The Human Front (12 page)

So … no apologies to the city fathers, the toon cooncillors, or even the inhabitants of the places in which I’ve imagined terrible things. Better to be the scene of [imagined] catastrophes than the scene of nothing but what’s real or what could well be—a pedestrian precinct indeed. I’ve imagined happy events there too, love and
sex, great deeds accomplished, enlightenments gained. The sense of presence in absence, like the ringing of the ears in silence, that I felt as a boy on hot, quiet afternoons climbing the side of Glen Valtos or clambering around the pools and boulders of the gully of the Alt-na-chuirn has echoed in the brains of characters, on this and other planets, who variously interpret it as the mindless mass telepathy of bacteria or the terrible love of God.

Beyond the literal landscapes are their analogues on other worlds. This has to be handled with care, to avoid lazy default to the familiar. For other planets, no matter how Earth-like, I reach for the holiday notebooks and photos and the geology textbooks and the coffee-table travelogues, looking for landforms of karst and fjord, desert and scabland and rainforest, and other features not found to any great extent around here. But sometimes, and consciously, I’ve reproduced Scotland even there, with variations: a moorland with a henge on every surrounding hilltop, a port town where the haar rolls in every day, a garden where bat-winged aliens get drunk on the alcohol from overripe fruit. (Maybe that last is too obviously the Pear Tree in Edinburgh.)

Behind all these arguable reasons—the kind of recognition and respect such re-creations imply, the realism gained by making use of places I know well enough to depict in detail—there’s something more personal. Mostly it’s love of the places (mostly—I once took a small but sweet revenge on Dornie for what years in it did to a couple of my friends). But it’s also an acknowledgement that Scotland’s streets and mountains, lochs and rain have shaped my own mind just as geological processes have
carved the landscape itself. This land I live in is still the place I visit in dreams. I owe it that forming, that weathering, that uplift.

Did you steal the idea for talking squids in outer space from Margaret Atwood? Or from the squids themselves?

As far as I know the only SF writers who have talking squids in outer space are Steve Baxter and myself. I like telling people that I’m responsible for fifty percent of what Margaret Atwood insists she doesn’t write.

The idea came out of a pub lunch with Iain Banks in 1980. We started wondering how much of the UFO mythos we could crowbar into a story that made some kind of sense. The Greys were easy: they’re so humanoid they are (in our view at the time, anyway) unlikely to have evolved anywhere but Earth, and they’re reptilian, so we figured they were probably derived from bipedal dinosaurs. Since there’s no trace of humanoid dinosaurs in the fossil record, they must have been taken
off
Earth, which gets us an uplift scenario. That was where the squids came in: the only invertebrates that show potential for intelligence are the cephalopods, so squids were a good
candidate for uplift too. And that gave us an explanation of the cigar-shaped motherships, which were so common in the early 1950s and are now so sadly rare: they have to be that size to make room for the aquaria for giant squids to live in. And they have flashing lights on the outside because cephalopods communicate by changing the colour patterns on their skin.

See? It all makes sense!

You are an actual working scientist. Is that what drew you to SF, or did it happen the other way?

I’m not an actual working scientist. Here’s the real story: It was SF that drew me to science, or at any rate made me want to be a scientist. Because I was no good at math, I chose the least mathematical science, biology, and specialised in zoology, and within that in vertebrate zoology. This was such a useless specialty that I was the only one in my class who took it.

In choosing my postgraduate work, I made the mistake of thinking I could at least make use of my high-school applied mechanics, and chose a project on the response of bones to mechanical loading. After a year and a half of my slow and intermittent research progress, my supervisors said they couldn’t justify my funding. But they kindly continued to supervise my research, which I struggled on with in my spare time for years, and eventually got an M.Phil. degree and my name on a published paper out of. By this time I had a job as a programmer, and my wife and two young children were in my graduation photo.

One of your characters (Elizabeth, in the
Engines of Light
trilogy) asserts, “It is possible to learn from the past.” You don’t really believe that, do you?

