After writing six novels, I need a break from emotionally draining two-year projects.
Over the last six months I’ve immersed myself in short stories – reading some of the best authors of the genre, and learning the craft of writing an entire work in 2000-3000 words.
I’m hopeless at remembering what I read (I’ve been promising for years to keep a list), but the standout short story authors have been Hilary Mantel, Peter Carey, Seamus Deane, Lucy Caldwell, and Wendy Erskine. The latter three are from Northern Ireland, and I chose them to help get my creative mind in good shape for a visit to Belfast in May 2023; one of my projects is to develop a piece of biographical short fiction based on a fragment my late father wrote on his early life in Belfast.
The Northern Beaches Writers Group, based at Manly here in Australia, have been a great support in critiquing one of my story drafts and exposing me to local short story writers.
And to show I’m really serious about this, I’ve entered stories in four competitions!
I have a collection of seven unpublished stories that I’d love to get more feedback on. The stories are mostly set in Australia and range from An Afternoon under the Paperbark, where a hidden observer witnesses a deadly family bust-up on the lawn, to Your Own Luck, a tale of desperate man who jumps off a cruise ship in search of a new life.
I’m delighted that Independent Book Review has featured The True History of Jude in its “The Best Books We Read This Year”. You can find the full list here.
Many thanks to my readers for supporting me in 2022. After writing six novels, I’m turning to the short story format, and I’m lining up a number of competitions to enter in 2023.
To give you a taste of what I’ve been writing (working titles only):
An Afternoon Under the Paperbark: A family self-destructs in plain sight.
The Afternoon of the Jackal: A bizarre addition to a Christmas lunch in Sydney.
Your Own Luck: A man decides to stow away on a cruise ship.
Thanks, Dad: A university Vice Chancellor resurrects skeletons from his past.
Belfast: A story based on an autobiographical fragment by my late father.
In his Guardian article on the encroachment of artificial intelligence into university essay writing, Jeff Sparrow suggests—with faint hope—that tackling the AI challenge might ‘spur us to recognise genuine knowledge’.
As I leave higher education this month after a forty-year run, I despair of the kind of scenario mentioned by Sparrow, where an AI-generated essay could be marked by an AI assessment program, bypassing learning and knowledge altogether. This scenario fails at least two of the five challenges that Luciano Floridi poses for AI in his Full-on robot writing’: the artificial intelligence challenge facing universities (1), i.e. that ‘we should make AI’s stupidity work for human intelligence’ and that ‘we should make AI make us more human’.
I fervently hope that scholars like Floridi and Professor Dagmar Monett (2) will help avert the potential damage to higher education by a misplaced faith in the ‘I’ part of AI.
My way of blowing off intellectual steam is through writing fiction, and it’s no coincidence that my latest novel The True History of Jude includes a satirical swipe at an industry that I am about to exit. I leave with deep worries for the future—the role of AI in academic writing being one of them.
The book combines a coming-of-age-tale, a time-shifting love story, and a reimagining of a Thomas Hardy novel—all embedded in a dystopian setting. And as a fantasy, it gave me the power to project a set of contemporary themes to their potential extremes: I predicted a climate-ravaged and depopulated Australia leased to the world community for uranium mining, a corporatised global authoritarian system controlled by an Australian royal dynasty, and the destruction of artistic creativity under the crushing conformity of an information monopoly. And of course there’s a university.
Could it happen?
When I was studying Russian in the USSR in 1974, could I have imagined the fall of the Soviet empire? When we basked in the Australian summer of 2019, could we have imagined a pandemic that would upend the world?
