Not The Day Job

First it was going to be a sewer. Then a deserted tube station. It might have been a tall roof in London or a deserted smoke-filled hospital. In the end we caught up with Neil Gaiman on the set of his new TV series, Neverwhere, in the depths of South London. Ex-journalist, comic writer, creator of Dream and Death, collaborator with Terry Pratchett, short story author, song writer, poet, anthologist; Mary Branscombe finds there’s no end to the work filling Neil Gaiman’s strange dark days.

There’s an Angel, called Islington, who lives in a cave full of candles, and the Earl’s court endlessly circles London in an underground train; there’s a post-modern vampire called Lamia, and a bodyguard called Hunter, guarding against the cut-throats Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, who have “A levels in Advanced Menace”. London below is a scary place, especially for Door, whose family has just been murdered and especially for Richard who tries to help and finds that his life is never the same again. Our hero is “definitely a goodie although he does tend to spend the entire plot wandering around going ‘what?’ and ‘I don’t know what’s going on’”. And there’s a terrifying beast (who’s really a bull called Albert). If you want to know what’s going on, you could wait till Neil Gaiman’s latest creation, Neverwhere, makes it on to BBC 2 in October, or you could tackle Neil’s ‘expensive’ imagination now.

When we arrive the producer, Clive Brill, explains how lucky we are to have avoided the sewers. “We have been filming in the dirtiest, coldest, most revolting places underneath and above London.” Neil on the other hand is all affability, warning us about the gusts of ‘smoke in a can’ that fill the set, occasionally “in quantity such that it was escaping from the sides of the building and the fire brigade got called. Plus we had little firelighters going, these little paraffin things on little tin trays on the walls everywhere, fires flickering and licking…”

The set here is equally fascinating - one carriage of a tube train done up as a mediaeval hall, wolfhounds and all. Neil shows us around. “The idea is that it’s one of those carriages that you never quite know why they’re there - because all the lights are off and the doors never open and you think ‘what is that for? Does it just fill up a space?’ and our heroes find when they knock on the door of one of those that it is this mediaeval earl’s court. There’s a fireplace, there’s even a library round the back. It actually does have all the dimensions of an actual underground carriage and down there on the throne at the end we have Freddy Jones, or rather we don’t have as he’s off having lunch”. We don’t have the recalcitrant wolf hound either, as it’s having to be tempted onto the set with a handful of digestive biscuits. It’s the usual disciplined chaos of a film set, busy turning imagination into fantasy. I keep asking the owner of the imagination what Neverwhere is but it proves hard to pin down.

Beasts and earls and tube trains and angels? What exactly is Neverwhere?

“Part of the inspiration for me was as a child I always used to think of London as a magical city like Baghdad in the Arabian Nights, only weirder. And I pondered some of these names and I wondered who the Earl of Earls Court was and whether there really was a knight on the bridge of Knightsbridge. And whether they had clowns at Oxford Circus…

What I did was I just sat down and wrote the kind of thing I would love to see on television but have never seen, figuring people then would slap me down to size and what’s actually happened is that I’d ask for something impossible and then they’d get very very cold and very uncomfortable and work very long hours actually giving it to me.

So far I have made a very very very successful career out of writing the kind of stuff that I like. I don’t write things for a mass audience because I have no idea what mass audiences like or want. So I write what I’d like to see and often I find a very large number of people like that kind of thing as well.

Neverwhere is not a comedy, its not horror, it’s not a gothic - it’s a contemporary fantasy for adults which has some funny stuff in and has some scary stuff in and has some weird stuff in and has some exciting stuff in. There’s blood, there’s excitement, there’s weirdness; I think there may be a nipple or two.”

Are you worried people are going to try to pigeonhole it?

“I feel an enormous amount of sympathy for anyone who tries to pigeonhole it! My own suggestion has unfortunately been ignored - I suggested ‘not as scary as the (big letters) X Files, not as funny as (big letters) Red Dwarf!’ but they said no! I thought that was good positioning for it. Absolutely nothing like the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. It’s not like Dr Who at all!

Its strength is that there isn’t anything else like this and its weakness is that you can’t say ‘well it’s one of these’. It’s about this guy and then you start explaining London below to people and then after a while you just give up and say ‘watch it - and watch it from the first episode because it will make more sense’.”

If this one of the few sets, where have you been filming? Have you had problems finding locations?

“Well, we don’t have the money to build it so we’ve gone out and found it, like underground stations that have been closed for sixty years. We spent two nights filming on H.M.S. Belfast which is the sort of place where you think they’d automatically say no.”

So you’ve been around disrupting London?

“No! Apart from those poor people staggering off the Piccadilly line swearing blind that you wouldn’t believe what they thought they saw in the underground. The trouble was even with those few underground trains that went past quite slowly, you had to be looking in the right place and just following it with your eyes as you went, so you get one, two, maybe three people on a whole train who would have seen as far as they could see, a dinner party floating in the air with giant snakes and four people, who looked rather strange sitting around, having lunch, and huge candelabras - one of which blew over and smashed rather excitingly.

One of the things we have is the original London urban legend. You know about the crocodiles and the alligators in the sewers of New York? London for many years had a similar urban legend, that there was apparently a butcher in Fleet Street in the early 17th century who was fattening up some pigs and one of the piglets ran away and got into the Fleet ditch and disappeared off into London’ sewer system where according to legend it grew huge and very dangerous. Occasionally they’d send hunting parties into the sewers, trying to find it and they never did. People would go to look for it and they’d never come back. So we decided to put the giant boar into this and then we rapidly discovered that there weren’t any giant boars in England which made it rather difficult, so we have a beast that will be played by a bull called Albert. With make-up! Because he’s going to have tusks and old spears sticking out of his side

It’s not only a beast called Albert, it’s also a huge animatronic thing and it’s incredibly realistic. It’s something between a bull and a boar - it’s a boarish short of bull or a bullish sort of boar. It’s great, it’s wonderful and it will be going on to work with Diana Rigg.”

Did you find writing a script much different from writing a comic, or a book?

“Normally I think visually because I’m describing panel by panel; you’re writing a script; I think it’s much harder to write a good comics script than it is to write a good film script or TV script or whatever because you’re not just being the writer you’re also being the director and the editor.

Recently I’ve been approached by a few different Hollywood film studios who are interested in me directing stuff. To one of them I said ‘what makes you think I could direct?’ and they said ‘we read your script for Calliope in the back of Dream Country and it’s a shot by shot description of what you’re doing, of course you could direct’ which I thought that was very nice of them. Possibly foolishness, but very very sweet.

I’m currently writing the novel, out when the series comes out - which is a bit upside down, writing the novel once you’ve already written the script - and it’s fun because I actually know what happens so I never have to walk round going ‘well, I wonder what happens next’ because I did that for five years. I’m enjoying playing with the things that you can do in prose. Very often I look at something and think ‘no, I wouldn’t have done it that way’ or ‘hang on, I have the budget to do it another way.’” Clive interjects; “ultimately we’re restricted by the budget and Neil’s imagination is expensive.”

“An easy example of that is one place that we originally set the first floating market in the script and then lost because they have no sense of humour, was Harrods. I thought ‘wouldn’t it be wonderful to do this strange huge market in Harrods’ food halls’ and we suggested it to them and they didn’t think it would be. And we thought ‘there’s no fun in building Harrods food halls’ so we’ve actually set it in Battersea power station now. But in the novel I thought ‘I can just go back and put it in Harrods food halls’ so we get this huge fight going on underneath the fish sculpture.”

So it’s all a nice break from comics?

“Actually DC do want to do the comic of Neverwhere. What I’d do is I’d give them the scripts and let them get on with it. We’ve also had a number of approaches from a number of different major film studios about doing Neverwhere the movie and I’m starting to go ‘I don’t know if I’d want to write the script’ - there’s a limit to how many times you can write something without getting really deeply and utterly sick of it. Right now I still like it, I’m halfway through the novel and I’m still liking it; I suspect if I actually had to sit down and do the comic script version or the radio version or something I would have had enough of it.

I’m talking currently with Warner Brothers, the film people, about maybe writing and directing a live action version of Death: The High Cost Of Living, filling it out a bit more. We may do it, we may not; they gave me a green light on it in October and then withdrew it immediately when they realised it might conflict with the Sandman movie… so we’ll see.”

Who would you like to see as Death?

“Don’t know. But I have to say that I don’t find the idea of interviewing every wonderful actress in Hollywood between the ages of 16 and 22 a particularly onerous one; there are things you do for your art, I could do that… dinner with Winona Ryder, lunch with Christina Richie, I could go through it, for my art…”

All this activity coincides neatly with the end of the Sandman comic which is what you’re probably best known for. Have you done everything you wanted to do with it?

“Sandman 75 is out tomorrow. And I did all the things that I wanted to do at the beginning and I stopped while I still loved it and I caught all the balls that I threw into the air while it was going on and I think it’s worked pretty well. There are some things that I regret but the things that I regret are specifically to do with just the logistics of bringing the thing out.

I did promise myself that I would quit before I had to get up in the morning going ‘oh god I have to do Sandman.’ I never got to that stage. I got very slow, towards the end and a lot of that was because I wanted to avoided what I’d done before. When you’re starting, it’s wonderful because there’s nothing you’ve done before. Every panel transition is new, every character, every line of dialog is completely new. When you get to the end you’re trying to figure out ways to tell stories that you’ve never done before and that gets a lot harder. When I began it took two weeks of every month and by the end it took six to eight weeks of every month to write.

But also, you get to do things like Sandman 74 with J Muth - the Chinese poem - it was the kind of thing I could only allow myself to do in the penultimate one, because it was just too weird; the only place I could ever do that is the one before last, because if they hate 74, what are they going to do? Stop reading?”

