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By Patrick St-Denis (2008-03-31)
- The Revelation Space universe is a huge and fascinating achievement of world-building and I was particularly struck by how you established its complexity in the trilogy and then used Chasm City, The Prefect and Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days to fill in some of the blanks in the history of that universe. Can we expect to see more of this in the future, or will there be direct sequels to Absolution Gap taking us further into the future? Or anything about the older history of the universe, such as the wars on Mars? Or indeed, any kind of companion book to the setting?
Well, I certainly hope that there'll be more. At any one time, though, I typically only have one idea in my head. Clearly, there's a limit to how much you can say about a certain fictional universe before the narrative space becomes too clotted. But I hope that day is some way off. I could envisage a sequel or two to The Prefect, maybe a book set after Absolution Gap, but I don't think I'll do anything set really early in the sequence. The later stuff is more exciting to me as a writer - the Melding Plague era, when it all starts getting a bit seedy and gothic. As for a companion book - maybe, one day. There are some extremely tentative moves in that direction, but we're talking about a very long term project.
- Were there any perceived conventions of the science fiction genre which you wanted to twist or break when you set out to write those different novels?
Not as such. I think to go about twisting or breaking conventions, you have to have a very confident overview of the genre, a sense of its boundaries and operating principles - and I've never had that. SF has always felt to me to be this vast, amorphous thing, extending in all directions, with a very vague and ever-shifting border - it's a bit like being stuck in an amoeba. I did have a conviction that one could do a big, space-operatic type novel without invoking FTL travel, but that wasn't a completely new innovation.
- The Prefect was a very interesting novel for the way it constantly subverted the expectations the reader had of it, particularly regarding the Clockmaker, which may be one of your most interesting creations. What was the idea behind that novel? And was it challenging to write a tension-filled story where a society is in jeopardy when the ultimate fate of that society is already known from later novels?
The originating impulse for The Prefect was simply to do a book set in the Golden Age. I had a number of sketchy ideas before I settled on the basic outline of the book, with the prefects, Aurora, etc. I was - and am - a fan of the TV series 24, so I was also intrigued by the notion of doing a 24-like storyline in the RS universe. By which I mean, a story that starts out with a small crisis, and rapidly escalates to the point where an entire society is (as you say) in jeopardy, and in which there are only a couple of people who can save the day. I dealt with the issue of tension by avoiding it completely - I just took it as a given that people would accept that something survives. But how much, and at what cost? We can still watch a film like Casablanca with enjoyment, even though we know that the "good guys won" in the end.
- Are we going to be seeing the Clockmaker again?
I think it would be more a less given that the Clockmaker would need to play a role in any future outings for Dreyfus, although not necessarily as the central plot device or threat. It might feature the way Lecter does in Red Dragon or The Silence of the Lambs - a kind of goading, teasing presence.
- Given the choice, would you take a New York Times bestseller, or a Hugo Award? Why, exactly?
Tough one. On a day when I badly need the money, I'd take the NYT list, thanks very much. On another day, a Hugo would be lovely. Of course, they're not mutually exclusive, as I'm sure Neil Gaiman would confirm. 
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