PAST AND FUTURE FACTION
Writers engage the past and anticipate the future when weaving fact into fiction.
Let me begin with a confession. I’ve never liked the word “faction”. There’s something curt and clunky about it. But it does do the job when describing the introduction of historical characters into fiction, or when novels and stories mysteriously anticipate the future.
As a term, “faction” came into existence in 1930. It was originally used to contrast purely imaginary science fiction, such as Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, which predicts the future of humanity for the next two billion years, with science faction, where a preponderance of fact makes the work more scientific, such as in the novels of Jules Verne. In the 1960s the term took on a wider meaning and was applied to writers like James Joyce, where a strong autobiographical element is present.
Literary non-fiction is a close relative of faction. A celebrated example is Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which focuses on the 1959 murders of the Clutter family by two killers in the small farming community of Holcomb, Kansas. Capote performed something similar in his posthumously-published Answered Prayers. Projected to be his masterpiece, it is a sleazy account of the mixing of upper and lower social classes, inspired by his role as confidant to prominent female socialites of his time, as well as their husbands. Extracts were published in Esquire, disastrously for Capote, as his classy friends immediately recognised themselves and disliked what they were reading. Shunned by the high society he adored, Capote went into sharp decline in a welter of drink and drugs. Answered Prayers is what the French call a roman à clef, in which real people, places, or events are disguised by fictitious names or details. Writers rarely pluck things out of thin air. A great deal of fiction is anchored in fact. Even a fantasy like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was inspired in part by his experiences in the First World War.
It has been my privilege or misfortune to write about the magician Aleister Crowley under his real name. But there is a long tradition of him appearing under a pseudonym in works by Somerset Maugham, Anthony Powell, Dennis Wheatley and Ian Fleming, all of whom knew him. Rather fitting for a man who adopted so many aliases during his lifetime and was known as the Great Beast 666 and the Wickedest Man in the World, much to his own delight. Born into a wealthy family of fanatical Christian fundamentalists in 1875, Crowley rejected their beliefs and spent his youth travelling the world, climbing mountains, canoodling and much else with scores of male and female lovers, as well as experimenting with every drug under the sun. He was a writer, poet, painter, and arguably the greatest exponent of the occult of the twentieth century. He was a spy, employed by various British Intelligence agencies throughout his lifetime, a fact I have explored in two books.
My own adventure with him and faction began in 1975 when I wrote a short story called “Sybarite among the Shadows”. It was based on an anecdote I read of Crowley giving Aldous Huxley his first mescaline trip in Berlin in 1930. The thought of two such diverse characters in such a setting intrigued me. For added spice, I inserted some atmospherics about occult Nazis – such speculations being very much in vogue at the time. To bring the men to life, I consulted their works and biographies. Crowley left a volume of Confessions, in which he speaks very directly and not always as boastfully as one might expect, despite the book being described as an autohagiography – the autobiography of a saint.
My story caused a stir. It was taken as fact and quoted in several books of the occult-conspiracy variety. Later it was employed by Christian fundamentalist websites in America, who were naturally dead set against the Beast 666 and eager to grasp any ammunition that came to hand. It was even pirated and published in Russia.
In 2004, a book of mine was published with the same title as the short story. In subsequent editions it was rebranded as Aleister Crowley MI5 as the word “sybarite” induced some puzzlement. It means a self-indulgent lover of suspect pleasures, a darker version of a hedonist.
The starting point of my book was another anecdote, this time from a biography of Dylan Thomas by Constantine Fitzgibbon. The Welsh poet was in a Soho pub, doodling at the bar when he noticed someone imitating him. The stranger – a hefty, perfumed man with a shaven head – approached and flourished a drawing under Dylan’s nose which is identical with his own.
The next day a flustered Dylan goes to see Victor Neuburg, the former poetry editor of The Sunday Referee, who as such had been the first to publish him. Remembered today as a minor poet and Crowley the sorcerer’s apprentice up to the outbreak of the First World War, Neuburg was still in two minds about what to make of his former master. The pair embark on an adventure in the bohemian watering holes of London in 1936, which culminates in an encounter with the Beast and embroilment his MI5 operation to expose Wallis Simpson and prevent the Abdication.