Of course the story continues, with your second Death mini-series and after a fashion in The Dreaming. Are you involved with those stories at all?

“No what I have done is read them as they come in and sometimes I like them and sometimes I don’t. Really it’s leaving people the idea of the Dreaming as a playground and see what they do with it. I do plan other things - by the end of the next decade I would like to have done something for each of the Endless, that would be fun.”

And what will you be doing first?

“Right now what I’m planning on doing is all the stuff that I had to put off until Sandman was over. There’s a lot of things like Neverwhere, like novels, like movies, where I’m going ‘ooh! I can do one of those now that I haven’t got a monthly comic to write’. And I still like comics and I can go back. I think if I’d had to stay in comics for another couple of years and not been allowed to go off and do anything else, I could see myself getting up one morning and going ‘oh fucking comics, I don’t never to write another one’ and that would have been that. Everything else is prose right now, or film, or TV, except I have to do a comic strip for Oscar Zarate. Oscar is doing this book about London and Warren Pleece is going to draw this eight-ten page story; that should be fun.”

So was it a relief to do something different, with comics like Miracleman and Angela in Spawn?

“Angela was such fun to do, it was complete and utter mindless silliness and it was a wonderful relief to do too. At that time, if I could get a page of Sandman done a day, I felt very very happy. On a normal day I’d get three quarters of a page of Sandman done and it was hard fucking going. And then I was offered Angela, where I’d write an issue in a day.

Miracleman is in an interesting position; it might be able to continue now. Miracleman 25 was finished two and a half three years ago, maybe longer and it’s been sitting around since not long after Miracleman 24. There is one whole comic nobody’s ever seen. Eclipse (publishers of Miracleman - Ed) were basically cheating people out of royalties and they were ordered to pay however many hundreds of thousands in back royalties and they couldn’t pay and they went under. And for years it was off in bankruptcy hell. Todd McFarlane just bought the entire Eclipse assets in a bankruptcy sale.”

Your last book was Angels and Visitations, which turned into the CD, Warning Contains Language. How did that happen?.

“Really it was what I did in my summer holiday! The way that it came about, I was getting pissed off at the fact that whenever I did readings at conventions, I discovered there was a thriving trade in Neil Gaiman bootlegs and I thought ‘hang on, if this stuff is going to be out there at least let it be good’. I never quite expected it to turn into this smash-hit CD thing; it began as a version of some Angels And Visitations stuff and then it just grew and got completely out of control and turned into a double CD.

Similarly, Angels and Visitations has gone on to be probably the small press success of the decade, we’ve done 25,000 copies of a $20 hardback which is an awful lot. It will be coming out of print very soon; we’re going to do the fourth printing and then we’re going to retire it. As part of the book deal I’ve done with Avon books in America, they’re going to be publishing two novels and a short story collection. The first of the novels will be Neverwhere and the second of the novels will be another thing, actually, about London, seen from a very different perspective and there’s the short story collection so I thought I think we’re done with Angels and Visitations, but I have an enormously soft spot for it.”

You’ve never perpetrated a funny cat book, but you did succumb to humorous fantasy in Good Omens. How did you come to work with Terry Pratchett on that?

“I wrote the first 20,000 words of this thing as a book I called William the Anti-Christ. I showed it to a few people, Terry Pratchett was one of them and then put it in a drawer and forgot about it. After I’d finished Don’t Panic; The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Compendium, I thought I can write in this style and by the time I got to the end of it I thought this is really easy, this is a doddle so I did a chapter of it, liked it, thought it’s quite good and then thought ‘I really don’t want to be pigeon-holed as a writer of funny horror’. Of the careers waiting for me in this world, a writer of funny horror is one I really do not want and I put it in a box, in a drawer and forgot about it.

And a couple of years later Terry rang and said ‘you know that book you started, d’you know what happens next?’ And I said ‘not really’ and he said ‘well I do. Do you want to sell me the idea and the first chapter or do you want to write it together?’ And I said, ‘let’s write it together’.”

So how did you collaborate? I’ve head you describe it as ‘alternate words.’

“We spoke all day on the telephone and then at nights I’d write stuff and mornings, Terry’s time, he’d write stuff. He had a slight advantage over me in so far as he was writing it between projects while I was writing it while also writing Books Of Magic and Sandman which meant that at two o’clock in the morning no matter where I was at on whatever I was working on I’d stop and write Good Omens until I fell asleep.

At the time Terry made lots of jokes about how once it was over, it would be our job to imply that each of us did all the writing on our own, all the way through and the other one just numbered the pages. These days when people ask I explain that I wrote 90 percent of it and Terry wrote the other 90 percent. And it also got very silly because there were places were I wrote sequences that were Terry’s idea and Terry wrote sequences that were my idea and then when we got towards the end, I’d written all the four horsemen of the apocalypse until they got to the airbase so I said ‘you take over the four horsemen and I’ll take over Adam and the gang because I’d like to do a whole Adam and the gang sequence’ so Adam and the gang going to the airbase and arriving there is all me and the four horsemen all Terry, just because we wanted a go at each others characters.”

Would you work together again?

“At the time Terry was a mildly successful fantasy author and I was a young journalist who’d just started writing a comic and we both had time. These days we’re both multinational corporations; there was never any contract between us for Good Omens, it was just ‘fine, we’ll do it and split the profits fifty-fifty between us’ but these days, the manoeuvring! People in suits would have to talk for a year before me and Terry would be allowed to have lunch together. I think he still owes me a lunch for Johnny and the Dead though, I gave him the title for that.”

Is it different when you’re working with Dave McKean on graphic novels?

“Violent Cases and Mr Punch are both me things; they’re both things I wrote and then handed to Dave. Signal to Noise on the other hand, was very very collaborative. I wanted to do something about the apocalypse and Dave wanted to do something about a film director dying and I said ‘let’s combine the two’.

Dave is doing the cover of Neverwhere (the book) and he’s doing the opening title credits so it’ll be very much a kind of animated Sandman…”

Weren’t you a journalist before you starting writing comics and novels?

“I was a terrible journalist, I was really rotten. I was quite a good interviewer, but I got bored after four or five years, I’d met everybody I wanted to meet. And also I’d moved from magazine journalism to newspaper journalism and discovered that I really hated it. I do not have the killer instinct that rejoices in sending other people’s children home in tears. I quit journalism in about 1987 when I got a phone call from my editor at Today and she said ‘Neil you’re our fantasy person, do you know anything about Dungeons And Dragons?’ I said, ‘yeah, yeah’ and she said ‘great, this is your big opportunity. We want a front page and an inside spread on how Dungeons And Dragons drives people to madness, Satanism and suicide’ and I said ‘no’, and she said ‘what do you mean no?’ and I said ‘I don’t think I’m working for you any more’.”

The Encyclopaedia of SF says that your writing combines “draconian verbal economy with an ample romanticism?” What does that mean and do you agree with it?

“Isn’t that nice. I think what John Clute is saying (Neil got the author spot on, but then he did co-write the entry on the graphic novel for the Encyclopaedia - Ed), although I could be wrong, is that I get my money’s worth from the words that I use, I make them work fairly hard. When I’m doing OK, I think I do; I know that I’m in trouble if I have to write pretty because it means that other stuff isn’t happening and I’m covering for it. That’s the quote that goes on to talk about ‘the burden of half-uttered resonances’; which is really very pretty and I’m not entirely sure what it means, but it think it means again that when I’m working well I can get things to resonate, I can say more than is being said.”

Gaiman on Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is quietly prolific. It’s not until you sit down and think that you realise how much he’s written. “It’s scary; I realised the other day I’ve got over 20 books currently in print. So, things that I would recommend.”

Mr Punch

“Of which I am so incredibly proud. It’s a graphic novel I did with Dave McKean; it’s really, I suppose, about memory and childhood. There is a fantasy element strung through it very delicately like a vein. It’s basically about violence, and memory, and the nature of violence and memory and the nature of the way that you see things as a child. It’s also a lot about families and families and secrets. And it’s some of Dave McKean’s finest work.”

Angels and Visitations

“My short story collection and stuff; a miscellany. It’s a hardback book I did with Dreamhaven which has a bunch of short stories and journalism; it was basically a book I did to celebrate having been a professional writer for ten years.

Some I put in because it was good, some just because I had a soft spot for it. It’s my little book of stuff I like and it’s got a few short stories I’m fond of, a few poems I’m fond of and there is at least one short story that is simply in there because I was very proud of writing it when I wrote it and at the age of twenty one I would have been so thrilled that it was going to wind up in a hardback book that I sort of put it in for me back then, a little gift for my 21 year old self.”

Sandman

The best-selling comic and graphic novel collections that tell stories, mainly about Morpheus, who brings sleep but not always rest.

“The nice thing about Sandman now is that one is almost in a position where one can say well, Sandman. 1-75, it is a big thing. Preludes and Nocturnes, the Dolls House, Season of Mists, Dream Country, Brief Lives, Game of You, Fables and Reflections, Worlds End, the Kindly Ones and the final volume, the Wake. It is a great big thing. They should be read in that order, they provide many hours of interesting entertainment and have lots of odd stuff in. I’m very proud of them.”

Death the High Cost of Living.

“Also a graphic novel; it’s the story of what happened when Death was mortal for a day. I just like Death. It’s a very gentle up-beat, delicate little story.”

Signal to Noise

The graphic novel of a comic originally serialised in The Face.

“I’m currently very fond of that, I’m enjoying it a lot at the moment because I’m turning it into a play for Radio 3. I’ve been away from it for long enough that I’m actually enjoying the process of going back in and messing with it, writing little extra bits and going back and taking out descriptions of what you can hear and inserting descriptions of things you could see.”

Snow Glass Apples

Where Sleeping Beauty is actually the villain, a chilling story of obsession and necrophilia.

