The Front Page - Scriptorium Writing Competition Interview: Alwyn asks Copperknickers II about Thus Spoke the Shark Men

Scriptorium Writing Competition 2015 Interview:
Alwyn asks Copperknickers II about Thus Spoke the Shark Men

Thus Spoke the Shark-Men won the Gold Medallion in the 2015 Scriptorium Writing Competition. If you would like to read the story before the interview, just click on the content box below. Underneath that, you will find the interview.

Thus Spoke the Shark-Men

The tall man with the shaved head strode onto the spotlit stage, greeted by vigorous applause, and he smiled up at the audience. It was a sincere smile, although it revealed teeth yellowed by too many cigars. His eyes were grey and intelligent, and he held himself with a swaggering confidence, but he spoke to the eager audience members in a soft and somewhat cracking voice, as if it were the first time he had spoken in days. His brother, sitting in the front row, rolled his eyes, as he noted the childlike excitement in his elder sibling’s face at being the centre of attention. It had been a long time since anyone had looked at either of them with so much admiration. He groaned inwardly, but listened to his brother speak:

“In the past, the night sky was viewed as a painting, a backdrop. But now, in the year 3015, the night sky is no longer a painting. It is an open air vista of the local neighbourhood. Near-speed of light velocity travel (a product of superefficient constant acceleration technology) has allowed people to reach many of the closer star systems, up to around 50 lightyears away. My brother and I were the first people to reach Proxima Centauri, our closest star, four lightyears distant. But even now, so many years later, we have barely begun to explore our part of the Milky Way, let alone the wider universe.

Anyone living on a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri would, theoretically, be able to see earth’s sun, and (with a sufficiently advanced telescope) earth itself, but they would be literally looking into the past, seeing it as it was four years before. The stars visible from earth with the naked eye are anything up to 2500 lightyears away: this means that we see them in 3015 as they were when the Roman Empire was falling, and Mohammedan armies were sweeping across the Middle East, or when Genghis Khan razed Samarkand to the ground. Without telescopes, we can only see a small proportion of the stars in the Milky Way, and none at all outside it.”

And so the man went on with his lecture, and at the end was greeted with applause. But the real reason everyone was there was not to hear a talk about their part in the history of space exploration. It was to hear about the men’s latest mission. But they were to be dissapointed. The brothers left swiftly, and, dodging reporters and news cameras outside, returned home, leaving the questions of a hundred people unanswered.

The two men, Mads and Kamy, were twins, brought up in the small village of London, England. It had only 10 million inhabitants, and so the two had grown up in a near constant state of small town boredom, and since a young age had longed to travel, to see the solar system. They had never even been to Neptune until the age of 18, when their uncle, who ran a small hydroponics farm on the moon, had paid for the three-day journey as a birthday present. This uncle later committed suicide by stealing a small Toyota space-Corolla and careering into the sun.

In earth years the men were now over 50 years old, although due to relativity, their frequent long-distance journeys meant that their bodies had not aged according to earth time: they had the bodies of vigorous young men of around 35. They were very close to each other, and lived in neighbouring mansions on the moon. They had no wives, due to their long absences, though they generally managed to acquire some gorgeous model or other on the rare occasions they returned to earth. But even so, they were past their prime, and despite their celebrity status, the money in interstellar exploration was poor: it was mostly the preserve of introverted scientists, or cult religions looking to find some out-of-the-way dwarf planet so they could practice rituals that they didn’t want the rest of the universe to know about.

But Mads and Kamy, experienced veterans of interstellar travel, had now decided to volunteer for a mission of no return. A wormhole had been discovered that was likely to allow travel to star systems beyond the farthest reaches of what had been ventured before, millions of lightyears from earth, systems where an observer might see our sun as it was in the age of the dinosaurs. There was no way of knowing what was on the other side.

And so, the time had come for a mission to end all missions. A mission which would transform the two men from B-list has-beens doomed to oblivion, into mythical heroes. There had been a major press conference the year before announcing the discovery of the wormhole, but nobody had yet stepped forward as volunteers to leap into the unknown. Mads and Kamy however were disillusioned with the universe, and they disliked their hedonistic lives, discovering like so many others that long months spent alone in a spacecraft hurtling through a pitch-dark vacuum is not a great asset to one’s emotional health or social skills. The two men indeed were borderline insane, not to say suicidal. They knew, despite the optimistic purring of the scientists who praised their bravery, that this would be a one-way trip.

