Thanks for stopping by to read Issue 14 of Ibn Qirtaiba. The highlight of the issue is an interview with one of Australia's foremost science fiction writers and critics, Damien Broderick, combined with a review of his latest non-fiction work, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. (In case this is not enough for Broderick fans, next issue will continue with an insight into Living Here in the Future penned by the man himself.) Those who have been following IQ's serial Other People's Flesh since issue 4 will be relieved to discover its long-awaited conclusion in this issue. A new serial will begin next month.
Many readers of this editorial will remember my prediction in the last issue that Issue 14 would be released in May and would feature media SF. It still will; except that it will be called Issue 15. I hope that I don't have to apologise for IQ's unexpected increase in frequency. When the magazine was published in hard copy format it was released once per quarter, almost to the day. I anticipated IQ's move to irregularity to ease the pressure to produce four issues per year. Instead, the same number of new issues have been released on the Internet in as many months. If you would like this to continue, please contribute your ideas, reviews, fiction, criticism and opinions for publication.
Review: Reading
by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction by Damien
Broderick
Damien Broderick is one of Australia's ambassadors of science fiction. His best-known novel is perhaps the prize-winning The Dreaming Dragons (which was included by David Pringle in his Science Fiction: 100 Best Novels). Broderick's other novels and anthologies include The Judas Mandala, The Dark Between the Stars, The Black Grail, Striped Holes and The Sea's Furthest End. He is also a prolific author of non-fiction works, of which Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (Routledge, London and New York, 1995) is his latest.
Reading by Starlight is one of a comparatively small number of serious critical surveys of science fiction published by an academic publishing house. As such its treatment of the topic is quite general. For instance, despite its title, the book does not restrict itself to the presentation of a particular thesis on postmodern SF, to the exclusion of other forms of the genre. The breadth of the book's scope entails that its focus inevitably wanders, but it remains coherent and interesting throughout.
The book begins in the time-honoured
tradition by defining its terms. What is SF ("sf", to
Broderick); where did it come from; and what are its formal
specificities? Is SF properly described as a genre of
fiction, and what distinguishes it from mainstream literature?
In answering these questions, a theme to which Broderick often returns is the tension in SF writing between the elements of science and fiction; ie. its descriptive and its empathetic components. Early on Broderick describes SF as
a set of writing and reading protocols articulated about and foregrounding aspects of the objective world (as science tries to do), through the engaging invention of stories about imagined subjects - that is, aware, feeling, thinking persons (typical of literary fictions).
This duality makes the genre problematic both to scientists and mainstream literary critics. The latter in particular attempt to decipher SF literature using the same codes of construction they bring to Jane Austen and Graham Greene, and are accordingly dumbfounded - or more commonly dismissive - when those codes fail to unlock the meaning SF enthusiasts seem to derive from the same texts.
The problem is exacerbated by the self-referentiality of SF literature. In Broderick's words an "extensive generic mega-text built up over fifty years" is implicitly drawn upon, augmented and contested by successive SF works. Moreover, many SF novels laboriously construct their own mega-texts (some, such as The Lord of the Rings and Dune even append glossaries and maps of their worlds), which since they are of tangential relevance to the plot and characterisation, are wrongly viewed as surplusage by uninitiated readers. The SF mega-text, and the discursive code in which the genre is written and read, "must be learned by apprenticeship" as Broderick notes.
The theoretical framework of the book is largely established in its first half, leaving the author to apply it to some of his favourite works, authors and critics. William Gibson and the cyberpunk movement are characterised as archetypally postmodern in an interesting chapter, although one which adds little to what has already been written on the topic. Brian Aldiss's epic Heliconia trilogy is then examined in depth.
Most attention is reserved for Samuel Delany, whose explicitly postmodern and poststructuralist approach to his art extends also to his considerable contributions to the literary theory of science fiction. Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is lauded as capturing the postmodern frustration with certainty and formula through the absurd depth of its scenography. The novel carries to an extreme SF's emphasis of the objective "foreground" over characterisation and subjectivism - which is one of the genre's perceived failings, yet in Broderick's submission, in fact one of its basic structural tools.
