Interview with Richard Morgan

Q: Do you truly believe the Alpha Male to be extinct?

That’d be nice, wouldn’t it. :-) But no, they’re still with us. Surplus to requirements in western society, I’d say, but it’s taking them – and us – a long time to notice the fact.

In fact, I’m being a little harsh here. One of the points that the book tries to make is that alpha male tendency alone isn’t really the problem, it’s the tendency the rest of us have to do what those fuckers say that really creates the static. Let’s take a for-instance. If the Cheney gang had jumped up and down and demanded a war in Iraq, and the rest of us had just said "Hell, no – that’s a fucking stupid idea", well, then we wouldn’t have a war in Iraq, would we? But instead, those assholes managed to whip up such a cloud of bullshit pseudo-patriotic fervour that the war became a foregone conclusion, and we all sleep-walked into it. It’s not the demagogue that’s scary in humans, it’s the mob tendency he can always awaken.

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

Well, that really isn’t for me to say. What I can say is that my work is largely character driven, with a high octane plot necessarily arising from the sort of characters I’m interested in creating, and the scenes I tend to envisage them in. But whether that’s a strength or not is another matter. Depends on what you want to read, I guess.

Q: Characters often take a life of their own. Which of your characters did you find the most unpredictable to write about?

In Black Man, almost all of them. I don’t think there’s a single major character in the cast who ended up where I’d expected them to. Some of them didn’t even come close. That’s part of the reason the damn’ thing took so long to write.

Elsewhere in my writing, I think Mike Bryant in Market Forces probably provided me with the most surprises of all my major characters so far – and that’s remarkable, because Market Forces was derived from my own original screenplay, and so written along very clearly delineated plot-lines, far more so than any of the Kovacs books. So the thing is, Bryant ended up exactly where he was always going to, but he astounded me with the amount of sympathy he managed to evoke in me along the way.

Q: Were there any perceived conventions of the science fiction genre which you wanted to twist or break when you set out each novel?

No, I don’t often think like that. I don’t believe there’s any special merit in breaking a convention per se – you only break it, if it gets in the way of what you want to do; if it doesn’t, you might just as well make use of it.

Q: Both SF and Fantasy have seen recent injections of elements of noir or thrillers into them. Yourself and Alastair Reynolds have done this for SF, and we've seen Scott Lynch do the same for Fantasy. What do you think draws genre writers to this, and to what extent can we expect these elements to dominate in your forthcoming fantasy work?

An acquaintance of mine, Ali Karim at Shots magazine, once suggested to me that "noir" was, quite simply, the antithesis of "Disney", and for me that definition has stuck. Disney tells you entertainingly colourful lies about the way the world is – work hard, stay honest, follow your dream, and everything will work out in the end. Its proper audience is small children. Noir speaks to the adult in us and it offers no such shiny assurances. Noir paints the world very much the way it is – life is hard, humans are a dodgy lot, justice is scarce and very costly to manufacture, in the end we’re all gonna die. For any writer who’s interested in writing even faintly realistic fiction, how can all that not appeal?

And yeah, there’ll be a lot of that cropping up in the fantasy novels when they come out. That’s a promise.