Besides, as the last few centuries had proven, the scientists were always wrong. Hilariously wrong. They had assured the public on several occasions that alien life was on the cusp of being discovered in some exciting goldilocks planet in the vicinity of the Sagittarius sector, but it never was. Mads’ favourite story was a colony of ‘space worms’ picked up by a probe on Europa, that on closer inspection turned out to be condoms left over from a Mars University frat hazing. It was a testimony to his loathing for scientists that a somewhat tasteless Youtube video edit of the 2998 C.E. Haley’s comet tragedy was prone to make Kamy laugh continuously for a whole hour on the more lonely stretches of interplanetary travel.

And so the two maladjusted young men arrived in Kazakhstan to a polite welcome from a large but rather sedate crowd, considering the occasion. The spacecraft was a huge, whiteish-silver monster, like a fighter jet on steroids, faster than anything ever built before. A brief religious service was held: Christianity was now largely extinct, but nobody seemed to know what else would be appropriate for the sending off of the two men into the void. A priest from an obscure protestant denomination was procured, and it was he who, handing them a bible for their journey, recited, in a strong Glaswegian accent, the final reading before their launch, from the book of Revelation:
‘And saw I then a new sky, and a new earth, for the old world had
Passed away, and there was no more sea.’

Part 2
Mads and Kamy, having journied for five years in earth time, approached the wormhole, and commenced preparations for entry. The outer shell of the spacecraft fell away as they drew near, leaving only a spherical graphene capsule. The hole itself was invisible, but it was marked on the digital interface which was spread over the cockpit view, and it distorted the light from the stars around it, so that their flickering twinkles were twisted into unnatural shapes, strings which seemed to converge and merge with one another, disappearing into nothingness. The men’s faces bore identical steely, but oddly content expressions, although one might have detected also in their eyes a glimmer of a primeval anxiety that must have belonged to Yuri Gagarin when he broke through the clouds, and saw the blue sky ‘gradually darken, become turquiose, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black.’

The pair passed through the portal, and immediately the ship began to shake and heave, first slowly, then violently, sliding into huge arcs, moving from side to side as if seized by the hand of God, then it span like a ship in a whirlpool, and after what seemed like an eternity, it suddenly slammed hard as if into a brick wall, and there was a noise like the howling of a thousand wolves. Then all was quiet, and the ship moved forward, slowly, as if it were in a sea of syrup or treacle. But it was stable and undamaged. The men were blinded, or so it seemed, but they realised soon that there was a bright light dazzling them. Eventually, it faded, and the two sat in silence for several seconds. They had entered the wormhole, and were unharmed. But in front of the capsule they saw nothing but a great wall of blue.

It stretched out in front of them in all directions, and seemed scarcely to end. It was not a uniform view, but one traversed by white lines and patches: it was a planet, covered in a vast ocean. There was no hesitation: Kamy opened the throttle and headed straight forwards. After a while, the waves and currents became visible, and not long afterwards the black sky above lightened into a brilliant blue as well. But the blue of the sky and the blue of the ocean were very different: the one a smooth pale cloudless expanse, the other a terrifying dark swell. It was not a stormy day, but still the planet was clearly larger than earth by several orders of magnitude, and thus the waves were as tall as skyscrapers. The spacecraft was tough, built to traverse a wormhole and supply the brothers with food and oxygen for years of interstellar travel, but nevertheless the wall of water caught them like a hand swatting a mosquito and plunged them into a watery world that amazed the two men.

After some hours Mads said to Kamy: “What do we do now? Explore? There is nothing here but water.” It was the first words either of them had spoken in several days. Kamy frowned and dived deeper into the abyss. Suddenly a huge shadow appeared below them, which as they moved closer materialised into a long thread the thickness of an oak-tree log and the length of a whale. It had no head or tail, and was made of a strange gelatinous material, a transparent membrane containing what appeared to be a large fluid filled sac. Its structure was not dissimilar to that of an amoeba.

