So there’s that. There’s a convenience aspect in terms of plotting. It takes away from your ability to do a kind of pure unity of narrative, because there’s a danger people will meet too early and talk. It’s a real danger, but I think you just have to get around it.
Technology and technological activities very often don’t dramatize well. Sitting and talking on the phone, typing onto a keyboard, whatever—those are not things that particularly work well as scenes, and they work terribly in movies, but even in books they don’t work very well. So you have to work around that, and again, it feels uncomfortable. Underlying that, there’s unease about technology as something that’s scientific and purely cognitive, and therefore somehow opposed to an emotional engagement with the world, which is a whole other discussion which I’m uncomfortable with. But a lot of people feel that way, and therefore, as soon as you introduce a beige box or an IMAX screen or an iPhone into a conversation, you’re somehow getting away from a narrative or what’s important about life. I think it’s wrong, but I think people are frightened of it.
You say technology resolves conflict, but certainly we live in a world with plenty of technology and plenty of conflict as well.
Communication can resolve conflict. Technology, no. Technology can provide an awful lot of conflict, too, absolutely. This is the logical tail end of that point.
I saw an ad years ago, actually, when I was in the States. I was living in New York and there was an ad on the Discovery Channel, which was a really, really, really old guy in black and white on the screen and he’s talking into the camera. I think we only see him to the shoulder but I don’t think he’s wearing a shirt, and he’s telling us how many children he has, how many grandchildren he has, how many great grandchildren he has. He’s talking about the fact that he’s thinking he’s going to go and maybe do a degree because it has been a long time since he’s done any studying. This extraordinary, huge number of people who are his direct family and his plans that he has, and then he says, “I want you to meet someone, but you have to be very gentle and quiet because my mother’s quite shy.” He’s like a thousand years old already, so the idea that he has a mother is completely extraordinary and underneath the caption was, “When this happens, you’ll want to know why.” And we will, when that happens, will want to know why, and I think a lot of mainstream culture isn’t going to tell us and isn’t preparing us for that conversation.
Every funky scientific experiment that happens provides me with another piece of ammunition about this. The most recent one for me was—the real extraordinary one—was actually the program where they networked a couple of rats together in late 2012. Do you know about this?
This is where they drive them around by remote control?
Well, no, it’s even crazier than that. Basically, there was a team in the U.S., I can’t remember exactly where, and I think the other team was in South America, was it Brazil? They put electrodes—quite crudely—scientifically and with great precision, but the object is crude—it’s got a big spike—into the brain of each rat.
One rat had run a maze and the other one had not, and once they networked them together over the Internet, the second rat, which had not run the maze, was able to run the maze faster using the memory of the first rat. The thing that was extraordinary about it was not that they’d done that, but what was even crazier was the guy who was running the experiment said, “Listen, the thing you have to understand here is that we have not created web-telepathic rats. We haven’t made two rats talk to each other telepathically. What we’ve done is turn two rats into one rat with two bodies on a basic level.”
I was just blown away by that, because I generally try to keep my eye on this sort of concept of humanity-reshaping stuff that we are doing and that one had completely passed me by. I was ready for the idea that we could start to do proper brain machine interface and you can have proper prosthetic limbs, which would give feedback, directly moved by the brain rather than by a combination of muscle signals. I wasn’t ready for the idea that we could network two brains together, and in fact, I had thought that that kind of thing was much more difficult. So it turns out these guys have done it.
Now, there will be all kinds of stumbling blocks along the way, but ultimately what we’re talking about is the beginning of the possibility of getting inside someone else’s head and indeed merging two people together, which is a completely society-reshaping possibility. Whether we pursue it or not, how we deal with it and so on, those are the things that determine whether a science becomes a usable technology or whether it becomes a culture. The possibility is there for something completely extraordinary and you could walk from one end of my country to the other without finding, as far as I know, anything being written as a consequence of that.
I’m sure someone’s got it somewhere, and certainly outside of science fiction you’re not going to hear a mention of it, and the newspaper article that covered it, broadly speaking, began with “It sounds like science fiction but …”, which is media code for “hey, guess what, you can ignore this, but isn’t this a weird thing.” It’s a phrase that, if I ever became editor of a news organization, I would ban from use forever. You simply never get to say this anymore, because it’s a cultural tag or a coded rhetorical tag that just means “By all means, tune out. This isn’t actually that important.” It is, it always is, when something like that gets said, it’s always something very important.
I feel exactly the same way. They always say, “It sounds like science fiction,” the implication being it sounds like something crazy that could never happen, the implication being all science fiction is crazy stuff that could never happen, when in fact lots of it comes true.
Precisely. “This is this week’s episode of Star Trek, you may miss it, you may not.” I find that very bizarre, I really do. It seems to me that there’s a determined effort to ignore completely extraordinary things that are happening. It’s a very, very odd thing.
