The Summer Isles

The Light Ages

“A meditative portrayal of an exotic society, fascinating in its unhealthy languor and seemingly imperturbable stasis … so powerfully recalls Dickens’s [
Great Expectations
] that this affinity animates the entire work.” —
The Washington Post Book World

“MacLeod brings a Dickensian life to the pounding factories of London in a style he calls ‘realistic fantasy.’ It’s a complete world brought to life with compassionate characters and lyrical writing.” —
The Denver Post

“Stands beside the achievements of China Miéville. A must-read.” —Jeff VanderMeer

“An outstanding smoke-and-sorcery saga to rival Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy and China Miéville’s
Perdido Street Station
.” —Michael Moorcock

The House of Storms

“Ian MacLeod writes like an angel. He strings together ideally chosen words into sentences that are variously lush, sparse, subtle, bold, joyous, mournful, comic, or tragic … But it’s on the character front that MacLeod truly expends his best efforts and achieves the most.” —SF Signal

“One of the finest prose stylists around, and—borrowing as he does much of the melodrama of Victorian literature, along with the revisionist modernism of later authors like D. H. Lawrence—his writing is unfailingly elegant.” —
Locus

The Summer Isles

Winner of the World Fantasy Award and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History

“Projecting Nazi Germany onto the England of the [thirties] is a most effective counterfactual device; and in the opposition of the narrator, historian Geoffrey Brook, and Britain’s Fuehrer, John Arthur, MacLeod sums up very neatly the division in the British psyche at the time, between Churchillian grit and abject appeasement.” —
Locus

The Great Wheel

Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel

“A serious, thoughtful work of futuristic fiction, this haunting novel is a bridge between Huxley’s
Brave New World
and Frank Herbert’s
Dune
.” —
Publishers Weekly

Song of Time

Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award

“Confirms MacLeod as one of the country’s very best literary SF writers.” —
The Guardian

Wake Up and Dream

“Set in an anti-Semitic U.S. drifting towards collusion with Nazi Germany,
Wake Up and Dream
slowly picks at the artifice of Hollywood to reveal its morally rotten core.” —
The Guardian

Introduction: Isles Lost, Isles Found

Part One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Part Two

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

A Biography of Ian R. MacLeod

E
VERY NOVEL CONTAINS AT
least three stories. Of course, there’s story in its pages. But then there’s the story of its writing. And there’s also the story of its reaching, or not reaching, the bigger world of its readers. As these things go,
The Summer Isles
proved a remarkably easy novel to write. But then it hit a wall which only now, through the book you hold in your hand, it’s finally managing to break through. At the time, I was puzzled and hurt. It is, I still think, my most rounded and complete work, and deals with an important, if not vital, subject. The success of the novella, which I created from the book at Gardner Dozois’s kind suggestion, only added to my confusion.

I don’t have any explanations to offer about the strange progress of this book. Novels aren’t about certainties, and introductions to them even less so, and writers must learn to exist in lands of confusion. Alternate history, by any standards an honorable strand in speculative fiction, has often been said to be in the doldrums by people who claim to know such things. There’s this book’s very Englishness. There are the sexual leanings of its main character. Then there’s its politics. But I firmly believe (as I writer, I think I have to) that that which is worthwhile will eventually rise to the surface. And here they are; these risen pages.

The Summer Isles
explores the undeniable fact that we humans are pack animals. That, most of the time, we keep in with the crowd and do what seems to be expected of us. This process—our ability to enter the mind-set and attitudes of the culture we find ourselves in—is vital to our survival as a species. After all, if every decision and precept were continually challenged, life and society would soon grind to a halt. We live and comply each day with innumerable petty demands, hierarchies and regulations. In any other direction lies chaos and madness. But this instinct to comply runs far deeper than our willingness to pay parking good, and what we think of as evil.

Sometimes, an entire society can become so skewed in the standards it sets itself that to find an understanding of the things which are done in its name can seem, in retrospect, barely possible. But the instances in history of such events happening are worryingly many. There’s the Terror during the French Revolution. There’s the mechanised slaughter in the trenches during World War One. There’s Nazi Germany.

When I set out to write
The Summer Isles,
I wasn’t so specifically concerned to mirror any particular episode of what might be called social madness as to make a general exploration of it. The necessary choice of a time and place, however, dictated that some parallels were more obvious than others. If England had suffered what Germany suffered in the 1920s and 30s, it seemed to me not so much plausible as inevitable that the so-called certainties which we English still merrily cling to would drift and darken towards some form of fascism.

But the politics was incidental. Fascism, when you attempt to analyse it, is a will-of-a-wisp of meaningless prejudices and hopeless aspirations in any case. What I really wanted to show was that, like the participants in Milgram’s famous experiment, people will mostly do what they are told, even when the things they are told to do, or witness, or conspire in or turn their backs from, are terrible. And I wanted to show how ordinary our compliance would feel—and then, being an Englishman, just how English.

