Just logged in to SL and found a notecard in my inbox that I thought I should share with the science fiction community. Joe Haldeman is doing a book reading in Second Life this Sunday coming:

I’d like to invite you … to a meetup with science-ficiton writer Joe Haldeman [on] Sunday [August] 12th at 9 am SLT [that's 1pm GMT BST, UK people]. Joe will give a reading from his upcoming novel, “The Accidental Time Machine,” if the voice client is feeling like working Sunday.

If the voice client is not working, we’ll just do the meetup as a text chat.

Either way, Joe will be talking about his novel, science fiction, writing, science, art and more, and answering questions from me and from the audience.

I hope to see you, and your group, there.

– Ziggy Figaro

Landmark to the event location - the Amphitheater at Dr. Dobb’s Island:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dr%20Dobbs%20Island/204/118/25

I think I’m going to be at a family gathering on Sunday, but if not I shall certainly be logging in. If anyone wants to tag along but is new to SL, drop me an email and we’ll arrange to meet up, or I’ll put you on to someone else who can chaperone you.

Futurismic is currently in redevelopment, having a new engine fitted … two evenings without posting to it, and I feel a peculiar absence. Blogging definitely has addictive properties.

So, in the interim, I’ll round up a batch of good stuff for sf heads to read on the web and post them here instead.

Kim Stanley Robinson on climate change

The man behind the much lauded Mars Trilogy (which I’ve still never read), Kim Robinson talks about climate change issues at Wired, in the context of his latest novel, Sixty Days and Counting.

Watts, MacLeod, McAuley and Slonczewski on science fiction and the biosciences

Thanks to Peter Watts, we can read [warning - PDF] a group discussion interview from Nature magazine where he, Ken MacLeod, Paul McAuley and Joan Slonczewski talk about their writing, the biological sciences, and the connections between the two.

There is apparently a longer and unexpurgated online version to come, reached by the URL at the end of the piece, but it doesn’t appear to be live yet.

(Special bonus material! Ken MacLeod is not too worried about doctors who think they can be terrorists. It’s the engineers we should be looking out for.)

Lewis Shiner gives it away

A little late to the pixel-stained revolution, but very welcome nonetheless, is Lewis Shiner’s decision to release all of his short fiction online under a Creative Commons licence. Yes, all of it, along with a manifesto about the importance of short fiction for developing one’s writing - and for cultivating readers, too.

I must confess to not having read any Shiner before, but his is a name I’ve had recommended to me countless times. Now I have no excuse, except the old ‘lack of time’ saw. Thanks to the omniprescient BoingBoing for the tip-off.

Happy reading!

Dalian Hansen isn’t real in the way that you or I are real, but he’s at least as real as the person who created him as his Second Life persona chooses him to be. Dalian is about to become the first Second Life avatar to publish a book in which the majority of the plot takes place in Linden Labs’ notorious virtual world.

He’s not the first novelist in SL, nor is the book the first to deal with the concept of the metaverse, nor is it the first book to appear in full in SL - but the combination of the three is a first, as far as I can tell.

As the book inherently has a science fictional theme at its heart, not to mention being written by someone who is a virtual extension of a real person in a way that would have been unimaginable outside of science fiction less than a decade ago, I figured I’d like to chase him down and ask him some questions about the project.

***

PR: So, tell me a little about yourself - what do you do in SL, and in RL* (if you don’t mind talking about both)?

DH: “Dalian Hansen is an Avatar that exits in Second Life. Among his many virtual projects as a computer generated simulation, Dalian is the Creative Director for Tretiak Media LLC (a SL Development firm which owns the SLQuery.com data engine service), Architect for such in-world clients as IBM and ABN-AMRO, and former Creative Director of the popular monthly Second Life magazine, SLBusiness.

His Anima connects to the virtual world from Manchuria, China. This meat version of Dalian’s digital persona is recognized as an internationally award winning Creative Director and photographer. He is also one of the first foreigners to host a Chinese network news program in China.”

PR: Have you always been a fan of science fiction novels?

DH: “I was always a fan of science fiction stories, but as a kid I didn’t read many books. So TV, movies, and comics were my primary exposure to the genre. As my tastes matured, I found novels and my imagination to be more entertaining.”

PR: Any favourite authors or books?

