| A Conversation With Paul J. McAuley | |||||||||||||||
| An interview with Nick Gevers | |||||||||||||||
| March 2001 | |||||||||||||||
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McAuley's great strengths are: a very thorough grounding in past SF (he is a frequent critic and reviewer), which allows him to deploy and comment upon the field's icons and tropes with great, knowingly humorous flexibility; a strong command of scientific theory and detail, which lends his work, like that of Bruce Sterling and Michael Swanwick, a relentless, densely argued, intellectually provocative texture; a mastery of brisk, variously contemporary and exotic language; and a quietly persuasive sense of the existential and moral implications of his fictions, however distanced from reality they may at times seem. All of these gifts have enriched a steady, consistent output of stories and novels. McAuley's first major literary campaign was in the territory of Larry Niven-esque space opera. A testing ground was the set of interrelated short stories constituting most of The King of the Hill (1991); Of The Fall (1989) was a long sidebar to this emerging future history; and its full story of alien contact, cosmic origins, and personal crisis emerged in the linked novels Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988, winner of the Philip K. Dick Award), and Eternal Light (1991). The focus of Red Dust (1993), a strong planetary romance, was a Mars of centuries hence, an elaborate realm of Tibetan monasteries, Chinese agricultural collectives, and bizarre secret histories; its rich drama and sense of place were carried further in the alternate history Pasquale's Angel (1994, winner of the Sidewise Award), which exhilaratingly and menacingly converted Renaissance Florence into a domain of advanced Industry in addition to its customary intrigue. From there, McAuley proceeded to master cyberpunk, in the majority of the stories in The Invisible Country (1996) and in the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel Fairyland (1995), which populated post-industrial Europe with artificial creatures that alternated as docile slaves and threatening figures from myth. The Confluence trilogy, made up of Child of the River (1997), Ancients of Days (1998), and Shrine of Stars (1999), and probably McAuley's masterpiece, revitalized Science Fantasy, telling superbly the tale of a young man of extraordinary powers who is the last of the Builders of a vast world populated by thousands of intelligent species, all of which must be saved from themselves. Paul McAuley's latest novel is The Secret of Life, published in 2001 by HarperCollins in Britain and by Tor in North America; it very distinctly gives voice to the agenda of "radical hard SF." I discussed McAuley's new book and related issues with him in an e-mail interview in March 2001. You've described yourself as a radical hard SF writer. By way of introduction to your authorial philosophy and techniques, what does writing radical hard SF entail? 
Radical hard SF was a term coined by David Pringle and Colin
Greenland in an Interzone editorial some years ago. They suggested that
there was room in SF for new fictions that would be "critical and
investigative, facing up to the science and technology of the present
and future... using the hard-edged language and imagery of technology
for imaginative interpretations of reality." More recently, Gardner
Dozois has appropriated it to describe the sub-genre of revisionist
widescreen baroque space opera -- which is only partly what I think
radical hard SF can do. I use the definition very loosely: SF rooted in
the core traditions of SF but also surfing the wave of the present,
with rounded characters, bleeding edge science, an attempt to convey
the complexity of a world or worlds. It's a reaction to the trad SF
approach of filtering the future through One Big Change --
nanotechnology, immortality, biotech. If there's one thing we've learnt
from the twentieth century, it's that change is continuous and is
advancing on a thousand different fronts.
I'm a science junkie -- always have been. If I'd been a writer
before becoming a scientist I think I'd still be writing about science
and I'm certainly still excited by the rich strangeness of the universe
-- I'm lucky to live here, at the start of the twenty-first century,
where new wonders are reported almost daily. As a scientist, I hope
I've acquired a certain meticulousness about thinking things through,
the ability to see things from the bottom up, and to not be afraid of
research. I'm definitely writing more and more about biology and the
culture of science now that I'm no longer a scientist -- there's a kind
of disinhibition process going on, and it's something I know a little
bit about.
Working as we all do in a genre that is itself a patchwork of
quotes, for the same tropes and tricks have been used over and over,
it's hard not to find a quote in any contemporary SF. For instance, how
can you write a new alien invasion story without acknowledging all the
old alien invasion stories? After all, your characters will already
know about alien invasions from movies and TV, if not from books.
However, I think that a lot of the parody in my work comes from real
events, not books; quoting the world is what I like doing best.
The Secret of Life is also written in the present tense, and the
protagonist is a woman, so the transition was even more one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees than you imply. And in fact, it was kind of
refreshing to be back in the quasi-familiar landscape of the near
future, and not that difficult -- getting back into serious research
for the background was more difficult than the actual writing. After
all, Confluence wasn't the only thing I had been writing -- there were
a bunch of short stories written in breaks from drafts of the trilogy,
and they were very varied exercises.
