Matthew De Abaitua interview

Matthew De Abaitua’s novel IF THEN has just been released in the UK and US. We’ve talked to him abotu IF THEN and his future projects.

First of all can you tell us a bit about your new novel, IF THEN?

It’s about the redundant people of a Sussex town who choose to submit themselves to an algorithmic life-monitoring system called The Process. The Process will maxmise the amount of potential happiness within the town, while manufacturing everything they need to survive. It works for a while but then the algorithm begins to manufacture something different: old soldiers, old weapons, trenches; it begins replaying a particular battle from the First World War in the English countryside.

Can you give us some insight into your main characters?

James is a bailiff. To keep the town in balance, the Process puts forward citizens for eviction. It is James’ role to carry out these evictions. He has an implant so that when he is evicting people he is entirely under the control of the Process. This prevents him from using the weapons he has at his disposal – a massive, forty-foot tall suit of armour being one of them – for his own gain. The downside is that the implant has hollowed him out.

The second point of view in the novel belongs to Ruth. She is married to James and she gets caught up in the eviction of a child. As James is drawn into the recreation of the war, Ruth moves around back stage – as it were – encountering the horrors required to replay such a large and bloody conflict. The third main character is called Hector. He is a manufactured man, the copy of a soldier who acted as a stretcher bearer in the war.

What goals might you have set for yourself when writing IF THEN and how do you feel about the end result?

I wanted to explore the First World War as a science fiction event. Reading the accounts and diaries of philosophers and science fiction writers such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Olaf Stapledon and John Hargrave, I saw how they initially interpreted the war as a necessary stage in human evolution. The war was their real-life zombie apocalypse, a technological event that wiped out people they loved. It felt like the end of the world. Science fiction concerns the impact of technology upon the self, and the war was a machine that ran amok among the human. During my research I came across an equation for the war drawn up by the mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson, who served alongside science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon in the Friends Ambulance Unit. During the conflict, Richardson sought to calculate when it would end. This combined with my interest in the contemporary impact of algorithmic reasoning within our own lives. How do I feel about the novel? I’m proud of it. There are so many nooks and crannies in it. However, I’m always nervous about what readers will make of it.

How did you come up with this rather unique idea of The Process?

It came from an interview with someone at Google. They were talking about using the second price auction system that calculates the value of individual Adwords as a replacement for the faux-market mechanisms used by health services and such like. I saw how that, in the event of economic failure, we could use life-monitoring, algorithmic processing and additive manufacturing to replace a failed market system – at lease on a small scale.

Sussex Downs, Gallipoli and WWI, how much research did you do for this project?

I exported all my Scrivener files for this novel. Including research, it comes to half a million words. I had to work through a number of possibilities to arrive at the finished vision. For the sections set in the battle of Suvla Bay in the Gallipoli Campaign, I read a lot of contemporary accounts held in the British Library and diaries and letters in the collection at the Imperial War Museum. Basically, I had to research a historical novel and a science fiction novel at the same time in order to fold these two corners of time together.

What books inspired your career as an author, and what authors do you enjoy now?

Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time really excited me as a teenager. A novel in which the characters could warp reality. I was also a big fan of Alan Moore’s stories, including a couple of his stories for the Star Wars comic that – when I asked him about them – he couldn’t really remember. A story in which a stormtrooper is haunted by the atrocities he has committed, a veiled comment on the Vietnam War. I still enjoy both these authors. I continue to be inspired by William Gibson’s The Peripheral, M John Harrison’s Light, the short stories of Ted Chiang, Ursula Le Guin’s formidable and clear-sighted wisdom and her novel ‘The Dispossessed’. For IF THEN, I sought out Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex which fuses the English pastoral with alternate reality.

What is your favorite and least favorite part of the writing process, and why?

I like rewriting, reworking. And I used to hate it. I had to get over myself before I could productively rewrite. I’m at peace with all stages of the writing process, for now. First drafts can feel desperate at times. Sometimes it’s hard to know where determination ends and delusion begins. My writing kit is a Mac, Scrivener, Evernote, a cat, a teapot and some tea leaves, a large pair of headphones and a playlist of abstract electronica.

What sort of challenges, as a writer, might you have faced over the years? Any insights you would be able to share for those aspiring writers seeking advice?

Challenges: being lazy, being distracted, earning money, putting money first, putting responsibility first, wondering if you have lost touch with the source of your talent, not writing enough. I worked on my craft with John Gardner’s excellent manual The Art of Fiction. His Grendel has been recently reissued.

My single greatest mistake was believing in the muse. That I had to be in a special state of mind to create. As Picasso said, ‘the muse exists but she has to find you working.’ In other words, don’t wait for inspiration. Start writing and inspiration will follow. You have go deep into your ideas, get through the plot, ensure the characters make things happen – and only then are you really writing the novel. I like Bret Easton Ellis’ advice: to be a writer, you’ve got to get the first hundred thousand words out of the way first. The last thing you want to hear when starting out but it’s the truth.

How do you go about the marketing aspect and especially related to your online presence? Anything you’ve seen work better than other things?

Promoting my work exacebates my worst tendencies toward self-obsession and narcissism. I work hard in my life keeping the vaulting egotism of the writer at bay, and then suddenly I’m expected to start going on about myself. Normally I have a couple of drinks inside me before I’m permitted to talk at this length about my obsessions.

Twitter helps me keep up with latest science research that I can traduce with my fiction, with the debate and releases in genre, and as a point of contact with readers. My publisher Angry Robot used Twitter to contact me when I was promoting the reissue of my first novel The Red Men, and that’s how I ended up delivering a book to them.

So what do you do when you’re not writing, any hobbies?

Swimming and camping. After each writing day, I swim a mile at the local lido to smooth out the damage that writing for eight hours does to my body. I wrote a history of camping for Penguin. I read all the old camping manuals, so I’m up on the camping practices of 19th century American woodsman and the woodcraft skills of the interwar period. My favourite camping manual was written by Francis Galton who invented the term ‘eugenics’. It includes a chapter called Proceedings In Case of Death. Advice more suitable for caravanning than camping, I feel.

What’s next? What projects are you working on at the moment?

I’m writing my next novel The Destructives, which will complete a loose trilogy set in the same timeline of my other two novels, The Red Men and IF THEN. It is due to be published by Angry Robot in Spring 2016. I started the Destructives with the notion of setting Mad Men in Space. Capitalism runs on cycles of creation and destruction so calling yourself ‘a creative’ limits you to only half of the available business. You could be a destructive too.

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