Easy Travel To Other Worlds

Just received in the post, my contributor's copy of John Joseph Adams' anthology Other Worlds Than These, a collection of tales of travels to and from other histories and alternate realities.  It reprints my story, 'A Brief Guide To Other Histories', which shares the various interconnected histories of my novel Cowboy Angels.  You can find out more about the anthology here, and more about my story in a brief interview, one of seventeen between the editor and contributors.

Meanwhile, the last draft of Evening's Empires (or at least, the last before it's fired off to its editor) moves on, from Tannhauser Gate to a wheel habitat at the outer edge of the Saturn System.

And here's something randomly lovely: a flash choir in New York's Times Square, singing a new composition by Philip Glass (who provided much of the soundtrack for Evening's Empires) in honour of his 75th birthday.

Above Us Only Sky

McLean Fahnestock made 'Grand Finale', a compilation of all 135 shuttle launches, almost a year ago; it was a finalist in the Remix category of the 2012 Vimeo video awards. It's a celebration of the visceral power of rocket technology, but it's also a requiem. Watch right until the end. This is how tragedy enters global awareness: a babbling chorus gradually falling away until only a single voice is left.

Escape Routes

[My story, 'The Choice' won the 2012 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short story.  I couldn't attend the award ceremony in Lawrence, Kansas, but Sheila Williams, the editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, kindly delivered this acceptance speech for me.]

When I was a teenager, living at the edge of a small town in the Cotswolds, England, I was a ferocious reader.  And what I mostly read was science fiction.  I read everything I could find in the public library, and in the library of my school (which possessed, for instance, a complete set of the works of H.G. Wells).  And I spent a significant fraction of my pocket money on paperbacks, new and old.  I hunted down caches of SF paperbacks in the backs of bookshops, on spinners in newsagent shops, in church sales.  And every week I scoured the trays of cheap, imported paperbacks and magazines that the local Woolworths set out on one of its counters.

I still have a few of those Woolworths books.  John Jakes’ The Asylum World.  Clifford Simak’s All The Traps of Earth.  And Theodore Sturgeon’s A Way Home, a Pyramid paperback edition of a short-story collection first published in the year that I was born, 1955, reprinted several times over the next decade.

The edition I have is the fourth printing, with the historically significant date July 1969.  I suppose I bought it a year or two later.  When I was 15, or 16.  In 1970, or 1971.  I’d read a lot of science fiction by then.  I was, by then, deep into the New Wave - Michael Moorcock and Joanna Russ, Tom Disch and Samuel R Delany, Keith Roberts and M John Harrison.  But I knew and loved Sturgeon’s work, and knew he was one of the authors on whose shoulders the New Wave guys were standing.  And one of those stories in the collection, the title story, spoke to me in the way that short stories can sometimes speak to us.  I felt a jolt of recognition, as I read it.  A thump in the secret chambers of my heart.

It wasn’t just that the protagonist was a young kid named Paul, although I was still young enough for that to seem significant.  And it wasn’t just that Paul, Paul Roundenbush, lived in a small town - in the Midwest, yes, and smaller and sleepier than my home town, but still. No, what really spoke to me was that, like me, Paul wanted to escape.

The story opens like this:
‘When Paul ran away from home, he met no one and saw nothing all the way to the highway.’

I wanted to leave home, too.  I was 15, or maybe 16.  Old enough to realise how small my home town was, to have some idea of the world beyond it.  Like Paul Roundenbush I was a smart, strange, dreamy kid.  A loner.  And like a lot of smart, dreamy, lonely kids who feel out of place in the place they grew up in, I read a lot of science fiction.  I’m sure that some of you feel a little jolt of recognition at this point.

In ‘A Way Home’, Paul, Paul Roundenbush, meets, or rather dreams of meeting, three possible future selves.  They’re exactly the kind of men a lonely kid eager to escape his small town would dream of becoming.  A millionaire with a glamourous wife and an expensive car and a glove box full of chocolate-covered cherries.  A hobo who lives outside the law and has travelled the whole wide world.  And an air ace exactly like a hero from a pulp story.

