Telling it like it is: William Barton

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William Barton’s Melting in the Sun 

So, to William Barton’s somewhat-fictionalised memoir, Melting in the Sun (2011) - stories from his young life, mostly. Barton comes across as a bright, intense young man, obsessed with science fiction, astronomy - and girls, of course. He grows up in the Virginia/North Carolina area, straddling two worlds: mixing with the dirt-poor, sometimes violent “white trash” kids on one side, and his more conventional peers on the other.

In one story, wandering by himself one sunny afternoon at the broken-down edge of town, he's accosted by an older boy who has previously bullied him. We're talking maybe 12 and 14 years old here. The older boy looks threatening and acts weird, and then asks the young Barton if he can hang out with him that afternoon. Barton helplessly agrees, but takes an early opportunity to escape, running off to meet with his friend at a downtown coffee bar.

It's only later that he discovers that the bully has been diagnosed with cancer and has only a few months left to live. Guilt haunts Barton forever.

In his late teens and early twenties Barton finds no clear career path - it's a string of odd jobs: stripping and cleaning offices, drifting into freelance work as a software contractor. Writing always presses at him, but for years he can't get published.

In a later story, the professional world of publishing is portrayed as cynical and arbitrary. He's approached by a fellow author who calls his work 'filthy'; others accuse him of writing male pornography, of being obsessed with sex, and misogynistic. Barton seems to take these accusations with mild incredulity and contempt: he's writing the truth about the male interior mind and he's being criticised by hypocrites and fools.

Publishers, however, are only interested in sales and the zeitgeist: authors are manipulated and dropped with no warning as fashions change. You are only as good as your last sales figures.

Barton seems always drawn to emotionally-volatile women who make his life difficult - they give him a hard time, cheat on him, and invariably dump him. Relationships confuse him - while he confuses his romantic partners. He’s accused of talking like he’s reading aloud from a book. He’s obsessed with sex (although that's hardly unusual  for young men). However, he never seems to get out of the cycle of dating disasters.

 'The craving for love': an emotion which dares not speak its name to the young masculine mind.

Some of the stories he recounts are bleak, even harrowing. In one, he’s hitchhiking at night in a bad part of town when the driver and accomplice rape his girlfriend while he is held at gunpoint. In another, he’s struck down by some kind of serious infectious disease, barely making the hospital: the medical staff are disparaging and try to eject him when he explains he has no medical insurance. 

It’s not hard to see where Barton’s fiction - and his recurring themes - come from. The world he writes about is harsh, unstable, and largely indifferent to the individual. If Barton was not such a talented writer he'd be just another intelligent oddball, stuck in the margins of society, invisible and unremarked.

Barton's works are very inconsistent: a lot of it is more like therapy-writing - deeply unpleasant to read. But at his best, where his searing honesty is harnessed to the power of higher ideals: we are jolted.

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For those curious about Barton’s fiction, the best place to start is with Acts of Conscience, When We Were Real, and When Heaven Fell. These are books that take the raw material of his life - alienation, desire, trauma, disillusion - and reframe it in the deep interstellar; distance lends perspective.

Review: 'When Heaven Fell' - by William Barton

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This may be my preferred Barton SF novel, although others, such as When We Were Real are more famous. Barton reminds me of Richard K. Morgan, in that both writers are fascinated by tough, solitary male characters who appear brusque and unfeeling, taciturn and cruel, merely goal-focused practitioners of realpolitik. To those around them, they seem hollowed out, almost machine-like in their pursuit of duty. Yet underneath -  camouflaged beneath the hard competence, the scars and swagger - they are secret idealists.

Morgan’s protagonists (most famously Takeshi Kovacs) tend to be more down-market, more culturally criminal, and certainly more disinhibited than Barton’s lead characters. Barton's men are more like burned-out idealists than amoral mercenaries - equally dangerous, but less jaded. There's something of the embittered patriot or betrayed revolutionary in them: they haven't given up on moralising decency, they've simply reclassified it as tactically unsound. Morgan's heroes are angry and vengeful; Barton's are in repressed despair. 