To characterise Dylan Thomas, I found his Collected Letters an invaluable resource. It is as though he is standing next to you in the bar, dazzling you with his wit and marvellous word plays. “Is her hair grown white?” he asks after a few days apart from Caitlin. “A couple of verse inspectors come to read my metre,” he jokes. Though very fond of Neuburg, a character of immense eccentricity and kindness, he can be scathing about his mentor’s antiquated poetry – “word tinkling” as he calls it – and launches into a tirade in one letter: “The creature himself – I must tell you one day if I haven’t told you before how Aleister Crowley turned Vicky into a camel – is a nineteenth-century crank with mental gangrene, lousier than ever before, a product of a … nuts-factory, an Oscar tamed.”
Crowley was embedded in the artistic life of his times and counted the painters Augustus John and Nina Hamnett among his friends. There are several other references to Crowley in Dylan’s letters, but to my surprise I stumbled on Dylan had also using the Beast as a character. In The Death of the King’s Canary, a posthumously published satire on contemporaries the Welsh poet wrote with John Davenport, there is a sinister marijuana-smoking magician called Great Raven. The code is not difficult to crack. The artist Nina Hamnett appears as Sylvia Bacon – to his friends, the Beast was “Crow”.
For my portrait of Crowley, I found a very useful additional resource at the Warburg Institute in London where there is a room full of Crowley papers and paraphernalia donated by his friend and, quite probably, secret service controller, Gerald Yorke. In diaries and letters, you can encounter the man’s wit, anger and troubles, though transposition is needed in the handling. Paraphrasing and synonyms serve oddly to make faction more authentic.
This subtle interpolation of the fictitious into the mix helps to strengthen faction. In a recent TV dramatization of Ben Macintyre’s 2014 book, A Spy among Friends, which tells the story of the Soviet spies Philby, Burgess and Maclean, the scriptwriter inserted a sharp-eyed female MI5 agent, who never existed. Her down-to-earth attitude brilliantly contrast with the braying whisky-sodden entitlement of the Cambridge Spies. It throws into relief how their immunity was bought by the deference embedded in the British class system.
At this stage it might be as well to slip in another word: transmogrify. Like faction, it sounds a bit unwieldly and hardly slips off the tongue. The definition is: “to transform in a surprising or magical way”. The genesis of my new book, Aleister Crowley MI6: the Hess Solution, is a letter Crowley sent to Ian Fleming of Naval Intelligence in May 1941, offering to interrogate the recently-captured Rudolf Hess. He argued that their shared occultism would be a way to wrest the Nazi leader’s secrets.
Employing flashbacks, much of the action and takes place in Netherwood, a boarding house on the Ridge in Hastings where Crowley resided from 1945 to his death in December 1947. It was run by a bohemian couple who were quite happy to have “Awful” Aleister under their roof. Their nephew worked for them as a handyman. He wanted to become a priest, so Crowley
tutored him in Latin. The concept of the pagan sex-and-drug obsessed Beast teaching such an innocent was too enticing to ignore. But what if the nephew was still alive? He might not relish my depiction. I transmogrified him into a character called “Will”, which came in handy as Crowley was always banging on about will. The couple were very involved in the local theatre, so Crowley acts as consultant on an updated version of Doctor Faustus performed on the pier. This was another transmogrification drawn from Crowley’s role as adviser to Peter Brooks on a production of Marlowe’s play, the young director having sought him out while at Cambridge.
Unease with the term “faction” has sometimes driven me to substitute historical fiction, which begs the question are they the same, and if not, why not? Faction usually, though not always, applies to works that focuse on the last century or so. The American E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime is a splendid example. Set in the New York City area from 1902 until 1912, the novel irreverently weaves historical figures and fictional characters into a narrative packed with surprising but plausible connections between the likes of J. P.
