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Future Remix
an interview with Ian McDonald
by Nick Gevers
INTRODUCTION
Ian McDonald, surely one of Britain's most
significant SF writers, is both a pyrotechnic stylist and a deeply humane
socio-political commentator. His novels and stories are frenetic, colourful,
allusive, hilarious; they comprehensively mix and recombine Twentieth
Century history and popular culture with the speculative gists of SF
and Fantasy, the radical conceptual sleights and off-the-wall dialects
of genre fiction. A long-time resident of Northern Ireland, McDonald
sees the contemporary world from the margins, from the materially impoverished
but always vibrant and adaptable perspective of the teeming populations
of the excluded peripheries of the globalised order. He gives the Third
World a needed science-fictional voice, but always with brilliant  lyrical
inventiveness, always with supreme narrative flair ...
McDonald's novels, while invariably fresh and
distinct, form identifiable thematic clusters. The condition of Ireland
is explored in a trio of superficially unrelated books, the magnificent
fantasy of archetypes King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), the
extravagant far-future picaresque Hearts, Hands, and Voices (1992,
published in the USA as The Broken Land), and an incisive near-future
police procedural with aliens, Sacrifice of Fools (1996). Satire
on systems of social repression informs Out on Blue Six (1989),
a Vonnegutian revolutionary comedy, and Necroville (1994, retitled
Terminal Café in the US), a kaleidoscopic vision of a
world whose proletariat consists of the resurrected dead. Africa is
liberated from its present chaotic dependency by a protean extraterrestrial
infestation in Chaga (1995, published in America as Evolution's
Shore), Kirinya (1998), and the chapbook novella Tendeleo's
Story (2000). And there is the transplanted Third World of McDonald's
terraformed Mars, the setting for both his esteemed first novel, Desolation
Road (1988) and his latest book, Ares Express (2001).
The richness of these full-length works is
on display also in McDonald's many fine short stories, some of which
are collected in Empire Dreams (1988) and Speaking in Tongues
(1992); important unassembled tales include "The Best and The Rest of
James Joyce" (1992) and "The Days of Solomon Gursky" (1998), a cosmic
follow-up to Necroville. Indeed, various of McDonald's shorter
fictions share and illuminate the locations of his novels; but others
are vigorously independent, for example the lyrical cyberpunk novella
Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (1994). Kling Klang Klatch
(1992) is an idiosyncratic graphic novel featuring text by McDonald
and artwork by David Lyttleton. McDonald's next novel is to be a huge
epic of mid-Twenty First Century India, Cyberabad.
I interviewed Ian McDonald by e-mail between
March of 2000 and June of 2001.
THE INTERVIEW
NG: Your background
sounds like an interesting and varied one -- long-term residence in
Northern Ireland, travels in Third World countries such as Kenya. How
has this shaped your SF writing? Would it be fair to describe you as
an author dedicated to the evocation and discussion of the plight and
potential of ordinary people in "developing" and conflict-ridden regions
of the world?
IMD: Little bit of personal history first:
I was born in Manchester to a Scottish father and an Irish mother and
came over to Northern Ireland when I was five -- a place which places
a certain importance on "identity". I grew up on the margins of the
margins, so it's probably inevitable I'd be attracted to a marginal,
outsider's literature. Likewise, I'd naturally identify with the marginalised,
those outside the mainstream of Koka Kola Kultur: the developing and
the conflict-ridden, as you put it. You write about what you see around
you, and you don't pass the greater portion of your life through the
"Troubles" without some identification with similar conflicts in the
developing world.
I'd use the expression "Third World" only in the sense that I include
Northern Ireland as a Third World country: a society of two significant
social groups that have been set against each other by historical engineering;
a skewed economic infrastructure based on the public sector, with a
highly economically significant samurai elite (the RUC); a highly-politicised
population with the ability to arm itself to the teeth if it's disregarded;
a post-colonial process of disengagement that failed half-way through;
physical marginalisation, poor infrastructure, a monied class rapidly
moving upwards that is yet unable to engage fully in either Irish or
UK society; the sense of cultural inferiority that forces both social
groups into re-engineering of their cultural tropes ...
This is getting worthy and boring. My point is, there's more dynamic
for change in "Third World" societies than in the West. Where there's
change, there's conflict and where there's conflict, you have story.