I never ran away, and neither does Paul Roundenbush, in the end, but with typically tender precision Sturgeon exactly nails the longing, the oceanic transcendental longing, of wanting to be somewhere else that almost all kids feel, at some point.  That I felt, very strongly, then, in 1970 or 1971, in that small Cotswolds town, when I found the Pyramid paperback edition of A Way Home in the Woolworths tray, under a slew of Spicy Detective Story magazines and remaindered hardbacks.

Is it really science fiction, ‘A Way Home’?  It was first published in a science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, and Sturgeon was best known as a science-fiction writer.  But because almost everything happens in Paul’s imagination, because its movement is small and close and personal, it reads as a straight literary story.  Maybe it bounced from Colliers before finding a home in Amazing.  Or from the Saturday Evening Post.  But its theme is the theme of many science fiction stories.  A yearning to move out, always further out.  To become more than you are.  And also the flipside of that yearning: the return home after long voyages to strange harbours, and knowing yourself, and where you came from, for the first time.  As in Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, for instance.  Or James Blish’s short story ‘Watershed’. And many others.

I’ve published eighteen novels and more than eighty stories, and I know that it’s a theme that I’ve returned to over and again.  It is, definitely, the theme of ‘The Choice’.  Its young protagonist, Lucas, doesn’t want to leave home, does all he can to stay, until circumstances force him to make a hard decision.  But I think that it shares, absolutely, the same concerns, the same movements of the human heart, as ‘A Way Home’.

And for that reason, beyond all the usual reasons, I’m amazingly proud and happy that ‘The Choice’ has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.  I would like to thank Sheila Williams and Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine for publishing it, and the award’s judges for choosing it.  And most of all I would like to thank Theodore Sturgeon, for his stories, for showing me how.

Militarisation

Occasionally, one of my short stories is reprinted in an anthology.  Here are the the latest two, both with a common theme.  War & Space: Recent Combat, which reprints 'Rats of the System'.  And SF Wars, which reprints 'Winning Peace'.

Oh, that perennial topic of SF, war.  War as a condition of being human.  Or of being intelligent.  War as a plot device - a quick and dirty way of putting everything to hazard.  Wars asserting human territoriality in a universe that frankly doesn't care - turning the entire solar system, or the entire galaxy, into a battlefield (now there's hubris).  Wars fought on the assumption that western capitalism is the best and only model for civilisation that we have.  Wars refighting Vietnam on bug planets.  The twentieth century stamping its combat boot into the face of humanity, forever.  It's heartening that a fair few of the stories in these collections argue against these assumptions, or don't take them at face value.

 I seem to have been writing a fair bit about war, recently.  Or rather, about failed attempts to avoid war, and about the aftermath of war.  Readers of The Quiet War, Gardens of the Sun and In The Mouth of the Whale will know that I'm not especially interested in generals and admirals, and the tactics of epic space battles.  'Rats of the System' is a quick little story about two mismatched people trying to escape an implacable pursuer; 'Winning Peace' is about two former enemies finding a common cause.  And right now, I'm finishing a novel in a post-war, posthuman future without a space battle or space marine in sight.  Heading out of the world-city Ophir to the semiautonomous free zone of Tannhauser Gate.

Local Colour

I've reached that stage, in the final push to finish Evening's Empires, where in addition to cutting cutting cutting I have to keep going into the office to jot down sentences that have to be inserted somewhere:

Most of her family were traders from Ceres and most of them were still there, she said, selling biologics to each other.  'My mother brought back dogs.  Do you know dogs?'

Caviar

I'm very pleased to announce that my story, 'The Choice', has won the 2012 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.  Congratulations to Charlie Jane Anders, and to Ken Liu, whose stories 'Six Days, Three Months', and 'The Paper Menagerie', won second and third place.  The winners are selected each year by a jury of experts, from stories nominated by a wide range of reviewers, serious readers, and editors.  I'm thrilled that they've chosen my story this year.

I won't be able to go to the award ceremony, over in Lawrence, Kansas, but Sheila Williams, the editor of Asimov's, which published 'The Choice', will accept on my behalf.  I've been to Lawrence once before, way back in the twentieth century, when Fairyland won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.  It's a pretty intense experience.  As well as the award ceremony, there's a short-story workshop, panels, and a visit to the University of Kansas's huge science-fiction library (enlarged since my visit by, amongst other things, Sturgeon's manuscripts and books).  Fred Pohl, who's a jury member, and his wife, Betty Anne Hull, gave me a lift back to the airport.  As we drove through endless fields of Kansas corn, I got Fred to sing a verse of 'Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin'' - you know, the one about corn being as high as an elephant's eye.  Science fiction takes you to places stranger than you can imagine.