“

,” said Mads, “if that’s an amoeba then what are the fish here like?” Kamy cooly replied that drawing such a crude comparison between life on earth and that of an alien planet was pointless, and that anyhow if simple lifeforms could grow so big it probably meant there was no complex life around to feed on them. This theory was promptly proven the worst prediction in the history of biology, as a blade-like tentacle sliced the ameoba apart, narrowly missing their spacecraft, and then spiralled upward, as a huge animal the size of a jumbo jet swam down from above and consumed its prey, cutting it up into manageable chunks and then absorbing them into a vast mouth that took up most of its side. There was no sign of any eyes or legs, and so it seemed not to notice the spacecraft, but simply floated, digesting its meal. All in all it resembled a monstrous cylindrical clam or a headless cuttlefish.

Kamy dove down deeper into the sea, fearful of more slicing tentacles, and it dawned on them both that they had come to a place where humans were like salmon fry hatching into a spawning ground where only 1% would escape the dozens of predators fighting each other for an easy meal. The two men careered through the deep, for the first time nervous. They knew it was only a matter of time until they ran into another monster. Shadows lurked beyond them, above them, beneath them, and they were tormented for many hours by unseen terrors. Every time they allowed themselves a flippant comment or a moment of calm, another amoeba appeared, not all identical to the first, and as they got deeper they came across many types, flashing blue, orange and green with bioluminescence, unlike anything on Earth.

Soon, inevitably, one of the shadows rose up and showed itself. It was a leviathan, shaped like a tangle of seaweed, but each strand was covered in mouths, circular openings rimmed by dozens of luminous curved teeth. Each tooth was the size of a house. Even as the men watched, the beast rose above them and soared over them like a bank of storm clouds, to meet another monster, even larger, so large that the men could not easily make out its true shape. It was covered in what seemed to be rows of blinking eyes. Kamy took the ship down even deeper, and deeper still, until all was pitch dark except for the occasional flash of an amoeba.

And then, with a thunderous crash, something siezed the craft and began to smash it off a hard surface like an otter trying to break open a shellfish. Warning alarms began to sound as the exterior of the craft buckled with the blows, though it did not break. Eventually, after what seemed like hours, the thing stopped, and swam ahead of them. It was the worst thing either of them had ever seen: smaller than the previous titans, but shaped not dissimilar to a human, albeit with razor-sharp fins instead of hands, and a head like that of a shark, with one wrap-around eye. It turned and gave them a malevolant look, as if it were calculating a better way of extracting them from their shell. The oxygen generator had failed, and in their panicked state the men quickly began to gasp for air. The last thing Mads saw was the horrible faces of three more of the shark-men, who joined their comrade and slowly advanced on the ship. He then passed out. The original sharkman seemed to gesture to Kamy, and in his oxygen-starved state it seemed infinitely more horrible. It drew up in front of the cockpit view and smiled, baring a set of spiralling green teeth. Then it began to talk:

“What are you! You are not of this world, you cannot survive. Go home.
On your planet you worship gods, but look at their pictures: they are only men. You have seen that there are things here larger and more terrifying than any of your gods. Your gods are not gods. They are merely storytellers. One of them travelled here long ago, and saw things that shocked him to the core. And because he was shocked, he thought that we were a sign, a warning, infernal symbols of death and the hereafter. But we are but prey for monsters.

Why dost though need heaven when here in your real universe there are infinite things that you cannot imagine? Your gods are false gods, deceivers. They have seen beasts with seven heads and ten horns, and upon their horns ten crowns, and upon their foreheads the name of blasphemy. But blasphemy is nothing more than censorship. The tricksters terrify you into serving them with stories of mighty beasts, but even the tricksters cannot imagine the truth, that even sharkmen are plankton for moonwhales, and our planet is a quark in the molecule of our galaxy, and our universe is an amoeba in the ocean of chaos.