In my version of the future, the Australian monarchy is the world’s first virtual state, having excised itself from its own territory(3). The Palace operates from leased premises at Oxford University. Across the city is the exiled campus of an Australian university (you’ll have to buy the book to find which one). It’s from here that the elderly Professor Susan Bridehead writes fawning hagiographies of the Australian royals, and teaches history to their offspring and aristocratic cronies whose royal stipends make it unnecessary for them to get jobs. The students return year after year to take the same courses, some even passing away from old age during lectures. Cosplay is a campus obsession: This year’s theme is Medieval, and Susan has to ask all the ladies wearing tall wimples to sit at the back to avoid blocking the lecture hall sightlines.
And last but definitely not least, under the ‘Standardised Study for Success Strategy’, students are obliged to produce their essays with the university’s in-house AI text generator. All grades are randomly generated.
It’s satire of course, but I’m certain that many academics will identify the threads I’ve pulled to weave scenarios such as: The banning of paper and handwriting; proscription of works of fiction; the training of professionals not at the university but in online polytechnics run by a consortium of three global consulting companies.
Could it happen? Could our current students imagine the kind of degree I took in the UK in the seventies? No internet, no credit point system, no fees, no assignment mills, no student surveys.
The story of a rebellious woman and the power of our stories, even in a world where truth is not welcome
TheTrue History of Jude is an epistolary novel about a bleak dystopian future in which the geopolitical structure of the world has drastically changed. Due to massive environmental upheaval caused by climate change, many countries, including Australia, face grave uncertainty about the future of their cities and the people who live in them.
When a pivotal moment strikes in the form of a tsunami, a complex political plan years in the making is triggered and the fates of millions are rewritten in an instant.
One hundred years into this new world order we find Susan Bridehead, an eminent historian. We learn about her through letters to a friend in America she calls Alex. She has been tasked with writing the history of her country from its inception after the tsunami, but her history must be approved at the highest levels, and so it must match the official version of events. Basically, it must not tell the truth.
At the age of seventy, Sue is experiencing worrying symptoms and is convinced her body is in decline. Perhaps this is why she dares to defy the law and begin to write what she calls a “true history,” namely the story of her prior life in the lawless lands back in Australia. Curiously she tells the story through the eyes of someone she knew there, Jude, rather than her own.
Because of this, the reader is never really sure how much of Sue’s story is actually true. Everything we see is in either a letter to Alex or Sue’s version of events as she thinks they might have seemed through the eyes of Jude. Add to this the fact that memories are often unreliable in and of themselves, and the whole book is given an eerie dreamlike feeling. It really does make the mind go in circles.
Fittingly, the elements of Jude and Sue’s backstory—the setting, people, and challenges to cover basic necessities—are visceral, but similarly dreamlike and even at times nightmarish. Their story takes place among the people left behind on the devastated Australian continent. They are complex and imperfect people trying to make any kind of life for themselves and make any kind of sense of this horrifyingly imperfect world.
They must navigate a society in which the systems that are supposed to be in place need to be reinvented and completely rebuilt. After the collapse, everything needs to be figured out again: language, religion, economy, currency, power, goods, labor, basic know-how, and craftsmanship. And every one of these is open to being corrupted or perverted by the wrong person. Every community is left to its own devices and so evolves in its own way.
It is striking how different people react to the same events in drastically different ways.
Though very accessible to any genre reader, this book is highly recommended to those interested in near-future stories with chillingly possible trajectories. The political and social issues depicted are thought-provoking, and thus it would be excellent for book clubs that enjoy serious discussions.
In many ways, it is a thought experiment with a terrifying premise: What would happen if the greatest powers in the world—those of government, military, and corporations were to join forces or be joined under a single will? As such, it is a look at how change can come gradually or in a single cataclysmic event. Of how freedoms can be slowly whittled away even if it’s obvious what is happening because no one has any idea what to do about it. Is there even anything to do about it, once such forces are at work?
Thank you for your interest in my latest novel, available here on Amazon (Kindle and paperback), Apple, Kobo, and other vendors – Stuart Campbell.
I’ve just updated the cover for The Sunset Assassin using an image licensed by Shutterstock. Instead of editing the image with a graphics program, I used Shutterstock’s built-in editor, which is terrific for simple jobs involving a single image.