Both revolve around a biotech theme, and both do have one character
in common, but the future history of Fairyland is not the future
history of The Secret of Life. While Fairyland was full of gothic
biotech riffs on nanotechnology, which is still in the vapourware
phase, The Secret of Life is firmly embedded in hard-headed
extrapolations of current biotechnology. In fact, in the 18-odd months
since I turned the novel in, I'm beginning to think I've been a little
too conservative, given what's around the corner in the biotech market.
And Fairyland is very much about the garage science ethic, while The
Secret of Life is set in the slippery interface between academic and
industrial research. Mariella, the protagonist, is an eccentric rather
than a rebel -- she works the system rather than walks away from it.
Not really. The realistic approach to the landscapes of Mars fits
in with the way I handled the culture of science and speculation about
science; and while Red Dust is set on post-Viking Mars, The Secret of
Life is set on post-Mars Global Surveyor/post-Mars Pathfinder Mars.
We've tremendously expanded our knowledge about Mars since the early
90s, when Red Dust was written, and I hope some of the detailed
complexity of the Martian landscapes comes across in The Secret of
Life.
I have to admit that I haven't read White Mars, so I can't comment
on it. I've always thought that bacteria, which make up 90 percent
plus of Earth's biosphere, and which for two billion years were the
only life on Earth and still drive Earth's biocycles, haven't been
given their due in science fiction. Viruses, sure -- they're a handy
metaphor for the informational interface between life and non-life. But
not bacteria. The problem is, of course, that until we fall ill, we don't
think much about bacteria; they do their humble thing very much out of
sight, like the Morlocks. So to try and dramatize their versatility, I
thought I'd write about something which had a supercharged version of
the ability most bacteria share, the ability to borrow genes from each
other. That's the relict species found on Mars, a kind of compendium of
the variety of Martian life collapsed into a single genetic volume. And
obviously, something that could self-select its genetic constitution
depending on its environment would be of tremendous interest to the
biotechnology industry, and a neat MacGuffin. It occurs to me now that
reading Kate Wilhelm's and Ted Thomas's The Clone at an impressionable
age may have been an influence.
Little bits of my biography do echo little bits of Mariella's
biography because I was lucky enough to have worked in research both in
the USA and in Britain and I've reached an age where I have a
perspective on it. It's pretty thoroughly mixmastered though, and
there's a whole bunch I didn't put in, because this quite deliberately
isn't a campus novel, and some parts are quite frankly sheer wish-fulfillment, mainly because I'm not a genius level scientist with a
chance of winning the Swedish Prize.
Governments were dealing with biowarfare long before private
biotech companies started to work with genetically modified organisms,
so I'd hardly say that governments were benign. On the other hand, for
the most part they've not tried to direct theoretical research, which
is probably a Good Thing, although, of course, there was and still is
tremendously gnarly political intrigue around the Human Genome Project
-- Robert Cook-Deegan's The Gene Wars gives a terrific insider's view.
What's interesting is that private companies now have the ability to do Big
Science projects -- for instance, Craig Venter's private company, Celera
Genomics, was in a hotly contested race with the government-funded Human
Genome Project to complete the sequencing of the human genome -- which
might mean some Interesting Times ahead.
.
I think she's on the far edge of the curve, but she does embody the
kind of single-minded commitment necessary to any working scientist,
although not any particular scientist. Sure, she takes risks; she
wouldn't be very interesting if she didn't, and I think her risk-taking
seems a bit exaggerated because she's a woman and a scientist.
Not right now; although I do have an inkling, I don't have a hook
to hang it on, and for now I'm content to use these short stories to
explore the lesser known corners of the Solar System. It's called the
Quiet War because that's what the victors on Earth call it. It was
pretty quiet and unspectacular for them, and it involved espionage and
economic sabotage as much as conventional warfare.
Whole Wide World is set even closer to the present than The Secret
of Life, and uses a lot of what I've learned about London since I moved
here a few years ago. I think the shoutline will describe it as a crime
novel about ultrasurveillance and cybersex, but it also has a thread of
dystopian SF running through it. I like the lead character a lot, and
hope to write about him again, but right now I'm thinking about a novel
about thinking.
Since completing a Ph.D. on uses of history in SF, Nick Gevers has become a moderately prolific reviewer and interviewer in the field of speculative fiction. He has published in INTERZONE, NOVA EXPRESS, the NEW YORK REVIEW OF SF, and GALAXIES; much of his work is available at INFINITY PLUS, of which he is Associate Editor. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa. |
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