Tag: Thomas Hardy

My nightmare (satirical) projection for the future of the university

‘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.

Image used under license from Shutterstock.com

My literary remake of Kuranda

There’s something about Kuranda in the far north of Queensland that draws me back every few years. It’s a green jewel of a town up on the Atherton tablelands, peopled by Aboriginal Australians, potters, painters and pie makers. The tiny railway station nestles in a culvert draped in rainforest trees and vines. The miniature St Saviour’s church is built from logs, its delicate stained glass windows recording its history and benefactors.

It’s here that I staged the eccentric romance at the heart of The True History of Jude which reimagines the story of Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Kuranda couldn’t be more different than Hardy’s Christminster (a thinly disguised Oxford), where the naive working-class stonemason Jude travelled to find his cousin Sue and to study theology. My Jude and Sue are part of a remnant population in an Australia wrecked by climate change and abandoned to mineral exploitation. My Jude escapes a government-controlled refugee camp at Orange that has evolved into a matriarchal society with its own creole language; Kuranda is an outlaw community ruled by a patriarchal religious sect. And like Hardy’s Sue, my Sue is married to an old school teacher.

I’ll leave the back story here to focus on my literary remodelling of Kuranda. The BP service station on Coondoo street is now the Blessed Prospect Church where divine singing mixes with the tropical breezes; you can just discern a petrol tanker among a tangle of vines out the front. There’s a train rusting on the railway station tracks, which are boarded over to form the yard of Slab, an odd-job man who employs Jude. He’s the nearest Jude can find to a stonemason, a New Zealander librarian once press-ganged to be trained as a drone operator protecting mine sites in Australia. And there’s the seedy end of town beyond the contemporary Foodworks store, where I located the public latrines and a bar. It’s here where Jude, drunk and despairing, was reunited with his first wife Arabella and his twin daughters Sorry and Anger.

Those familiar with Jude the Obscure will recall the tragedy that took place in the closet-room in Christminster, but I’ll avoid a spoiler for those who aren’t and just mention that I found an excellent location at the Barron Falls lookout.

A friend put me on the spot the other day: Why did you choose Kuranda of all places? I can concoct half a dozen post-hoc rationalisations, but in the end it must have been a mystical intersection of two emotional planes – my inexplicable obsession with Hardy’s novel and my instinctive attraction to Kuranda. The idea just fell into my mind six years ago. And when I sat drinking a coffee in Coondoo Street in June this year, I looked around and knew it was right.

You can find The True History of Jude in ebook and paperback here.

The best or the worst novel I’ve written?

This question has dogged me since I brought the first pages to my writing critique group six years ago. The True History of Jude endured restructures, abandoned endings, a complete change of tense, and deep puzzlement from some of those who read drafts along the way.

The question is perhaps irrelevant. This was a novel I wrote for myself, ignoring advice to cram it into a genre box. I categorise it as ‘coming of age tale’ and ‘dystopian thriller’. I could just as well say ‘epistolatory confession’ and ‘satire on Australia’s elites’. Or even ‘reimagining of a nineteenth century English novel’.

The True History of Jude is now out in ebook and paperback. I’m nervous.

I’m planning six or seven blog posts over the next few months, talking about various themes and motifs in the novel. These are some of the topics I’ll cover:

  • The potential for a tsunami that renders Australia’s east coast uninhabitable.
  • The Macfarlane family, who lease Australia to the international community as the exclusive supplier of uranium for a thousand years.
  • The development of a new creole language among climate change refugees abandoned in Australia.
  • The secession of the southern states of the USA.
  • The community of religious fundamentalists who have taken over the North Queensland town of Kuranda.
  • The fate of a royal historian in the post-truth era in England, where computer generated language technology has eliminated fiction.
  • A main character who believes he is Jude in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

If that hasn’t convinced you that The True History of Jude doesn’t fit a genre straitjacket, then I’ll try a little harder: Most of the book is supposedly written on an old typewriter, which is fine in the paperback edition where a suitable font replicates typing; but the robotic flowing text of the ebook neuters the aesthetic effect—technology eliminating art!

The True History of Jude is available here at a promotional discount of $0.99 until the end of July 2022.

Writing dystopia: The authors who walk beside me

For an academic turned novelist, the habit of acknowledging my sources is one that I find hard to discard. So ingrained is the habit that my last novel included endnotes. That story was rooted in historical events, while my work in progress is set in alternate worlds. There’s no history to guide the story, no need to get the dates and facts right. Or is there?

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With my manuscript half finished, I recently found myself reflecting on how the work has been shaped by an unlikely miscellany of writers over the last eighteen months. The book is a dystopian novel set in Australia and England more than a hundred years into the future. There are two dystopias: A post-apocalyptic Australia, and a post-Enlightenment England, by which I mean a society in which most people have given up thinking for themselves.