If you're interested, you can read part of 'The Choice' for free, here.  It's available in various Best SF collections, too, and will be including in an upcoming audio-book anthology.

Decaying To Mere Fact

Where do writers get their short-story ideas?  Seven years ago I was a speaker on a panel about the future, at an event organised by the Royal Society and the ICA.  You know: science and the arts.  One of the topics we kicked around was the synthesis of meat using some kind of nanotech device that would be as cheap and easy to use as a microwave.  Synthetic meat is hardly a new idea, in science fiction.  Vat-grown chicken helps to feed the overpopulated world of Fredrik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, published in 1953, for instance.  But there's an old rule of thumb that you can generate stories by thinking about who might be hurt or threatened by new technology, and when I was heading home after the event, walking past the bouncers outside a throbbing nightclub, it struck me that if celebrity stalkers found a use for cheap meat makers, then celebrities might need to take elaborate countermeasures.

I turned this notion into a short story that was published in Nature.  You can read it here.  Seven years later, a couple of things I stumbled across in the same week suggest that the future, or what I like to call the consensual present, has caught up with that little story.  First, there's the news that Madonna employs a sterilisation team, because she's worried about fans getting hold of her DNA.  And in an article on the manufacture of artificial meat, there's the following exchange between the author and a scientist:

"Could you make fake panda?"
"Sure."
"What about human?"
"Don't go there."

As far as I'm concerned, Madonna isn't paranoid, but prescient.

Shortly Appearing

This Wednesday, I'm the guest at the monthly meeting of the British Science Fiction Association, where I'll be interviewed by award-winning critic Paul Kincaid.  It's free, starts at 7.00 pm, and takes place in the Cellar Bar of the Melton Mowbray pub, 18 Holborn, London.  There'll be a raffle, apparently; I'll bring some of my books, for prizes.  More details, and a map, here.

Show Time

I'm not a huge fan of that commonplace tyranny of the writing manual, 'show don't tell.'  Avoid exposition and other forms of authorial narrative.  View scenes only through the camera of close third person.  Don't tell the reader that a character is brave, or foolhardy, or tired: show the character performing some action that illustrates the point.  Always dramatize.

Novels aren't movies, which unless they resort to clunky exposition in dialogue, are more or less all show.  But novels can use allusion and metaphor, condense time and action, generalise, describe internal psychological states.  And too often, in a novel, showing takes longer than telling.  'She was afraid' is better than 'She clasped her hands tightly together to stop them shaking.'  Neither are especially satisfactory, but at least the first is short and to the point.  (Of course, evoking the psychological state without resorting to physical symptoms is better still.)  Which isn't to say that there's anything wrong with dramatisation, or the vivid illustrative action.  A narrative that explains everything leaves no room for the reader; it would be as tedious as a story in which every action is described, moment by moment.  And it's important to keep the character in focus, to see and feel a scene through her eyes, her reactions.

Something I'm reminding myself page by page, paragraph by paragraph, as I press on with the final draft of Evening's Empires.  Here, for instance, is a pretty bad bit of tell not show:

Tamonash Pilot, Hari’s uncle, his father’s younger brother, was about the same age now as Aakash had been when he’d passed over.  A stocky old man with a hawkish profile and bristling white eyebrows, dressed in simple black coveralls, so closely resembling Aakash that it was a shock to see him waiting in the bustle and flow of the elevator terminal.

There are all kinds of things wrong with this, but what's especially wrong is that I'm not only telling myself what's happening, using information the protagonist doesn't yet know, but I'm telling it back to front. My first drafts are, shamefully, littered with place-holders like this.  This is closer to a final version:

When he followed Bo out of the booming elevator from the docks, Hari saw his father standing in the bustle and flow of the dispersing passengers.  A stocky old man with the familiar hawkish profile and bristling white eyebrows, but clean-shaven, dressed in black coveralls.  Smiling now, holding out his hands, saying, ‘Gajananvihari!  Nephew!  How good it is to meet you at last!  I am Tamonash.  Welcome to Down Town.  Welcome to Ophir.’