But go home now, for this one glimpse of the truth will redefine your whole species. One little spaceship will wipe away millenia of charlatanry and human-centric stupidity. For now you have seen the bottomless pit, now you have witnessed the dark abyss. Repent your sins, such as they are, and go home to Babylon. Tell those you find there that you have seen the sea of blood, and that you bring news of mysteries, of abominations, and of sharkmen. Go now.”

Somehow, Kamy managed to direct the ship upwards, out of the ocean. He flew for many days, not venturing out of the oxygen rich atmosphere of the alien planet, and soon found a small island. He did not linger there, swiftly fixing the ship as best he could and jetting off back through the wormhole. The food generator was faulty and he knew it would barely last the journey to a habitable planet. The cameras on the ship had captured everything, but he did not dare watch the recording, and simply read the Bible to himself, aloud, without thinking or even processing the words.

Part 3
A battered, discoloured orb crash-landed much later in a mining settlement on a large exoplanet orbiting Alpha Scorpii. The planet was terraformed, and so the man found alone by two young women was breathing, albeit in quick, shallow breaths. He said nothing, until they carried him back to their house on a rocky hill bathed in the supergiant sun’s cool red glare, and laid him on a clean bed to rest. After a while his eyes opened and his breathing slowed. He looked at the two women, and his tired eyes gazed on them with pity. He was holding the Bible to his chest, and hugged it tightly. He was close to death, but he found the strength to utter one final verse from the book he had been reading for the last 10 years:

“Rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them, and woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea: for the devil is come down unto you.”

Congratulations on winning the Gold Medallion in the 2015 Summer Writing Competition! The theme was science-fiction. Would you like to mention some of your favourite science-fiction authors or books? Have any of your favourites influenced your writing – if so, would you like to say something about those influences?

I like science-fiction and always have done. In school, we used to study all the standard works of English literature: Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, etc. If I'm honest, I didn't usually find that kind of thing very interesting. So when we occasionally studied authors like George Orwell or John Wyndham, it felt like a break from the usual fare, and I enjoyed it. 1984 and Wyndham's 'the Chrysalids' were some of the first sci-fi classics I read, both texts on the school curriculum. I then read Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, as well as 'a Clockwork Orange'.

More recently I've read some lesser known sci-fi books, such as 'Under the Skin' by Michel Faber (a book about aliens landing in the highlands of Scotland, recently made into a very successful art-house film starring Scarlett Johansson. It brought the entire city of Glasgow to a halt when we heard that an A-list celebrity was coming to film here for 2 days. In fact Glasgow has been making various appearances in sci-fi films recently, Brad Pitt came here to film some scenes in World War Z. I applied to play a zombie in the latter since they were looking for local extras, but I couldn't make the filming day... anyway I digress: on the whole, I wouldn't call sci-fi my 'favourite' genre, I tend to prefer fantasy, adventure/travel stories, and especially anything with a supernatural theme.

But nevertheless, I have a big affinity for sci-fi, for two reasons: I come from a scientific family background, so I've always had a strong interest in science, technology etc. And also, as it happens, I am distantly related to Aldous Huxley, my great-grandmother was his second cousin and met him a couple of times. So I suppose I have to choose Brave New World as my 'favourite' sci-fi work out of loyalty, although I've never actually read any of his other works. :S I threw some references to Brave New World into Shark-Men, but oddly, I think one of the influences, at least for the setting in the first part of the story, was actually Futurama, which is my favourite sci-fi TV show. It's quite good for distilling a lot of the sci-fi tropes from Star Trek, Star Wars, Red Dwarf etc into an easily digestible cartoon form, as well as being incredibly cleverly written.

Right from the start, you present a clear image of your main characters, the brothers Mads and Kamy. How did you go about creating these characters – did you write more of their background than you included in this story?

To explain that, I have to give a brief explanation of how I came to write Shark-Men in the first place. The germ of the idea for the story goes back a long time, to a schoolday in my childhood. I had been watching David Attenborough's 'Blue Planet' documentary, specifically the second episode which deals with marine life in the deepest parts of the ocean where there is no sunlight. It's literally an alien world: there are ecosystems on the seafloor that are fed by underwater volcanic activity and don't even depend on the sun's energy like the rest of life on this planet. We could have WW3 on the surface with a thousand year nuclear Winter and it would hardly touch them. Plus there are some real monsters down there: the fearsome looking anglerfish and viperfish, but also leviathans like the giant squid and six-gilled shark. The documentary had a big effect on me and I remember sitting in school the morning after seeing it, and imagining myself as an astronaut exploring the oceans of an alien planet full of such nightmarish creatures. Ever since then I wanted to create a story about such a journey and I thought last year that it was about time I tried my best at doing it justice.