I've never been attracted to the "aristocratic" model of science fiction
-- wunderkinder, the dynastic model, the Hidden Prince. It strikes me
as a singularly irresponsible way to rule billions of sentients: when
the going gets tough, the supreme executive saddles up and heads off
into the thick of tough. Like sending Blair to Kosovo at the head of
a division of Household Cavalry. (Then again ... ) This may come from
the fact that a lot of science fiction is historical fiction set in
the future. Me, I like ordinary people who get catapulted into extraordinary
events, like Sweetness in Ares Express. Certainly, I'll be exploring
"Third World" science fiction for a couple of volumes to come; I like
the way that the tropes and assumptions of SF mutate and transform when
they hit a totally different society from the one in which they were
bred: that's why I mentally subtitle Cyberabad "A Khyberpunk
novel".
NG: Another very prominent
feature of your writing is your (an inadequate adjective) poetic prose
style. How did this style develop? Was it influenced by any modern authors
in particular?
IMD: There's a certain "either/or" theory
of writing that I've never subscribed to: either you have a good story
or you have good characters, either you have a mile-a-second plot, or
you have good language. This strikes me as defeatist; surely, the idea
is to have both/and/all? I do care about language in a book: that's
why I have to plot everything in detail before I actually get down to
fingers on keys, otherwise I'll be so preoccupied with what happens
and how that I'll forget it's ultimately words on a page, and those
might as well be (I hope) well-chosen words. Also, I do come from a
different literary environment from the English Bourgeois Dispassionate
School: one in which poets are (often over-) esteemed and verbal dexterity
-- particularly in spoken language -- is valued. The mix? It's all mix:
Joyce is in there, of course, the everyday hyperbole of Thomas Kinsella's
translation of "The Tain", Blake -- as always. A lot of it is just hearing
the way sounds bounce off each other in my head, some words resonate
better off each other; balancing syllables, stresses in a proper name,
all that stuff. You hear magic dialogue and language everywhere; it's
just listening. Nowadays, as I read virtually no fiction, I'm more reliant
on overheards than ever, otherwise I'd descend into parodies of McDonald
style.
NG: It's frequently
been commented that you quote and rework texts by other writers in your
own fiction -- very much a postmodern technique, and one you employ
very skilfully, in a sort of transcendent parody. What has motivated
this tendency?
IMD: So? Doesn't everyone? The most commonly
levelled charge is about the Chaga Saga recapitulating The Crystal
World. Can't list that sample on the sleeve notes. I've never read
Ballard: I've never taken to all that Home Counties pining-for-Empire/degeneration
stuff. I've been living in the last days of empire for most of my life,
and it gives you quite a different perspective. Historical necessity.
There's still a big cultural hang-over from the Victorian romantic ideal
of artist as quasi-divine creator: a quick, agonised commune with the
muse and it all pours out of his head, perfect and complete and new
upon the world. This is an historical blip; Classical and Baroque composers
quite happily drew (improved) upon themes written by other composers.
Screenwriting seminar with a guy whose greatest fear was that someone
or something might influence and thus taint his purity of finish with
"derivativeness". Nonsense. Everything influences you. To deny that
is to deny any attempt to produce art at all. Writing is pure response
to the world. Everything is part of the mix. I've -- what we call "post-modernism"
is simply not an adequate term for what's happening here; for a start,
too much of it is self-aware, preening and dishonest. Irony? Get out
of here. "Modernism" is just so last century now. I'd call our developing
cultural trend to use the wads of information surrounding us and our
access to it, to create micro-cultures, "modern-modernism". It's modern
in that it's a product of our technological ability to surf, sample
and mix, rather than concentrating on trans-historical sources, as in
the academic definition of the term. Anyone with an eye on the zeitgeist
would agree that the art of the edit will be the cultural skill of the
new century.
NG: How do you conceive
and develop your novels and stories? What comes first -- the concept,
or the style and imagery?
IMD: It is a long slow process. The idea
always comes at once: I still drive daily past the traffic lights where
King of Morning, Queen of Day appeared all at once, entire while
I was waiting at red. After that, it can take years for the story to
grow to the point where it can tell itself. Nothing's clear yet, just
an idea and a feeling. It's like a planet forming: narrative gravity
attracts ideas, characters, scenes. After the initial "I'd like to write
about..." glow, there's usually a moment when characters, story and
voice all fall into place simultaneously. By "voice", I mean the way
the story's going to tell itself: stylistic conceits, like the idea
of Story as story in Ares Express, or how the opening of Chaga
and the closing of Kirinya are modelled around John Tavener's
The Protecting Veil to (hopefully) evoke a transcendent stillness.