“A short story I did as a chapbook, which I’m very fond of. It’s a fairy tale turned inside out and upside down. It has been picked up by various years’ best anthologies. I think of all my short stories, that and one I did called Murder Mysteries (which is in the back of Angels And Visitations), are probably my favourites.”

Black Orchid

Neil’s first mainstream comic (after Redfox), drawn by Dave McKean. It’s the story of a superhero who’s really a flower.

“It was this very noir thing and we set ourselves all these rules; no third person narration, very bonketa-bonketa-bonketa-bonketa pace and fixed grids…”

Spawn

Todd McFarlane’s strange comic, guest-written by luminaries including Alan Moore, Dave Sim and, of course, Neil Gaiman. Neil wrote about the hunter, Angela.

“I wrote it in this completely bizarre way, I just drew it all out for myself and got a little tape machine and dictated what was happening in each panel and the artist went off and drew it and it came back to me and I’d write all the dialog. It was the easiest funniest, silliest thing I think I’ve ever done. And my son liked it which was the purpose of the exercise.”

Temps, The Weerde, Villains

Shared world books for Penguin.

“Temps was an idea I’d had five years before; one night in a bar, we were talking about Watchmen and stuff and ‘of course’, I said, ‘if it was in England’ I said and just started burbling about these inept super-hereoey types who would never wear costumes just working for the civil service as temps. And The Weerde was something I basically made up on the spot when Penguin said “and we’d like a horror one”.

And then Villains came about because after that they wanted a normal one. They said “could we have one that’s closer to the stuff that people buy?” And Mary Gentle was going to have to edit that one and I said ‘why don’t you just do something in which the bad guys win?’”

Gaiman on artists

Neil’s own colour-by-numbers Sandman is always popular at conventions but he has worked with a huge number of artists on Sandman and other books, with varying results. When we asked Neil about his favourite artists he was unfailing enthusiastic.

“My favourite comic artist to work with is probably Dave McKean just because I think he’s a genius and because I never know what I’m going to get but it’s always better and stranger and more than I ever asked for. I’ve been incredibly spoiled on Sandman, I’ve had a list of artists that most people would kill to work with - of living, working artists there are very few that haven’t done something - even Barry Smith did us a pinup! I would love to have worked with Bernie Wrightson circa 1974/75 (the original artist on Swamp Thing - Ed). I would have liked to have worked with Barry Smith (the artist on Elric comics - Ed). They are the only two people in the world of classic comics that I wanted to work with who I haven’t, either in Sandman or in something else. I got to work with Michael Zulli, with Bryan Talbot, with Charles Vess, Jon J Muth, Ken Williams, Chris Bachalo, Mark Buckingham. It’s an amazing list, it is a wonderful, wonderful list. Mike Dringenberg and a whole host more - Craig Russell in Sandman 50. I’ve been spoiled!

A lot of the people I’d love to have worked with are dead; I’d love to have done stuff with Windsor McKaye - he did Nemo in Slumberland, wonderful artist. There are other people that I’d love to have done comics with like Aubrey Beardsley and Francis Bacon possibly - that would have been interesting. Richard Dadd - a Victorian artist who went mad, killed his father and spent the rest of his life in Bedlam; where he did The Fairy Fellow’s Masterstroke and The Marriage of Oberon and Titania. In fact I’ve been talking with John Bolton (who’s another artist I’ve been spoiled by getting to work with, we did the first of the Books Of Magic together) about doing a Richard Dadd comic - the life of Richard Dadd, moving in and out of his paintings.”

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

His books are multi-layered adventure stories with tomorrow’s technology mixing with yesterday’s archetypes to threaten a world that’s never quite as we know it, but Neal Stephenson still has to visit London to promote his latest best-seller. Mary Branscombe uncovered him in a Kensington hotel and discovered a dark-eyed and intense man with a very dry sense of humour and a penchant for painfully descriptive neologisms.

Neal Stephenson has only written four-and-a-half novels (including, Interface, a collaboration with his uncle under the pen-name Stephen Bury) but Snow Crash was probably the most successful SF novel of 1993 and 1994 put together, establishing him as a trendy, must-read author who gets his short stories into Wired and Time magazine. Stephenson enjoys the sort of mainstream success normally reserved for Terry Pratchett and Iain Banks’ non-SF novels; The Diamond Age looks set to repeat the success of Snow Crash and his earlier ecological thriller, Zodiac, has just been published in this country. His books touch on everything from virtual reality, nanotech, computer viruses and how to keep credit card transactions secret, to teenage rebellion, martial arts, personal morality and the inner meaning of fairy tales. And they’re damn good reads as well. We asked him about the secret of his success.

In the bookshops, we’re seeing Snow Crash and The Diamond Age in the mainstream section rather than on the science fiction shelves. Is your all your work SF or do you see Zodiac and The Big U and Interface as being completely different sorts of novels?

No, but those are the two that have been labelled and marketed as science fiction. I try not to be label conscious when I’m writing. Arguably everything I’ve ever written could be classified as science fiction and arguably it could all be categorised as fiction that has a lot of technical stuff in. If you look at it there’s no real logic to the way the labels work and Michael Crichton writes what could very easily be described as science fiction but it’s simply not labelled and marketed as such.

You haven’t published any short stories in the traditional SF markets. Instead you had Spew (a story about monitoring everything from shopping habits to cable TV) in Wired and Simoleons (about the development of cyber-cash) in Time Magazine. Are you deliberately looking for new markets for your writing?

I don’t know much about short stories - I don’t write many of them, I don’t think I’m particularly good at them, I haven’t published many. The one in Wired, I don’t think there’s anything unusual about that - they like to publish fiction but they don’t very often come across any that’s really suitable. And the one in Time was a complete fluke, it was a shocking fluke. They were doing this special issue on technology, they decided they wanted some fiction and they hired me as the “cyberlebrity” of the moment to write it for them. You can’t ring up Time magazine and ask if they want to publish fiction!

Are you planning to turn Spew into a novel?

No. I realise it’s got a sort of indefinite ending but that’s not to be interpreted as a sign that I’m going to continue it.

Your main characters are often very active, using martial arts, riding inflatable boats round harbours and diving in polluted water. Are any of these the sort of antics you get up to - how much of you is there in the books?

Not very much! The character in Zodiac was loosely inspired by a good friend of mine who did some of that kind of work and so he was able to help me out with some of the details - really all of the details. A lot of people are frequently surprised to find out how different writers are from the characters in their books, because I think sometimes people may underestimate the amount of creative work and imaginative work that goes in to writing a piece of fiction.

So do you get your inspiration from anywhere in particular?

I am more and more attracted to the ancient Greek view that it comes from the muse who is capricious and unpredictable, because there’s no logic to it at all.

There’s a very strong sense of place in Zodiac - Boston is virtually one of the characters in the story. I went to college in Boston and I lived there for a while after college and compared to other locations I could mention in the United States, Boston does have architectural style and a feel that is entirely its own. I think it helps to anchor any book if you can try to provide some clear description of the setting.

In nearly all of your books you have a fairly cynical view of government as manipulative and politicians as corrupt. Are your personal politics reflected in your writing?

I think that if you do even a cursory reading of 20th century history you can’t help but come away with a somewhat sceptical attitude towards large governments and government power in general and that doesn’t have to glow out of any fundamental philosophical or political belief system. It’s just very simple - if there’s a big beast that keeps running around and eating people in plain sight and knocking you around and threatening you then you can see and agree that the big beast is nasty and scary and ought to be caged or done away with without having to base that opinion on any kind of political system of belief system. So my position at this point is that I’m really sceptical of any kind of totalising ideology and that includes Libertarianism - but it also includes just about any governmental system you can think of. Actually, the more I go along, the more respect I have for some of the really old tried and tested political systems like the United States constitution, the parliamentary system here. They’re both imperfect and they’ve both occasionally been vulnerable to excesses of government power but as we’ve gotten more experience and become more sceptical of government power ,I think those systems still have a lot to offer.

The technical side of your books is always convincing, you seem to know a lot about exotic weapons as well as cryptography and computer networks. Do you hack?

Well, I’ve been programming computers since I was fourteen. Most of my experience in the last decade has been on the Macintosh. I’m trying to develop some facility in Unix and Internet-related coding but that’s sort of a future project. But along the way I’ve been reasonably fluent in probably eight different computer languages. So while I haven’t actually sat down and written cryptocode I’d like to think I have enough grounding in math and computers to be able to give a convincing account of how that stuff might work, what would and wouldn’t work - what the bugs would be.

I’ve never been paid to write code, which may be all for the better! I come from a family with a lot of techies. One of my grandfathers was a physicist and the other was a biochemist, my father is an electrical engineering professor and I’ve got various other scientists in the family and I grew up in a town that’s a one-industry town centered on a technical university so all when I was growing up of my friends’ daddies and mommies were PhDs and hard scientists. Wherever you grow up, you think that’s normal, so that’s what I thought was normal until I left. I’ve kind of been immersed in that world ever since I was born and I feel reasonably comfortable with it. I studied physics in college and moved over into geography because they were doing a lot of computer stuff at that time and it was a good way, probably the best way to get a chance to just play with computers (particularly graphical computers). I did some work as a research assistant during my summers in physics labs but I’ve never used my degree or my computer programming skills to actually make money.

How feasible is the science in your books - is it hard science or flights of fancy? Do you expect to see any of it in real life?

I think that the best approach is to stay with hard science as far as it can go and then if you want to go on a flight of fancy try to blur the dividing line a little bit. So, in Snow Crash for example, the science and the computer science is mostly pretty straight and the historical research is all for real - the only thing that’s fancy is just that one extra step of imagining that an ancient virus could actually infect the brain!

