Christopher Evans: Omega

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

Welcome to the SF Gateway.

Omega opens with a shock; a literally explosive start to a story set in two worlds. Our narrator, Owen Meredith, is the victim of the bombing in our cosy, contemporary London. He’s the producer of Battlegrounds, a CGI television series recreating old battles, and a very popular programme. Recovering in hospital he begins to learn that his personal world is not the world he remembers.

At the same time Major Owain Maredudd, in a brilliantly drawn wartime London of the 21st century, is also the victim of an explosion. But this time the source of the attack is a mystery. How eerie to have the whole of Soho a militarily guarded “forbidden zone”. Nelson’s Column topped by a gold eagle rampant!

But of course, we are in Chris Evans’s territory. The confusion and interaction of alternatives that Chris always does so well; here, with this new novel, and in past tales.

Chris is excellent at evoking a constant atmosphere of mystery, of uncertainty. Everything is clear—but is everything as it seems? As the two worlds run in parallel, the mysteries are different but oddly reflective of each other. We are constantly asking how the characters are being manipulated, and to what extent the reader is too.

And when Owen and Owain start becoming aware of each others’ worlds, we are in for a mind-game to take the breath away.

Both men are examples of a character trait that Chris does well: the displaced man, characters in search of their true ground. Perhaps this is how the author himself felt when he left a valley in Wales for the cold sprawl of London. Perhaps it is not. In any event, it’s a theme that often crops up in Chris’s work.

And displacement is at the heart of Omega in several forms; and “Omega” itself is at the heart of it.

Chris Evans writes slowly and carefully and it shows in the incredible detail. He is also very strong on character. Though Owen and Owain are the same man, he shows the similarities in character as human and the differences caused by their individual situations. And the same goes for the women in the book. Chris is very strong on female characterisation. They inform his stories with power and insight.

Omega is very much a story of relationships, from love, to authority; from brothers, to deception. But the most intriguing relationship in Omega is that between Owen and Owain, as each man becomes aware of the other.

The dark world of Major Owain Maredudd that Chris explores is packed with facts and references, political and military. It’s tempting to redraw the political map of the world based on this section, the different alliances, the different war zones—America encroaching on Australian Pacific territory, statues of Field Marshal Montgomery celebrating his landings along the Baltic in 1943! Owen, in this world, would have a field day with his tv programme! The astonishingly vivid sequence set in Russia, in Major Owain’s war-torn continent, certainly takes Owen to a battleground.

Omega is a story of dark, deep, sometimes desolate but always hopeful alternatives. We run our lives alongside the “what might have been”. We run those lives with compassion. And with humour. And with the persistence of love. Omega is two stories, both very human, both addressing the harsh realities of a world of this age and this time: one recognisable, the other sinister. We are invited to sympathise with both sides.

I met Chris thirty years ago and we found we had much in common in our attitude and desires for what we wished to achieve from our writing, even though we were very different writers. We were both published at the time by Faber and Faber. His first novel was Capella’s Golden Eyes. In the early and middle 80s we enjoyed a little “time off”, co-editing a writer’s magazine (Focus)and three volumes of stories, Other Edens, which featured early work by some now well-known authors in the field.

But importantly, Chris went on to write The Insider—a, story of alien occupation in the most invasive of ways—and In Limbo. In Limbo, a story concerning “Carpenter”, a man in care after a nervous breakdown, contains some of Chris’s funniest and most personal writing in the second of its three sections. Intensely political though much of his work is, he is also a very wry observer with a great sense of humour. In Omega, for instance, Owen’s historian father is described as having a “prodigious appetite for disapproval. He had a special distaste for what he called ‘fantasists’—historians who did not stick scrupulously to the facts but were prepared to speculate on alternative outcomes.”

After In Limbo, Chris produced a collection of related short stories entitled Chimeras. Again, they are set in a world we can recognise but which is not our own world. They deal with the process of creation, of invention, of the desire to fashion beauty in a place where beauty is both ubiquitous and yet absent. They are Chris’s take on the way we live in two worlds: that y ie real and that of the imagined—the creative process, another theme that fascinates him. Art, in these tales, is conjured out of the air: “creations deliberately fashioned with an excess of ambition so that they dissolved away within minutes of their emergence, leaving nothing but dust behind.” An eloquent comment on the ephemeral nature of “art for art’s sake”? And yet, in another tale, an artist of genuine talent is described as claiming that “becoming an artist had given meaning to his life. He wanted to leave behind something lasting. When he had difficulties with a creation, he would pause… focusing his imagination.” He would become as a “locked door.”