Locus, March 2014

by Locus Publications

  ‘‘From The Children Star onward my books have all these intelligent machines. The intelligent machines, they have all different forms, but they have human rights with some civil rights issues. I deal with civil rights issues by saying: How would we treat machines? If you think about civil rights issues in terms of ethnic groups or other groups that we know today, we all know how we’re supposed to behave. With machines we don’t know how we’re supposed to behave, so some of these issues come out. In Brain Plague you have the interracial marriage issue. Is it OK for a human to marry an intelligent machine? There is a prominent character couple, a woman married to an intelligent machine. The viewpoint character at first sees that as very icky, but throughout the book her attitude changes.

  ‘‘Are there actually pathogenic microbes that take over a host like a zombie, and manipulate its behavior to enhance transmission? Yes, that happens all the time. Of course, usually pathogens don’t have to manipulate the host, because the host is going to transmit them anyway. When you get a cold and it causes you to sneeze, you’re transmitting the cold virus. In terms of a pathogen affecting the brain, rabies affects the brain so that you engage in violent behavior associated with the mouth. That’s probably the closest.

  ‘‘But there are other aspects of the zombie trope that interest me – particularly the idea that they go after brains. In the past when human populations have starved, there’s a certain amount of cannibalism. It would make sense to go for the brain, because the brain is the most protected tissue in the body, and the part that is most likely to be there if someone has starved to death. Zombies to me look more like starving people than anything. In my book Brain Plague, there are good strains and bad strains of the microbes, so the bad strains take over their hosts and cause them to deteriorate, and to bite other hosts in order to transmit the strain.

  ‘‘The Highest Frontier was labeled YA by some people in the field. I saw it as an adult novel that would be of interest to teens with good vocabularies. It was the kind of SF I would have read as a teen. I think we need to expect more of young people. To get into college you have to read Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. Young people should be able to read SF that has challenging vocabulary.

  ‘‘I was interested in reaching young people and their parents interested in college, because college is the big rite of passage today. College just throws everything at you right away, and there are all kinds of challenges you face that you don’t expect. I wanted to give high school people the inside scoop on what it looks like going to college, and their parents can read the book and find out what their children are experiencing. Particularly the idea that you’re learning all these great things at once, you have so many responsibilities, but meanwhile who is taking care of you? The protagonist is a biology major; she is also a med tech, so she has an actual role in her community.

  ‘‘Because Earth is in the midst of these environmental disasters in The Highest Frontier, parents send their children to the space satellite, which they think is safer as a college. Kind of ironic, because in my day outer space was (and is) a dangerous place, whereas in the future, Earth is so dangerous they think, ‘A space satellite will protect them.’

  ‘‘The Highest Frontier has two protagonists. Besides the student, there’s also the college president, who is married to the college chaplain, and they’re both men. The president character allowed me to show what college looks like from the inside. One of the reasons I chose to write the book is, I asked myself, ‘Where are the novels about college?’ This is where you have your educated people, your readers, and there are plenty of books about high school. And of course I have the on-the-spot view of it. I’ve seen people from the administration down to the first-year students entering, I see it all.

  ‘‘The politics of science is our politics, because our greatest challenges today are how to keep the planet alive and how to keep ourselves alive. What are people concerned with? Everybody wants to live forever, let’s face it. To live healthily forever. At the same time everyone wants to have a planet healthy enough to live in, and those are fundamental challenges that face all human beings, and increasingly those are challenges of science.

  ‘‘So how do we respond to science? One response is to embrace the new discoveries, whatever they are, no matter how shocking. To some extent people are willing to do that. For instance, if you can save the life of your child by producing new embryos in a dish and picking the one whose genes can save your child, you will do that. People do that now, with surprisingly little controversy. If you need to eat shit in order to save your digestive track – a digestive bacterial transplant, or fecal transplant – people will do that.

  ‘‘But on the other hand, if you need to accept that the world is 4.5 billion years old, that’s too shocking for some people. I live in a community where we had a middle-school teacher that was fired after teaching creationism for 11 years. The community I live in, the community surrounding the college, includes some people with this cultish view of rejecting science, rejecting climate change. I face that every day. In a way, it’s a good thing because I have to deal with that. Whereas people who live in a city, they can say ‘That’s fringe,’ but it’s not fringe, because to be a presidential candidate in one of our two major parties you have to deny evolution. What’s up with this?

  ‘‘The trouble is that some people think false science has no consequence. Who cares if it happened six thousand years ago or four billion? But it does have a consequence, because we are evolving creatures. Biology is evolution. If you want medicine, that’s evolution. The planet is evolving, life forms all over the planet are evolving to cope with climate change. Forests, as part of their response to increasing carbon dioxide, now draw less water from the earth. The problem with that is that if they draw less water from the earth, then they make fewer clouds. Trees make rain – you think rain makes trees, but trees make the clouds. We’re going to have fewer clouds that make rain then. It will become drier because of the CO2 effect.