I'm very much an image-driven writer, I have to be able to see stuff
in my inner cinema, and images very much form the seeds of stories:
key images for Cyberabad are the high-speed train carrying Mr
Nandha the AI assassin across the Indo-Gangetic plain, the rooftop farm,
a garland of orange flowers floating on a river, the dry rain clouds
in the south and the dog that is beaten to death for defending a guava
tree.
NG: Throughout your
career, you've produced a steady flow of highly atmospheric short stories,
the earlier of which appear in Empire Dreams and in Speaking
in Tongues. Do you have a particular affection for the short form,
despite its low rate of pay?
IMD: There are story ideas, and there
are novel ideas. Sometimes, as in "King of Morning, Queen of Day" and
"Towards Kilimanjaro", the story becomes a novel; then, as in Tendeleo's
Story, the novel becomes a story again. Everything has its natural
length; but I do like a good, tight short story -- it was Harlan Ellison's
short fiction that really made me want to write. I often use stories
as a way of introducing ideas I'm going to explore over a series of
works: the Chaga (which began with "Towards Kilimanjaro", a novelette),
the Shi'an in the stories ("The Undifferentiated Object of Desire",
"Frooks", "Legitimate Targets") and then Sacrifice of Fools,
the Mars of Desolation Road and Ares Express (which first
saw print in the short story "The Catherine Wheel"). Some ideas have
to be approached from several sides. I'm currently feeling my way into
what I call Big Future: a fictional setting with the cultural variety
and sophistication of Ursula Le Guin's Ekumen but hard science and STL
space transport, set ten to one hundred thousand years from now. And
no aliens: the humans are the aliens in this wide, slow, multi-levelled
society. It has enough facets to keep me entertained for some time.
Low rates of pay be damned -- pay is pay, and, to be brutally career-ist
about this, it's good to keep your face seen.
NG: Your most recent
book is Ares Express, a companion volume to your first novel,
Desolation Road. The terraformed Mars these books share as a
setting is a rich locale, one to which you've repeatedly returned. How
did you originally contrive it, and what is its continuing appeal for
you?
IMD: Of course, Ray Bradbury is in the
mix: I remember a single copy of The Silver Locusts (that's the
UK Martian Chronicles) being the only science fiction available
on the Liverpool-Belfast boat. Bought it, read it anyway, over a long
and very boring night crossing, and it left me with a very strange impression
because it was so unlike the kind of SF I was reading at that time,
loose structure, episodal, with a huge cast of characters and a non-realistic
style and a lingering image of Mars as Zion: the blacks leaving the
South is an image that still haunts me. I loved the way Bradbury told
a story of a place, and a place for ordinary people. Years later, Omni
published a story called "Vox Olympica" -- it might have been Michael
Bishop wrote it but I can't be certain. I can't remember too much about
that actual story apart from using the calderas on Olympus Mons as a
very large church organ but the setting, a richly terraformed Mars,
blew me away. I thought, of course ... and then went and found everything
I could at the time (and there was a lot less of it than there is now)
on terraforming Mars.
Somewhere back in the mix was Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the elements
fused into the idea of a magic realist science fiction novel. Critical
opinion will doubtless class this an oxymoron, as science-fiction is
essentially a non-realistic form; I came from the standpoint that science-fiction
must aspire to realism if it is to achieve sufficient suspension of
disbelief, and I wanted to play around with that. It wasn't until I
spent some time in Africa in 1984, at the start of the great drought,
that the feel of this Mars came together in the now-lost story "Cirrus
Minor": I didn't want this Mars to be Bradbury's small-town America
in the sky, I was looking for a different paradigm and I still see the
Road Mars as a combination of India and Australia. By a nice
coincidence, I was approached a couple of years back by an Australian
Production company who had this insane but commendable idea to do Road
as a TV series -- Northern Exposure on Mars was the pitch --
and they had a creative alliance with a Bangalore-based CGI company,
who'd do the big fuck-off engines and all the angelic/miraculous gear.