Followed by a chunk of exposition that gets past the whole awkward and overly-familiar getting-to-know-you scene as quickly as possible.  I guess the main rule is, whatever works.

Travellers' Tales

I've just sold a story to editor Jonathan Strahan's Edge of Infinity, an anthology of tales set in various versions of a settled, industrialised Solar System.  Mine, 'Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler's Green, The Potter's Field' shares the setting of the Quiet War future history: a trio of tall stories framed by a journey from Egypt to Saturn's moon Dione, made by a woman invited to memorialise her dead father.  Not quite the last Quiet War fiction.  This week I've been on Vesta and its artificial moon; next week I'll be in the world city, Ophir, as I slowly fine-tune the last draft of Evening's Empires.  Another traveller's tale.  Science fiction is a literature of the restless and displaced.

Just Not Evenly Distributed

From an interview with Edward Burtynsky:

Manaugh: ... From the point of view of a photographer, then, it might seem equally interesting that there are now all sorts of new types of photographic systems on the rise -- quadcopter-mounted 3D scanners, drones, and even smart ammunition equipped with cameras that can loiter in an area taking aerial photographs. Simply on a technical level, I'm curious about where you see the future of photography going. Do you see a time when you're not going to be riding in a helicopter over Los Angeles but, instead, piloting a little drone that's flying around up there and taking photographs for you?

Burtynsky: I'm already doing it.

Twilley: You have a drone?

Burtynsky: Yeah.

Cover Art - Five Novelisations

We Are The Dead

The problem with adapting novels for film is usually what to leave out.  At first sight, David Cronenberg's solution for his adaptation of Don DeLillo's short novel Cosmopolis is to leave everything in.  And that's part of the problem; but the other part is the small yet crucial detail that Cronenberg does omit.

Before you read any further, by the way, there are spoilers ahead.  Massive, unavoidable SPOILERS.
 
In both novel and film, young hotshot billionaire Eric Packer decides to get a haircut, starting an odyssey across New York's grid, which, jammed by the motorcade of the US President, the funeral cortege of a Muslim rapper, and an anti-capitalist protest that culminates in a riot in Times Square, increasingly resembles the Hunger City of David Bowie's 'Diamond Dogs'.  Packer observes this human chaos from the coffin of his cork-lined (prousted), fully-equipped limousine, where he tracks his attempt to buy as much of the world's supply of yuan (yen, in the novel) as possible and receives visits from various experts who work for him, and an intimate medical examination.  Excursions include sexual dalliances with his art dealer and one of his bodyguards, a visit to a rave, and several encounters with his new, independently-wealthy wife.  Meanwhile, his currency speculation goes monstrously awry, and it becomes clear that someone wants to kill him.

Robert Patterson, formerly the world's most famous vampire, imbues Packer with a glacial, otherworldly glamour that reminded me more than a little of David Bowie's stranded alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth.  Another person trapped in the consequences of their meddling with the controls of the capitalist world-machine.  He spends most of the first half of the film wearing sunglasses, but even without them his gaze is inscrutable, barely human.  He's the epitome of capitalism, a maths whiz who made his money in the dot-com boom and parlayed it into a stratospheric fortune by playing the money markets with strategies most can't follow.  The kind of omnicompetent hero usually found in science-fiction novels, armoured by his wealth against the consequences of his manipulations, issuing demands to minions to purchase whatever catches his eye (he has already bought a Russian nuclear bomber; he wants to buy the Rothko chapel and install it in his apartment; there's room, apparently, next to the shooting range).  For much of the film, Packer and the camera are locked together inside the limousine while the New York streets flow past like glimpses of an alien planet on a spaceship's viewscreens.  In one of the best scenes, Packer and his theorist (played by Samantha Morton with just the right touch of steely eccentricity; all of the actors give fine performances) exchange quips and observations while waves of rioters break against the limo, but fail to do little more than cover it in graffiti scribble and tilt the level of the cocktail in Packer's glass.