  ‘‘People who reject good science don’t realize they are manipulated by powers that earn money off their disbelief. The people who have churches that believe this stuff sincerely don’t realize they are manipulated by the Koch brothers and by other entities that stand to make a lot of money off technologies that are destroying the Earth, like fracking. You have this coupling of the industry that wants to frack and so on with the science-denying churches, and the churches don’t realize how they are being manipulated.

  ‘‘In The Highest Frontier I try to show both creative and destructive expressions of faith. The college chaplain is the force for progressive religion, religion that humanely engages science. Whereas there is another view in the book, the geocentrist view that says everything just centers around the Earth. People think that is ludicrous, but in fact, geocentrism is out there. The fascinating thing is that science deniers are appropriating more – they are starting to deny physics as well as biology. They deny cosmology, and the creation museums present this anti-cosmology view. There was even a conference in Chicago of geocentrists. In one way or another, science deniers like Ken Ham are arguing that the entire universe centers on the Earth. It’s up to the rest of us to tell the much more inspiring story of biology and science fiction.’’

  –Joan Slonczewski

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  Paul Cornell was born July 18, 1967, in the West Country of Britain. He got his start as a writer doing Doctor Who tie-in work, producing a number of novels starting in 1991. Beginning in the mid-’90s he also wrote for various British television programs, including Doctor Who; he scripted the Hugo Award nominated episodes ‘‘Father’s Day’’ (2005) and the two-part ‘‘Human Nature’’/’’The Family of Blood’’ (2006), the latter adapted from his 1995 novel Human Nature. He’s also co-written several nonfiction books about TV shows.

  Cornell’s first non-tie-in novel was Something More (2001), followed by British Summertime (2002). He began a new urban fantasy series with Londo
n Falling (2012), with volume two, The Severed Streets, forthcoming.

  Cornell has produced a small body of well-respected short fiction, notably Hugo Award nominee ‘‘One of Our Bastards Is Missing’’ (2009) and Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist ‘‘The Copenhagen Interpretation’’ (2011). He is part of the SF Squeecast podcast, winner of the 2012 and 2013 Hugo Awards for best fancast.

  He is also a comics writer, notably of Hugo Award finalist Captain Britain and MI13, Volume 3: Vampire State (2009) and the Saucer Country series from Vertigo (2012-13); volume 1 was a Hugo Award finalist in 2013.

  Cornell lives in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, England, with his wife, the Anglican priest and writer Caroline Symcox.

  •

  ‘‘When I was young we lived in a bungalow, built by my father, in the shadow of a chalk White Horse cut into the Wiltshire downs. I used to spend a lot of time up there when I was little. My mother had a complex relationship with what she would never refer to as the Little People – she just calls them ‘her people.’ She said to me just the other week on the phone, ‘I wander about the house at night, and, well, I never actually meet anyone…’ That was the house I grew up in. The possibility that there were ‘people’ at night was terrifying, but also interesting.

  ‘‘I did a term of Astrophysics at University College London, but I dropped out, because I couldn’t handle the maths. I’d written for the college magazine, and I quickly realized I needed a source of income. That’s when I sold my first piece (a review of The Rocky Horror Picture Show for Starburst magazine). I recommend poverty to sharpen one’s writing skills. When I went back to college, at the University of Lancaster, I got an MA in writing. Yes, I’m actually qualified to be a writer! At the scene of an accident, I can yell ‘let me through, I’m a writer!’ What I really learned in my time there was how to run a radio station and a night club.

  ‘‘I’ve never had a real job. In the 1990s I was in Manchester during the ‘Second Summer of Love,’ and had an amazing time – lots of ecstasy. While I was there, in the same week, I sold my first radio sketches and also my first Doctor Who tie-in novel.

  ‘‘My prose back then was weird stuff that – if it got published anywhere – got published in little indie things (though I did get one story in Interzone). I wrote loads of fan fiction. I still love it, wish I had time to do it now. Writing for fanzines back then, you got your work critiqued in the next issue, six months later, like a very slow internet. Some of that fanfic went into the Doctor Who novels I wrote, and one of those novels I adapted for the show itself, so I took my fanfic all the way to the series it was based on. I also started writing comics via the fandom that gathered around Doctor Who Magazine. A whole bunch of us moved from fan fiction to writing Who comics and novels and audio plays at the same time, and a lot of those people got onto the show itself, ran the show itself, and tons of the others went on to long professional careers.

  ‘‘But my professional writing career really depends on the fact that I had a friend working in the Guinness Brewery, who made friends with a chap who worked in the office dealing with the Guinness Book of Records. They wanted to do a TV book, my mate asked to co-write it with me. I wrote an entry for that book about Press Gang, which was Steven Moffat’s first TV show. Moffat read it, called up my publisher, found me, and took me out for beer. We went out for beer many, many times, until finally he said, ‘So, have you got a script you might want to show me?’ I had one ready in my bag. That’s what I always say to aspiring writers: you’re going to need luck, but like Picasso said, let luck find you working, be ready for it.

  ‘‘Jo Fletcher at Gollancz invited me to pitch something. I came up with Something More and British Summertime, which I kind of regard as failed novels. I threw in everything and the kitchen sink. So I have two ‘first novels’ which didn’t do very well. They’re not easy to summarize and they weren’t easy to publicize. Something More ended up with just a picture of the Earth as the cover, which I suppose is at least where the book is set.