A major challenge of writing dystopias is that they must be plausible: My invented futures must contain the pathways by which they have come from their pasts. In the early stages of imagining the novel, I consulted Futurevision, Scenarios for the World in 2040 by Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman to get an idea how professional futurists think, which pretty well confirmed my plausibility theory.  Some time later, I read Rhonda Roberts’ Gladiatrix (Kannon Dupree: Time Stalker), a terrific lesson in the importance of making alternate worlds coherent. Rhonda gave me some feedback on an early draft that got me repairing holes in the back story. Around the same time, I spotted Niall Ferguson’s The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die at my local library, thinking that it would give me some clues about how my dystopias got where they are. It was broadly useful, but its main impact was its persuasiveness: Ferguson is way to the right of me in his political views, but by the end I was eating out of his hand. I wriggled out of his clutches in the last chapter (no spoilers). The last word goes to Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. It’s a lumpy compilation of a book in my view, but it answered a question that had been plaguing me: Why do my dystopias echo The Handmaid’s Tale, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and other works in the canon? The answer: This is a genre with its conventions and tropes. Get over it. (At least that what I got from Atwood; I’m not sure she actually said that.) I had a quick detour through H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau to wrap things up.

My book has multiple voices, one of which comes up in fragments of a popular history written decades into our future. I originally drafted these as (fake) academic history, but my friends in our writers’ group in Sydney got a bad case of lexical indigestion. One or two of them suggested I try using a popular history approach  – that odd variety of writing that turns dry history into page turners. While not exactly history, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism gave me a useful stylistic model. Paul Ham’s The Target Committee showed me how much historical content you can load up into a paragraph without it turning to sludge. In the end, I found my own style of fake popular history, which turned out to have a satirical thread in the weave. Bonus.

Reading Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, it struck me that dystopias can be defined in terms of their relation to the rational thought that is the hallmark of the Enlightenment. If I imagine a bell-curve where the top of the curve represents the pinnacle of Enlightenment thinking*, then the two tails are post-apocalyptic Australia (where people are slipping back into the Middle Ages) and post-Enlightenment England (where other people do your rational thinking for you). But the main lesson of Pinker’s book is its stunning optimism: It’s packed with graphs to convince the reader that we’ve never had it so good. Sometimes I wondered why the world needs dystopian novels when we’re already in Utopia.

Now for some specialist influences. I’m a linguist by profession, so it’s not surprising that I have a lot of fun with language in my books. My dystopian Australia has creole languages, and I turned to Derek Bickerton’s Roots of Languageto check the authenticity of the speech I was putting into my characters’ mouths. I rank Bickerton’s book among the top five scholarly works I have encountered in my entire career. Vale Derek Bickerton, who passed away in March 2018. Another Professor, Ted Bryant, was my source for technical detail on tsunami. Bryant’s Past tsunami in Australia gave me the idea of a tsunami triggered by a piece of the continental shelf slipping off the east coast of Australia. The New South Wales State Emergency Service tsunami web pages filled in more detail. And let’s throw in some religion: My two dystopias handle faith in quite different ways, and I had to read up on vernacular religion to get a sense of how an isolated post-apocalyptic society would handle these things: Marion Bowman’s journal article Vernacular Religion, Contemporary Spirituality and Emergent Identitiesgave me some directions, but I shied away from going in too deep into what looked like a controversial field. On the question of freedom of speech, I carefully read The United States Constitution; my specific question was the extent to which the First Amendment could be used to constrain artificial intelligence. And many hours were consumed in following – and not properly documenting – leads on such subjects as accounting, climate change, pre-industrial economics, and post-polio syndrome.

I should also not forget three books that are in a sense characters in the novel: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the King James version of the New Testament, and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

Perhaps the sweetest hours of my background reading were spent during a balmy trip to Far North Queensland, where I visited Cairns and Kuranda, two of the locations of the novel. My unlikely reading material was The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865, edited by Janet Croon. LeRoy was a teenager, the son of a wealthy plantation owner, who spent the war years crippled and suffering from spinal tuberculosis in Macon, Georgia. The diary is an account of daily life as the Confederate cause slowly collapses, and LeRoy’s health deteriorates. As I read, I realised that living conditions in 1860’s Georgia were not unlike those I was trying to depict in Kuranda in 2126: Constant sickness, extreme summer heat, intermittent supplies of basic commodities, plagues of insects. This, by the way, was by far the best book I read in 2018.

And of course, walking alongside Atwood, Bickerton, Shakespeare and all the others are the members of the Write On! writers group at the New South Wales Writers’ Centre here in Sydney  – Sarah, Garry, Karen, Michele, Nore, Julia, Rhonda. Stick with me till the last page, my friends!

*I place this at about 1975, but I’m happy to argue the point.

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