike-ing my way through the on-going new season of Slow Horses (which will have finished between me typing this and me remembering to upload it) and also Widow’s Bay, both of which are lots of fun. I absolutely looooooved DTF St Louis, so next up is the previous show that showrunner made, which I keep forgetting the name of, but will know once I start watching it.

*** Sometimes unequivocally evil; there are events I’ve assisted with the catering for that have left me feeling tainted and ashamed, and I don’t think this is a feeling I have any interest in training myself out of.