DH: “I like the classic Science Fiction books from Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert and Philip K. Dick. These guys understood the science of the fiction, and its social effect. They built a world around the technology and made it believable. I would say that Dean R. Koontz remains a big influence on me. I have read over 40 of his books that go back to the beginning of his career, when he wrote pure science fiction.”

PR: Have you always wanted to be writer?

DH: “My written work has been published for years in some form, I just never made a living from it. As a kid, I had all these visual ideas but lacked the talent to express them with my hands by freehand drawing. So I turned to writing as a way to paint pictures with words. It also meant I was not dependant on anyone to create my vision.

As I got older, the computer was a big liberation for me. It was a tool that allowed me to finally express these ideas in pictures. As a result, I eventually became a Creative Director for major advertising agencies and made TV commercials and such for international clients. I still enjoy writing, but being a visual artist puts food on the table. Plus, writing takes a great deal of time and emotional commitment. It is like a relationship because it consumes the mind and requires a constant focus, at least for me.”

PR: Tell me why you’ve chosen to write directly about Second Life - a personal fascination, or marketing decision?

DH: “I wanted tell a story where Second Life was more than just an environment, it would be like a character. There have been many guide books about Second Life and short stories about virtual avatar adventures. But this is my attempt to bring the idea into mainstream fiction.

I took well documented points in Second Life history and combined them with real people and fictional characters to invent a mythical story and secret world. After all, reading a book is still the ultimate virtual reality for the human imagination, and establishing this lets Second Life exist in your mind and not just the computer. So I wanted to offer a fun story connected to Second Life in the spirit of old dimestore pulp fiction novels.

“Anima” is just the beginning of a bigger saga I would like to tell. I really don’t care about fame or profit from this or future books. It was just something I wanted to do. I set my mind to it and the accomplishment is its own reward. I don’t expect or care if the novel is a success. And even if it is an utter failure, I’d rather accept that than the regret of not trying.

After all, not very much in science fiction is completely unique or original. But many stories can evolve a popular theme into something fresh and entertaining. That is all I have tried to do and never intended to deliver a groundbreaking epic.”

PR: Do you see there being a long-term future for the written word as entertainment? And if so, do virtual worlds have a part to play in it?

DH: “Human history has been documented by the stories we tell. Whether by campfire in a cave or on a computer terminal connected by the world wide web. People have told stories long before the written word was invented, which basically turned spoken sounds into pictures. The written word is just a medium. It is our nature to tell stories, and the environment only changes how this is done or what we use to do it.

Printed books created an explosion of information in their day. The Internet has created another such revolution. Technology will always provide different opportunities, but I think the purpose remains the same. Whether a story is written, painted, acted, or virtually simulated, the method is meant to communicate. The written word has been a useful tool, and it stands to reason that it will continue to have a relationship and place even in the virtual age.”

PR: According to the synopsis I read, your novel deals with SL as being a very serious and very real part of the protagonist’s life - can you tell me how you see the penetration of synthetic worlds into meatspace going in the next decade?

DH: “No one could have guessed the effect of the Internet on world cultures. It is easy to draw parallels about the direction of the metaverse, but there are many side effects that cannot be predicted. For example, velcro was invented for the space missions. The internet was invented to protect American military computers from a nuclear attack. I think the bigger effect of the future metaverse is in these side effects. Sure, it will be a simulated world where we can interact. But with the freedom it offers, economic opportunities, and technology it inspires, these other effects will be more far reaching. The influences and habits of the Internet are now far more powerful than the tool itself.”

[* Note for meatspacers - RL is Second Life slang for 'real life'.]

***

I think the real take-away for me here is that someone so obviously deeply involved with the metaverse believes there’s a valid future for the written word as entertainment - an interesting contrast to the ironically technophobic Old Guard of the genre.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding with any book is in the reading. But Hansen seems to be able to talk the author talk pretty well, even if he doesn’t seem to bothered about the project being a commercial success, so I’ll be trying to fit it into my reading schedule at some point soon - I’m curious to see what he’s come up with.

A final morsel to chew over - if it’s possible for a virtual avatar to publish and promote a book, how will this affect the gender and cultural biases that currently plague genre fiction? Will initialising and anglicising names go out, in favour of writing under an entire assumed persona - one that isn’t necessarily even human in form, let alone gendered or coloured?

I’m very pleased to announce that Gareth L. Powell has sold his first novel, Silversands, to Pendragon Press. It’s been quite a month for Gareth, as just a few weeks ago he announced the acceptance of his first short story collection. Congratulations, Gareth, and well deserved.