That covers part 2 of Shark-Men: part 1 was working backwards, and thinking up a conceit which could bring some foolhardy explorers of deep-space to such a dangerous place in a way that gave the characters some kind of depth. It wasn't too hard to come up with the idea of explorers as part-scientist, part-celebrity: iirc at the time I was writing Shark-Men, Commander Chris Hadfield was just coming to the end of his period in the ISS (that guy who recorded himself singing a David Bowie song in zero gravity, and generally being the first 'social media spaceman'). I don't know exactly where I got the idea of Mads and Kamy as two brothers: probably I subconsciously plagiarised it from something else I had been watching or reading at the time. I might have only had one character, but it's difficult to write even a short story about one character and noone else, especially one which is already so outside of any normal human context. To be honest I also have a bit of a phobia of writing dialogue and capturing complex relationships between several characters is not one of my strengths (although I've been practicing it more lately) so two characters was the optimum number. As for the characterisation of Mads and Kamy specifically: the story started out with various elements of dark comedy, which I mostly took out, partly because I didn't find them funny enough and partly because of the word limit. Unfortunately this also removed some of the context of the brothers' lives.

The original idea was that they were in their younger days the half-scientist, half-natural resource prospector stars of a reality TV show which involved them flying on long journeys through space and documenting their very boring lives, á la 'Keeping up with the Kardashians', and that they were the only ones willing to take on a mission which would possibly result in their deaths and definitely involve years of mind-numbing interstellar travel (I don't know about you, but I can barely cope with long-haul plane journeys so imagine if they lasted for many years). Once the basic idea occured of two somewhat jaded celebrities volunteering essentially for a suicide mission as one final attempt to cement themselves as something more than a historical footnote, various stereotypes and tropes opened themselves up (several recent films including Harrison Ford spring to mind here for some reason...) and there you have it: two wealthy, sleazy has-beens who have lost their purpose in life, who don't have a great relationship with each other, hoping to redeem themselves in the eyes of the world. If I could rewrite the story, I would put a lot more emphasis on the relationship between Mads and Kamy: I put in a couple of hints but I could have made it clearer that they really don't get on well in the slightest, to put it mildly.

The mixture of scientist and celebrity is an interesting one, this shows that your story is commenting on the evolution of culture (as well as developments in technology), which I see as a sign of well-written science-fiction. It would be strange if technology moved on but culture stood still (unless there was a reason for that).

Science fiction certainly does comment on the evolution of culture, although I find (and it's been noted before) that the visions of the future it provides are often more of a reflection on contemporary culture than a real attempt to look at what the future is likely to bring, at least as regards the main themes, less so the superficial stuff. I think there are four main types of science fiction: dystopia (by far the most common), alien attack (e.g. War of the Worlds), space drama (divided into epic or serial, e.g. Star Trek, Star Wars etc) and parody/humour (e.g. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, futurama, mars attacks, etc). Of these, the last is especially prone to reflection on the present, since the setting allows the author to play with, and push to comic extremes, funny observations about the modern world. Not that I think this is a bad thing: after all you can't exactly parody something that hasn't happened yet so it's natural to parody the present using the future.

And of course any sci-fi story worth its salt tries to depict the differences and changes that have happened since our own time, even when they don't directly relate to the plot: that's half the fun of sci-fi, letting your imagination run wild and dreaming up things that might happen given current trends. Sci-fi without good cultural and technological novelties is like fantasy without magic and dragons: you might as well just write about the real world if you don't have them, right?

You mentioned that you enjoy reading fantasy, adventure/travel stories and anything with supernatural elements. It seems to me that Thus Spoke the Shark-Men has elements of all of those. Do you think that the combination of elements of different genres is one of the things which helped your story to stand out, in the competition?