So it started as an Oz/Indian fusion, and may yet end there too. How
satisfying.
NG: Desolation Road
is a highly eventful picaresque novel, with a large cast of characters
and a remarkable circular structure. What sort of design have you followed
in Ares Express? How does the new novel relate to, and depart
from, its predecessor?
IMD: Ares Express is a companion
to Desolation Road (not a sequel, prequel, any kind of quel),
and shares much of the same terrain, attitudes, technology, steam and
a couple of characters. The more observant will notice some differences,
like the Grand Valley worldroof, which surely would have been noticed
in Desolation Road. Now, I never actually said it wasn't
there in Desolation Road. A certain amount is authorial frustration
at being constrained by history and wanting to bolt new annexes on;
most is my exploring the idea of this perhaps being an alternative --
the best of all alternatives: one of the slew of possible Marses created
by the vinculum processing computers that crash-terraformed the planet
for ROTECH. I've recently done a story for Pete Crowther's anthology
on Mars: it has some similarities to the Mars of Ares Express
and to the early prototype story, "The Catherine Wheel", but from a
different angle. I'm moving a little further from base each time: Mars
seems to be unfolding into a series of novels, about a series of worlds
that are companions to each other. Terraform Mars stories are just so
last century now, so of course it's time for me to go back and have
a another little look round and see what we've learned; but the particular
structure of Express is drawn from the train Catherine of
Tharsis and those who live upon her, so it's direct and straightforward
and deliberately brought into the open. It's a story about Story, but
in case that makes it sound like one of those deadly Italo Calvino novels
about novels, there's a lot of fun going on.
NG: Your second novel,
Out on Blue Six, was a sort of satirical dystopia, a colourful
and noisy book, which some esteem less than your other works. How do
you yourself regard it now?
IMD: I can't look at it. Everyone has
a bad book in them; in mitigation, I hope I got mine out early. Second
Novel Problem. The one thing I like about it is that it has the only
character in fiction named after a Scout Hall in Belfast: Courtney Hall.
NG: King of Morning,
Queen of Day, on the other hand, is widely seen as your masterpiece,
both because of the authenticity of its Irish setting and because of
its varied content, stylistically very different accounts of the encounters
of successive generations of women with the source of all archetypes.
What was the intention behind this book?
IMD: It was the first of what I think
of as the "Irish Trilogy" and was written out of a pure mean spirit.
I'd bought and read R. A. McAvoy's The Book of Kells and was
mildly infuriated by the American Oirishness of it all: it was fun but
didn't seem to have made much effort, or have much desire, to go into
the subtleties and complexities of modern Ireland. Deep in the Celtic
Twilight. The idea struck me to do a modern Irish fantasy, to take the
Celtic whimsy King of the Faeries thing, look at where it's come from
in our century (heavily politically engineered) and where it might be
going. All cultures and identities must evolve and change or they die,
"Irishness" is no different. Look, I have to fess up to a certain amount
of hubris here: I thought "I can do that/I can do that better", banged
out the original story and then the thing blew itself up to novel length.
It's my quintessential remix novel: each section remixes the one before,
the whole is about how each generation remixes the mythology of the
one before. Throw in some clever dick stuff playing around with twentieth
century Irish literature, Bob's your Uncle. I mix a sound track to every
piece of fiction I write, and this is one of the few I still listen
to. The book is firmly planted in 1990, but the CD'll still lift a party
...
Of course, this vanity is returning to bite me on the ass, first with
the Chaga Saga, more so now with Cyberabad. I'm the outsider
trying to feel my way into different, complex and subtle cultures. Serves
me bloody right, then.
NG: Hearts, Hands,
and Voices, your far-future biotech novel, reads like a summary
or allegory of all the Twentieth Century's intractable sectarian conflicts.
Why is the heroine mute? And is the telepathic communion achieved at
novel's end a serious prescription for the resolution of conflict? Ken
Livingstone approved, but still ...
IMD: Hearts, Hands, and Voices
-- the title's from a splendid old Lutheran Hymn, "Nun Danket Denn Wir
Gott". The idea was, of course, to generalise the Irish Problem -- by
extension, the armed history of the twentieth century. Although it's
number two of the Irish Trilogy, it's not about Northern Ireland --
it's more or less specifically a reworking of the Irish War of Independence.
