Concept Sci-fi

Interview conducted by Gary Reynolds (August 2008)...

Can you begin by telling us a bit about yourself and how you got into writing?

Well, J K Rowling has a nice way of putting it; she said once that as long as she’d known there were such things as writers, she’d wanted to be one. That describes my feelings exactly. Been scribbling since I was under ten. I wrote my first serious piece of finished fiction before I was twenty, I wrote my first novel as soon as I got out of university. And it took me until my mid thirties to get anything published! That’s mainly because I was very stubborn about what I wanted to write, rather than looking at the market and trying to do something I thought might sell. Looking back now, I’m very proud of that fact, but of course at the time it wasn’t quite so delightful.

Can you describe your writing process. How do you get from initial idea all the way through to the final version?

No idea! For me writing is an organic and largely mysterious process. When I sit down to create something I usually only have the vaguest of ideas where I’m going with it – I’ll start with a couple of lines of dialogue or a strong sense of place, a visual scene maybe, and then just kick off in whatever direction it seems to want to roll. I guess this must be what jazz improvisation feels like from the inside. It’s also the reason why it takes me so long to get a novel done. I tend to move quite slowly as well, going back and re-writing multiple times along the way, rather than just pounding out a first draft and then revising. It’s a slow and painful way to write, and I don’t particularly recommend it, but I really wouldn’t have any idea how else to go about it. And it does have the single benefit that if you as the author have no clear sense of where you’re going with the story, your readers aren’t going to either. If you’re surprising yourself with the twists as the plot develops, chances are you’re going to be surprising the reader with those twists as well.

What are you currently working on?

Currently, I’m writing a sequel to my newly published sword and sorcery novel The Steel Remains. Working title is The Cold Commands.

What's the worst piece you've written and why?

Oh, there’ve been many! Basically, almost anything I’ve tried to write in short story mode has turned out pretty crap. I’m just not very good at the short form. For a while in those long unpublished years, I fell into believing that hoary old myth about “honing your art” and “building a name for yourself” by writing short stuff; for me, it was a total waste of time. The truth is that the two forms, the short story and the novel, have very little in common and you really need very different strengths and skills to do well at each. Most writers seem to be strong in one area or the other, but the number who are strong in both is really very limited indeed.

You've written some hugely popular novels. Why have you chosen to also write two graphic novels? What's the appeal of them compared to a novel and which do you prefer?

First and foremost, I did it because I was invited – a Marvel editor had read and liked my prose fiction and thought she had a good match for me in one of Marvel’s stock character properties. The money was pretty good, and it was something I hadn’t done before, which for me is an irresistible combination. I believe in pushing your art, trying new stuff as much as you can – it helps you stay fresh. And the character I was offered, the Black Widow, had huge potential to play with – I had a huge amount of fun with it, and learnt a lot into the bargain.

But as to which I prefer, in the end my first love is always going to be the long prose form. You can do some interesting things with sequential art (for masterful examples, see almost anything by Alan Moore), and it often has a visual and visceral impact that’s hard to pull off with prose, but in the end it is a very abbreviated form; generally a graphic novel just won’t carry the same amount of complex human freight or significance that a prose novel can.

Your books seem to have a fairly dystopian theme to them. What is it that appeals to you about this specific theme? Do you think that’s where the human race is heading?

Yeah, dystopian is a rather over-used term these days, and its meaning has become a bit diffused as a result. Clearly I’m not writing idealized futures, but I don’t really think the themes I cover in my fiction are any more “dystopian” than the themes of any contemporary noir novel or intelligently written political thriller. The things I put into my fictional futures are the same human salients I see going on around me right now. Corruption, corporate excess, violent repression, alienated and dispossessed populations controlled by moneyed elites – it’s not like I’ve made any of this up out of thin air. So rather than having a gloomy view of where humanity is headed, I’d argue I simply have an informed opinion on the enduring dynamics of human nature. After all, we look back half a millennium at Shakespeare’s plays and understand the motivations of the characters perfectly – there seems no reason to suppose that humans half a millennium into the future are going to be any less like us than those five centuries in our past.

Of course, technology does have the power to make human existence better, and has done, and continues to do so in many ways; but it’s still very much a double-edged sword and the grip is always going to be in human hands. The same science that gives us longer, healthier lives or puts us in touch with each other around the globe is also the science that enables us to rain death and fire on each other from thousands of miles away. The Internet helps bring us the truth behind the lies about Iraq, but it also serves to put Chinese journalists and democracy advocates behind bars (yeah, cheers for that, Yahoo – you self-serving venal motherfuckers!) You can use an airliner to unite families who live thousands of miles apart but you can also use it to murder three thousand New Yorkers. The internal combustion engine drives tanks just as well as it does ambulances. The key element is not the technology, it’s the humans using it, and they are always going to be dangerously fallible, if not actually corrupt. To be honest, knowing all that, I don’t see how you can write anything but “dystopian” futures. It’s only this rather weird and wide-eyed semi-autistic technophiliac tendency that seems to think basic human nature is going to change for the better just because we build some new toys.

Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Black Man, et al. are definitely based in the realm of science fiction whereas you’ve now made a definite move into fantasy writing with The Steel Remains. Why the change? Is there a concern that you may lose some of your ‘hard sci-fi’ reader-base?

Well, like I said earlier – I’m keen on anything that helps me stay fresh. Fantasy presents some interesting variation on what you can and can’t do in a narrative, and to be honest, I think I’ve always had a hankering to write some good old-fashioned hack and slay fantasy. I grew up reading master practitioners of the form like Michael Moorcock, Poul Anderson and Karl Edward Wagner, and there’s a brutal, brooding pulp appeal to those stories. As to whether my readers will come with me and cross the divide, of course I hope so, but I suppose there are always going to be a small proportion who are too narrowly focused in their tastes to tolerate the shift. Can’t be helped, it’s a risk you take every time you do something different. I seem to have already pissed off a fair few readers with Black Man because it’s different to the Kovacs books in heft and focus, and before that a lot of fans of Kovacs truly hated what I’d done in Market Forces for similar reasons. Come to that, even with Broken Angels, I managed to pull down a fair bit of criticism because it wasn’t an Altered Carbon copy. Personally, I’m mystified by all this; I’ll read anything if it looks well written or interesting, regardless of genre, and I don’t really understand people who won’t.

What can we expect to see from you in the future?

I’m signed up to do two more fantasy novels in the same sequence as The Steel Remains, which should keep me busy well into 2009. After that, I’m going back to SF, probably to write some more in the Black Man universe – although of course by then, I may have an idea for something else instead. Who can tell? At the moment I’m having a hard time planning even one book ahead – pointless to ask me to second-guess what I’ll be doing in 2010!

If you could have one piece of tech from any of your novels, what would it be and why?

Capacity to re-sleeve, obviously (and some prime-flesh clones waiting on ice). I’m not looking forward to being dead any more than the next man, and the idea of being able to step out of your dying body into a fresh one is immensely attractive. Hey, you’re talking about practical immortality here – what’s not to like???

Please can you tell us something interesting about yourself that isn't related to writing?

Yesterday, I thugged my way up a 6b+ (French grade) overhang climb that’s had me beaten for weeks. Grunting and snarling like a maniac by the time I did it, fingers aching and raw, T-shirt drenched through with sweat from the effort and the fear – but man did it feel good to hit the top of that route!