altariel | Under the Influence (Reply)

katlinel asked about Under the Influence. This is a B7 story which appeared in the zine Star Four. Star Four is still in print, so I won’t post the story publicly here.

Under the Influence was written for a B7 mailing list birthday party. I can’t remember what the theme of the party was now – the story had existed in my head in some shape or form for some time, and I was lucky that I able to use it for the purposes of the party. It’s a piece from the point of view of the individual conducting Blake’s interrogation after his first arrest. Blake is tortured and broken, but it seems he has had an effect on the interrogator...

A relatively straight-forward story, and one often told. Specifically, there are two influences on the piece. Firstly, the B5 episode Intersections in Real Time gives the piece its structure (focusing around three interrogation scenes). It also provides most of the detail of the interrogation (noise, light, starvation, repetition of questions, etc.).

The other influence is a short story by Ursula Le Guin, ‘The Diary of the Rose’, in her collection The Compass Rose. ‘The Diary of the Rose’ is about a naïve young doctor working in a psychiatric ward who starts to realize that the madness she is treating can turn out to sanity in the context of the totalitarian society in which she lives. As you can see, when I say this short story influenced mine it would be more honest to say it’s a retelling.

It’s quite strange to go back and look at this story now. It’s one of the earliest pieces I wrote – I think this is something like the fourth or fifth piece of writing I ever did. It’s fairly clunky in places and also very sparse – I really hadn’t got the hang of description yet, although I think in a way that serves the story. Chance, of course, rather than design. It’s also one of a few stories I wrote around this time that dealt with ambiguities of Blake’s character and situation. I do believe that Blake has a remarkable capacity for self-delusion, and that while he was indeed right to fight, that doesn’t mean I have to like him much.

I think the other thing I wonder about when I reread this is what exactly the compulsion is for me in writing characters like the interrogator in this piece. Not long after writing this story I discovered DS9, and the questionable charms of one Elim Garak. Most of Garak’s philosophical disquisitions on the nature of interrogation are safely tucked away on my hard drive, part of a long story about him and Bashir that may or may not be finished one day. He does have quite a lot to say about professional persuading to Ezri Dax (a therapist) in my story Closure. Ezri, to give her her due, has a lot to say back.

Sublimation of my baser instincts, no doubt. Don’t use your talents for evil – or, at least, if you are playing with people’s heads, be subtle about it.