Reading by Starlight concludes as it began with a definition of SF - a longer one, this time - in which Broderick positions it as:
a kind of narrative native to a culture undergoing the epistemic changes implicated in the rise and supersession of technical-industrial modes of production, distribution, consumption and disposal: a world of culture which has virtually replaced nature, remade it, and stands at the edge of destroying it.
If your experience of science fiction criticism is restricted to the review columns in magazines - and even more so if you have not studied the humanities at university - you will find portions of Reading by Starlight difficult going. On the other hand it is not necessary to have a qualification in literary theory to appreciate the broad brush of Broderick's arguments or the aptness of the examples he draws from the SF canon. I encourage you to look for Reading by Starlight at your local university library or specialist bookshop.
Damien Broderick was kind enough to speak to Ibn Qirtaiba about some of the issues raised by the book, as well as delivering his opinions on other aspects of the genre, postmodernism, fandom and his own writing.
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IQ: Your book seems to be directed partly to academic readers and partly to fans - ideally, of course, to both. Many fans without a university education will be unfamiliar with the theory behind postmodernism and the objectives of its program. Do you think that such readers of postmodern SF novels receive an impoverished experience of them because of their ignorance of the movement's aims and assumptions?
DB: The crucial postulate of "postmodernism" is that our certainties - artistic, and in ordinary daily life as well - have been steadily undermined since, say, the fifties. Remorseless change affects everything. Virtual replaces "real". But "real" was always a construct, so this earthquake is more a shift in understanding than a change in the world. If so, we live postmodernism. Therefore we always already have a theory of it, structuring our daily experience, just as your cat has a brain-wired theory of birds as it prowls the garden.
On the other hand, theories running on auto-pilot deserve mistrust, even if they're zany and pomo. We're well advised to dredge them up into full view, shove them through some logical sieves (themselves theories, yes), put their predictions to the test.
"Theory" - or metatheory - is a strange and wonderful concept. For at least 20 years it's been central to sophisticated cultural analysis, but people still get stirred up about its pretensions. (I'm one of them - I wrote a book, still unpublished, called Theory and Its Discontents, which is ambivalent about the claims and posturing of high critical theory.)
It used to be supposed that the world is just out there, on the other side of a clear sensory window pane. Now we're sure that the experienced world is itself a construct, a somewhat unstable patchwork of mental models driven partly by what's outside, partly by genetically ordained internal grammars, partly by the local cultural templates we imbibe from childhood on (including the language we use to categorise and communicate our grasp of the world). It's naive to suppose that culture and language capture "just how things are", and hence to fear and hate anyone whose inner maps conflict with our own, but still it takes quite an effort to see that our worlds are built-up in accord with these internal maps or theories. Education helps; it's easier to reach such counter-intuitive insights with the aid of difficult books, and dialogue with other people who've been down the same path.
Science fiction often does this unsettling job just because its imaginative schtick is to slam comfortable expectations upside down. Sf destabilises our prejudices, and does so without preaching, for fun. (All too often, of course, it more subtly confirms our local comfort zones, and we go on just as smugly as before, having "experienced" the Truths of our prejudices enacted in the 30th century. But the option for genuine cognitive and moral shock is available in sf in a drastic way that conventional fiction can't readily achieve - look at Joanna Russ's wonderful The Female Man.)
You don't have to study this stuff at university. There are plenty of accessible and entertaining guides. The one I like best is Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 1983), which is tough-minded, funny and exhilarating. I don't agree with all of it, but anyone who hasn't surveyed these important ideas owes it to herself to dig Eagleton out of the library. My own critical books assume that readers are familiar with at least this level of argument, and with the basic technical terms that postmodernists and poststructuralists have coined to think anew with: signifier and signified (roughly, word or image, versus concept), referent (the thing or state that signs point to), metaphor and metonymy (signifiers replacing each other according to similarity - food for thought - or association - turf instead of horse-racing), paradigm and syntagm (lists of available word choices or synonyms, versus the syntactic "string" or sentence the selected words are linked into)... While this jargon is momentarily alarming, it soon becomes second nature, and is endlessly convenient when we come to think about the deep issues raised in contemporary discourse. I end up defining sf as a distinctive kind of story-telling using metonymic (or syntagmatic) tactics to achieve metaphoric strategies: crudely, "realistic" prose driven by "poetic" imagination. Of course, this kind of technical abstraction gives many people the screaming horrors.