I still like the biotech -- I was feeling my way towards the Chaga
Saga here, the whole organic thing that seems to bubble up from some
deep brain fold. I have a feeling it's part of this "both/and" attitude
I was talking about way up the page. I see the split between biological
and mechanical (including electronic) as artificial: our current cultural
paradigm is to model life and sentience on a weak simulacrum hooked
up through the 19th Century telephone system concept; but machines will
-- must -- become more like biological systems. You don't get round
Papa Darwin that easily. Marvin Minsky is dead wrong -- and deeply dull
-- when he mind-masturbates about us all flinging off our shoddy little
meat carapaces and taking on superior bodies of metal and silicon. Machines
will become more biological: evolution works, in any environment. That
Platonic dualism of Minsky's has a long tenure in science fiction: the
mortification of the heated flesh, the notion of disembodiment and superintelligence
deriving infinite pleasure from Knowing Big Stuff About the All. Julian
of Norwich was doing it in her convent cell back in the twelfth century.
Keep your higher mathematical truths, mate. I'll hold on to the Playstation.
Godel's going to shaft you in the end.
Hearts, Hands, and Voices: Mathembe's not speaking was a simple
symbol for the disenfranchisement of the young: speaking of the Northern
Ireland situation, what you're offered is a series of off-the-peg attitudes,
identities and solutions made up by people with a vested interest in
you buying them. Mathembe has no voice; at another level, she knows
that if she did speak, no one would listen to her. The ending: I'd forgotten
what happened. HHV's one of those books, like Necroville,
I have no memory of writing; if I were to thumb through a copy, there'd
be stuff in there that would surprise me. Likewise, some of the earlier
stories are receding over the memory horizon; it wasn't until you mentioned
it in this interview that I remembered I'd written a story called "The
Best and The Rest of James Joyce" ... I do remember the original ending
to HHV was a lot harder and darker and offered very little hope.
I think the best point I can draw from a slightly over-convenient plot
resolution is that communication is all we have.
NG: The graphic novel
Kling Klang Klatch was an intriguing departure in literary form
for you, although readily recognisable as your work. Have you conceived
any further projects in this vein?
IMD: Kling Klang Klatch was one
of those offers that come up that are just too much fun to refuse. I've
always been a closet comics fan, and I'd seen what was happening in
the graphic novel field in the early nineties, after Dark Knight
and Watchmen wrote the Old and New Testaments for the genre.
Poor man's movies. I sent Faith Brooker three ideas, one of which we
wanted to do with Bill Sinkiewicz, but he'd vanished to some island
in the middle of a lake in Canada, supposedly, communing with something.
That story ended up as Necroville -- the mind boggles what it
would have been like as a graphic. David Lyttleton had been scheduled
to work with Jonathan Carroll but again, something perhaps not unconnected
with a Canadian island happened there, and we ended up with Kling
Klang Klatch.
It was written in a hurry -- with a nasty hiatus in the middle when
I got shafted by a certain former agent not altogether unknown to the
SFWA -- in weekly instalments in screenplay style, which David drew
up at white heat; if you look carefully, you can see his style develop
as it goes on: halfway through the book characters lose their arms and
legs because David reckoned you didn't actually need a limb to communicate
the concept of handness and footness. I'm still immensely fond of it,
though I could drive Inspector Morse's Jaguar through the plot frailties.
Even now, I can spot a Lyttleton a mile off; when one crops up in New
Scientist or the Guardian, I get a small rush of trainspotterish
pleasure. At the time, I was keen to do more in the vein, but the genre's
shifted. I was gobsmacked by From Hell: the chapter where Dr
Gull goes on his tour of Hawksmoor Churches and demonstrates the London
Pentagram is exceptional. Docu-drama comics strike me as an exciting
possibility.
NG: Scissors Cut
Paper Wrap Stone, your long novella, like the final section of King
of Morning, is an exercise in cyberpunk, although by no means just
that. In fact, it marries cyberpunk with an extrapolated Kabbalistic
mysticism, to quite extravagant effect. Why this particular combination,
and in a Japanese locale?