I’ve used a consistent format for all of the Siranoush Trilogy novels: A bleached sepia image of the city where the novel is set (Cairo, Valletta and Sydney) with the title in a russet serif font, and a dark sans serif font for the author and the text at the foot of the cover.
Here’s the back cover blurb:
Sydney, New Year’s Day, 1978. While the beaches teem and the cold beers flow, a clandestine syndicate is planning to overthrow the Australian government. They’ve commissioned dodgy businessman Kerry Rich to detonate a bomb at the Opera House on Anzac Day. He’s passed the job on to Pierre Farag, a reluctant British sleeper agent dumped in Australia. But Pierre and his wife Zouzou want out — out of Sydney and out of doing other people’s dirty jobs. Meanwhile investigative journalist Liz Lanzoni has got a sniff of the bomb plot and sees the chance to break the story of the decade. As the day of the blast looms the operation unravels, and Pierre, Zouzou, Liz and Kerry find themselves on the run to a hideout in the northern tropics of Queensland. Soaked in the hedonism and corruption of late seventies Sydney, The Sunset Assassin traces the fine line between loyalty and betrayal.
Let me know what you think of the cover. And check out my books here.
I usually write psychological thrillers and espionage stories, but I stuck my neck out with this book. I resisted advice to make it fit a genre. I wrestled with the text for six years.
Now the feedback is coming in, and I’m delighted with the positive things people are saying.
I think its the best book I’ve written.
Is it a dystopian thriller, a time-shift romance, or coming of age story? You be the judge.
‘At my first lecture this year, I had to ask all the ladies wearing tall wimples to sit at the back,’ writes Professor Susan Bridehead in my genre-defying novel The True History of Jude.
The book combines a coming-of-age-tale, a time-shifting love story, and a reimagining of a Thomas Hardy novel—all embedded in a dystopian setting.
And as a fantasy, it gave me the power to project a set of contemporary themes to their potential extremes: I predicted a climate-ravaged and depopulated Australia leased to the world community for uranium mining, a corporatised global authoritarian system controlled by an Australian royal dynasty, and the destruction of artistic creativity under the crushing conformity of an information monopoly.
Could it happen?
When I was studying Russian in the USSR in 1974, could I have imagined the fall of the Soviet empire? When we basked in the Australian summer of 2019, could we have imagined a pandemic that would upend the world?
Back to the wimples: The Australian monarchy is the world’s first virtual state, having excised itself from its own territory*. The Palace operates from leased premises at Oxford University. Across the city is the exiled campus of my alma mater The University of Sydney. It’s from here that the elderly Susan writes fawning hagiographies of the Australian royals and teaches history to their offspring and aristocratic cronies whose royal stipends make it unnecessary for them to get jobs. The students return year after year to take the same courses, some even passing away from old age during lectures. Cosplay is a campus obsession: This year’s theme is Medieval, thus the tall wimples blocking the lecture hall sightlines.
It’s satire of course, but I’m certain that many academics will identify the threads I’ve pulled to weave scenarios like these: The banning of paper and handwriting so that all student work is created and archived online; the obligatory use of AI text generators to write assignments that result in randomly generated grades; works of fiction proscribed; professionals trained not at the university but in online polytechnics run by a consortium of three global consulting companies.
I’ve spent decades of my professional life helping create Australia’s higher education system. What I observe today is a quantum leap away from the undergraduate degree I took in the UK in the seventies—no internet, no credit point system, no fees, no student support service, no assignment mills, no student surveys, no casual lecturers. My future scenario for the university in The True History of Jude may seem outlandish, but the threads are clear to see today.
*The Australian Parliament excised the mainland from Australia’s migration zone in 2013.
Copyright 2022 Stuart Campbell
To check out The True History of Jude and my other books click here.
Stuart Campbell author 