IQ: Post structuralist critics reject the traditional primacy of serious over popular literature. To them, this is an illegitimate hierarchy based on the values and prejudices of the literary class. Yet a recurring theme of your book is that there is a real and objective distinction between "good" and "bad" SF. How is this distinction any more justified than that between SF and "literature"?
DB: It's true that a typical poststructuralist move is to "interrogate hierarchies" and swiftly show that subordinate or despised categories are really required in the very creation of the favoured ones. This can be a refreshing party trick, and certainly provides a formal account of why, say, "woman" has been the "marked" or suspect category when placed in binary opposition to "man", the unmarked or default case. Using this gambit, para-literatures such as sf, kiddie lit and pornography have been clawed back from the critical abyss. I insist, though, that any situated judgement is going to discriminate between good and ill instances of these recovered texts. No longer demanding haute cuisine at every meal, snobs may agree that fish and chips or hamburgers can be eaten without shame - but nobody doubts that a day-old battered sav dropped into dirty used oil, or limp lettuce and soggy tomato, recycled gizzards and stale buns, make for crook take-out. I can tell the difference between Piers Anthony and Gene Wolfe; my nose and taste-buds are still working.
IQ: Can you briefly summarise for the readers the argument that SF is not in fact a genre of fiction, but rather a "mode"?
DB: Fair go, cobber! These are complex issues. Um. Genres are a sort of contract between writer and reader, laying down what to expect in a given text, how the bundles of words are best - most "richly" - unpacked, setting up the "reading protocols" we bring to the page (or screen, etc). However various they are, crime novels form a (fuzzily-) bounded genre. So do war stories. Cooking books with recipes. Psychiatric reports. Local council documents. Gothic romances with embossed covers, smouldering heroes and low-bodices beauties.
Well, the argument suggests that sf (despite its embossed titles and stock robots or spaceships on the gaudy covers) bursts such boundaries, sucks genre techniques into its vortex. So we can have sf love stories, sf crime thrillers, sf historicals (often set in histories that never happened). These days, interesting sf tends to be generically hybrid.
As a mode, sf's textuality is distinguished from, say, the fantastic (the mode of uncanny realism), the mimetic (the mode of naturalistic realism), surrealism (the mode of the unconscious run riot); feel free to add your own modal groups.
IQ: You concede in your book that SF is a literature of metaphor, but raise the question "a metaphor for what?". I have always winced at explicitly metaphorical SF scenarios, that are devised not for their intrinsic novelty or interest but simply (and often transparently) to comment on contemporary phenomena. For instance, I remember reading an interview with Dorothy Fontana in which she revealed that an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation written by her was a metaphorical investigation of the male menopause. Do you think that it is possible for writers to contrive science fictional worlds that stand entirely apart from the 20th century social context of the author, and if so can you name any particularly successful examples?
DB: Not easily. Maybe not at all. A truly successful sf novel, by that criterion, might be unintelligible. Stanislaw Lem has tried several times to write about recognisable humans who encounter the utterly incomprehensible... and the result is bafflement, a humiliated return to local human concerns. Greg Benford's late novels have been set in a far future of chip-implanted and augmented human clans, but the books strike me as fatally stolid and lumpy.
On the other hand, we can take educated (or wild) guesses at some of the technologies that will emerge in the next 50 to 200 years and try to imagine life in a world so skewed. You swiftly run into combinatorial explosions of feedback loops. Consider a recent sf fad, molecular nanotechnology: Greg Bear tried bravely in Queen of Angels, as did Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age, but it goes schematic or clotted or turns into a fable very quickly. Can we imagine a culture (many cultures) where molecular compilers build any commodity we desire out of gunge for the price of electricity? Where nano surgeons rewire consciousness, or upload it to multiple bot copies, or ensure physical immortality, or rejig DNA so we grow whatever new parts we wish for? Where genuine AI goes hyperintelligent within months or decades of its emergence? Where quantum computers put us in contact with alternative superposed universes (if that means anything)? Where all this is happening at once, and not in AD 5001 but to our grandchildren? It does make for wonderful storytelling, just pour le sport. The chief metaphoric message is, perforce, the medium: things change, including humanity. So old metaphors like the Apocalypse might turn out to be literally instantiated in another current hot meme, the Singularity (tipped to happen around 2050), when all the curves of radical change go asymptotic, straight up. Transhumanity. If so, that's not a metaphor any longer - it's a terrifying, ebullient promise.