Another example that’s come up just recently is in The Diamond Age. The nanotech in that book has been vetted by the leading experts in the field like Drexler (author of Engines of Creation), and Merkle (a researcher at Xerox who’s worked out the major equations describing how nanotechnology would work) gave it a good review after the fact but the one complaint Merkle has is with the notion of a centralised feed system (which I won’t explain because it’s in the book!). That that notion is not really technically sound because it wouldn’t be that hard for every house to have its own source and you wouldn’t have to have it all networked in that way. And I have no doubt that that’s technically correct statement because he knows much more than I do! However! In a way it’s not exactly the point here, because the question is, suppose you were designing a new society that was going to be built around nanotech you might - in fact you probably would - feel the need for some kind of central control mechanism and so you might build it that way.

There are many examples of technologies in our world that aren’t necessarily the most logical way to do something. It’s not what you would do if you were starting from scratch but it’s what we ended up with because it’s path dependent.

Another point I would make regarding technical accuracy is that in The Diamond Age the Drummers are presented as being able to use some kind of collective mind to break into the most advanced crytpto schemes - well there’s a great deal of speculation there. On the other hand we’ve all seen examples of math prodigies who could do amazing things in ways that couldn’t quite be explained so it’s at least got some grounding.

Do you see nanotech as being the next big development, rather than Artificial Intelligence or a singularity with people uploading themselves into computers?

I’m pretty resistant to any scenario that presumes some kind of equivalence between the brain and computers. It just seems too schematic to me and whenever people have these really schematic ideas about what’s going to happen in the future, the reality always turns out to be much more complicated. Reality is an adaptive system; simple things don’t happen in reality, reality changes as things are happening and particularly as regards anything to do with brains and artificial intelligence - I’m sort of a follower of Roger Penrose when it comes to all that.

I think it’s possible to be very sceptical about artificial intelligence without being mystical or unscientific at the same time. The predictions of the strong AI people have been just so pathetically far off the mark, so consistently for such a long time that I think one has to assume that there’s something there that they’re not getting, that we’re not getting and one therefore has to take a cautious sceptical approach.

Were you trying to achieve anything in particular with Diamond Age, like recreating the Victorian novel, following the lives of the characters like Dickens?

Well that I guess it’s true that that aspect of the book is a little Dickensian; that was not a conscious effort to be Dickensian because I’ve always has a bent for writing very long complex novels so I suppose that writing a pseudo-Victorian novel gave me the license to give in to that tendency!

I don’t know if there ever is any one clear pre-existing goal that one pursues in these cases. It just struck me as an interesting idea and I thought that I would have a go at it; I did want to do something with nanotech because after reading Drexler’s book I felt that it would be very hard to responsibly write any science fiction again that didn’t largely revolve around nanotech so I did want to explore that, see what could be done with it.

You obviously don’t see nanotech as being the solution to our every problem because otherwise you’d have to write about post-scarcity utopias where there aren’t any problems left and it’s terribly terribly boring…

Like Star Trek? Yeah! Well, there’s a really fundamental split there, in one’s attitudes about human nature. The Star Trek attitude is that the only reason we’re nasty to each other is because sometimes we run out of stuff and that if we stopped running out of stuff we would all stop being nasty to each other and then our only problems would occur when our spaceship inadvertently ran into a tachyon storm out in the middle of nowhere! And I don’t buy that view, I don’t see any reason to buy that view of human nature.

I mean we’re very close to a post-scarcity future right now - at least in my country. There’s poverty but there’s not starvation, except in really odd places, and there’s disease but there’s not plague, there’s not people dying in the streets and there’s homelessness but most people can find a place, can find a roof over their heads if they need it - it may be in a homeless shelter or something nasty but anyway it’s something - and it certainly hasn’t stopped people being nasty to each other. I mean look at OJ - he wasn’t lacking for anything, nobody in that sick sub-culture in LA was lacking for anything but all it did was remove all the limit from how tawdry they could be to each other. That’s all post-scarcity did for them, break down the barriers that kept them from being as grotesque as they could theoretically be. So I guess one of the points that’s being made in The Diamond Age and it’s kind of a sledgehammer point, is that you’ve got this group of people, the thetes, who have everything they need in the way of food, shelter and even information and they’re still miserable wretches, just like Dickensian miserable wretches.

But Nell escapes. Does that mean you believe in the redeeming power of education?

Sure. I don’t think education by itself is a panacea, I think in general that it can raise people up out of the really nasty primitive lifestyle. But there are plenty of educated people who behave badly, so I think there’s also a need for some kind of cultural norms that encourage some sort of ethical system, what ever it may be - whether it’s based on scientific rationality or some kind of religion or whatever. I think that there is a need for ethics and morals if you will, but education is a good start.

Talking of education, at the end of Snow Crash we’re left wondering what might happen to YT and in The Diamond Age there’s this prim and proper pseudo-Victorian school-ma’am racing her wheelchair and coming out with phrases like “chiseled spam”. So tell us, is Miss Matheson YT?

I prefer not to issue a definitive opinion on that.

So she might be?

I prefer not to issue a definitive opinion on the subject!

Moving on to Interface, the novel you wrote with your uncle, is the marketing of politicians in that book based on anything in particular?

It’s very simple straightforward observation of reality in the United States, slight exaggeration and out comes a novel. They came very close to doing this with Reagan in his last election campaign, they actually had a real-time polling system hooked up during one of his debates and the results were being telephoned to Ed Meese who was standing about six feet away from Reagan just off stage and the only thing that kept them from closing that feedback loop was the six-foot distance between Meese and Reagan so it’s hardly science fiction or even fiction to talk about closing that loop.

Why did you pick the name Stephen Bury?

Well he couldn’t use his real name because he’s an academic who writes a lot of books and his publisher made an ultimatum that it would have serious consequences on their future relationship if his name began to appear on tawdry novels! So we had to come up with a pen name from him and this was before my name was worth anything and we just thought “well let’s go for it”. If we could even get one or ten percent of the Tom Clancy-Stephen King market - the airport book market - we’ll be rich so let’s come up with something really short and pithy that can be put in very large letters on the cover of a novel, or a whole series of them! So it was just pure mendacity and of course now we’re being heavily second guessed and there are those who think that we should go ahead and start putting my name on these books, combined with some fake name for my uncle but we’re going to stick with Stephen Bury because in the science fiction world everybody knows so there’s no point. It’s not going to help because everybody already knows!

So there’ll be more Stephen Bury books?

Yeah, we just finished one called The Cobweb which is going to be out in the States next summer and we have ideas for more, it’s just we’re taking a breather from it now for a year or two, we may get back to it later.

Cobweb is set in a Twin Cities area in Iowa in 1990 and one of the cities is a university town - lofty and affluent, up on the bluffs, oak trees and gothic buildings - and the other one is down in the flood plain and it’s a really depressed industrial town with rendering plants and packing houses and there’s a deputy county sheriff in this town who becomes aware that some of the Iraqi foreign students are engaging in some highly disturbing extra-curricular activities. It’s the adventures of this sheriff trying to deal with this problem when nobody else takes it seriously.

Are you working on any other books yourself?

No. I need to get back into a productive cycle again but at the moment I’m writing a screenplay, I’ve written a script for a CD-ROM game - of course we don’t call it a game! Actually the term I prefer to use is “edfotainucation”! It’s an edfotainucational piece set in Seattle in the present day and it’s a noir type of psychological thriller, it has a lot to do with memory, how our memories work and putting an audio-visual interface on that.

The production company is Shadowcatcher Entertainment and it’s a newish company in Seattle that was founded by some people who got out of Hollywood because they couldn’t take it any more. Any time you try to produce anything where a couple of millions of dollars are required, it’s funny how those people with millions of dollars get particular about who they give it out to! I can’t imagine why it’s that way but they’re just ever so cautious about writing out two million dollar cheques.

Do you think media like CD-ROM will ever replace books?

No. I think they will replace certain types of books, I think they will replace reference books, do-it-yourself books, cookbooks, atlases - anything where there’s cross-referencing, where there’s lots of graphics but I think that’ll just clear the field for good old linear narratives. I’m quite convinced people will be reading novels on paper a thousand years from now. I think it’s a technology that’s well developed and pretty much reached perfection and it will pretty much keep on going.

What about films? Is work progressing on the film of Snow Crash and are you involved?

That is also happening, but that script has been written by another fellow, which is fine with me. I was hired to write an unrelated original screen play. The script is written and so again it comes down to trying to figure out why these people are so cautious about writing 40 or 50 million dollar cheques for the budget. But there are some people on the job in LA who are as good as anyone in the business at handling that sort of political stuff so they’re busily trying to come up with these machiavellian schemes for convincing the people in question that there’s nothing better they could possibly do with that particular 40 or 50 million dollars.

Do you have any strong feelings about actors for particular roles?

The first thing that has to be said is that my opinion is completely irrelevant! That is a decision that will be made partly by the director but largely by the people who write out the cheque for 40 or 50 million dollars. As far as I know the only person who’s physically right for the part of Hiro is Roland Gift, he’s the only person I’ve seen who could really come anywhere close to matching the way Hiro looks - but that’s just rank speculation. I have the feeling that people who make the movie will be a lot less concerned with matching the description in the book to the character than they are with marquee value so I wouldn’t be surprised if Hiro underwent some racial changes. Other than that I think Patrick Stewart would make a good librarian.

Do you have any idea how long it might take?

The complications of producing it are such that from the time that the fateful cheque is written out to the time they actually begin shooting will probably be a year, which is a pretty long time but it would take that long just to organise the whole production and work out the details with ILM regarding the effects and from the time that filming begins to when it comes out could easily be an additional year, so - not any time soon.

There’s such a lot going on in your books that it can be difficult to pick out the themes or the messages. Do you feel that people understand your books or are there issues that consistently get misunderstood?