I’ll let you decide your own list of three, but I’d submit Trekkies as one of them. Wired has a piece on a phenomenon that will be more than familiar to most readers of this blog - the “oh no, this brilliant piece of literature/cinema isn’t sci-fi; it’s too good for that” reaction, which often comes from the creators of a successful work just as much as their marketing people.

Personally, I’ve started to stop worrying about it in recent months. As a long-standing rock music fan, I’m accustomed to being mocked and denigrated for my cultural choices, and I figure a bit of personal pride in our underdog status is definitely the way to go. Stand up for your bookshelves, brethren! Say it loud - we’re geeks, and proud!

Tobias Buckell seems to agree, though for slightly different reasons. I really like his idea of marketing science fiction to kids as “the stuff your parents, pastors, teachers and straight arrow khaki-wearing friends don’t want you to [read]” - because I’m positive it would work extremely well.

(Thanks to long-standing VCTB habitue Trollop23 for the Wired tip-off.)

Via the Interaction Forum comes sad news - Kurt Vonnegut dead at 84.

Edit: predictably enough, the blogosphere (sf-nal and otherwise) is heaving with tributes. I liked David Louis Edelman’s look at Vonnegut’s work and the effect it had on him as a young reader,  and Chris Roberson posted up some sound writing advice from Vonnegut. Yet another author who I’ve failed to fully appreciate before he passed away, it seems. Selah.

March 2007 sees the publication of Ken MacLeod’s new near-future sf thriller, The Execution Channel. I was privileged to secure an interview with Ken via email, and the parts of it that deal with the new book can be read over at the excellent SF Site.

However, even once I’d taken all of that out, there was still masses of great material left over, and I’m pleased to be able to publish it on Velcro City Tourist Board. Here, Ken talks about his long friendship with fellow Scots science fiction author Iain M. Banks, his reading and writing habits, and his views on transhumanism and the singularity. And of course, it wouldn’t be a Ken MacLeod interview without a few questions about politics, so if you’ve been wondering what Libertarianism actually means (to Ken, at least), here’s your chance to find out. Enjoy!

***

PR: Who were(/are) your sf idols: the writers that hooked you on the genre, and the ones who inspired you to become a writer yourself?

Ken MacLeod: “SF idols: Robert A. Heinlein; John Brunner; and M. John Harrison. I got hooked by Alan E. Nourse. [I was] inspired to become a writer by the example of Iain M. Banks.”

If it’s not prying too much, can you confirm the rumours that Iain has sold of some of his gas guzzlers and bought a Prius?

“Yes, he’s doing that, or at least in the process of doing that.”

Iain mentioned in a BBC4 interview that he’d taken 15 years of churning out manuscripts before selling one, and that you sold the first one you finished (much to his chagrin). How fast and loose with the truth is he being? If he’s exaggerating, how did it actually happen?

“The chagrin is one of Iain’s little jokes - he was delighted. The rest is basically true. Iain started writing novels while he was at university. His first was TTR, a very long satirical novel full of puns and characters with improbable names of which the least ridiculous was Gropius Luckfoot - a rich man, who as I recall is introduced thus: ‘Gropius Luckfoot was born with a chrome forcep in his mouth.’ Iain collected many rejection slips for TTR.

“After that I think he made one false start, then wrote Use of Weapons, Against a Dark Background, The Player of Games, and Consider Phlebas (I think that’s more or less the right order). Then, after all of these had been rejected, he wrote what he quite honestly thought was a conventional mainstream novel - he actually agonised to some of his friends that he was selling out, betraying the SF cause, by going middle-of-the-road with this everyday story of country folk, The Wasp Factory.

“Now, in my own case I wrote a very few short stories over many years, and kept telling Iain about these great *ideas* I had for novels, and it was in part because I’d gathered from a third party that Iain was getting well pissed off with this - because he knew I could do it - that I started writing The Star Fraction. Finishing the first draft took several years, off and on. I sent a second draft to Iain’s agent, Mic Cheetham, who showed me what was wrong with it by asking: ‘If it was a film, what would you put on the poster?’

“I replied, ‘It’s about a man who gets killed but his gun goes on fighting.’

“‘Go and write *that* book,’ she said.

“So over the next few months I rewrote it entirely and sent it to Mic, who took it round to John Jarrold - then the editor at Legend - and he read it and made a two-book offer straight away.”