IQ: In Ibn Qirtaiba I try to strike a 50/50 balance between coverage of written and media SF (not that I always succeed). From the outset your book makes no apology for its weighting towards the former. Given that most media SF (or "sci fi") is, as you put it, of the "dumbed down" variety, are there nevertheless any television shows or movies that you regard as of equal quality to the novels you applaud in your book?
DB: No. Sorry. Are there any jingles or limericks equal to the sonnets in a standard anthology? (Everyone knows some great limericks, of course. There was a young lady of Exeter/ So exciting the men flexed their pecs at her./ And some were so brave/ as to take out and wave/ the distinguishing mark of their sex at her. It's not Shakespeare, is it, or even Philip Larkin?) (Actually, it's Isaac Asimov, near enough.)
IQ: One explanation you offer for the refusal of the uninitiated to take SF seriously is that they do not possess sufficient training in the codes of construction and reception of SF, or sufficient knowledge of what you have called the SF "mega-text". As this can only be gained by exposure to SF, it poses a catch 22 situation. Yet many of the concepts that must be understood to appreciate written SF, including time travel, hyperspace, force fields, VR, transmats and energy weapons, are staples of media SF. As media SF is much more accessible to the public at large, would you agree that it performs a valuable function in acclimatising people to the SF mega-text?
DB: Absolutely. I was turned on to sf
through comics, including the strips I read in my father's
newspaper when he got home from the factory: Brick Bradford,
Garth, Flash Gordon, Mandrake. You've probably never heard of
them. Then Superman. And most importantly, a mysterious medium
now lost in the mists of history: radio serials. Wonderful space
operas. I'm sure they stank, but they were my equivalent of
reading Doc Smith or seeing Star Trek or Star Wars.
Raw sense of wonder activated upon the inward, half-dreaming
stage. It certainly acquainted me with many of the standard sf
tropes and devices, just as Babylon 5 does for today's
kids. You bootstrap yourself into the specialised sf argot
through this simplified and dumbed-down sci-fi ambience, and with
luck pass on to collections of short stories by the clumsy
originating geniuses of the '40s and '50s who invented modern sf,
and then to the magazines (if you can still find any), and
paperback novels, on through the exultation and pleasure of
Heinlein and Herbert and Zelazny and Phil Dick and Bill Gibson,
and as one's taste and discrimination develop, to the great
difficult grown-up texts and writers: Aldiss, Crowley, Delany, Le
Guin, Russ, Wolfe...
IQ: Over a decade ago now, you wrote Transmitters (Ebony Books, Melbourne, 1984), an "imaginary documentary" of Australian science fiction fandom from 1969 to 1984. 1984 was the year I published my first fanzine, and I remember it as a boom period, with new clubs, conventions and fanzines being announced every week. How do you perceive Australian SF fandom to have changed since then?
DB: I'm out of touch with fandom. I helped start a sort of SMOFish discussion thing years ago called The Nova Mob, which is still meeting in Melbourne once a month, but you know how it is, people get fed up with each other and stop going and new people replace them. Fans find me snobbish and disdainful, I gather, or a Boring Old Fart, or have never heard of me. Back in about 1983 I was flown to Swancon in Perth as Guest of Honour, which pleased me greatly, but I've never been GoH at a National Con. This fact amuses me in a sort of low-level sardonic way, given that Aussie sf is known around the world largely because of books by George Turner, Greg Egan, and me. Then again, I've only been at it for 33 years.
By the way, I rewrote Transmitters some years ago, removing the fannish locale and turning it into a book (Transparencies) about people in a high-IQ association who emit fanzines called quipu. No publisher cares to buy this novel, alas, assuring me that the reading public would hardly be captivated by such a tiresome and self-important setting. Oh dear oh dear.
IQ: Much of the latter part of Reading by Starlight discusses the fiction of Samuel R. Delany. Imagining for a moment that the tables were turned, how do you speculate that Delany himself a critic and a writer of postmodern SF would review your science fiction?
DB: Haven't got a clue. I met up with Chip in a New York
cafeteria years ago and we had a pleasant chat, but we've had no
contact since. Recently he's published a mainstream novel, The
Mad Man, about gay blokes who get sexually aroused by
guzzling enormous amounts of each other's hot urine and
occasionally tucking into a fresh turd. There's also some Theory.