Those quips and observations . . .  They're lifted straight from the pages of the novel, but they don't really work, as film dialogue.  Like Harold Pinter, DeLillo's dialogue puts its own spin on the repetition and circling flow of 'realistic' dialogue.  But while Pinter's dialogue, on the stage, is like a flurry of punches, DeLillo's, on the screen, is more like a kind of intellectual ping-pong.  The characters are far smarter than us, but the things they say aren't the things that people far smarter than us would say.  In the novel, this works, sort of, as a kind of parody of Packer's isolation from the actual world detachment.  It's all very postmodern, irony ironising itself with a knowing wink.  In the film, despite the best attempts by the actors to give it life, it often doesn't connect.  The characters don't connect with each other; the audience doesn't connect with the characters.  Its abiding flaw isn't pretentiousness, exactly; I admire Cronenberg's audacity in trying to portray the mindset of someone who has lost contact with the ordinary world and is, maybe, trying to find his way back in.  No, it's that Cronenberg doesn't make us care about the characters, or what's happening to them.  When Packer throws himself against the slopes of the man-mountain who gives him the news of the rapper's death, we don't believe his grief.  When his wife tells him she wants a divorce, we wonder how she managed to stick it out for so long.

And when Packer finally gets to the quaint old neighbourhood barbershop where he used to get his hair cut as a kid, while his driver and the barber bond over shared experiences driving cabs in NYC, Packer remains aloof.  Okay, the scene which satisfies his child-like concern about where limousines go, at night, is touching, but this delicacy is shattered by a botched volley from his would-be killer, a lead-in to the last twenty minutes, trapped now in a derelict room piled with dead cathode-ray monitors and other kibble rather than a high-spec limo and its icy blue touch-screens, while Packer and his murderer (Paul Giamatti, hooded with a ratty towel like a hobo monk) interrogate each others' motives, and the film finally gains a dimension of suspense.

And here's the thing that Cronenberg elided.  Not Packer's motive for destroying everything he's created, but his state of mind, at the end.  Or rather, his state of grace.  In the novel, in the first pages of the novel, we're told that Packer can't sleep.  That sleep eludes him.  'Sleep failed him more often now, not once or twice a week but four times, five.'  When he reaches that barbershop, in the novel, he not only touches base with who he once was, but he finds a place of safety.  A place where he can, and briefly does, sleep.  And after he wakes, when he's riding in the limousine again, he finds a film-shoot where several hundred naked people, in the style of Spencer Tunick, imitate the victims of some atrocity.  And he joins them, and finds his wife, and, it's made clear, in the novel, also finds himself.  In the film, his willed self-destruction is an extension of his megalomania.  In the novel, it becomes something else, something more like human life, rounded with a sleep.

Dead Futures

We're remaking the future all the time, here in the present.  As you grow older, you begin to lose track of the number of times you've seen what seemed like a solid, unchangeable, unchallengeable future murdered by what we later call history. I can think of at least four or five major hinge points in my lifetime, but I'm sure that many more, large and small, have flipped our timeline in unexpected directions.

Kennedy's assassination was the first big global news event I remember (sitting in front of the fire on a damp Saturday evening in November, hearing the BBC radio news report, aged 8, while my mother was ironing the weekly wash (here's a later TV bulletin on the same day)), but a couple of years before that Kennedy and Khrushchev had narrowly avoided a global nuclear war during the Cuba crisis and a future grimmer by far than any we've lived through.

The Apollo 11 moon landing killed every future with easy travel to other planets stone dead. As soon as Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar dust, the political point of the enterprise had been made.  Half a dozen missions followed, more or less because the hardware was in place, but that was it for manned space travel beyond Low Earth Orbit in the Twentieth Century. No wheel space station, no mission to Mars or beyond, none of the cool stuff in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Twenty years later, Germans were standing on top of the Berlin Wall, the beginning of the domino collapse of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War and hundreds of fictional futures in which the US and Russia were locked in perpetual struggle.  And on 9/11 in the real 2001, the future was changed again, and we're still dealing with the effects.  Maybe the Arab Spring will be another game changer; as Zhou Enlai is supposed to have said when asked about the changes caused by the French Revolution, it's too soon to say.

Apollo 11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 9/11 were all enacted live, on television, which is how we get our history these days.  That, and Twitter and other social platforms.  'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe,' Roy Batty says, at the beginning of his soliloquy in Bladerunner. So have we all, Roy, without leaving our homes. That's a game-changer, too.