In When Heaven Fell (2012), the protagonist, Athol Morrison, is a recently promoted and highly competent junior officer in the legions of the Master Race - a galaxy-spanning machine intelligence empire that conquered Earth a few decades ago. On furlough back on Earth, Athol returns to his small North Carolina hometown where he reconnects with his family, his teen girlfriend Alix and his old friends. They try to recruit him into their little amateur resistance group, training in the woods. 

But Athol, an experienced soldier of the empire, knows the truth: the Masters have orbital weapons platforms that can glass continents. Their patience with petty rebellion is thin, and their sense of proportion nonexistent. Resistance, in this context, is not only futile but risks the extermination of the entire human species.

So he does his duty.

Yet Athol believes: he just doesn't know what to do about it.

Barton has written a gripping story of conflicting loyalties. But as ever with this writer, his deeper preoccupation is with relationships: the possibilities of male friendship, and the impossibilities of navigating the dialectic of love, lust, and manipulation with his ex-girlfriend Alix - perhaps the only woman he has ever had a non-instrumental relationship with.

Barton is a fine writer. His prose can be blunt and workmanlike, but is often elevated by moments of startling lyricism. He has a deep, understated psychological insight into what is normally unsaid - or unsayable - about the male psyche.

He’s also, in the end, a moralist - though not in the American puritanical sense, where moralising is confused with righteousness. Barton’s universe is too far gone for that. What he offers instead is a kind of existential moral realism. Athol Morrison, trapped in the grim, mechanised hierarchies of the post-human cosmos, does what he can to protect what little remains of human dignity - not the pompous or naive dignity of martyrs, but the smaller kind: the necessary act that preserves any possibilities of a future.

The Masters themselves—cold, clinical machine intelligences—are not villains in the operatic SF sense, but something worse: indifferent gods, entropy incarnate, bureaucracy with planet-sterilising capability. Morrison knows the best that can be done: to carve out a tolerable human space within their suffocating embrace; not revolution but salvage.

The novel is suffused with melancholy, but it never wallows. There are moments of unexpected beauty: sunlight on an abandoned porch, the scent of Alix’s skin, the unreliable nostalgia of home. Behind it all is a kind of ruined Americana - the dream of a country annexed not just by aliens, but by the long defeat of any kind of hope.

Like all good military SF, When Heaven Fell isn’t really about the military. It’s about the things war strips away, and the few tattered things that survive. There are battles, yes, and some satisfyingly crunchy descriptions of exotic hardware, but Barton’s real theatre of war is the psychology of people pushed to the outermost extremes of horror and suffering, cruelty and hopelessness.

It’s a shame Barton remains a cult figure - too earnest for the nihilists, too bleak for the sentimentalists, too emotionally raw for the genre formalists. But for those who can turn off their tribal reflexes, When Heaven Fell is a quiet masterpiece: bitter, beautiful, and utterly unsparing.

Transgressive Science-Fiction

"The Garden of Earthly Delights"

I still recall the shell-shocked faces of the BBC Newsnight team at the Cannes Film Festival. Kirsty Wark had been too scared to go while Mark Kermode, who had attended, self-consciously praised and defended Lars von Trier's latest film. It was the transgressive "Antichrist".

In mainstream literature think Bret Easton Ellis; in painting, Hieronymus Bosch; in TV, 'Game of Thrones'.

Transgressive art is characterised by psychological and often physical violence; visceral, graphic and explicit sex; profane language; the unleashing of the id; subversion of our safe little lives.

In science-fiction there are some notable practitioners (most transgressive first):

1. Scott Bakker (Neuropath)
2. William Barton (When We Were Real)
3. Richard Morgan (Takeshi Kovacs novels)
4. Peter Watts (The Rifters Trilogy; Blindsight & Echopraxia)
5. Dan Simmons (Hyperion Cantos - Simmons just makes the cut)

I'm currently reading 'Neuropath'. It's difficult, though wholly engrossing - if you can stomach psychopathic brain-control torture, edgy relationships, dense discussion of mind, brain and consciousness.

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OK, let me do it this way. Look at your most significant other: his or her smile, affectionate glance, amusing quip. Now make the the skull transparent and look again with the eyes of an MRI scanner. For every quirk of personality you love so much, there's that small net of neural tissue lighting up. That's all there is and ever has been. Meaningless.

Oh, and you too.

One of the themes of this novel is how resistant people are to even engaging with this concept. They shy away - too transgressive.