Morgan and Henry Ford, or the socialite Evelyn Nesbit and the anarchist Emma Goldman. Perhaps it is in taking such creative liberties we find the measure of faction. Historical fiction is more conventional: Raleigh covers a puddle with his cloakfor the Virgin Queen; Nelson holds the telescope to his blind eye. Think of the daring plotlines of The Crown. That’s faction. By the same token, Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, which completely turns on its head the traditional view of a dry, unsympathetic Thomas Cromwell and presents him as an adroit and subtle statesman could benefit from the category. The immediacy conveyed by her use of the Present Tense only adds to this impression. Faction perhaps comes across as contemporary, even when it deals with the distant past, whereas historical fiction does not.
As stated earlier, future faction often pivots on the way that writers eerily and presciently anticipate coming inventions and events. Jules Verne imagined submarines and rockets. H.G. Wells described tanks, atomic bombs, and a communication system very similar to email. E. M. Forster’s 1909 The Machine Stops foresaw the internet. Are we living in Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World?
Inventors often build on such insights, so that faction becomes fact. In Clipper of the Clouds, Verne envisaged an airborne craft propelled by rotors at a time when flight with heavier-than-air machines was deemed impossible. Igor Sikorsky read the book as a boy and built the first helicopter. “Anything that one man can imagine, another man can make real,” he said. NASA physicist Jack Cover named his creation the Taser in honour of Tom Swift, the genius inventor who was the protagonist of a series of juvenile science fiction books which appeared in the early twentieth century. “Taser” is an acronym for of “Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle”.
Sometimes the writer seems to take on the role of seer. David Brin’s 1989 Earth appears to describe global warming, rising sea levels, the breaking of the levees on the Mississippi River, and even the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. J. G. Ballard’s dystopian science fiction finds many echoes in our deteriorating world. The outstanding example, however, is John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, which
appeared in 1968. Set in 2010, the book foresaw wearable technology, the creation of the EU, the economic decline of Detroit (which nevertheless is home to a thriving techno music scene), the marginalisation of tobacco alongside progressive marijuana decriminalisation, gay marriage, Viagra, video calls, the rise of global terrorism, and random mass shootings in schools. There is also a popular and charming president called Obomi. Unfortunately, for the many starry-eyed internet sites that see this as conclusive proof Brunner had a hotline to the future, Obomi is a seventy-five-year-old Berber who leads a small African country called Benin. Other things in Stand on Zanzibar have also so far not come to pass, such as deep-sea mining and a Moon base, but may still happen.
Brunner is not alone in seeming to identify the yet unborn. The American writer Ingersoll Lockwood authored two illustrated children’s books in the late 1890s centred around a character called Baron Trump. Trump’s adventures begin in Russia. He is guided by a mysterious “master of all masters” called “Don”. While the protagonist shares a name with Donald Trump’s son, he really is a baron. Likewise, “Don” is the title of the learned Spaniard, Don Constantino Bartolomeo Strepholofidgeguaneriusfum, commonly known among scholars as Don Fum (for reasons that are not hard to understand).
In his final novel, 1900 or: The Last President, which came out in 1896, Lockwood really outdoes himself in the fortune-telling stakes. New York City is in a “state of uproar” in early November after the election of a hugely opposed outsider candidate. Vast mobs threaten to attack a Fifth Avenue hotel that has the
same address as where Trump Tower now stands. Fearing the Republic will collapse, people form a resistance, protesting against what they see as a corrupt political process. Lockwood’s eerie prophecies were popularised in a July 2017 Newsweek article, exciting speculation on conspiracy sites that the Trump family had a time machine.
Another story seemingly about someone who did not yet exist is Edgar Allen Poe’s only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838. Starting out as a seafaring tale, the Narrative quickly descends into gothic horror which offended contemporary critics and led its author to describe it as “a very silly book”. Most of the action takes place on a whaling ship. Following a mutiny and a colossal storm, three sailors and a cabin boy are left on the battered hulk. After surviving for days on the rationed remains of a turtle and near delirious with thirst, they resort to cannibalism and draw lots to decide who the victim should be. The cabin boy loses. His name is Richard Parker.