Of course I do. “History is the trade secret of science fiction”—that quote’s attributed to me, but I think I got it from Asimov. History is also the trade secret of politics. Successful politicians left and right read lots of it and learn from it. Heck, just reading Macaulay’s
History of England
is a political education, and not just for those who share Macaulay’s politics: it’s centrally about a revolution, after all.

In your work, intelligence is widespread in the universe, but it’s mostly not biological. Huh? Aren’t you a biologist?

Well, not quite, as I’ve explained; and in fact the widespread intelligences in the
Engines of Light
books
are
biological. They’re dominant because they actively prevent non-biological intelligence from coming into existence. That’s the only way you could have such a scenario, because non-biological intelligence is so obviously better adapted to space.

Think about it. Which is likely to happen faster: the evolution by natural selection of a species with superhuman intelligence, or the development of machines that can think faster than us? My bet would be on the machines. Even if you bring in genetic engineering, all that gets you is a given higher level of intelligence, which you can only improve by further genetic engineering. With artificial intelligence, you can in principle get improved
performance just by increasing the clock speed or adding hardware, and beyond that you can upgrade the software or make it self-upgrading. That raises the prospect of runaway intelligence increase, which leaves biological mechanisms and reproduction in the dust.

This is of course Vernor Vinge’s Singularity thesis, which—if human-equivalent AI is possible at all, and perhaps even if it’s not—has an awful logic to it.

Flying saucers: do they come from Outer Space or Genre History?

Disc-shaped flying machines, and spindly humanoids with big bald heads, were imagined and illustrated in SF magazines in the 1930s, so in that sense they do come from genre history. The story that started the modern flying saucer craze, Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting, was of more or less wing-shaped flying objects, which he described as moving like saucers skipped across water. Somehow that got garbled to “flying saucers,” perhaps because of the images from the pulps, and the hare was off and running. The whole mythos that has evolved since then is a mixture of misidentification, disinformation, urban legend, rumour, lies, hoaxes, honest mistakes, and so on, and it has interacted with SF all along. It would be interesting to trace these interactions and the mutual feedback between SF and UFO reports.

But having said that, the image of a silvery disc levitating above the landscape is immensely resonant, like the dreams we have of flying, and I suspect this is what gives the UFO mythos its power to fascinate.

Banks, Burns, Doctorow, Clarke, Stevenson (R.L. not Neal), Robson, Robinson: each in a sentence please.

Iain Banks is my oldest friend, and one of the very few writers who can do both SF and literary fiction equally well, or indeed at all. Rabbie Burns is an eruption of free-thinking, folk tradition, love, sex, and sheer poetry against a Kirk that tried to smother them all under a wet blanket of guilt. Cory Doctorow is a professional agitator who writes science fiction in his copious spare time (at least twenty minutes a day), and a dangerous man who should be watched. Arthur C. Clarke is unfashionable and underrated today but some of his work will be read hundreds of years from now, and he was second only to Asimov among the few public intellectuals SF has produced. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote (among many other things) adventure stories of great psychological subtlety and insight. Justina Robson is a friend, so I can’t be objective, but I find her a writer of astonishing range, power, and variety. Kim Stanley Robinson—well, there’s the objectivity problem again—is one of the most serious SF writers, in the sense that he really means it: he isn’t just playing with cool ideas but putting something on the line.

What is lablit? What does it mean to “work the wet end” of something?

Lablit is fiction about scientists—not necessarily or even usually science fiction, but fiction that has scientists as central characters and shows realistically what scientific work is like. I don’t know where I got “work the wet end”
from, but I meant practical lab or medical work as opposed to administration. I guess it could be applied to literature as well.

Publishing being the dry end?

You said that, not me.

Would you describe
Night Sessions
as a police procedural or an ecclesiastical thriller?

Both. It’s a police procedural set in a possible future in which religion has been officially marginalised, and religious terrorism suddenly pops up from an unexpected quarter. But perhaps not so unexpected if you know your Scottish ecclesiastical history!

How come so many UK leftists are Trots?

Short answer: because Trotskyists in Britain moved fast on the CP’s crisis in the 1950s, and moved with the times in the 1960s.