I would say you find people writing about it in science fiction. I think one thing that’s interesting is that you have authors like Cory Doctorow, Neal Stephenson, who are classically science fiction authors, but are actually writing about real life right now because real life has become so science fictional that you can write about things that are actually happening and it reads like science fiction.
Now, that’s quite interesting to me because, first of all, that’s fascinating, and I enjoy living in that world. I wouldn’t choose to live in any other time, although this is, in many ways, the best of times, the worst of times. But I find that very promising. It fills me with hope for the future that we’re doing this extraordinary stuff. I think we need to be in more control of our own genome, because otherwise the problems that we’ve created for ourselves with the industrial revolution period are just going to swamp us.
At the same time, I find it weird and a little bit worrying, because I have this shtick about spaceship fiction, that for a long time, a lot of science fiction was about spaceships because the future as we saw it was composed of hard science travel to other worlds. That was the next logical step. That was the Apollo program ethos, that this was the beginning of something. We were moving the planetary envelope and going out into space, and we didn’t do it. We got as far as the moon, then we decided to do something else for a while.
That kind of ethos was nonetheless driven by those incredible illustrations that NASA commissioned of orbital housing. Did you see those? They’re amazing. Great toruses, and they’re basically the suburbs in space, with the best view ever. People almost literally in a business suit with a goldfish bowl on their heads. It’s great stuff. But it kind of defined an era and then, when it didn’t happen, people got funny talking hopefully about science, and they got cautious and they got, “Well, we won’t be fooled again, we won’t fool ourselves again.” At the same time, science fiction carried right on ahead in spaceship fiction mode a lot of the time.
People continue to think about science fiction as
being spaceship fiction, but as you say, as we get a more science fiction-feeling world, it gets harder and harder to pursue those shapes. They start to feel weirdly dated. Also, you have very valid and very problematic critiques, which basically say. “This is a kind of white, western European, male, hetero-patriarchal, fantasy of space colonization. It’s the West reenacted in space. Why are we still telling this story in 2014?”, which is not a very strong thing to be talking about.
So, through the combination of those things, you suddenly have a difficulty with that kind of fiction, which we should, but we’ve also pushed the science in many cases so far that everything that you could try as an alternative starts to feel familiar and reheated. How do you write science fiction in that environment? You either write about now or tomorrow, or you write about parallel worlds, or you have to come up with something that’s completely off the shelf, off the wall, or just completely nuts. And then that’s one of the boxes that I get into, is people start to say “Well, that’s not really science fiction because the science is absurd or the ‘what if’ question is completely ludicrous,” which, guilty as charged in many cases.
But a lot of real science is absurd.
That’s also true. Occam’s Razor is another of the things with which we have to contend, because it’s actually baseless. It’s an inductive reasoning trap.
The thing I get to from that is that we need science fiction that’s about biotechnological possibilities, that’s about the possibilities of consciousness, and all these things are being done, but there isn’t the same singularity of purpose. There isn’t the same sense of a drive to the stars, so people haven’t hoisted on board, quite, that science fiction is more than just spaceship fiction, and that it needs to be, maybe.
Incidentally, I love spaceship fiction. I mean good, solid spaceship fiction is fantastic, but I think it becomes increasingly problematic. You can see the problems with it in the extraordinary efforts that people who write good spaceship fiction are going to, to combine it with new societies and new ideas about impossible technologies.
Iain Banks, when he was alive, was writing Excession, about this extraordinary, hightech culture encountering a culture whose technology it doesn’t understand, which is a potential extinction event. It could turn out to be the moment where they’re simply overmatched, and they’re like the guys on the small island when the great big sailing ship appears with the armed men on it. I think he says that an excession is the kind of thing that most cultures only encounter in much the same way that a sentence encounters a full stop. It is great stuff, but still and all, for me, I want to be pushing in directions that are not in that area and are unexpected, and that force you to recast your sense of what people are and what it means to be in the future. What the future looks like. It’s going to be more weird and more unexpected than that template would normally allow.
You mention Iain M. Banks, and he’s one of my favorite authors. They didn’t even use to sell him in the U.S. I didn’t even discover him until I did a study abroad in Ireland and like a third of the science fiction section there was Iain M. Banks.
The weird lack of crossover or the number of authors who are published here but not there or there but not here who are amazing is very, very strange. It bewilders me, who is and who is not published, transatlantic. Banks, absolutely. I’m always bewildered that Lois McMaster Bujold isn’t better known here, because I think she’s an extraordinary storyteller. Tim Powers, for a long time, was not published here or was published only quite quietly, and he’s an extraordinary writer as well.
We’ve interviewed Lois McMaster Bujold on the show. Tim Powers is definitely one of my favorite authors. How much involvement do you have with the science fiction community? Do you hang out with science fiction authors or go to science fiction conventions?