Forty-eight years later, in 1884, a colossal wave sinks an English yacht called the Mignonette, sailing from Madeira to Cape Town. A seventeen-year-old cabin boy and three others drift for days in a lifeboat with little food or water. The cabin boy falls overboard and makes the mistake of drinking seawater to quench his thirst. The boy is hauled back onto the boat but is delirious. The others decide to eat him. His name is Richard Parker.
Twenty-four days later the men are rescued and put on trial in England. The case causes an uproar in Victorian Britain. The jury finds the men guilty of murder, but the sentences are later reduced to six months hard labour. Their case establishes the precedent in common law that necessity is no defence against a charge of murder.
Such a maritime coincidence is not unique. Three men each named Hugh Williams were the only survivors of shipwrecks in the treacherous Menai Straits off North Wales on three separate occasions. Two Hugh Williamses survived on the same day, December 5th, a hundred years apart.
Poe was a writer who lived “continually in a reverie of the future” and there are further examples of his prescience. The weirdest is contained in a 150-page prose-poem written in the final years of his life called “Eureka” in which he anticipates Big Bang theory by expounding on an expanding universe derived from a single primordial particle that began in “one instantaneous flash”. The Italian astronomer Alberto Cappi states, “It’s surprising that Poe arrived at his dynamically evolving universe because there was no observational or theoretical evidence suggesting such a possibility. No astronomer in Poe’s day could imagine a non-static universe”.
It is equally difficult to explain the discovery of two satellites of Mars by the scientists of the flying island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Phobos and Deimos, both relatively tiny and invisible to the telescopes of Swift’s time, were not identified until August 1877 by the American astronomer Asaph Hall.
The Covid pandemic was anticipated by the American author Dean Koontz in his 1981 novel, The Eyes of Darkness, which described a killer virus called “Wuhan-400”. The name alone excites goose bumps as, of course, the first outbreak of Covid-19 was in Wuhan. On the downside, as far as the prophecy quotient is concerned, the virus in Koontz’s book has a “kill-rate” of 100%. Furthermore, it was developed as a biological weapon, though the jury is still out as to whether human intervention, the controversial gain of function, and the resulting virus escaping from a lab, unleashed Covid. The 2011 film Contagion centred around the outbreak of a global infection that spreads from animals to humans. On Instagram, while travelling to Paris Fashion Week in a face mask, Gwyneth Paltrow, one of the film’s stars, posted, “I’ve already been in this movie”.
When writers score a bullseye, it is usually because they extrapolate the elements of their own time and cast them into the future. Does this account for the debit cards that Edward Bellamy imagined in Looking Backward, published in 1888, or the hijacked 747 crashing into the Capitol building in Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honour, seven years before the attack on the World Trade Centre? Not one, but two authors foresaw
the sinking of the Titanic on 15 April 1912. The British newspaper editor William Thomas Stead died in the disaster that he had anticipated in two articles, one published in 1886, the other in 1892. The British writer Morgan Robertson’s 1898 Wreck of the Titan recounts how the largest ocean liner of its day, dubbed “unsinkable”, hits an iceberg in the North Atlantic with the loss of almost all passengers due to a shortage of lifeboats. Robertson’s Titan also sinks in April.
Closer to home, a dystopian satire I wrote in 2017, The Dream of Boris: Deceived Kingdom, set in a fragmented, economically devastated post-Brexit Britain places Prince Harry in the South Pacific where he indulges in kava, the local psychoactive beverage. In October 2018, the Prince visited the South Pacific with Meghan and did exactly that.