Long answer: in the 1960s in a lot of countries semimass currents arose to the left of the official Communist Parties. In some countries, including the United States and West Germany, most of the radicals who wanted to be revolutionaries became some kind of Maoists. In others, including the UK and France, much the same kind of people became Trotskyists. I think part of the explanation goes back to the 1950s, and especially the aftermath of 1956 and the Soviet intervention in Hungary.

The crisis of the Communist Party of Great Britain gave rise to a very serious opposition around a magazine called
The New Reasoner,
involving academics and people with real labour movement roots, which became what’s now called the Old New Left. Some of these people were very open to Trotsky’s arguments, and none of them were interested in adopting a new personality cult or clinging to the old one.

The funny thing is that in the United States the Trotskyists were much better organised than in Britain. For one thing, they were all in one party, the Socialist Workers Party (except for the Shachtmanites, who were busy becoming social democrats). In Britain they were all in one party too, but it was the Labour Party, and they were split into (at least) three mutually hostile groups. But the largest group was able to intervene in the crisis of the CP and rip off a couple of hundred serious people: intellectuals and trade unionists. Then they picked up more young people from the first wave of anti-nuclear activism—the Aldermaston marches and all that. They proceeded to lose or burn out the best of them, largely because their leader, Gerry Healy, was a thug as well as an ultra-left. The regime in Healy’s group was far worse than anything anyone had experienced in the CPGB. Say what you like about Harry Pollitt (the CP’s general secretary until 1956) he never thumped another communist, or threw anyone down the stairs. But other Trot groups were there to pick up people from the heap at the bottom of Healy’s stairwell. What’s worrying, actually, is how many went back up the stairs.

In the United States, the SWP fumbled the CPUSA’s crisis, saw the CP left wing walk past them and into the
increasingly ultra-left Progressive Labor, and followed up by failing to dive into the Civil Rights struggle. The mass movement they did dive into was the Vietnam anti-war movement, and even there they found themselves to the right of the young radicals who wanted to wave Vietcong flags. They came across as a very staid, conservative organization, rather like the CPUSA itself, and missed the 1960s. It took some doing at the time for a revolutionary organization to recruit almost no one out of SDS, but the SWP managed it.

Two of the British Trotskyist groups of the 1960s, the International Socialists and the International Marxist Group, were very much more open to the so-called counterculture. They didn’t frown on kids with long hair who smoked dope. They waved their own Vietcong flags. They shifted farther and faster than the U.S. SWP did on gay liberation, as it was then called. They had plenty of militant working-class struggles to pitch into, which the SWP didn’t to the same extent (and it missed out on the ones it did have).

So Britain is infested with ex-Trots instead of with ex-Maoists, which is a small mercy.

What kind of car do you drive? (I ask this of everyone.)

A Mazda 2. I abandoned my Bentley when it ran out of peat.

Old-school tools like socket wrenches and WD40 show up in your Futures. Is this a shameless nod to the Steampunk crowd?

No. I don’t know enough about Steampunk as a genre, and what I do know doesn’t attract me much. If people want to dress up as Victorians, that’s fine by me, but as a genre it seems backward-looking—indeed, that’s its whole point. We can do better than that.

What is Semana Negra and why is it important?

Semana Negra in Gijón, Asturias, is an annual literary festival with a crowded and raucous funfair attached, complete with Ferris wheel. Its focus is on crime fiction, or “black novels” as they’re called in Spain, with a periphery of attention to comics, westerns, horror, fantasy and science fiction. Hundreds of thousands go to the funfair, and thousands go to the book and film festival off in a corner of it.

Partly because crime writers in the Spanish state and in the wider Spanish-speaking world tend to be left-wing, the event has become part of the class struggle in the region. This July, my wife and I rode from Madrid to Gijón on
el Tren Negro
—the Black Train, which they hire every year to transport dozens of writers and journalists to the festival. We stopped in Mieres, a coal-mining town in the mountains of Asturias, where we were greeted by the mayor and a delegation of striking miners and taken on procession through the town for lunch. The train was delayed because striking miners in the adjacent province had blocked the track; it was a very bitter and militant strike. When we arrived at Gijón a brass band at the station played the “Internationale” as we climbed on the bus. You could get used to this sort of thing!