Interview with Ian McDonald

Q: What do you feel is your strength as a writer/storyteller?

What, just one strength? No, hubris aside (and this is a very hubristic question). Much as I deride 'The Method', I think I'm a bit of a 'Method-Writer', in that I immerse myself pretty completely in what I'm writing. This sounds pretty damn pretentious, but I've not just come out writing a book set in Brazil, I've come out of thinking Brazilian. Maybe its because I grew up in a society with a very very keen sense of social nuance (there are thousands of subtle and not-so-subtle ways of telling what another person's religion is in Northern Ireland and in the not so distant past, that literally could be a matter of life and death) that I have or a feel for those unspoken social rules in other societies. I like to immerse readers in a complete experience, so they come out with a gasp, saying, 'whoa, that was intense.' Intense, yeah. I'm the Christian Bale of SF.

Q: What was the spark that generated the idea which drove you to write RIVER OF GODS in the first place?

It's well known that I was at a lunch with my agent John Richard Parker and my then-editor John Jarrold (truly a legend) and over the umpteenth bottle of wine, we were talking about Kipling, and, against contemporary convention, that Kim is a great novel of India; and I mentioned it would be great to try to write the science fictional equivalent of Kim. I could never be accused of excess of modesty, and other ideas were falling together at the same time as I said above. This was 1999, and it seemed a blindingly obvious thing to do --as far as I knew, no one else has tried anything on this scale, that was as much about India as set in India-- so I started to lay out the building blocks. Because it was such a huge concept it drove me back to John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, which impressed me when I read it as a teenager as one of the first SF futures that felt lived in. It felt wide and deep and complex and his multi-media technique seemed to be a clever and effective way of getting that wide-screen epic style I was looking for. As it happened, I used a slightly different method, of multiple POV characters, but Brunner was in the mix.

Q: Were there any perceived conventions of the scifi genre which you wanted to twist or break when you set out to write RIVER OF GODS? How about with BRASYL?

I think I do that to a certain extent in everything I write. It makes it fun to read and fun to write. It's a game, and there's a game at the heart of every SF story: what if? One of SF's great virtues is it's self-awareness and internal dialogue, it's not a very big field, everyone is two handshakes away from anyone else and it contemplates and talks about itself constantly. Every book, either knowingly or unknowingly, is part of that discourse, maybe I'm just a bit more knowing about it. There's a lot more SF around now, but in a sense it's harder now than ever; there's a very strong 'noveltarian' strain in the genre, which values new ideas and conceits and scientific speculations. Fair enough, science has expanded many times beyond what was known in the so-called 'Golden Age', and even then, major ideas like quantum theory weren't being used much. For me the big values have always been the sense of wonder and the sense of the strange. I'm somewhere I haven't been before. It's unfamiliar, a little uncomfortable but I can live here.

Q: Given the choice, would you take a New York Times bestseller, or a Hugo Award? Why, exactly?

New York Times bestseller. No disrespect at all to the Hugo's --I'm lucky enough to have been nominated twice now, and it is true, the honour's in being nominated. But to hit the New York times list is to haul in those readers outside fandom, the casual fantasy and SF readers, the ones who have Harry Potter or George R. R. Martin, or the Time Traveller's Wife. I'm with Gollancz editor Simon Spanton when he talks about the 'lapsed Catholic' audience on this, those who once read SF but dropped away, because it wasn't doing it for the, because they want more than juvenile lots and characters, because they want worlds and people and situations they can believe in, because media SF has so successfully colonised the low and fertile floodplain that it's all people think of when they hear the words Science Fiction. This was a brief blog-bubble between myself, Paul McAuley, Lou Anders, Charlie Stross and Paul Cornell as a counterblast to the 'back-to-basics' movement advocating a return to Golden Age style space adventure. My position on this is well known: of course there's always going to be a need for space-fic --what the general public think of and call 'sci-fi', and it may draw readers in at the bottom end, but it sure won't hold them. 'Mediaesque' sci-fi may, in that sense, 'save' science-fiction, but it sure will lobotomise it. And there are a lot of general readers out there who will buy and enjoy science-fiction if they can convince themselves it's not that geeky stuff...