So common is the phenomenon of writers accurately predicting the future that it has sparked academic investigation. Taking its name from the Trojan priestess who could foresee the future, the Cassandra Project was initiated at the University of Tübingen in Germany in 2017. Funded by the defence ministry, the initial aim of the Project was to investigate novels and short stories from different countries to find clues to future conflicts. Daunted by the challenge of reading so many works in such a multitude of languages, the academics switched their focus to “literary infrastructure”, that is how the book was received. Was it heaped with awards and state prizes? Was it banned and the author forced into exile? The data was fed into a computer and a conflict risk score developed. Results were impressive. In 2017, the buzz around Algerian dystopian fiction flagged up approaching trouble. Two years later, civil protests broke out in Algiers and several other cities, culminating in the fall of the president. Towards the end of 2019, Azerbaijan donated anti-Armenian books to Georgian libraries. A year later, 6,000 soldiers and civilians were killed in a six-week battle over Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed enclave of Azerbaijan populated by ethnic Armenians.
Due to a government reshuffle and the Covid pandemic, funding was withdrawn from the Cassandra Project in the winter of 2020. During its brief existence the Project excited considerable scepticism, even though it was purely pragmatic and never claimed that writers possessed prophetic powers. Instead, the Project’s instigator, Jürgen Wertheimer, a professor of comparative literature, spoke of great writers’ “sensory talent”, an ability to channel trends, moods, and conflicts and, therefore, act as a conduit for the spirit of the age.
Exploiting the visionary powers of writers is not solely confined to academia. Apple, Google, Ford, Nike, Visa, and government bodies like the French army and NATO, have all enlisted the services of science fiction writers to help them envisage the future for their products, services, and strategies. Jeff Bezos, for example, derived the concept of the Amazon Kindle from Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel The Diamond Age.
What accounts for this apparent ability of writers to conjure the future? The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant conjectured that space and time are modes of consciousness, not attributable to the physical world. Ouspensky, the Russian disciple of Gurdjieff, described time as having several dimensions, one being that of an “eternal now” combining past, present and future. This is very similar to the thought expressed in T.S.Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’:
Time present and time past
Are both present in time future
And time future contained in the past.
A similar idea was developed by the British aeronautical engineer J.W. Dunne in his An Experiment with Time (1927). Now largely forgotten, the book made a great impact in the inter-war years. Dunne argued that the future as well as the past appeared in dreams; a conjecture easily overlooked as their content vanishes almost immediately upon waking. The future we glimpse, however, is not an impersonal one, but one based on our individual experience. He recorded a dream, for instance, in which 4,000 people died in a volcanic eruption. A short while later there was just such a disaster in Martinique. A whole town was destroyed, and its inhabitants perished. Dunne believed his dream was inspired by a headline he had yet to read and was, in fact, based on a misreading as the number printed was 40,000. Later, when more accurate information was available, the true deathrate turned out to be much higher.
Dunne’s ideas influenced J.B. Priestley’s time plays, James Hilton, John Buchan, Agatha Christie and Vladimir Nabakov, and had a profound effect on the Inklings, the group of dons who regularly met at the Eagle pub in Oxford. Dunne’s Serialism pervades the Elvish time in Lorien, different from that in Middle Earth, in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, as well as the abrupt time shifts in C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle. Many writers attest that the zone they enter when writing has much in common with a dream state. Dunne himself came to believe that the future, was also accessible to waking consciousness.
A more empirical explanation can be found in the ideas of the American twentieth-century theoretical physicist David Bohm, who developed the notion of quantum-interconnectedness or nonlocal correlations. Quanta of light sent off in opposite directions maintain their links to one another; each photon is affected by what happens to its twin many miles away, a phenomenon known as non-locality. An illustration of this is the striking similarities demonstrated by identical twins who despite being separated at birth and raised apart, often pursue very similar lives, marriages, and professions – far more so than what could be reasonably attributed to DNA. Bohm argued that, like a hologram, each region of space-time contains information about every other point in space-time, and that this data is accessible. Just as thunder announces a storm or a whirlpool a giant boulder in the river ahead, writers tap into the future, as they do the past.