And these days everything in the world is connected to everything else.  You're a mouse click away from Armstrong's first footstep, or Times Square (as I type this, in London, it's raining, in Times Square). Less than two years after the fall of the Soviet Empire, a couple of hundred kilometres to the north of the Berlin Wall [EDIT, actually about five hundred kilometres southwest], in CERN, Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee set up the first web site.  The World Wide Web rendered thousands of fictional futures redundant, but created thousands more.  And that's the thing, if you're a science fiction writer.  Every future you create will be undermined by history sooner or later.  Usually sooner.  But science fiction isn't  - or shouldn't be - in the prophesy game.  It can be about realistic futures, but it isn't especially into realism.  It can parody present trends or inflate them into widescreen phantasies; it can contrast human stories with the pitiless scale of the universe. Most of all, it can tell us in as many ways as possible that the future will be different, wilder and stranger than we can imagine.

Update

So I've finished writing a couple of short stories, and the first draft of something for a secret project I'm not allowed to tell you about, quite yet. And now it's back to the novel, and the final pass before I send it off to my agent and my editor; this is the draft where every sentence is interrogated and everything that doesn't carry weight is cut, otherwise known as the slaughter of the darlings.

Meanwhile, you can find a new short story of mine, 'The Man', in the second issue of Arc Magazine, and another story, 'Antarctica Starts Here', is scheduled for publication in, I think, the October/November issue of Asimov's SF. And I've contributed a chapter to the mosaic novel Zombie Apocalypse. Fightback!, due out in December.

This Saturday (the 9th), I'll be travelling to Cardiff to take part in the British Humanist Association's annual conference, where I'll be talking with Professor Gregory Claeys about the future. And later in the month, on Wednesday 27th, I'll be interviewed at the monthly meeting of the British Science Fiction Association, in the Cellar Bar of The Melton Mowbray Public House. 18 Holborn, London (map here). Entry is free, and non-members are welcome.

One Of Those Days In England With The Country Goin' Broke

Only Forward (redux)

The terror of the blank page, of wondering what comes after the next paragraph, the next sentence, is eliminated by writing something down. Even if it's the wrong sentence, the wrong paragraph. The trick is to keep moving. To get to the end of the first draft without looking back. All the bad stuff can be fixed, or eliminated. It isn't a waste of time. It contrasts with the good stuff - the stuff you got right. It shows you where you made all the easy and obvious decisions. If you finish a first draft and can't find much to cut, you're usually in trouble.

Some writers plan everything out. They know where they are going. They write a chapter, and the next, and the next, and at the end they more or less have the book they expected to get. I start with notes about characters and settings, not much else. A few high points. Some key scenes. The rough shape of the thing. The place where it begins; the place where it ends. I write to discover what it is I'm writing. I write to surprise myself. It can be wasteful. It can involve false starts and dead ends. But sometimes you only find the right direction after trying all the others first.

Please Stand By

Under The Paving Stones, The Forest

 

"Hawthorn bushes sprang up among them, and, protected by the briars and thorns from grazing animals, the suckers of elm-trees rose and flourished. Sapling ashes, oaks, sycamores, and horse-chestnuts, lifted their heads. Of old time the cattle would have eaten off the seed leaves with the grass so soon as they were out of the ground, but now most of the acorns that were dropped by birds, and the keys that were wafted by the wind, twirling as they floated, took root and grew into trees. By this time the brambles and briars had choked up and blocked the former roads, which were as impassable as the fields."

 

"No fields, indeed, remained, for where the ground was dry, the thorns, briars, brambles, and saplings already mentioned filled the space, and these thickets and the young trees had converted most part of the country into an immense forest. Where the ground was naturally moist, and the drains had become choked with willow roots, which, when confined in tubes, grow into a mass like the brush of a fox, sedges and flags and rushes covered it. Thorn bushes were there, too, but not so tall; they were hung with lichen. Besides the flags and reeds, vast quantities of the tallest cow-parsnips or "gicks" rose five or six feet high, and the willow herb with its stout stem, almost as woody as a shrub, filled every approach."

 "By the thirtieth year there was not one single open place, the hills only excepted, where a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of wild creatures or cut himself a path. The ditches, of course, had long since become full of leaves and dead branches, so that the water which should have run off down them stagnated, and presently spread out into the hollow places and by the corner of what had once been fields, forming marshes where the horsetails, flags, and sedges hid the water."

Richard Jeffries, After London

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