Iain is renowned for his ‘three months on, nine months off’ writing schedule. How do you organise your own work-load? Do you take a lot of notes or clippings when stewing up a new book, or is it all a cerebral process until you sit down at the keyboard?

“The truth is that I organise it very badly, and organising it better is my main New Year resolution. But what usually happens is I get an idea, make notes, feel sure I’ve got it, write a page or two and run into a wall, then go off and make more notes and a proper outline, and then write a book which deviates wildly from the outline at some point in the last third - because the plot logic is different in the working out than it seemed in the outline.”

Can you tell us what’s next in the pipeline as far as your writing is concerned?

“Most likely, an expansion of my Sandstone Press novella The Highway Men.”

What’s the next book in your ‘to-read’ pile?

“Pride and Prejudice.”

Do you read a lot outside of the genre? What authors would you recommend to genre readers that you think they should read (but doubt they have)?

“I regret to say I don’t read enough science fiction, and I particularly avoid reading in whatever sub-genre I’m writing in at the moment. So I have a huge backlog of good new space opera to read, starting with Karl Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes. Most of what I read while I’m working on a book is non-fiction - history, memoirs, pop science, philosophy. I’ve just read Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and am currently reading Thomas Paine’s reply to it, Rights of Man.

“I suspect from my own case and others that the big gap in most genre readers’ reading is good contemporary mainstream fiction. SF readers tend to like classics and historical fiction, but to dismiss modern literary fiction. This is a mistake - and one I go on making.”

You had free sample pages from one of your novels available for download way back in 2002, and you’re on record as saying that piracy is an over-inflated issue. Have you been watching the results of (and reactions to) Stross, Doctorow and Watts releasing entire works in this way?

“I haven’t followed it closely, but I’ve discussed it with my editor at Orbit. For the moment, we’re of the opinion that while it may work for some authors, it’s not necessarily something that would work for most.”

Do you think that ebooks, podcasting, print-on-demand and democratised publishing (ie, the internet) is the nemesis or the saviour of literature in general, and sf in particular?

“Neither.”

The Execution Channel features blogging quite heavily, as did Learning the World to some extent. You’re a blogger yourself, so you know the medium - do you see it as being an important tool of the ongoing future, or a useful flash in the pan?

“Blogging, or something like it, is here to stay.”

I interviewed Karl Schroeder recently, and he gave the Vingean technological singularity a thorough kicking; you are credited with coining the moniker ‘rapture of the nerds’ for the same concept. What is your principle objection to the scenario (technological or ideological)?

“Actually, that specific phrase was coined by an Extropian in a self-satirical article. ‘The Rapture for nerds’ was my riff on that, and I also riffed on - or ripped off - a few other phrases from that article in the same conversation in The Cassini Division. But you have to remember, in that novel the Singularity happens! I don’t have any objection to the concept, in principle. I have two suspicions about it. One is technological - quite simply, that human-equivalent AI is very much harder than is supposed. As I’ve said before, it’s been twenty years away for as long as I can remember. My other suspicion is ideological: that its current or recent popularity has been a sophisticated version of millennarianism, that recurrent belief in an imminent, total transformation of life on earth by some superhuman agency. I think now its moment is over. It was a 90s dot-com boom thing, that flourished between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers, like some other illusions.”

You’ve mentioned before that you think life extension is a realistic possibility within the next handful of decades; how far would you go to extend your own life-span? And how much sympathy do you have with the transhumanist movement?

“So far, the only proven life-span extension method is calorie restriction, which I understand works in rats, and I haven’t gone for that. In matters of speculative medicine I have no intention of being an early adopter. It’s like the old joke: how many extropians does it take to change a light-bulb? None, they sit in the dark and wait for the technology to improve. If something came along that was no more of an effort than giving blood, having a minor operation, or taking pills, I’d go for it. The World Transhumanist Association has me as one of its honorary letterhead figureheads. I’m not active in it, but I support its general outlook and I wish it well.”

The Execution Channel is politically very provocative - you’re no stranger to politics in sf, but the could-be-tomorrow closeness of the setting makes the questions it asks much more immediate and harder to shrug off as idle speculative entertainment. Was this a form of literary catharsis?

“Well, I’d hoped it would be. I said to Iain Banks that since writing my first novel I’d had ten years or so more of accumulated rage to blow off. However, writing it didn’t have any cathartic effect at all.”