I hope Delany would say of my work: "Finger-lickin'
good."
IQ: What will be your next SF novel, and how will it differ from your last, The Sea's Furthest End (Aphelion Publications, Adelaide, 1993)?
DB: HarperCollins Australia will release a young adult's sf novel, Zones, written with my old Monash University pal Rory Barnes, next February. Avon in New York will publish a 400-page far-future novel, The White Abacus, a couple of months later. The first is a jolly romp told by a 14-year-old girl, and deals with quantum theory, time travel, boyfriends, divorce, all that. The second is my shot at the sf big time, I suppose. I hope it causes yelps of excitement. Certainly it was a hell of a lot of fun to write. Oh yes, and Rory and I have recently finished another novel, The Book Of Revelation, which is a sort of genre-bender about growing up in Australia, farcical cults, and UFO abductions. I think it's beaut, but no-one's bought it yet. Funny life, being a writer. Just as well I'm accustomed to postmodern uncertainty...
Ibn Qirtaiba thanks Damien Broderick for his time.
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The story so far: Mark Heydon was about to transmat from Perth to Singapore when the operator of the transmat started shooting at him and was killed by Heydon in the ensuing fight. At the same time as he fled from the scene, he appeared to be in Singapore, and was questioned there by police. The two Heydons met and the Heydon from Singapore explained that in a transmat malfunction his body had been transmitted to its destination without the original copy in Perth being destroyed. This Heydon, having been charged with the murder, entreats the first Heydon to surrender. He refuses, and now horrified by transmat technology, tells his tale on current affairs television. A radical anti-technology group takes up Heydon's cause, and he unwittingly joins them in blowing up the transmat terminal. The other Heydon helps the police to find his double, who is wanted for the bombing. This infuriates Heydon, who knocks his double out while they are alone in his police cell, and escapes custody by impersonating him. Heydon is pursued by the police and his double the next morning, but they are caught in an anti-transmat demonstration, where the double is freed from the police car and the police officers are killed. Back home with his wife Penny (who believes him to be the double), Heydon plans to leave town. Meanwhile the demonstrators (who believe the double to be Heydon) force him to join them in picketing Heydon's house. Penny discovers Heydon's true identity just before the demonstrators arrive.
"Penny, get away! Get back in the house!", the other Heydon yelled back at her. Confused, she looked over her shoulder at the doorway, but Heydon still stood in it, so she stayed where she was.
As the mob drew level with the house, someone shouted, "Kill the freak!" and threw a rock at the front door. Heydon ducked, and it smashed a mirror inside. A second rock sailed through the air. Penny opened her mouth to scream a moment before it cracked against her forehead. She fell backwards, and a second crack rang out as her head hit the brick path.
"Penny!" Heydon screamed, running to her side. He grunted as a rock impacted his shoulder. Another hit his thigh as he knelt down and took her hand. He watched his wife helplessly as her eyelids twitched and her head turned spasmodically. He smoothed a strand of hair along her forehead, leaving a smear of blood. "Penny, I'm sorry, this is all my fault," he babbled. A beer bottle smacked against his ribs. "I should have told you. I should have come to you at the start."
Her lips moved, and Heydon thought he heard her say, "I forgive you." He brought his ear close to her blood-spattered mouth. "I love you... both of you," she wheezed, and her head came to rest. Heydon cradled her limp body in his arms as rocks pelted his unflinching torso.
Frantically, the other Heydon broke Natasha's grip and pushed his way through the throng, clambering past the raised arms and distorted faces until he stood over his wife and twin at the front of the crowd. "Stop it, all of you!" he implored them. "Stop it and listen to me!"
"Keep out of this, Mr Heydon," Dr Asqui warned in a low voice.
The other ignored him. "You don't know what you're doing! This has gotten completely out of hand! These people have done nothing to you. If you're attacking my double because he betrayed me to the police, you needn't bother, because... because he didn't betray me to the police. I betrayed him." The crowd immediately fell silent. "I'm the one who took the transmat to Singapore, and he's the one accused of the bombing. I told the police where to find him, and then he got his own back, by knocking me unconscious and trading places with me at the police lockup.