I think that a lot of people felt that Snow Crash was an all out attack on all forms of religious belief which it wasn’t. It was more an attempt to point out a distinction between religions that are kind of viral and not based on any kind of rational thinking versus ones that are, as the Muslims would say, “Religions of the Book”, meaning ones that are based on fixed text and immutable and from an informational point of view more hygienic!

That’s one skewed interpretation that seems to come up frequently and another one that I get all the time is the d-word, dystopia. It seems as though a lot of people can’t talk about this kind of fiction without framing it terms of a dystopian view of the future and so I’m constantly pointing out that the twentieth century has been pretty damn dystopian and nothing shown in any of my books is as dystopian as a good part of the world has been for a good part of the twentieth century. I don’t go to either extreme, I don’t believe in the Star Trek world and I don’t believe in the George Orwell world either. People will be doing good things and bad things to each other and there’s going to be a really fine granularity to it. You won’t have entire continents suffering from massive persecutions, but you may have a lot of individual people who are being persecuted within a family or a small community instead. I just think that the future’s going to be really, really complicated.

The (snow) crash guide to Neal Stephenson

The Big U (1984)

A gonzo campus caper described by John Clute as “rather in the style of National Lampoon’s Animal House” only with intelligence.

“The Big U is essentially sophomoric campus humour, a few worthy moments, a few bright spots but probably not worth seeking out.” [Stephenson has suggested that he allowed the book to be reprinted because he didn’t want fans to be overpaying for an out-of-print book.]

Zodiac (1988)

An ecological thriller, following the strange adventures of Sangamon Taylor as he tries to avoid being poisoned by the unethical chemical companies or sacrificed by the drug-crazed heavy metal fans before he has time to save the world (again).

“Zodiac is a fun book and a book I still have great affection for.”

Snow Crash (1992)

The future of virtual reality and the end of the nation state collide as the katana-wielding Hiro Protagonist and the hip skateboard courier YT bike across America running from the prehistoric computer virus that infects the human mind.

“Snow Crash is the famous one and it’s probably worthless for me to introduce it.”

Interface (1994 - with J Frederick George as Stephen Bury)

The conspiracy that controls all the other conspiracies decides that the best way to make money is to control a US president, not just assassinate one. Take a senator with a stroke, implant a radio-controlled microchip and you can react to the polls in real time but can the senator stay human?

“Interface is meant to be an entertaining but not stupid book - I hope that’s what it turned out to be.”

The Diamond Age; or, a Young lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995)

In the nanotech age of plenty, in a South China slum on the other side of tomorrow a streetwise tearaway steals a book to give to his sister Nell and the Illustrated Primer changes her life and that of its inventor. We said “violence, adventure, sex, serious hardware and an intriguing plot - it’s all here and it makes an excellent story.”

“Diamond Age is my take on nanotechnology which I think is going to be very important and on the way it’s a continuation of some the thoughts on society and culture that are there in Snow Crash.”

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

Although colonising the nearest almost habitable planet is a frequent subject for science fiction, with more than 15 Mars books coming out in the last four years, one writer has dominated the red planet recently as much by the scale of his ideas and themes as by the scale of his Mars trilogy. But Mars certainly isn’t the only interest of the versatile Kim Stan Robinson (Stan, as he’s referred to by everyone including himself) as Mary Branscombe found out and for all his skill in plot and character he clams to be the last to get plot twists on TV.

With the majority of his books and short stories mentioning Mars, at least in the background, the obvious question to ask Kim Stanley Robinson is ‘why Mars?’ In an interesting case of art imitating life, it turns out that Stan’s interest was piqued by Voyager’s images of Mars in The Atlas of Mars, put out by the US Government, with stereo-optical pictures taken by two cameras, so you can see a three dimensional image of the surface of another planet. “I was fascinated when I saw all these geographical features that were like the mountains and deserts I love so much, but huge. Incredibly tall cliffs, giant volcanoes, enormous canyons as long as the United States is wide. As a rule of thumb you can think that features on Mars are about ten times as big as the equivalent geographical feature on Earth.”

And the size of the Mars trilogy is to scale, not surprisingly with over a hundred years and a whole world to cover (Stan jokes that he kept a map of the journeys the characters made around and around the planet “just to make sure I hadn’t missed anywhere that I could explore” - but knowing him it’s likely to be true). Now that the chunky third volume, Blue Mars, is out, we wondered if he know how big the story was going to be when he started. “More or less. The timescales that are put on terraforming vary from 100,000 years or 20,000 years down to 50 years, but that is a pretty extremist judgement, so my timescales are within the bounds of possibility. When I first started on Red Mars and after the first hundred pages they hadn’t even got there, I realised that to cover all this it would need to be a trilogy so I stopped and went back to my agent and my publishers, who weren’t at all unhappy!”

Over such timescales, you either need a succession of characters, or characters who stay around for longer than usual and the Martian colonists handily develop techniques for extending their lifespans. “I don’t like the generational saga and I wanted the same people to be alive through the whole extent of that Martian novel, so at first it was just a practical technical novelist question that quickly led into the larger things. I think it’s important to take the whole treatment of longevity as a subject seriously if you’re going to use it at all but it’s certainly is convenient when you’ve got a long scale narrative.

This whole longevity thing in science fiction is also an interesting way of talking about the felt experience of our own lives, how long it sometimes seems. Living a long time but losing your memory is an interesting analogue for ordinary experience. It’s a way of talking about it in a heightened way.

The nice thing about that Martian project is that everything fell together so well. I needed the longevity so that I could talk about Mars properly but I really wanted to talk about longevity and our own relationship to memory in a landscape anyway, so it was a very magical falling together of all kinds of different topics in a way that made it good for me.

It started as a convenience long ago when I did Icehenge and the novella Green Mars; I saw immediately how useful it was going to be. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for years, I’ve been writing about this topic now since the late 70s, off and on, and there’s a development in my thought about it. I did the research on gerontology and senescence intensively for Blue Mars; after years of playing with it and seeing what I thought about, Blue Mars is like a culmination of a lot of things.”

In fact Blue Mars is the culmination of years of hard work, researching geography, meteorology, space construction, politics, genetics… “It’s a novelist’s talent to research effectively for what I need for the book rather than for a complete knowledge of the subject so there’s a kind of stagecraft to it - but I’ve been reading about these related groupings of topics for so long that especially near the end I was beginning to make connections over broad areas. I think the combination of those two adds up to a fairly information dense book”.

One character who exemplifies that intense research is Sax, the withdrawn scientist and one of the big surprises of the trilogy is that out of all the fascinating characters in the First Hundred, Stan picked on Sax to carry much of the narrative in the second and third book. “For a long time my social life was my wife’s social life (she’s a chemist) and when I came to write Sax I found I had all this information about the scientific mind, at least from the point of view of chemistry.” Tortured for information about the rebels, the precise (if devious) Sax returns in Blue Mars - aphasic, struggling for words and coming out with phrases that are not quite right, but often revealing and almost poetic. “That was great fun to write. I wish in a way that Sax could have carried on like that rather than learning to speak again.”

“But at the end of Red Mars I realised that I had killed off all my male point of view characters with John Boone and Arkady and Frank and I was thinking ‘that was silly - what do I do now?’ and Sax just stepped forward.” Put that way Sax’ development makes a lot of sense, although when I ask about the intense pressure that he puts his characters under to get such developments, almost too much for the reader to empathise with, Stan laughs and says that the complaint he gets most often is that there isn’t enough happening to his characters.

Talking of research, he has been as close as you can get to Mars without going into orbit, spending some time at the South Pole last autumn (“It was 30 degrees below zero at night” ) as the first science fiction writer to win a National Science Foundation grant. “I heard about this and applied and was accepted, basically because of the Mars books. It was five weeks in Antarctica. I spent a week in a glacier area with a team doing field research then we spent a few days at the pole.” He’ll be using the experiences in his next book, Antarctica, an ecological thriller about what happens when the polar icecaps melt. He also seems tempted by the idea of a novel based on his experiences in Washington DC; “I think I could do quite a good book based on that.” [This became the series that starts with 40 Signs of Rain.]

However, the next book out will be A Martian Romance; a concordance to the Mars trilogy with explanations, essays on terraforming, short stories, his experiences while researching and writing the three books, plus poems and songs and stories. “All the things I couldn’t fit into the books.”

To avoid confusion, it’s worth remembering that although many of his books are set on Mars, not all of them are on the same Mars. In particular, the original Green Mars - a novella about climbing Olympus Mons that deals with the now-familiar themes of the ethics of terraforming Mar and the memory problems of longevity - seems to be set in a slightly different universe. “Yes, I wrote that mainly to stake a claim - at least a moral claim - on the name. I thought Green Mars was such a good name, such an obvious name. And when I heard about Olympus Mons, this enormous volcano, I just had to write about climbing it.” It turned out to be a sensible precaution; he’s since heard that Arthur C. Clarke considered using it as the title for his collection of articles on terraforming Mars (now called The Snows of Olympus).

He chuckles. “I suppose that I should write a Blue Mars equivalent - I have Icehenge as Red Mars and Green Mars the novella and then I’d have my own alternative Mars history.”

But then Kim Stanley Robinson likes playing with history. In his short stories The Lucky Strike and A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions (the later collected in the carefully named Remaking History) he considers the possible alternatives to the bombing of Hiroshima as examples of the many different theories of history. His favourite short story is again historical; the World Fantasy Award-winning Black Air tells the story of the Spanish Armada from the viewpoint of a press-ganged child.

