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By Patrick St-Denis (2008-03-31)
- There is a strong theme of identity running through your work, most notably in Chasm City. Was this notion of ‘self’, transformation through technology and what makes a human being human something you always wanted to explore?
You're right to identify that as a central theme, but I'm at a loss as to why I've gravitated towards it. Certainly, two of my favorite (though very different) writers, Gene Wolfe and Philip K Dick, have explored these themes in great depth - greater depth than I'll ever manage, I suspect. I don't think one can over-analyse personal thematic concerns too highly - trying to work out why I find something interesting is a bit like trying to pick up a bar of soap in the shower.
- What are your views on faster-than-light travel? You were quite strict about not using it in the Revelation Space universe (whilst hinting that it is possible, but ultimately dangerous) but then employed wormhole technology in Century Rain.
I'm actually very open-minded about the possibilities of FTL travel, or - shall we say - FTL or superluminal communication. I do get slightly irritated when you hear self-appointed SF pundits say something like "of course, all SF books featuring FTL or time travel are essentially fantasy", as if there was no distinction between questioning one tenet of modern physics, and - say - positing the existence of wizards. The possibility of FTL communication is still being debated in physics journals. The same goes for time travel. It's by no means a closed book. It won't be a closed book until we have a complete understanding of Quantum Mechanics (nonlocal influences) and General Relativity (wormholes, etc). Right now I'd say I'm 95% confident that FTL travel will turn out to be impossible in our universe (so will reverse-directed time travel, for associated reaons) but that still means I'm 5% open to the idea.
- Century Rain was an ambitious book, mixing elements of the noir thriller with alternate history with hard SF. What was it that you wanted to achieve with that novel?
The incept point for that book was listening to a pop song (something by the electronic duo Goldfrapp, as it happens) and being overcome with an intense feeling of sadness at the idea of losing the Earth. There's a bit on their second album where Alison Goldfrapp sings about waterfalls and rainclouds with a kind of whistfulness as if to suggest that these things no longer exist, and that for me was the emotional hook for a novel. God, doesn't that sound pretentious? But that's how it happened. I thought about it for a year or so and then came up with the underlying skeleton of the book - a murder mystery in Paris, a desolate, post-nanocaust Earth in another plot strand. I was also interested in the idea of writing an alternate history novel that was embedded in our universe. I guess I wanted to write an SF novel that felt black and white, which is why I made Floyd colour blind.
- Do you have any desire to write outside of the SF genre? A few other SF writers, such as Richard Morgan and Justina Robson, have recently dabbled with Fantasy and I got the impression from Century Rain and The Prefect that you’d make an excellent contemporary or period thriller writer as well!
Much as I'd like to fantasize about it, I don't have what it takes to write a non-SF thriller. I really do think that a strong literary thriller depends on one of two things - either a strong sense of character, or a strong sense of place, ideally both, and I don't I'm massively well-equipped for either. I'm totally uninterested in plot-driven Dan Brown type stuff, although good on those that like that kind of thing. Above all else, though, I love SF with a fierce, uncritical passion! It's like being handed the best electric guitar in the world, with the best effects pedals. Why would you not want to use it?
- With authors such as yourself, Peter F. Hamilton, Iain M. Banks, Richard Morgan and Neal Asher, British SF seems to be flourishing at the moment compared to a general downturn in the genre, particularly in the United States. Why do you think this may be?
Some of my favorite SF writers are American, but I don't think you can escape the fact that there's been - for whatever reason - an abdication of interest in the medium/distant-term future in American SF. I know there are a crop of younger writers coming out who are perhaps redressing that, but there's no denying that the big hitters - the big American SF guys of the eighties and nineties - seemed to undergo a collective loss of interest in writing about anything other than the very near future or the present. I couldn't understand for the life of me why Greg Bear stopped writing the kinds of book he seemed best suited to - things like Eon, Anvil of the Stars, Moving Mars - for these near-future technothriller type books. This man had an almost supernatural aptitude for massive, widescreen SF - SF with a head and a heart. There are others - Sterling, Vinge, even Gibson to a degree. If the British books have done well, I suspect it's not because they're fundamentally better or different than the kinds of book that the US writers might have been writing had they stuck in the game - it's just that they didn't, and we did. You can't even say it's a leftist thing - you've got all shades of the political spectrum in those names up there. 
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