Prejudice exists. People condemn and dislike and persecute. You see it in the news. You encounter it when to talk to otherwise charming people at parties. You’ll also find it in your own heart, if you’re prepared to look deeply enough. So much of what happens in
The Summer Isles,
and many of the things which are said by its characters, is simply a reportage and reflection not of some oddly twisted alternative universe, but of the way things really are.

You scarcely have to look far in this current world of ours to see similar horrors and stupidities. It seems to me that deep certainty, especially moral certainty, whether it is bolstered by religion or some political philosophy, is the best breeding ground for this kind of social madness. It exists, plainly, in the minds of many terrorists and so-called freedom fighters, but it still also exists amid nations. The terminology is irrelevant. Fascism sticks out to us now only because it is currently seen as laughably outdated. Terrible things have been done in the name of such nebulous concepts as
the will of the people,
or of God, and in the name of science, and of freedom, and even of democracy.

History, even alternate history, has never yet stopped repeating itself. Let’s just hope, now, that it’s time for a change.

Bewdley, England

December 2004

O
N THIS AS ON
almost every Sunday evening, I find a message from my acquaintance on the wall of the third cubicle of the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow. For a while we experimented with chalk, but everything is cleaned so regularly these days that it was often erased. So we make do with a thumbnail dug discreetly into the soft surface of the paint.

This whole place has become so bright and neat that it’s hardly like a proper Gents at all. Toilet rolls on all the holders, clean basins, polished wooden seats, and a one-armed War veteran who sits reading
John Bull
and smoking Capstan Full Strength in his glass cubicle. But he’s gone now. It’s past eight. The plangent sound of evensong bells carries through the tiny frosted window.

I do the obvious thing one does in a toilet—delaying the moment of looking like a child with a last precious sweet—and then I study the mark. It’s two thumbnails this week, which means the abandoned shed by the allotments past the rugby grounds in an hour’s time. I mark it with my own nail so that we’ll both know it’s been seen. A trail of other such marks run across the cubicle wall; what amounts nowadays to my entire sexual life. I see here that week in February when I was suffering from the influenza that still seems to trouble me, and tottered from what felt like my death bed to make the cross-nail sign that would inform my acquaintance that there was nothing doing. (I could have left no mark at all and simply not turned up, but we deviants are still human. That would have worried and inconvenienced him.) And here—Oh, happy, dangerous days!—is the special triple-mark that meant a back room in the hotel of a sympathetic but understandably wary proprietor. Good old Larry Black at the Crown and Cushion. He’s gone now, of course, has Larry. Quietly taken one night for the shocks and needles of the treatment centres around Ramsey and Onchan on the Isle of Man. So many have gone now that it sometimes seems that the rest of us are ghosts, going silently and unseen about these last fragments of our rituals.

The paint, like everything else in this country that once used to be so shoddy and municipal, is fresh, scarcely a year old and soaped-down twice weekly. A single erect penis raises its lonely head as I look hard for graffiti, and there are a few swastikas from that little man in Germany. Still, and almost lost from sight in the shadow of the cistern, an offer is made of intimate services at a specified time and date. I can’t help but smile at that. Could anyone be so naive? More probably, it was done as a half-sad joke, much like the fact that I and my acquaintance still use this place for our own discreet messages; a tiny monument to other, freer, times. Although, I reflect as I pull the chain, they hardly seemed free whilst one was living them.

I clunk back the lock and step out into the sweetly disinfected Jeyes Fluid air. I wash my hands, studiously ignoring the young man who stands at the stalls, humming to himself as he urinates splashingly. Above him on the wall, with what, if you didn’t know this country, you would surely imagine to be ironic intent, hangs a photograph of John Arthur. He gazes warmly across his desk, looking younger than his forty-nine years despite his grey hair. A file lies open before him. A pen waits in his hand. Papers to process. Lives to change. The photograph is brass-framed, well-polished. It could fit in the best drawing rooms in the land. Of course, no one has dared to deface it. I straighten my tie and the lapels of my jacket as my reflection lies over his on the glass, and smile warmly back at him.

To pass the required hour whilst early summer darkness thickens, I return up St Giles to the Eagle and Child. There, I drink Burton’s beer and tamp in a moist pipe-full of Four Square Ready-Rubbed beside a pleasant but unseasonable inglenook fire. From beyond a leaning doorway drift the strangulated cries of upper-class voices. There are a few genuine academics still left at Oxford, although Williams has gone, Lewis contents himself with the income he makes from children’s books, and it’s said that Tolkien soon hopes to do the same. But, still, the insults fly about
Beowulf
and
The Cloud of Unknowing.
Sham that I am, I content myself with studying the pages of today’s
New Cross
which, because of its Modernist leanings, has a freer hand than the supposedly more intellectual papers.