You're right I suppose, it does have elements of all of those. I would like to say at this point that I greatly enjoyed reading all of the other entries, especially the other medal winning stories, and I found the latter ones strikingly original. There are a lot of things that can make a story original: combinations of different genres, a different take on an old theme, or even a conventional style story in the unique voice of a particular author with his/her own way of describing the unfolding story and bringing the characters alive for the reader. I am happy that some people on this little corner of the internet took to my story and enjoyed reading it, I certainly enjoyed writing it. A great literary critic once said that "all literature is nourished from two sources: lived experience, and other literature",* and Shark-Men was nourished by two particular sources that were perhaps always going to lead to a slightly unexpected kind of sci-fi story. One of them was a lived experienced, namely watching Blue Planet as I said above. The second was a literary source material. Which leads us nicely into your next question:

*one might ask of course, what else it could be nourished from

.

My review mentioned that you use imagery from the Bible, but perhaps there is more to this than I realised.

You were quite correct: and not just from the Bible, but specifically the Book of Revelation. This was perhaps the most consistent and conscious inspiration for the story. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the Shark-Man's monologue, when he (I) quote several phrases from it (also the final line of the story). Kamy was of course given a Bible by that Scottish priest when they left Earth, so we must assume that he had been reading it, and was indeed quite familiar with it after such a long journey with nothing much else to do. Revelation is the only book of the Bible I've read all the way through, since it's not really comparable to any of the others. A non-Christian would be tempted to pass it off as a 1st century A.D. acid trip, but in fact it's very carefully constructed from the venerable tradition of Jewish prophecy and fits into the genre of 'apocalyptic literature' that John the Apostle would have been familiar with. John was a prophet relaying a message of doom which he felt needed to be revealed to humanity, and after his encounter with the Shark-Man, Kamy takes on a similar mantle. Albeit the 'revelation' is not divine in nature, but the opposite: a nihilistic, even Nietschean condemnation of the divine, ironically interspersed with Biblical phraseology (and hence of course came the title of the story, after Nietsche's famous work 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra').

This is where my story shows its true colours as regards those four sci-fi categories I mentioned above: it is a kind of parody, or at least it was originally. It actually had many elements of dark comedy in the first draft, although I mostly took these out. Partly because of the word limit, and partly because I didn't find them funny enough. It's a shame though, since it meant a lot of the background of the two brothers and some of the thematic content was not there in the way I originally intended. Nihilism is obviously a theme during the start of the story when it's clear that the brothers have lost their purpose in life, and in the shark-man passage, and the results of it can be glimpsed in part 3. It's a bit of an agenda of mine that I like exploring: not nihilism as such, but the acceptance of atheism and its implications of a godless and hostile universe.

I'm intrigued by the supernatural elements of your story - would you like to say more about them?

That's something I was hoping you'd ask. One part of the story in particular is especially supernatural, according to one interpretation at least. I am referring to the encounter with the shark-man himself. Astute readers will remember that that the cabin of the spacecraft at this time was running low on oxygen and was also damaged. Technologically inclined readers might also have noted that a damaged craft in the deep ocean would pose a serious risk due to the high water pressure at such depths. Medically inclined readers might further note that high pressure in such an environment could conceivably cause nitrogen narcosis, symptoms of which include distorted sense of reality, and hallucinations. Of course something must have caused the damage to the ship in the first place, but was that something necessarily a human-shaped alien with the power to communicate in English, with a message that just happened to borrow heavily from the book that the brothers had been reading for several years? A good supernatural story always keeps things ambiguous of course.

Hopefully I'll get another opportunity to compete on TWC in the future, especially if there were to be a supernatural/horror themed competition, partly so that I get the chance to read some more great stories from other members, and also partly because I may or may not have a couple of finished (or nearly finished) stories of that nature sitting around...

Thanks for reading - and thanks to Copper for explaining the thinking behind this exceptional story. Don't forget to look out for Scriptorium Writing Competitions in future!

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Scriptorium Writing Competition Interview: Alwyn asks Copperknickers II about Thus Spoke the Shark Men

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