You’ve thrice won the Prometheus Award for libertarian science fiction writing. ‘Libertarian’ isn’t a word you hear very often in the UK, and researching into it on the internet tends to run a person into a lot of intense (and often conflicting) invective from US fringe politics. So, for the politically ignorant (myself included), what the hell is libertarianism, in a nutshell?

“Even that question is a bit of a minefield, because historically ‘libertarianism’ was more or less synonymous with anarchism, which - even in its individualist versions - is a form of socialism. But in current usage - contested though it is - ‘libertarianism’ usually refers to a range of ideas that derive historically from liberal and to some extent conservative thought. In its moderate form it’s classically stated in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and Herbert Spencer’s The Man versus the State. Its extremism is what’s provocatively called anarcho-capitalism. The best one-liner about it is: ‘Thatcherism - on drugs!’ The most thorough philosophical exposition of libertarianism is Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. The best introduction to it for British readers is to browse the vast online literature of the Libertarian Alliance, to which I’ve contributed a couple of documents. There’s a splinter group also called the Libertarian Alliance which has another online archive, also full of fascinating stuff. And, of course, the website Critiques of Libertarianism, for the other side of the argument.”

OK, so *are* you a libertarian? Or a socialist? Or both, or neither?

“I’ve often asked myself that question. In a review of Newton’s Wake, Gwyneth Jones alluded to my ‘hard-left libertarianism’ and I immediately agreed with her - yes, I’m a hard-left libertarian! I have very hard-line libertarian positions on some questions, such as guns and drugs and free speech.

“On the other hand I have no objection to a public sector that is financed by honest tax-and-spend and not mucked about by so-called market reforms, which I strongly suspect were consciously advanced by free-market think-tanks for no other purpose than to destroy public transport, the health service and so on. In the long run I would like to see the public services run by mutual associations rather than by the state, but that’s another question.

“The only kind of socialism I would propose for the foreseeable future is what the economist Alec Nove called ‘feasible socialism’, or some kind of market socialism. The socialist thinker I find most interesting at the moment is the American philosopher David Schweickart. There is no party that actually advocates feasible socialism or market socialism, as far as I know. In any case, I don’t think that’s the real dividing line in current politics. The real issue is whether you are for or against imperialism and all the repression and surveillance and authoritarianism that goes with it.”

You’ve said that you aim to provoke independent thought in your readers, rather than declaim a set ideology as an ideal. But to what extent is your fiction a personal exercise in political thought experiment? Or in other words, do you know where you’re going before you start, or do you set the initial conditions and see where the story goes?

“The political thought experiments have gone on in my head before I start writing the story. The anarcho-capitalist territory of Norlonto of The Star Fraction, for instance, was pretty clear in my mind for years before I wrote it. It tends to be the twists of the plot that change as the story develops.”

UK citizens, especially the young, seem to be increasingly disinterested in (and mistrustful of) politics as a system (as well as politicians as individuals). Why do you think this is so?

“TINA - There Is No Alternative. The major parties agree on the major issues, and even where they don’t, they compete for the swing voter and the centre ground. The political arguments we referred to a moment ago, about capitalism, the free market, and socialism, are dead. Dead partly in the same sense as Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’, and dead partly in the sense of ‘dead as disco’. As for mass movement protest politics, the banners of the last two big mobilizations were: Stop the War, and Make Poverty History. Some disillusionment was inevitable.”

Would you hazard to make a vague prognosis on the next decade of UK (and world) politics?

“What will decide everything for a long time to come is whether or not the US attacks Iran. I fear it’s quite probable before Bush leaves office, and that it’s possible, though somewhat less probable, that it’ll include the use of at least tactical nuclear weapons. If that happens we are looking into the fucking abyss. It would be a situation where the future world of The Execution Channel is one we’d be very lucky to get.

“If the US doesn’t bomb Iran, then the next few years won’t be so apocalyptic, but still messy. The best the US can hope for in Iraq is a withdrawal that doesn’t leave behind a failed state and that doesn’t destroy the US Army in the process. The US has a choice between an embarrassing failure and a crushing, humiliating, generation-defining defeat. And then there are what Donald Rumsfeld called ‘unknown unknowns’ - break-through technologies, some sudden worsening of climate change, whatever.”

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer my questions, and best of luck with The Execution Channel and your future work.