His main experiment in alternative history is The Orange County trilogy (The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast and Pacific Edge), which tells a story about growing up within a community on the coast of southern California - in three different histories. “Now that I am very proud of because I invented something quite new. They’re all three set in the same locale, in southern California, about the equal amount of time into the future (fifty years or so) but they’re three different futures - radically different in fact - so that one is after the fall, one is a dystopia and one is a utopia. They all three have one character who has lived three different lives in the three different futures but is given the same name so that if you’re paying attention you’ll see that there’s that one character who’s in all the three books.” The result is three wonderful inter-linked stories ringing the changes on all the possibilities in the situation.

Stan plays with time in many of his books, confounding our expectations of chronology. With his long-lived characters there’s always the tantalising possibility of discovering what really happened from those involved (assuming that they can actually remember) rather than piecing it together from archaeology and documents that may or may not give a true picture. But then the uncertainty is the point in Icehenge, which he refers to as a three-part rebus, a word game and when I ask him what the real truth was, he protests “I can’t remember! I deliberately wrote it as a puzzle. I showed it to my wife and she was convinced that Emma was Carolyn and forbade me to put any clues in that made that impossible! But I wouldn’t have anyway, because I wanted to leave it open for the reader to construct themselves.”

Mental effort in the books is usually accompanied by physical exertion. If the characters aren’t repeatedly walking, gliding and driving around Mars, they’re climbing up or hiking across mountains or going surfing. “What I try to do - as far as the circumstances of the plot allow for all these things like bodysurfing - is to give the sense of us as physical animals. We are not just brains in bottles,” he insists and condemns the modern tendency to get absorbed in “the industrial machine” to the exclusion of the outside world. “The whole notion of the standard science-fiction modes of the future is like Asimov’s Trantor, where an entire planet is a city; all these models are intensively urban or space-ship or completely metallic and it’s beginning to look like none of these ultra-techno futures are physically possible to sustain.”

He’s pretty active himself but despite the accounts of climbing that capture the detail and spirit closely enough to have climbers of my acquaintance lusting to climb with the man, he’s not an obsessive climber. “I’ve climbed about half a dozen times, but I’m more into hiking and scrambling.” He has been to Nepal and found it pleasantly mad - “we laughed every day we were there, it was just so ridiculous, with the contrasts” - very like his bitingly funny Himalayan story of yetis, Shangri La and American hippies, Escape From Kathmandu. The novella Green Mars was “a homage to the British climbers of the 70s, the Chris Bonnington group”, but he comments sombrely “many of them have died in climbing accidents” and confesses a healthy fear of falling. He adds that he gets a lot of his exercise these days from cultivating the land rather than clambering over it and points out with a grin how strenuous gardening is when you work at it.

A rather more laid-back attitude this, than the high-speed, drug-filled world of The Gold Coast or the censorship and grim committees of Icehenge. Many of his characters from that era feel trapped within a system they oppose and confused by not knowing how to voice their objections, let alone rebel. When I ask him about this he considers for a while and says “I know which characters you’re referring to”, then pauses again. When he continues, it seems he’s trying to draw a clear distinction. “At the time, that was something I was very concerned about. Now I’ve found that my writing is actually a political statement and I’m involved with running a community in northern California. I guess I’ve found my way to work within the system.”

“I believe in Shelley’s great statement: that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. And I believe that science fiction is one of the most powerful modes of poetry of all time. Science-fiction is just a metaphor for the world we live in and metaphor is one of the basic tools of poetry.”

This all sounds much closer to the utopian and ecotopian possibilities of Pacific Edge and the 1994 collection he edited as New Ecotopias. In the introduction he discusses the ideas of Future Primitivism in the stories and it’s a concept that seems to fit a lot of his own writing as well. “At the time that was a label I was exploring to see how it described my work but whatever the subject matter, that is a collection of truly excellent stories.” The same can be said of almost everything Kim Stanley Robinson has written.

Stan on Stan

Kim Stanley Robinson’s works cover a surprisingly wide range, from murder mystery short stories (set on Mercury) to the magical realism (or just magic) of Black Air, as well his more famous Californian novels - and of course the Mars books.

The Planet on the Table (1987)

The first collection of short stories, including the award-winning Black Air and the thought-provoking Lucky Strike. “Those are my first eight short stories and that was back when short stories would take as much mental effort as a short novel so they’re probably my densest short stories.”

Remaking History (1994)

The second collection of short stories, including A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions and the political Down and Out in the Year 2000. “At that point I was trying all sorts of different experiments in short fiction so they aren’t as coherent as the first grouping; a bunch of experiments.”

Icehenge (1984)

Three linked stories about the search to understand a giant monument on Pluto - that’s made of ice. The first appearance of familiar themes like terraforming Mars, revolution, longevity and memory loss - plus a baffling puzzle. “One of my very first longer narratives where I stumbled into a lot of things that I was going to explore later. I particularly like the middle novella.”

The Memory of Whiteness (1985)

The travels of a touring orchestra and the blind young conductor whose music is more than it seems. “That was an experiment - one of the first long narratives I ever tried and it proved to me that you can’t write about music!”

Escape from Kathmandu (1986)

A glorious bitter-sweet romp of a book about the hidden secrets of the Himalayas (with a little help from a pair of American hippies). “That was a gift out of our trip to Nepal; my wife and I went to Nepal and afterwards the book wrote itself. Was it really that crazy? Yeah - if anything, more so!”

A Short Sharp Shock (1990)

Stan describes this tale of travel and transformation as ‘the weird one.’ “A surrealist science fantasy, written right after my first son was born in a state of sleep deprivation. I wrote it partly because I knew I’d be writing this huge realistic trilogy.”

The Orange County trilogy

The Wild Shore (1984)

Growing up in a post-holocaust America based on barter between isolated communities, a young boy finds that rebuilding the railways is as much about political ambition and betrayal as about travel and trade. “That was my first published novel, a kind of science fiction homage to Huckleberry Finn.”

The Gold Coast (1988)

Poetry and radical action, drugs and defence contracts, friendship, love, sex, lies and videotape in a futuristic mechanised, urban society. “One of the books that’s most importantly to me. It’s a very personal book about Orange County in the 1970’s (or the 2020s!)”

Pacific Edge (1990)

The third book shows a co-operative ecotopia in 2020, but there’s still conflict, still corruption, still politics and ambition - and still love and loss. “My utopian novel. It gives me a lot of pleasure as a novel whereas as a utopia it was a very frustrating experience - the form of the book made it hard to talk about larger issues in the way that I might have wanted to.”

Red Mars (1992)

One hundred picked scientists set out to colonise Mars. “What can I say! Probably the other book along with Gold Coast that’s most important to me personally. That was where everything really felt like it was falling together in a nice way.”

Green Mars (1993)

The First Hundred have gone into hiding at the pole but the children born on Mars have their own plans that don’t include the multinational corporations from an increasingly desperate Earth. “More of the same! That one was a tremendous challenge, to try to describe in detail a successful revolution. It was a political education to write that book!”

Blue Mars (1996)

The triumphant conclusion - can man live on Mars or just exist there? “I’m happy the way it ended - I’m happy with all of Blue Mars. I think of the three books as one novel really - a three volume, three-decker Victorian novel and I’m pleased with the way it ended.”

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

Banks is a prolific writer and (at the time of this interview) had produced 13 books in  16 years. We asked him to describe his books for us and he told us “it’s a tired old cliché but books are like children…”

The Wasp Factory

“It was supposed to be a respectable, normal kind of book that went away and came back with a ring through its nose and a safety pin through its cheek, and dressed in black leather.” Bank’s first published novel, though not the first he wrote, this is the macabre and darkly humorous story of Frank, an unusual child growing up on a Scottish island.

Consider Phlebas

“A broth of a book, not particularly bright, but great fun to be with, the life and soul of the party… ho-ho-ho-ho! Rather a Brian Blessed sort of a book.

Consider Phlebas is the first of the Culture books and you actually learn a lot about the Culture. You learn it from an antagonistic standpoint and the main character Horza hates the Culture - that was me trying not to proselytise too much, trying not to make it boring for the reader by saying “hey, here’s the Culture, wouldn’t you like to live there!” By writing from the point of view of someone who despised it, who was fighting against it, I made it more interesting for me and I hope for the reader as well.”

The Bridge

“Definitely the intellectual of the family; it’s the one that went away to University and got a first. I think The Bridge is the best of my books.” The anonymous narrator awakes on an enormous bridge and slowly dreams his past life as he travels around an alien planet, dreaming of a barbarian straight from the pages of a sword and sorcery novel.

Espedair Street

“It’s the child that wanted to be a rock star and got it.” The story of Danny Weir, mega-rock star, and why he didn’t commit suicide…

Walking on Glass

“It doesn’t fit into this category at all! It’s probably schizophrenic, it’s a cluster bomb of a book.” His second published novel, Walking on Glass combines the coming of age of an anguished adolescent, the disturbing fantasies of a paranoiac who’s an outcast from a galactic war and the game-playing exile of two warriors from opposite sides of the conflict.

Complicity

“Definitely a coke addict!” Probably the nearest Iain Banks has come to a straight detective novel, this is the fast-paced story of a computer game-playing substance-abusing Gonzo journalist who’s following up one big story and becoming part of another. It alternates between the disturbingly explicit and blackly ironic humour. “A bit like The Wasp Factory except without the happy ending and redeeming air of cheerfulness.”

The Crow Road

“A family sort of person, an earth mother type.” Another mystery, this is the story of Prentice McHoan’s complex family, including the exploding grandmother.

Feersum Endjinn

His latest book and winner of this year’s BSFA award, it’s set on an Earth of the far far future and a third of the book is told by the child Bascule, in phonetic writing. “I was just getting fed up with writing normally, and I thought would make it feel more childlike, give more of a childlike feel of what it was like to be in this gigantic structure. I’ve always liked gigantic structures - probably because I was brought up near the Forth Bridge! Had a big effect on me.”

