Read Online The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts - Free Book Online Page A

and Darcy dancing a saraband rather than thrashing about in bed. Nonetheless, stories were always about a lovely woman and a handsome man dancing that saraband. Then there was the Chatterley trial, and suddenly in the 1960s and 1970s novels were full of sex scenes. Of course, it was always a particular kind of sex scene. Growing up in the late seventies and early eighties, before the supersaturation of culture by internet porn, I devoted a lot of time to digging out the dirty bits in contemporary novels borrowed from the library. It was all we had, back then. I pored over the scenes in Harold Robbins blockbusters, or Henry Miller, or the novelisation of Endless Love . What you get in those books is amazing, mind-blowing, transcendent fucking. Beautiful, physically confident young people getting naked with one another and blowing one another’s minds. Then computer porn came along and literalised precisely that for the whole world. We went in short order from no sex in our literature and film to— Well, that. In doing so we hopped right over the broad middle ground. It’s that middle ground where we all live. All of us save only a few supermodels and tantric sex athletes and whatnot. At the upper end of this hinterland are people with thinning hair and bad skin having sex with other people cringingly self-conscious about their flab. People who cannot build physical confidence upon the shifting sands of frankly unprepossessing bodies, who yet can’t seem to make common ground with one another over their shared insufficiencies. People who muddle through, sweetening a life of low-level self-dissatisfaction with tart little orgasms from time to time, though ‘time to time’ turns out to be never quite frequent enough, the partner never quite attractive enough, the wellbeing provided by the orgasm just a touch too fleeting a thing, breath into the wind. People tired, and resentful, and corroded by their cul-de-sac awareness that this is all there is for them. People making compromises on their sexual fantasy ideals in order to accommodate them to the reality.
    And those are the lucky ones. The lucky ones! At the lower end of that same hinterland matters are murkier. The people dwelling there go for months, or years, having sex only with themselves, bedding-in (hah!) the poisonous disjunction between commercial fantasy and individual actuality by relying on the same porn that mocks them with their own insufficiencies to bring themselves off. It’s not a recipe for psychological health.
    I’m not saying that the nineties and naughties were a total strike-out zone for me. I dated some women. Let’s be precise and say: I dated four women, relationships lasting between one month and two years. But I couldn’t make it stick, and the time between girlfriends was long and lonely. I tried dating agencies, and personal ads; I pressed friends to hook me up with their single friends. I chatted nervously to people in bars. It did me no good. My face walked always before me, a boy with a red flag preventing my motorcar life from moving into any of the higher gears.
    I’m not bidding for your pity when I say this. Most people live like this, after all, to one degree or another. For most of the time, I simply got on with my life. I worked hard, and got together with my friends, and I read and watched telly and went on holidays. I drank, and pointedly didn’t think about my experiences in the Antarctic, and drank some more. I interviewed poorly for a job at Lancaster, but somehow got it anyway, and moved to that city. There was important work to do. Hubble was launched in 1990, and I was part of a team run out of the universities of Michigan and Lancaster to analyse the data from the telescope’s High Speed Photometer. Then they discovered that the Hubble mirror wasn’t quite the right shape, and fitted cunningly designed optical correction hardware to bring the telescope’s images into focus. The HSP was one of the instruments