I’d read two books by Karl Schroeder in the last few months, both of which blew me away. So I took it upon myself to send the man an email to see if he could spare some time to answer some interview questions from me. He very graciously agreed, and I am therefore very pleased to present the first Velcro City author interview. Continue reading “Author Interview: Karl Schroeder”

If you love science fiction writing that hinges on detailed and complex world-building, it’s high time you read some of Karl Schroeder’s novels, if you haven’t already. A great place to start would be his latest book, Sun of Suns, which is the first part of the Virga trilogy and available right now from anywhere that carries decent books.

In addition to writing science fiction stories, Mr. Schroeder works as a foresight consultant, and has worked with a variety of organisations, ranging from the Canadian military to the environmental foresight website Worldchanging.

During a break between novels, he was kind enough to take the time to answer some questions about his writing, about foresight and the demise of futurism as a discipline, his objections to the technological singularity, and the long-term prospects of literature, sf-nal or otherwise. Here are the results.

***

AA: There are a few reviews of Sun of Suns floating around (with another one to follow here at VCTB in the next few days), but let’s hear its creator describe it: give us your ‘three minute pitch’.

Karl Schroeder: “Sun of Suns is pure unabashed fun. Imagine sky above, sky below, infinite blue to all sides peppered with cloud, randomly floating spheres of water and chunks of soil - and you flying free of gravity. This is my world Virga, a rigorously extrapolated and completely possible artificial world that’s the perfect playground setting for a pirate adventure - a tale of revenge, betrayal, treasure maps, swordfights and boarding parties, yet set in a world where fish fly and where young, bitter Hayden Griffin zips around on a wingless jet engine mounted with a saddle and handlebars. Hayden’s bent on revenge for the deaths of his parents, but the man he’s targeted is a prominent admiral who hires Hayden as a flyer on a dangerous and possibly illegal trip into the darkened corners of Virga–the empty places collectively known as Winter.

There’s low humour and high drama, massive set-piece battles and intimate moments amongst the clouds. And Sun of Suns is only the first book in a series - there’s much more to come …”

It’s obvious (to this reader at least) that you really enjoyed creating the world of Virga; was it a slow accretion of ideas or did it spring to life fully formed?

“I rely on my unconscious mind to do the slow accreting, and then after a certain point a novel will leap into my head fully formed. Someone more in awe of their conscious mind than myself might attribute this appearance to a sudden burst of creativity but I know all the groundwork’s been laid by the various daemons that chug away in dark, inaccessible corners of my brain while I’m doing the dishes or chasing my daughter. So I could say that Virga appeared in my mind fully-formed in the space of about ten minutes - but that the ideas had been fermenting for well over ten years, occasionally surfacing and then sinking again before I could catch them. Does that make any sense?”

Were there any particular direct inspirations or source materials that played a part?

“One of my unpublished novels, written, oh … sixteen years ago or so, used the basic environment of Virga, in a slightly different form. It was a giant geodesic sphere made of glass, containing asteroids and so forth. So the basic notion had been kicking around my head for a very long time. I suppose it was pairing that initial, very high-tech idea with the steampunk conceit of gas-powered jet engines with saddles on them, that ultimately led to these books.”

Did you find yourself taking a lot of notes, working the world out on paper, or was it a strictly cranial process until you had it completed?

“None of my major novels has ever had more than a page of notes towards the worldbuilding side of things. All of that stuff is self-evident to me, I don’t have to write it down or think about it too much. I had a little sketchy map for Ventus, but that was about it. For Sun of Suns there’s some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations regarding the size of the world, its volume etc. Recently Vernor Vinge told me that he’d “run the numbers” on Virga and that it all checked out - a good thing, since I was sloppy enough with it that I still can’t tell you whether the world is three thousand or five thousand miles in diameter.”

Were you left with more detail and filigree than you had space for in the narrative?

“Oh, yeah - books and books worth. I could go on spinning yarns about this place for the rest of my life. Any time I focus on any part of Virga, I find stories in stories. It’s a rich territory.”

Did the world dictate the plot?

“Only in the sense that it prompted some questions that I felt needed to be answered - eg. how come this incredibly high-tech world has such a low-tech civilization in it. The real answer might be “because I wanted it to” but that’s not very satisfying, is it? In trying to justify my decisions, I ended up inventing the strange place I call “artificial nature” which surrounds Virga. And that threatens to steal the show as much as the Rights Economy did for some readers of my novel Permanence.”

Sun of Suns seems to have some things to say about nation-states, resource scarcity and the reactions of individuals to these pressures and interactions. Was this a deliberate attempt at commentary on the real world?

