Interview with Peter Watts

Q: Are you surprised by what little support you receive from the Canadian media? Writers like Steven Erikson and R. Scott Bakker rank among the best speculative fiction authors out there, yet you Canucks appear to get very little recognition in your own country.

Yeah, well you know what they say about a prophet in their own land.

Actually, there are pockets of support: John Burns at the Georgia Straight isn't shy about noticing my stuff; Douglas Barbour gets pro-sf pieces into the Edmonton Journal now and then; and of course, Spider Robinson sings the genre's praises whenever he can in the Globe and Mail. Even the official Canadian Literary Establishment pay tribute in their own peculiar way, generally by grabbing ideas the genre has been playing with for decades and repackaging them as "real" literature. I was quite impressed, for example, to read that Margaret Atwood had singlehandedly pioneered the idea of a biotech dystopia Oryx & Crake. (Although I should add that I am quite a fan of Atwood's prose, and to give the devil her due she does seem to have become a bit less strident with that I-don't-write-sf-because my-stuff-is-good schtick that she was so fond of a few years back. If only the same could be said for the Canada Council.)

Fuck 'em. You want Canadian sf, read On Spec.

Q: A lot has been said on the subject of online reviewers vs print reviewers these last few months. Many people in the industry still don't hold online reviewers in high esteem, while others appear to grudgingly agree that a few of them are legitimate. What's your take on the topic?

I haven't been following that debate. My sense, though, is that if there's a significant difference between online and print reviewers, it's one of clarity as opposed to substance. I have read supremely articulate and insightful reviews on personal blogs; I have read extremely shallow and inattentive reviews in mainstream print. But insights aside, I think the print reviewers tend to be better at the actual craft of writing. This only makes sense, since you have to pass at least some sort of rudimentary journalistic muster before you get a print column; any doof with a freebie Livejournal account can be an online reviewer. (And indeed, some of the most articulate online reviews I've read hail from people with roots in print)

Q: Honestly, do you believe that the speculative fiction genre will ever come to be recognized as veritable literature? Truth be told, in my opinion there has never been this many good books/series as we have right now, and yet there is still very little respect (not to say none) associated with the genre.

That ship may have sailed. There was a time, not so long ago, when science fiction was the only literature capable of containing some of the grander and scarier possibilities waiting down the road. When you're the only literature capable of plotting a course through the future, you damn well deserve respect. (When it comes to real-world relevance, a story about the ethics of cloning is certainly going to kick the shit out of yet another dreary coming-of-age tale set in post-World-War-Two Ireland.) But more and more of those worldchanging elements are imminent now, or even passe. We've already got clones and gengineering. We've got rudimentary nanotech, proof-of-principle invisibility cloaks, melting icecaps, underwater resorts under construction, AI that some people describe as "conscious", and - just maybe - working prototype FTL inside a decade. The fact that you or I may be supremely sceptical of some of these claims doesn't matter - the point is that these undeniably sfnal concepts are being discussed in mainstream media as serious news stories. You don't have to postulate new technology to write science fiction any more. You don't have to step outside the present day. The fundamental role of speculative fiction is to address the question "What if things were different?". Well, here we are, in the twenty-first century. And things are different. And Bruce Sterling and William Gibson are writing mainstream novels that happen to feel exactly like sf.

So what does this leave us? It leaves us nerd-rapture singularity stories - which will either staledate in a decade or two (if the Kurzweillians are wrong) or will become irrelevant along with everything else during the Great PostHuman Uplift (if they're not). It leaves us with far-future Roman Empires in Space. It leaves us with thought experiments about the shape life might take elsewhere in the universe. What it won't leave us with is any monoply on the relevant, world-changing ideas that science fiction has always hung its hat on.

Don't get me wrong. Science fiction deserved respect. It deserves respect. But perhaps it's tougher now to make the case that the world needs something explicitly called science fiction, because so many of these issues can now be explored in mainstream fiction. And Time Magazine will always have a way bigger audience than Analog.

(I hope I'm wrong about this, by the way. I would welcome rebuttal. I rather like this particular ghetto.)