IMD: Scissors was something of
a bluff: novellas were fashionable at the time and I persuaded Bantam
to do Scissors as a free-standing book. Looking at the previous
answer, I'm coming out of this as a right little fashion tart. Anyway,
they liked it, and Scissors has had the cheek to go around the
world in this format; not the UK for some reason. I used to live across
the road from an extravagantly good second-hand bookshop where I got
copies of Oliver Statler's Japanese Inn and Japanese Pilgrimage,
which describes the Shikoku pilgrimage with the luminosity and spirituality
of a Hokusai print. I liked the idea of writing a spiritually informed
cyberpunk novel, and the circular pilgrimage meshed with the thought
"Zen and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance." I already had the idea
of the fracters -- the graphic typefaces that can interact directly
with the brain -- from Neville Brody's book on design and typography.
There's a lot more Buddhism in it than Kaballa, Neal Stephenson notwithstanding;
I'd quite like to revisit that post-industrial Japan, and Ethan Ring
(oh the heavy-handed symbolism) and his ill-starred relationship with
Luka Casipriadin. However -- I'm depressing myself here -- I'm getting
to the stage in my life where I'm starting to realise there are things
that may just never get written.
NG: Necroville
deals with the plight of dead people who have been resurrected by means
of nanotech only to become a servile underclass. Is this a direct commentary
on industrial relations in general?
IMD: Necroville as an allegory
of labour relations? Hadn't thought of this: Corporate Capitalism Costs
You Your Body and Soul. Maybe there is something in this. The whole
contratada system at the heart of Necroville -- the Tesler-Thanos
Corporation can bring you back, but you're a long time paying it off
-- came from the realisation that the living would envy the Dead. They
look good (they can look anything they want), they never get sick, they
live forever. Of course, the vested interests of the living are going
to want to put restrictions on that. Dead investments could totally
devastate the economic system. Immortality always comes at a price;
in Necroville, it's fiscal and contractual. It's a long-standing
literary convention that because we can't have it, immortality comes
at so high a price that no one would want it. Ask Count Dracula.
In "The Days of Solomon Gursky", a novella in Asimov's, I developed
the idea that in such a society, there will come a point where Dead
is the norm and meat life is as restricted as life in the womb. You
don't have to go too far into a future like that to reach a world that
is almost incomprehensible to us. In the end, "life" abolished altogether.
We've reached that meat/machine fusion I was talking about. These future
humans, with their ability to reshape physical reality, are effectively
colonies of quasi-biological nanocrafters. They can die and be reconstructed
any number of times -- they use it for space travel in an STL universe
-- so you have minds that will make it all the way into deep Deep Future.
NG: Your sequence of
novels beginning with Chaga and continuing with Kirinya
involves a breathtaking transformation of sub-Saharan Africa into a
surreal evolutionary paradise by an alien biological infestation. Africans
are at first threatened, but ultimately empowered, by this change. Your
ideological agenda seems fairly clear here; but in practical terms,
what statement are you making about the future of Africa, and how will
Ananda (the final volume) carry this manifesto forward?
IMD: The future's coming to Kenya as
much as to Kentucky; and to me, it's more interesting in Nairobi than
Nashville. Africans are tough and resourceful people. The great skiffy
cliché is the UFO/White House combo: what if it's the White Mountain
--Kilimanjaro -- instead? The image of the unstoppable wave of transformation
was nicked from The Wrath of Khan: it's the Genesis device, slowed
down, and once I had that, it became a rich source of metaphors: for
colonialism, new technology, globalisation, change, death. If the Chaga
is colonialism, it's a unique kind that allows the people of the poor
South to use and transform it to meet their needs and empower themselves:
it's a symbiosis. The Chaga creates a society which needs nothing from
Western Capitalism, in fact, threatens to destabilise it: here material
objects are cheap and easy to make. Skills and talents become important.
This is a true knowledge economy, where a repro Lexus is worth a haircut,
because how many folk do you know can do a really good haircut? So we
get a democracy of commodities, and nanoprogramming skills are the economic
base. There'd be a lot of copyright fights but the food would be great.
As I said about King of Morning, Queen of Day, in the Chaga
Saga, I'm an outsider, so the main character, Gaby, has to be an outsider:
a journalist who manages to wreck every good thing she touches. She
has to find her way into and through levels of very different societies,
and her journey has far from ended.