“This will become very clear by the third book in the series. I’ve set up a world with an almost medieval social structure, but while that sort of thing may be popular in space opera it’s not really justifiable. There’s an inherent tension to social systems that’s brought about by the presence of advancing technologies, and since that’s precisely what Lady of Mazes was about, I’m not about to ignore the theme in the Virga books. Expect an extended riff on social systems and alternative politics, buried between the sword-fights.”

What sort of response are you looking to produce in a reader - what switches are you looking to throw?

“Sense of wonder, of course, first and foremost. But while I’m fully capable of swatting the reader across the nose with a mind-blowing image or two, what I’m really into is making people dig down a few layers further into the way the world works than SF usually goes. That was the impulse behind Lady of Mazes, which doesn’t just question technological progress but asks what technology itself is. The answers I come up will hopefully startle people into thinking; for that Lady of Mazes question, the answer is “technology is legislation.” Once you parse that and let the notion infect you, your mind is going to start going in directions that no other piece of SF has ever taken you. And that is what I like to do.

On the other hand, in Sun of Suns I just wanted to blow stuff up. So I did.”

It shouldn’t be a shock in sf writing, but the characters in Sun of Suns and Lady of Mazes seem exceptionally engaged with their own futures, both socially and personally - many modern sf characters are very much ‘living in the moment’ by comparison. Are you drawing characters in an attempt to see how attitudes can affect actions and choices in the real world?

“My work is not about the future. It’s about the here and now. My blogging work with WorldChanging, for instance, is fully engaged with issues such as climate change and political power. SF is a filter through which to view those things. I’m primarily an entertainer, of course - I have no pretensions about being a prophet - but the best entertainments have a nasty and invisible tail of social conscience that coils around and stings you when you least expect it. They empower you to act in the real world even if you don’t recognize where that sense of empowerment is coming from.”

You’ve done a fair bit of ‘futurist’ work in your time; can you tell us a little about the sort of things you’ve been involved in?

“I’ve designed scenarios, helped organize and facilitated at a few foresight study workshops, for the Canadian government and army mostly, including giving a keynote address at a military science and technology conference a couple of years ago - and of course, I wrote Crisis in Zefra, which is a military technology extrapolation disguised as fiction set about twenty years in the future. Zefra has ironically garnered me more attention lately than my other work - ironic, because it’s written in a very spare and generic prose style, totally unlike the carefully wrought sentences and images of, say Lady of Mazes.”

What do you think of Bruce Sterling’s recent proclamation (in his final column for Wired) that futurism is dead and prognostication is becoming just another form of consultancy?

“Hardly a revelation - things have been this way for quite some time now. I don’t call myself a futurist, but I do consult on foresight. Futurism is a kind of guru-driven form of institutional prophecy. It’s very much about experts. Foresight, which has come to be centered around a technique called scenario-based brainstorming, has for quite a while now been a collaborative exercise, expert-free, that produces portfolios of alternative possibilities rather than predictions. It’s definitely becoming a mainstream organizational tool.

For instance, the collapse of the New Orleans levies during a major hurricane was one of the scenarios that was actually created about seven years ago during disaster-planning foresight exercises in the States. Pity nobody referred to those documents when the actual event occurred… This scenario-based technique goes gack decades, so Bruce’s comments may come as a surprise to some people, but not to anybody who actually works in foresight.”

You wrote a story for Worldchanging (‘Community’) about a small-town library of the future. As a library assistant and life-long bookworm, libraries are very dear to my heart. What is your relationship to them, and how do you see the public library surviving an increasingly wired future (if at all)?

“I just now came back from having lunch with the librarians at Toronto’s Merril Collection, our public collection of SF, Fantasy and Speculative literature. They answered some critical reference questions for me in the past couple of weeks pertaining to the next novel I’m planning. Also, my 3 1/2 year old daughter loves libraries, and I love taking her to them. The library is an extremely important institution for me and I hope it always will be with us in one form or another. That said, as an SF writer I am open to the evolution of all things, including institutions that I hold dear; that’s what that WorldChanging piece was about.”

I’ve seen you mention that some of your work is a rebuttal to the notion of the technological singularity. What aspect(s) of the scenario do you find to be false, and what would you put in its place?