"Neither of us is perfect; we're both human, we both share the same genes and upbringing. We've both acted selfishly, trying to protect our own interests in a situation we didn't know how to deal with. Maybe some of you would have behaved differently. But I've stopped blaming transmats for the situation we've gotten ourselves into, because the blame lies with us. If we're going to patch things up again, we'll have to look to ourselves; we can't rely on technology to undo what's been done.
"I don't know how many of you believe you have lost your souls by using transmats, but from where I'm standing you could all do with some soul-searching. Why are you attacking people, when you're angry at machines? I don't ask you to like transmats, or even to forgive me for what I've done, I just ask you to leave us alone. If you can do that, then maybe my brother and I can sort out our problems peacefully too." He turned his back on the mob and knelt to tend to his wife.
"Get him!" Dr Asqui roared, "Don't listen to him, he's the devil! He deceived us, can't you see? The transmat destroyed his soul!"
Apart from low muttering and shuffling of feet, there was neither sound nor movement from the crowd. Those demonstrators who had been carrying rocks began to drop them harmlessly to the ground.
Dr Asqui's tone became more agitated. "He's a computer technician, he doesn't understand you! He's been working for the enemy all the time. He's happy for machines to enslave us all! Get him, for God's sake!"
One by one, the demonstrators began to walk away from the scene. Natasha attempted to restrain some of those who wore the LHL's red and black badges, but they shrugged her off and continued walking. Those who remained hung their heads and made no move as the two Mark Heydons carried their bleeding wife back into the house.
"Traitors!" Dr Asqui spluttered, enraged. "Come back now, or you're finished! I'll remember this, don't kid yourselves! The battle isn't over yet!"
Penny Heydon's body lay straight and still on the hospital bed, her head swathed in red-stained dressings. Heydon and his double had been staring at her from either side of the bed for what seemed like hours, ever since the doctors had finally turned off their machines and a nurse had folded the sheet up over her face. A few minutes ago, oppressed by the silence, Heydon had turned on the television above the bed, and lowered the volume to a comforting babble. It murmered in the background as if offering a private eulogy to her memory.
"I can't help thinking that if I hadn't tried to kid her I was you, she would still be alive now," he lamented.
The other stopped him. "No, you can't possibly blame yourself. If I hadn't been so hostile towards you they wouldn't have attacked the house in the first place. We both made mistakes. We're both as much to blame - or as little - as each other."
There was a long pause, and Heydon asked, "How are we going to manage without her?"
"I don't know," the other confessed. "For starters, I won't be able to look after the house by myself. And it's your house as much as mine, after all, so..."
Heydon understood the proposal his double was making, and shook his head glumly. "The house is yours. I had been intending to escape, but there's no point now. I'll turn myself in to the police and take what's coming to me. If they convict me of murder, I'll serve my time."
"There's no need to turn yourself in," the other objected. "You killed that transmat operator in self defence, and the LHL were responsible for the bombing."
"That's for the court to decide. I'm still under arrest, and if I don't surrender the police will have to hunt me down again."
"Ah, but is it you or me who is under arrest? We've both changed our clothes since they saw us last. They've no way of knowing who's who unless we tell them."
"Does it matter?" Heydon asked, confused. "They can arrest us both if they're not sure."
"One good thing about our legal system is that accused criminals can't be convicted unless their guilt is proven beyond all reasonable doubt."
Heydon caught on. "So if they don't know which one of us is which..."
"...they can't prove either of us guilty!" his double finished triumphantly. For the first time since Penny's death, they both smiled. It was then that Heydon knew he would would learn to manage without her. He may have lost his wife, but he had also gained a brother.
There was a polite cough from the entrance to the ward. A doctor and a mortuary attendant stood respectfully at the door. A police officer stood some distance behind them.
"Time for us to go," Heydon addressed the other - or perhaps Penny. Standing, they both lingered over their final look at their late wife, before reluctantly turning their backs and leaving the room together.
The television above the bed continued to murmer, forgotten. "Repeating tonight's major bulletin, the use of transmat technology on human beings is to be suspended pending a government enquiry. The enquiry will survey the views of the community on some ethical concerns with transmat technology that have recently come to light. We'll be back with a further news bulletin at 8:30. Until then, goodnight - and if you're travelling, keep safe."