 Ananda,
the mooted final chunk of the Chaga Saga (or rather the novel-form part
of it) has back-burnered, but suffice to say that we'll get Gaby back
to Africa from her exile, there'll be a resolution with Shepard, who'll
make it back from the BDO, we find out what's on the other side of the
last chamber, and Ren gets to grow up a bit. Plus all the usual mayhem,
shooting, rough sex, politicking and cosmic stuff. And a lot more football
-- it was left out a bit in Kirinya.
Tendeleo's Story, commissioned by Pete Crowther and published
by PS Publishing, Gollancz in Futures and Binaries and
Gardner Dozois in Year's Best, was a sidebar to the Chaga Saga
I'd wanted to write about for some time, but was leery about touching.
It may be stating the glaringly obvious, but I'm not black, I'm not
female, I'm not Kenyan. I drew much from the experiences of a Zairean
refugee I know, and my own time in East Africa, but I was still worried
writing it. It seems to have worked, and I'd like to go a bit further
with Tendeleo and the world she is building. She's not an outsider,
she's an insider.
NG: Sacrifice of
Fools, third in your thematic Irish Trilogy, and one of your most
compelling books, deals more closely and grittily than King of Morning
with the realities of contemporary Ireland, going to the heart of Ulster's
problems. Could one say that the thesis of this novel is that if there's
one way to make ethno-religious factions comprehend their own bigotry,
it's to introduce a third and far more different grouping into their
midst -- aliens, in this case?
IMD: More Outsiders, explicitly so this
time. Of course, it's Alien Nation in Ulster. I feel that the
film fudged the whole issue by making it a dumb drugs story. There was
a lot of potential in the central premise of a whole rake of aliens
being dropped as a sizeable ethnic group into our society, and us discovering
that they aren't just Valley Folk in silly rubber heads, but have a
core of alienness we can never touch. Hence, the Shi'an. They're the
Great Science Fiction Cat, made into an alien race. A hunting society,
both sexes sexually similar, that only have sex twice a year but when
they have it, they have it? That's yer moggie, that is. After
that, the conceit's easy: drop them in Belfast rather than Los Angeles,
throw in a serial killer and off you go. Sacrifice contains the
only accurate SF prediction I ever made: The Patton Report into Policing
recommended renaming the Royal Ulster Constabulary the Northern Ireland
Police Service (which I call the new Joint Authority police force in
the book), until they realised they'd get called the Nips instead of
the Ruck, so it was recently changed again to Police Service for Northern
Ireland (Psin?).
I'm not recommending massive social engineering as a device for conflict
resolution, bringing everyone into contact with an external third force.
Jehovah aside, trinities tend to be unstable, chaotic systems. It just
seemed to be a useful tool for exploring the roots and branches of the
conflict here -- far from resolved yet. In the Shi'an sexual set-up,
I could examine the Troubles as one big bloody male see-who-can-piss-the-highest
contest, with guns. I've yet to find a corresponding way to use the
Shi'an to explore female sexuality -- they may not be the right construct
to do it. I'd like to do more with Andy Gillespie, the reluctant ex-con
turned investigator: he's a man who's made himself an outsider by being
unable to accept the givens of his community. We'll see.
NG: A final question:
your relationship with publishers has swung from early American success
with Bantam and initial obscurity in Britain to current prominence in
Britain and non-publication in America. Why has this occurred?
IMD: Why does a publisher dump anyone?
You don't sell enough books. Chaga (Evolution's Shore
in the US) got a big advance in the US and, nice reviews apart, didn't
sell that tremendously, so when Bantam took a look at Sacrifice of
Fools, they had a reason to say, "wouldn't know anything about that
Irish stuff, nah." Likewise, with Kirinya, "that African stuff".
It was also perceived as being anti-American. Balls. Anti-American corporatism,
yes; if you guys seriously subscribe to "love-me, love my corporations",
you have my sympathies. It's like saying I'm anti-Irish because I laugh
at Westlife.
But we're going to remedy that soon, I hope, with Ares Express
and Cyberabad ("that Indian stuff"). Cyberabad is the
fiction project now, and, as books about India tend to be, it's going
to be big. Maybe not a Peter Hamilton, but I've eleven main characters
and a lot of story, so it'll be thick. India in 2049 is a much bigger
challenge than Kenya becoming alien; I'm delivering in June 2002 and
there's a scad of work still to do before I hit the keys.
This interview
was first published in Interzone,
October 2001.
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