“I could go on and on about this but I won’t. I have way too many objections but they’re often pretty complicated; for instance, my objection to the future of sentient machines a la Kurzweil is that natural selection seems more capable of originality than sentient thought - in fact, the engine of human creativity is probably a process of natural selection happening ‘under the hood’ of consciousness. So a future of ever-increasing intelligence or widening consciousness is just not on. The future lies in unconscious processes and in efficient reproducers, not efficient thinkers.

I also object to this ridiculous notion that change is accelerating. The period of greatest change in human history was one hundred years ago, when my great-grandparents went from a lifestyle that hadn’t changed significantly from the middle ages, to having electricity, radio, air travel, running water and access to modern medicine, all in about twenty years. Nothing comparable to that change is happening now nor is it likely despite all the hand-waving about the transformational power of genetic engineering or nanotech.

People in science fiction talk about the singularity as if it’s an inevitable truth. People who do foresight for a living - who study technology’s effect on society for a living - don’t see this exponential change occurring. Neither do I.

Hey - if Bruce is right and the age of futurist prophets is over, what does that say about the prophets of the singularity? - Like Kurzweil? Isn’t the singularity stuff just another case of futurist prophets dictating our future to us? (I don’t include Vernor Vinge as a prophet here because he’s a professional myth-maker like me, and I seriously doubt that he ‘believes’ in the singularity any more than I do. We’re in the business of crafting mythologies, not believing in them; he’s come up with a pretty damn good one and he’d be a fool not to run with it. And he knows it. But beware of thinking he’s a ‘true believer.’)”

You’re a Canadian writer, and from the outside looking in, Canada seems to have a pretty solid and lively sf/genre literature scene. Your relationship with Cory Doctorow is well documented; what other names should we be looking out for, from established stars to rising talents?

“There’s a lot of really good SF being produced up here. I could name-drop about a hundred different people but don’t take my word for it - buy a copy of Tesseracts 10, the latest anthology of Canadian SF from Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. It’s edited this time by Robert Charles Wilson and Edo van Belkom. The Tesseracts books are where I got my first short story sales, they’re literally where my career was made. I have no doubt that the next stars of Canadian SF are to be found within these pages. Tesseracts 11 is being edited by Cory Doctorow and Holly Phillips and is open to submissions until the end of Calendar 2006, so the tradition continues.”

Where do you stand in the whole ‘how do we save sf from itself’ debate (if you care about it at all)?

“Science fiction no longer belongs to science fiction readers - or writers. It’s fully owned by the mainstream now, and they don’t need us anymore. Try taking a look at a website like cgtalk.com, which has more than 100,000 members from all the countries on Earth that have an internet connection. These are graphic artists for the most part, and game designers. And if you look at the art they create and upload to the site, it’s almost all SF and Fantasy-oriented. It’s how their imaginations work - and how many of these people actually read SF?

It’s preposterous to bemoan the ‘death of science fiction’ when in fact SF has triumphed and taken over the cultural imagination in most countries on Earth. It’s not SF that’s on its way out - it’s just fandom and SF writing. Because they’re no longer where the action is. It’s games, movies, cgi, graphic novels, and all the sophisticated home-built stuff that kids are making for their own amusement - that’s where SF lives today.”

Asking you to wear futurist and author hats at once, what effect do you think the ongoing democratisation of publishing via the internet, print-on-demand technology, e-books and pod-casts and the Google Universal Library project having on the writing industry?

“Oh, it’ll destroy it. Twenty years from now I don’t expect to be able to make a living writing fiction. You know, this is related to Bruce’s comments about the end of futurism. The end of the SF writer as the primary producer of SF is around the corner. As I’ve said, SF has been appropriated by mainstream culture - it’s not ours any more. Ditto for publishing in general. There was only a brief period in history when one could make a living as a fiction writer, and it’s ending. - Except, of course, for stars like J.K. Rowling. They’ll get richer, the rest of us poorer. Since technology is legislation, there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

Last but not least, give us a teaser for the next two Virga books.

“Well, the third book starts this way: “One thing I can guarantee,” said the tug’s captain. “There has never been a prison break quite like this one.” –And it’s true, that I can promise you.

And the second book? Well, I decided to take everything that had been interesting about the first book, and … not do it again. Queen of Candesce is entirely unlike Sun of Suns. But it’s riotous good fun. You’ll get a chance to see what I mean in March, when the first instalment of the serialization comes out in Analog magazine.”

Thanks very much for your time.

“Thanks for the questions! It was fun.”