State of the Art

A collection of short stories, including the novella in which the Culture discovers Earth.

“I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if the Culture found us. Basically it’s a joke, Earth ends up getting used as a controlled experiment.”

Player of Games

Gurgeh is the Culture’s best Player of Games and he’s sent to play the ultimate game of the Empire of Azad, without realising he’s a pawn of the Culture. “It’s impossible to be that big and that powerful and not to behave like that. By showing that, I was trying to make it a more rounded society.”

Use of Weapons

Zakalwe is a mercenary, working for the Culture and trying to forget his past and ending up reliving it. “It’s more a personal tragedy. Both this and Player of Games are slightly more like mainstream novels, slightly more about the individual characters but whereas there is a kind of redemption at the end of Player, there isn’t at the end of Use of Weapons. Any optimistic note is predicated on the reader believing that the Culture is good. Zakalwe has created another slightly monstrous version of himself, another guy who has a thing about chairs. In the end, I still think the Culture is doing it’s best by all concerned; it’s a dirty job. I think it’s the best of my SF novels, the most complex and the best structured. I think it’s the second best of the novels overall, it’s very psychological, about one person, one obsessive type; it’s a kind of tragedy”

Against a Dark Background

Set outside the Culture, this is the story of the Lady Sharrow’s quest for the last Lazy Gun, a weapon that destroys what you fire it at by poetically appropriate methods. “It’s an SF rendering of a fantasy plot - getting the gifted team together and going in search of things of power. I wanted to have that sort of scale and that breadth of canvas and to do it from a hard SF point of view. It’s all completely relativistic, completely Einsteinian, there’s no breaking of the light speed barrier at all.”

Canal Dreams

As the US government prepares to hand the Panama Canal back to Panama in the year 2000, the Japanese cellist Hisako Onoda travels to down the canal to reach Europe. “My first attempt at a political thriller - an action book. I was quite pleased with the way it escalated gradually so in the first half of the book there’s no violence at all and about halfway through it starts to get quite violent and the rest of it just gets completely over the top. I was quite pleased with that aspect of it but as a political thriller it’s not very good because it would be so easy to take the politics out.”

He also told us about his next two books - one set in the Culture, but the first, Whit, set once again in Scotland. “It’s set in May - there’s a very good technical reason for this but it’s a bit complicated. It’s set largely in a cult, a religious cult. It was going to be called Cult Novel (well it’s a novel and it’s about a cult and I hoped it might become a cult novel…) but that was trying to be a bit too cheeky, a bit too clever, so back to the original title. It’s told from the point of view of a young girl of 18 who’s going to be the next cult leader. It’s about her leaving the ashram - where they live just up-river in Stirling - travelling to Edinburgh, then to London then round England and then back, trying to find her cousin who’s become apostate - she’s hankering to leave the cult and they want her back in. I think it’s a comedy - the jury’s still out on that I think!” He laughs, then grows more serious. “It’s also about power and hate.”

Although it’s mostly finished, he’s still “tinkering” with Whit. “My publishers extended the deadline; they’ve actually got very relaxed about deadlines since Nelson Mandela’s autobiography which came in with about an hour to spare! But it should be out in September.”

After that it’ll be the next Culture novel due next June, Excession. “I’m really looking forward to that, I’ve been thinking about it for the last few months. I think it’s going to be fun -there’ll be lots of starship names of course!”

Where to start?

Where should you start, if you’ve never read an Iain Banks novel before? Although Wasp Factory was published first, its macabre approach may not be the best place to start; The Bridge is our favourite, but not everyone likes it. We aked Iain Banks what would be a suitably gentle introduction. “Espedair Street. It’s so nice, there’s not even any real deaths and murders in it! Not even any violence, it’s very pleasant that way. I would say not The Bridge because although I think The Bridge is the best of my books, it’s also the most complicated. And you don’t want to read the best one first!”

Originally published in SFX magazine issue 1 - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

Iain M Banks’ latest Culture novel is a tale of conspiracy, deception and eccentricity. So Iain, we asked, what’s it all about?

“About 450 pages” he replied, hefting the book and grinning. It is indeed a long and complicated tale of conspiracy that keeps you counting on your fingers to work out who is deceiving who past the last page and when we asked him what really happened to the Ships at the end he protested “I don’t know!”

What Excession is really about is Banks’ beloved Ships. The Minds are in control and although the human characters are interesting enough, many of them are never even named and can be dismissed as “out of the loop”. “It just worked out that way; it was something that was going to happen in the course of the novel anyway but it became more pronounced as the novel went on and I was wondering whether to work against that and make the humans more important but I thought well, as long as it’s still gripping, still interesting. I think that is the upper limit of human non-involvement, I don’t think I’ll write a novel in which humans are less involved. In the next one I think they’ll be more clued up. And probably more drones as well; there’s not enough drone tetchiness - that’s something I think I’ve missed out on.”

The humans who do show up are pretty irritating at times and Ulva, in particular, we have pegged as a spoilt brat. “Well, yes she is a bit, but she does her job, in the end she does what she’s asked to do, which is all that’s really required of her. It’s not her fault that it all goes horribly wrong. I like Ulva a lot. The humans can be a bit more - well, not dysfunctional, but less practical, less perfectly dynamic, they can be a bit more eccentric. Why should the Ships have all the fun?”

Fun for a Ship, it turns out, is spending time in virtual reality. “Well, I thought, what would they do with all this time? Inventing a world where you have different laws of physics, that would be about the ultimate version of Civilisation.” Banks confesses to plenty of time spent playing that game. “That’s part of where the idea of Outside Context Problems came from, you’re getting along really well and then this great battleship comes steaming in and you think, well my wooden sailing ships are never going to be able to deal with that. But when I started Excession I deleted Civilisation off my hard drive.”

Much of Excession is composed of messages and conversations between the Ship Minds, complete with convoluted jargon. This doesn’t mean he’s finally logged on to the Internet though. “It was just me trying to work out how it would actually work, what the Ships would need - it’s a sort of anorackish tendency in myself to want to get all these technical details right. You have to have something at the beginning to tell you who’s talking to whom, so you do need that - a formalisation of the protocol that would have to go on anyway when a Ship talks to another Ship. I just like that stuff! I think it’s neat, which is probably rather sad on my part but there you are!

“In Consider Phlebas there’s a message that the Culture sends out, just a common or garden ‘by the way we’re going to blow up this entire world in a few days’ and that’s got the same sort of thing, it’s just I let rip a bit this time whereas normally I try to keep that sort of thing to a minimum.”

Of course there’s method in his madness. “One message you actually see three times in the course of the book. The first time you see it it’s just as it comes, no explanation whatsoever, but you’re reading it from the point of view of a character who’s got a terrible hangover and says ‘I just don’t know what this means!’ I was trying to point out the importance of that message and say ‘it’s all fairly complicated but, let me take your hand here - I’ll talk you through it as much as possible!’ Doing both at the same time gives you an impression of the complexity of the whole situation but at the same time make it comprehensible.”

He cheerfully confesses that he indulged himself in this book, with “lots of gratuitous ship names, like the Frank Exchange of Views” and he’s as enthusiastic as ever about the Culture. “I always enjoy writing Culture novels, I feel at home; it’s my train set, I built it, I chewed that papier mache! I love writing Culture novels - it’s almost too much of a self-indulgence. That’s why I deliberately took two books away from the Culture to reassure myself that I wasn’t so besotted with it that I couldn’t write science fiction elsewhere.” He doesn’t feel the need to prove himself again though. “I’m not sure what to do next; I’ve just signed another four book contract and there’s two sf novels included in that. One of them will certainly be a Culture novel, if not both.”

This next sf book will be rather different from Excession where (unusually for a Banks novel), hardly anyone dies (permanently). “The next Culture book will definitely have a lot of death in; I wouldn’t want people to think I’d gone all cuddly. It felt the right thing to do in Excession; you shouldn’t force ghastly mayhem onto every book if it doesn’t need it and it’s galloping along quite happily, but certainly the next mainstream novel is very grim - a high percentage body count there. And the next sf novel? I don’t know but I suspect so just in case it might look like a trend and we can’t have that! I’ll probably do something a bit more on the grim side - although I might change my mind!” Mind you, Banks also comments that he tried to keep books like The Crow Road more ‘cuddly’ without much success, although he maintains happily that his last mainstream book, Whit, was rather gentler. “But the next one, it’s about symbolism, death, mystery and death. And death. Oh and did I mention death?”

The provisional title for this next mainstream novel was Feu de Joie (it became Song of Stone). “It’s a technical term for when people fire their guns into the air to celebrate - pretty dangerous thing I’ve always thought.

Unusually for me, it’s a bit timeless and placeless - there’s a castle and an artillery piece. Basically it’s a three-hander, there’s a very minor aristocrat and his sister and there’s a greedy captain from a mercenary band. A lot of symbolism, fire, earth, air, water - bit of a departure for me this one. It should be a wheeze. It should be relatively short, thin but to the point - a bit like a stiletto.”

There’s been a rumour recently that Banks might be dropping the M from his science fiction books and while he dismisses it as just a rumour he didn’t really seem to have made up his mind.

“I’m not, probably, but I might - I’m almost certainly not. I’ve talked to my publishers and there’s no problem about dropping the M - or including the M for everything if I want - but I’m not really intending to do it. I’ve thought about it but - och, I can’t be bothered!” Just a rumour then, Iain? “There is some truth in it but it’s probably not going to happen - but it could if I wanted to! Though again I might change my mind…”

That’s clear then! But remember - you read it here first.

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

When you’re rich and powerful and can have almost anything you want, what do you do next? Well, if you’re Iain M Banks ,you write about what interests you, like the secret manoeuvrings of the ship minds that really run the Culture (and you indulge yourself with as many gratuitous Culture ship names as you like). And if you’re one of the ship Minds that manoeuvre around secretly running the Culture, you go looking for the ultimate immortality; another universe to escape to when this one finally implodes.