  ‘‘More recently I approached Tor UK with a multi-book idea that had once been a TV series pitch, though never a script.(I regret having mentioned that in the back of the book now, because all the reviews began, ‘This was obviously once a TV show.’ Although now it’s once again been optioned to be one.) Last year’s London Falling has been much more successful than my first efforts. Both it and the forthcoming sequel The Severed Streets are commercial novels that I think are also about something. They’re me trying to square the circle of writing pop fiction that also has heft. A bit like Doctor Who.

  ‘‘The series deals with a group of undercover police who suddenly gain the ability to see all the supernatural stuff in London. The only way they’re going to survive is by using police methods and tactics against the magic. It’s Luther does Buffy. (I know, you’ve seen that video.) What’s important, really, about these books is absurdity: the notion that a group of professional people, who have their training and systems, find themselves up against something that’s impossible.

  ‘‘It’s been a great pleasure to get to know police officers and intelligence analysts. Analysts are the people who work out the diagrams of gang structure, where the money goes. My broken genius analyst Ross is based on a dear friend of mine (not actually broken) who is also a Doctor Who fan. There are loads of them in the police force. If I want to meet some police, I just say, ‘I’ve written for Doctor Who,’ and they’ll go, ‘Ooh! Which one?’

  ‘‘The books are kind of sciencefictional, in that, being police, my characters are always trying to figure out my magic system and check if my plot is logical. In one of my favorite scenes in London Falling, they’ve got to deal with a ghost bus. ‘How can a motor vehicle be a ghost? Did it not follow the light and move on to its reward?’ They’re interested in the mechanisms of how that all works, and so won’t be satisfied with the generic. By the end of the books, I think they will have actually figured out all my magic and come to a rationalist conclusion about it. Though I never use the word ‘magic’, rather like the word ‘Mafia’ never appears in The Godfather. It keeps me honest.

  ‘‘I call these books urban fantasy, because I don’t like the idea of trying to squirm out of a genre when one is obviously in it. I also like the urban fantasy audience, I want my books to be for them, and they will find nothing that alienates them. But I like the idea that the books are SF and crime fiction too.

  ‘‘I’m just finishing book two, The Severed Streets, where Jack the Ripper’s back, and he’s just killing rich white men. My team get to explore politics, money and the intelligence services, against the background of austerity and the Coalition government. Two of my characters start a really tragic and damaged relationship. And the book features a real person playing themselves, with their permission, which I think is a bit of a first. I can’t wait until the first readers see who that is.

  ‘‘There are going to be more books in that series, but at the moment I’m also trying to sell an unrelated book that I’ve had finished for years, and keep tinkering with. That’s the novel I live for, really. It’s called Chalk. It’s a fantasy about 1980s pop music and the Wiltshire Downs. It’s my attempt to cope with some of the impossible things from my childhood.

  ‘‘I’m very proud of the Jonathan Hamilton stories, which are set in an alternate world where Isaac Newton started thinking about quantum physics, and so centuries later the Great Game of espionage between the great colonial powers of Europe continues across the Solar System. There’s a new one of those, ‘A Better Way to Die’ coming out in an original anthology I’m very excited about, hopefully this year. They’re me putting on my Ian Fleming voice, that wounded post traumatic maleness, but coming to some different conclusions to Fleming.

  ‘‘I’ve also got two creator-owned comics coming out this year, one of which will be for children, and is kind of half first comic, half children’s book. But I can’t say any more about those right now. I’m also the regular writer on Marvel’s Wol
verine, telling one huge story about him over two years. That all comes to a head this autumn.

  ‘‘For a year, I had a policy that I would only appear on panels which were at least 50/50 male/female. I’m always afraid I sound smug about this stuff, because this is a cause that belongs to women and I’m just doing this one tiny thing and lots of other people did it first. I got dropped from a couple of events as a result of this policy. I had planned to just do it for a year and then stop, but loads of people asked me to keep going. I changed my rule to make it a bit easier, and these days just won’t do all-male panels (unless it’s a convention that’s gone to the trouble of counting men and women across all its panels and then equalizing the number of panel seats all in all). These days, the concept tends to get called Panel Parity.

  ‘‘The thing is, there are always qualified women in the audience, and they’ve often de-selected themselves, wondering if they know enough, while men will usually think ‘I don’t know much, but I’ll have a go’. So there’s an untapped resource of these highly qualified women in the front row of panel audiences. People arguing against Panel Parity often say ‘we want to get the best people for the panel, irrespective of gender.’ If you’ve really done that, then I hope your convention doesn’t feature any male panelists who say ‘I don’t know why I’m on this panel,’ and I hope that afterwards you’re able to justify why so few women were among ‘the best people.’

  ‘‘In my work, I believe in deliberate diversity. It doesn’t ‘just happen naturally.’ Everything a writer does is a decision. You can’t leave a manuscript open overnight and have gay men grow in the pages like mustard and cress. If you don’t include diverse characters on purpose, you’re just unconsciously following the prevailing culture, and perpetuating inequality.