Mostly what I hang out with is my kids, because I’m the dad of two small children, three and one, so they eat up a lot of my time when I’m not writing. I’m naturally focused on them and my wife and my writing, almost an exclusion to everything else, but actually, I was at Nine Worlds on Friday, which is a wonderful fan convention here, and I’m at Worldcon on Monday, the eighteenth, basically talking about this. Talking about where science fiction waterfalls into the mainstream and vice versa. I have great fun.
I had the enormous pleasure of meeting Bill Gibson a while ago. Neuromancer was one of my formative books, and he’s one of the nicest men in the universe, which is always really nice when someone you admire turns out to be an incredibly nice person.
Actually, at some point in the next twenty-four hours, I have to book the table for lunch with a bunch of writers, so yes, I absolutely hang out, to the extent that I hang out with anybody. Those guys are on my list of people I hang out with, but I’m so constantly trying to claw back some time to write a book at the moment that I’m probably less sociable than I would be otherwise.
Just looking over your Twitter feed, it looks like you retweet John Scalzi a lot and you’ve contributed things to his Big Idea?
Absolutely. I have never met him in person, but I would really like to. He seems like a really nice guy. So that’s one of my excitements for the future, if I get to do that at some point.
Let’s talk a bit more about Tigerman. One thing I was wondering about is, there’s a scene early in the book where the main character makes an improvised grenade out of a biscuit tin. I was wondering if that’s possible, and if it is, how you discovered that that’s possible.
I was warned a long time ago about that being possible. Exactly how possible it is, I’m not sure. So the caution about explosive yield, which is in the book, is a caution that was given to me by my chemistry teacher when I was in school, and it’s true about a lot of powders with a very fine grain size—custard powder is one, pepper is another—that if you put a small amount of them in a box and shake it up and find a match, you get a big whompf.
It is a real, do-not-try-this-at-home moment, because you can get a real power of flame and if you’ve enclosed that, you get an explosion. I don’t know, to be honest, exactly how powerful that explosion would really be. I think, if you absolutely nailed the distribution and you added the trail of gunpowder, maybe you might get a seriously big bang. I just don’t know. But it’s one of the things where it’s sort of ridiculous enough to be plausible and I didn’t want to check it and mess it up. Certainly, you would get a respectable flash and a bang out of that. Whether you would get any serious percussive force, I don’t know.
That’s interesting. I know that your father is the famous spy thriller author John le Carré. I just imagined, growing up, that you guys just talked about garrote wires and poisons over the dinner table.
That’s a great idea! I wish we had. I don’t think he was ever that kind of spy. I think he was more the kind of “sit behind the desk and take reports from agents in the field.” He’s very reticent about exactly what he did. He asserts strongly that it wasn’t very much and that he was quite bad at it. So we have not done the seminar on custard powder explosives.
I have a tendency, with things like that, to work out something which is approximately possible under the right circumstances and just let it go, because the thing that I’m definitely not is a hard science guru. My scientific qualifications are relatively scant. I like science; I try really hard to educate myself about it, but in the end, if something has to go boom and it would probably only go whoosh, I am relatively unconcerned about that, which is a sin, but not, I think, a grave one.
I also saw you say in a video that your father’s father was a confidence trickster?
Yes, he was somewhat notorious for a little bit of professional trickery from time to time.
What sort of things did he do?
I’m not really supposed to answer that question anymore. His surviving family, apart from us, are getting a little bit tired of hearing about it, but he did some pretty colorful stuff. My advantage in this respect is, although he was still around when I was born, I don�
�t remember him as a person, so I have all the great stories about selling a bunch of unbreakable plates to a Greek wedding, which you can imagine didn’t go down very well. The reality of it was potentially a bit darker, but I just don’t know. I wasn’t there.
It just strikes me as interesting that novelists and confidence tricksters are two species of liar, in a way.
Of fiction-makers, yes. And more than that. As a novelist, your job is to persuade people of things they know aren’t true, and at the same time, to impart, in some ways, something that is. Under the heavy cover of darkness, you’re in the business of fiction, you’re in the business of storytelling. You’re not in the business of offloading great chunks of actual fact and forcing people to memorize them. There is an absolute similarity there. And plausibility—that definitely runs in my family. We’re all plausible and usually able to find an explanation for where we are when we shouldn’t be or something. That’s a comparison that always makes me giggle.
There’s a line in this book about how it’s hard to lie backward. Is that a thing?
That’s apparently true, but I got that off a TV show. This is one of those things I’m not even sure where it comes from exactly. My recollection is that in interrogation, it’s difficult to lie in reverse because you can’t keep the sequence of events straight, because you’ve imagined it rather than actually remembering it. The other thing though, which I suppose really mitigates against that, is that interrogators, as I understand it, one of the things they look for is stories that are too perfect, where people remember exactly the sequence of events and never change. When you’ve done that, it’s because you’ve memorized it. Normally, if someone’s telling a true story, they’ll go back and they’ll revise.
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 54 Page 24
