David Langford on the origins of BLIT and "Different Kinds of Darkness"
After two stories and a flash-fiction squib (‘BLIT’, ‘What Happened at Cambridge IV’ and ‘comp.basilisk FAQ’ respectively) I hadn’t planned to return to the conceit that Greg Egan in Permutation City called the Langford Mind-Erasing Fractal Basilisk, and which provoked similar gratifying allusions in novels by Ken MacLeod and Charles Stross. But along came an invitation to write something for a younger readers’ sf anthology, and after various false starts I began to think about how an endemic BLIT problem might lead to over-protective reactions.
It’s hardly necessary to generalize about the things we do to children for their own good. Once upon a time I used to walk a couple of miles to and from school on most weekdays, with a short cut through a more or less deserted cemetery – which today might cause British social workers to have a stern little talk with the “negligent” parents. Why is the level of paranoia so much greater now than when the Moors Murders trial (1966, which dates me) was a fresh and ghastly memory? Discuss….
It turned out that the anthology had filled up long before the official deadline, and indeed I have no idea whether it ever appeared. Instead Gordon Van Gelder, that god amongst men, accepted ‘Different Kinds of Darkness’ for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. To my astonishment it won the 2001 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. A British fan friend brought me down to earth with her insistence on calling it ‘Harry Potter and the BLIT’.
It was always dark outside the windows. Parents and teachers sometimes said vaguely that this was all because of Deep Green terrorists, but Jonathan thought there was more to the story. The other members of the Shudder Club agreed.
The dark beyond the window-glass at home, at school, and on the school bus was the second kind of darkness. You could often see a little bit in the first kind, the ordinary kind, and of course you could slice through it with a torch. The second sort of darkness was utter black, and not even the brightest electric torch showed a visible beam or lit anything up. Whenever Jonathan watched his friends walk out through the school door ahead of him, it was as though they stepped into a solid black wall. But when he followed them and felt blindly along the handrail to where the homeward bus would be waiting, there was nothing around him but empty air. Black air.
Sometimes you found these super-dark places indoors. Right now, Jonathan was edging his way down a black corridor, one of the school’s no-go areas. Officially, he was supposed to be outside, mucking around for a break period in the high-walled playground where (oddly enough) it wasn’t dark at all and you could see the sky overhead. Of course, outdoors was no place for the dread secret initiations of the Shudder Club.
Jonathan stepped out on the far side of the corridor’s inky-dark section, and quietly opened the door of the little storeroom they’d found two terms ago. Inside, the air was warm, dusty, and stale. A bare light-bulb hung from the ceiling. The others were already there, sitting on boxes of paper and stacks of battered textbooks.
“You’re late,” chorused Gary, Julie, and Khalid. The new candidate, Heather, just pushed back long blonde hair and smiled a slightly strained smile.
“Someone has to be last,” said Jonathan. The words had become part of the ritual, like a secret password that proved that the last one to arrive wasn’t an outsider or a spy. Of course they all knew each other, but imagine a spy who was a master of disguise . . .
Khalid solemnly held up an innocent-looking ring-binder. That was his privilege. The Club had been his idea, after he’d found the bogey picture that someone had left behind in the school photocopier. Maybe he’d read too many stories about ordeals and secret initiations. When you’d stumbled on such a splendid ordeal, you simply had to invent a secret society to use it.
“We are the Shudder Club,” Khalid intoned. “We are the ones who can take it. Twenty seconds.”
Jonathan’s eyebrows went up. Twenty seconds was serious. Gary, the fat boy of the gang, just nodded and concentrated on his watch. Khalid opened the binder and stared at the thing inside. “One . . . two . . . three . . .”
He almost made it. It was past the seventeen-second mark when Khalid’s hands started to twitch and shudder, and then his arms. He dropped the book, and Gary gave him a final count of eighteen. There was a pause while Khalid overcame the shakes and pulled himself together, and then they congratulated him on a new record.
Julie and Gary weren’t feeling so ambitious, and opted for ten-second ordeals. They both got through, though by the count of ten she was terribly white in the face and he was sweating great drops. So Jonathan felt he had to say ten as well.
“You sure, Jon?” said Gary. “Last time you were on eight. No need to push it today.”
Jonathan quoted the ritual words, “We are the ones who can take it,” and took the ring-binder from Gary. “Ten.”
In between times, you always forgot exactly what the bogey picture looked like. It always seemed new. It was an abstract black-and-white pattern, swirly and flickery like one of those old Op Art designs. The shape was almost pretty until the whole thing got into your head with a shock of connection like touching a high-voltage wire. It messed with your eyesight. It messed with your brain. Jonathan felt violent static behind his eyes . . . an electrical storm raging somewhere in there . . . instant fever singing through the blood . . . muscles locking and unlocking . . . and oh dear God, had Gary only counted four?
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