#182 Wish it was here: Last Letters from Hav (1985) by Jan Morris

The definitive travel guide to a place that never existed

Like J. G. Ballard's Crash - featured in episode 149 - Last Letters From Hav is another novel which might challenge or expand definitions of science fiction. Originally published in 1985, the book is a work of veteran British travel writer Jan Morris, who died in 2020. Sitting comfortably alongside her books on cities like Oxford, Venice, and New York, it is a travelogue - the difference being that Hav is a fictional place. But what is it that makes Hav such a strangely believable locale? And what qualifies it as science fiction?

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Transcript

A unique hub of trade, cultural exchange, and historical ferment and yet little known to the outside world, Hav was an ideal subject for Jan Morris (1926 - 2020). A veteran travel writer, by the mid-1980s she had visited and reflected on places as diverse as Venice, Oxford, New York, Oman, South Africa, and Spain. Then, she made a surprising sideways move, because Hav is an entirely fictional place.

Published in 1985, Last Letters From Hav is an extraordinary fusion of travel writing and yes, science fiction. Drawing on her rich experience, Morris created in this unique novel a special type of imagined location. Hav is simultaneously both impossible and plausible, a wild flight of fancy and uncannily real. Morris’ eye for detail, and stature as an established travel writer, led some readers to believe that Hav was an actual place. 

Writing in 2006, Ursula K. Le Guin made a persuasive claim that Last Letters From Hav should be regarded as science fiction, “of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality.” 20 years on, the novel is still outstanding, the allure of its fictional city as powerful as ever, even when our experience of the world is so different.

About Jan Morris

While it is easiest to refer to Jan Morris as a “travel writer”, it is a term she disliked. Her books, as she pointed out, are not about movement but about places and people. In a career of several decades, she certainly met a great many of those.

Before the mid-1970s, Morris’ journalism and books were published under her birth name, James. In this period, she served as a soldier in the Free Territory of Trieste after World War II, and later was the only journalist on the successful mission to ascend Mount Everest in 1953. In this capacity, she broke the story to the world, famously on the day of Elizabeth II’s coronation.

Beginning in 1964, she began transitioning to life as a woman and in 1972 she became one of the first high-profile British people to undergo gender reassignment. This was done by the pioneering surgeon Georges Burou at his clinic in Casablanca, Morocco. Morris wrote about her experiences in her landmark book Conundrum (1974). After its publication, Morris told a BBC interviewer she had “yearnings towards fiction”, which would eventually be expressed in 1985.

Welcome to Hav

“These letters from Hav, originally contributed to the magazine New Gotham, were written during the months leading up to events, in the late summer of 1985, which put an end to the character of the city.”

As Le Guin admitted, Last Letters From Hav is “not an easy book to describe.” It is a novel written in the form of “travel” literature. No indication is given that Hav is not a real locale and Morris’ descriptions are rich with deep and even believable detail. The book slots comfortably alongside her work on real cities.

Morris does not describe a “secondary world” per se; Hav is situated within our world and open to its influences. Described by the Science Fiction Encyclopedia (SFE) as “vastly intricate”, Hav is presented as a kind of confluence for peoples and cultures - a melting pot of influences drawn from the British, French, Russians, Chinese, Greeks, Americans, and more.

The city is accessible from mainland Europe only via train, which is Morris’ method of entry. During her visit she spectates a foot race over the rooftops, meets a deposed caliph, and confronts an escaped Nazi war criminal. As Morris wanders, she becomes increasingly aware of an undercurrent of menace. After six months, she is warned of imminent unpleasantness and leaves. On the final page, she relates an ominous view: “like grey imperfections on the southern horizon, I saw the warships coming.”

An impossible, plausible place

Part of what makes Hav feel strikingly real is that many of its features have equivalents in our own world. The dramatic rooftop race, for example, has a key role in Hav culture just as the famous Palio horse race does in Siena. The firing of a cannon each day is clearly a transposition of Hong Kong’s Noonday Gun. There are real cities which, like Hav, reflect a complex history of occupation and influence over hundreds or even thousands of years. Palermo, for example, could be twinned with Hav, an ancient Mediterranean city which has been occupied many times and remains scarred by long-ago wars, but which retains a defiantly distinctive culture of its own.

In a sense, Last Letters From Hav is an extended exercise in pure worldbuilding, in that it is largely plotless and evokes a strong sense of place. Crucially, though, Morris ensures that Hav is as packed with contradictions as real places are. The characters that Morris meets have strong senses of what Hav is, make forceful claims about “the real Hav”, and yet these perspectives often clash. The city is not as orderly and planned as fictional ones can often seem and Morris’ fictional alter ego is all too aware that she is only scratching the surface. There is a strangely living, unknowable quality to Hav, like a tempting mirage.

Last Letters from Hav as science fiction

Those who have read any of Morris’ other books will find Last Letters From Hav just as engaging, just as full of her attractively literate prose, but it also deserves the attention of science fiction readers. In 2006, Le Guin wrote that neither Morris nor her publisher would be happy to see the SF designation applied to the novel - but still argued the case strongly. The sciences involved, Le Guin stated, are “ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history”. This situates Last Letters From Hav as a notable work of social science fiction. 

It is clear from reading the novel that is engaging in a form of science fictional estrangement. Like Area X in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach books, Hav can even be thought of as a science fictional Zone. This makes even more sense when considering that time, and history, do not necessarily seem to function as expected in Hav. As John Clute wrote in the SFE, “several eras cohabit within the city and the land”. Hav is an unreal place which represents a kind of intrusion into the real world. In turn, Hav is a hybrid product of real-world influences. 

This interpenetration of unreal and real has a peculiar effect, encouraging readers to consider how “real” are the places they have visited. It may seem quaint or even implausible that readers in 1985 could think of Hav as an actual place, but that was a very different time, long before today’s internet made it easy to find information about anywhere in the world, albeit on a superficial level. As a time long gone, is 1985 any more real than Hav - or less?