The Culture may seem like a democratic utopia where you can have, be and do just about anything you want, but there’s always someone in the background pulling the strings. In this book we find out that it is, not surprisingly, the super-intelligent Minds of the Culture ships who decide what’s going on. Some of these are decidedly eccentric, for example the Sleeper Service which stages tableaux of famous battles with the uncomplaining bodies of those who are on board in suspended animation waiting for things to get interesting again, or the Grey Area (more popularly known as the MeatFucker) who breaks every rule of etiquette by rummaging around in people’s brains and dispensing Justice.

Much of the book sets about exposing the less salubrious side of the Culture, from the misfits who don’t want to fit in to a bunch of paranoid intriguers who are convinced the end justifies whatever means they see fit to use. Which is more of a problem when they’re the ship Minds skulking in the corridors of power, setting everyone up.

Since the Idiran war five hundred years before, the Culture has been determined to have things its own way without any of that messy fighting, thank you very much, but it has a new neighbour now, the Affront (a sobriquet coined by one particularly irritated race and adopted with glee by the huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ and just generally killin’ prone Affront who have genetically engineered their entire ecosystem to be as unpleasant as possible - for everyone else). Then an object turns up that is so strange that non-one can decide whether it’s a terrible threat, a never-to-be-repeated opportunity or a figment of the imagination. An Outside Context Problem is what takes you from top of the heap to a footnote in the history books but this perfect black sphere just hanging in space is even worse than that, it’s just too much to deal with - it’s an excession. So naturally no-one can bear not to meddle, and it turns into a race across the Universe between the Affront, the sensation-seeking Elench and half the ships in the Culture, including the revived battleships that everyone has forgotten about. Every new ship that turns up either starts a new investigation or foments a new conspiracy until it starts to look the Scott Report meets The Prisoner; the Minds could certainly teach most politicians something about manipulating the press.

Of course, the drones, the environment modules and even the intelligent protective suits have to get in on the act as well, leaving most of the humans involved knowing rather less than the reader. Not that most of the humans actually want to be involved anyway; they’d much rather get on with their own lives and it’s good to see that the Universe is still populated by the kind of hedonistic, self-centred, obsessive egotists that give humanity such a good name.

Excession is painted large on Banks’ usual mind-boggling vast canvas - genocide on a planetary scale is just a throwaway scene, an entire race subliming (just to get away from those annoying neighbours) is a mere reference in a discussion of why the Culture is still determinedly corporeal. As usual, it’s fast-paced, extravagant and dryly witty - and of course huge fun. The Minds are quite at home with the covert military euphemisms, unintelligible tech-speak, info-babble and acronyms that spatter their messages and it seems even a hyper-intelligent spaceship never gets around to answering all its electronic mail.

The personal narrative keeps it from being overwhelming; for all their size and power, the ship Minds turn out to be just as fallible as the rest of us and if you thought the Culture was an impossibly nice place to live, Excession is enough to convince you to get paranoid. There’s enough gratuitous hardware and enough amazing, barely believable tech to keep it fun (battleships with protective fractal colourations? Identity-swapping twin droids making anti-matter reactors out of their dead brains?). There’s a little more talking and a little less action than usual in a Banks novel, and surprisingly few of the main characters die messily (at least not permanently). For all the secret machinations and betrayals, this doesn’t feel like a dark book - unlike Use of Weapons or Player of Games - although almost everyone gets what they deserve, in a bitterly satisfying way. A somewhat lighter Iain Banks this may be, but it’s still likely one of the best SF novels you’ll read this year.

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

Just how do you get elected President of America these days? You can sink a political career on TV in a few minutes if you make enough of fool of yourself; on the other hand if you look and sound good enough you can sway the nation. All you need to know is how well you’re going down with the voters. Take a politician who’s had a biochip implanted into his brain, linked to the computers that analyse the responses of the specially chosen market research volunteers, who represent the heights and depths of the great American people and you can work out exactly what you need to say to get your candidate elected. And then you control the President. Which is handy if you’re a worldwide conspiracy wanting to get a firmer grip on the nation to stop the Treasury reneging on the national debt and undermining all your investments.

Of course the politician and his family may not be that co-operative and the doctors and computer scientists you need to implant the chip and get it working may give the game away. Throw in the pollsters and political fixers, the secret compound under the mountain, the purpose-built hospital in India and the evangelical healer laying hands on a dying politician on live TV and you have a tale that veers from chilling to hysterical and back, via cynicism, technology and the manipulation.

But then what else would you expect from the inventive, twisted and yet ruthlessly logical mind of Neal Stephenson? If the similar cover design doesn’t give it away, the publicity material points out several times - no doubt to cash in on the huge (and completely deserved) success of the superb Snow Crash and the equally delightful Diamond Age - that Stephen Bury is a pseudonym for Stephenson “with another writer”. The other writer is his uncle, a respected University lecturer whose academic publishers would prefer him not to put his name to a big thick airport book. That’s how Stephenson sees Interface; a thick slab of a book that will seize your attention and hold it across the Atlantic. Interface is much better than that. It’s a fast-paced, compellingly believable tale that combines real people and real science with politicians who are so realistic that you’d like to vote them out of office, conspiracies that make sense of everything and sharp black humour that sees modern life through a twisted glass. It’s convincing enough to be scary, scary enough to keep you reading and wonderfully well written. Buy it even if you’re nowhere near an airport.

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

If morality is “a work in progress” you can do whatever you want - or whatever you can get away with. That’s the motto of the Strange Magnificence, the black-satin-clad terrorists taking over space station Solitude in the title story of this collection but the idea recurs in nearly all the stories. From the mostly justified violence of the detective trying to defend the station (and the half-wit Barnacle Bill), to the gardener fighting the decadent and sadistic Captains so he can get on with growing the tomatoes that will feed a new world, Shepherd’s characters polarise between desire and obligation, often bloodily, and sometimes with love and lyricism. There’s a fair bit of graphic sex too!

The British flavour of some stories doesn’t work; Shepherd is far better at painting the grimy, hard-edged glitter of an anonymous American city, the desolate beauty of the badlands or a space station in orbit around the Sun, than at any aspect of British life, from geography to accents (for the London accents on Solitude, think Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and shudder). And while most characters are well-drawn, almost to a man the narrators are confused, desolate, nihilistic and uninvolved, but still carry on acting as the plot requires and experience a convenient if cynical redemption.

The stories range from the discomforting magical realism of the purblind boxer gaining a new vision through the horror of re-animated jazz players whose music literally changes your life, to science fiction (complete with faster than light colony ships, transcendent beings living on the Sun, super-evolved humans and the entire human race getting frozen). They all leave you thinking and some leave you shuddering.

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

What a world. Once you’re legally dead, they can pump you full of neurochemicals that bring you back to life just long enough to answer a few last questions before the toxins polish you off. If you don’t want to be a typical man, surgery can turn you into an asexual or if you can afford it, you can rewrite your DNA so no virus can ever affect you again. Meanwhile the physicists are well on the way to explaining life, the universe and everything - permanently. It’s something of a brave new world but not everyone is happy; some people want the right to remove the part of their brain that causes the delusion that you can ever understand anyone else and others are coming down with Distress, an inexplicable, incurable mental illness that leaves you thrashing and screaming in agony and despair. Not surprisingly, our hero Andrew Worth has decided to get away from it all, on a blacklisted artificial island built with stolen genetically engineered nanotech where the physicists are battling it out to explain the universe, before it ends. Of course, this isn’t away from it at all and Andrew is soon skulking around interviewing terrorists, getting kidnapped and trying to save the world…

It’s a gripping situation and Distress drags you along from discovery to suspenseful discovery by the scruff of the neck but it’s a shame that Egan can’t resist rubbing our noses in how much he knows about quantum physics, cosmology and post-colonial politics and gender choice along the way. The cynical detached journalist who starts out alienated and aloof from the situation and ends up becoming his own story is something of a cliche and it’s hard to write an enjoyable book based around an unsympathetic (indeed downright irritating) main character - especially when the only vaguely likeable character spends most of the book avoiding everyone.

When he’s talking about the universe and the physics that underlies it, Egan produces writing of great beauty and passion (although far too much of it is mystifying technobabble) and he makes some telling points about our attitude to science and to other people, and how the mystical midnight revelation usually turns out to be rather trite in daylight. Unfortunately he can also be unsubtle and obvious. Any book that sets out to answer all the questions of the universe is bound to turn out something of a disappointment on reflection, but while you’re caught up in the story, it’s a rattling good read despite the jaw-breaking jargon.

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

It’s people rather than places, principles or even the ever-present politics that are at the heart of Melanie Rawn’s books and you need to figure out a way of keeping track of them if you’re going to enjoy what is really rather an enjoyable tale of magic, battles, discovery and the very occasional dragon. You can’t rely on names because in order to show the complex inter-relations of the people of her world and how their disagreement in the face of the invading barbarians amounts to bitter internecine civil war (or perhaps because she ran out of ideas for names?), Melanie Rawn often has important characters Name their children after one another. Often this is followed by a change of heart and the children grow up to oppose their near-namesakes, so for the sake of the plot as well as to avoid confusion, it’s important to get clear in your mind the difference between Andry, Andrev and Andrade and between Sioned and Sionell - otherwise you’ll be suspecting some of the characters of incest instead of just adultery.

Ah yes - adultery, deceit, rape, madness, plague, treachery, sorcery and unrighted wrongs from generations long dead, it’s all here, as the barbarians horde advances to destroy the people of the desert and the High Prince and the would-be-Torquemada Lord of Goddess Keep have to decide whether to put aside their differences to fight the invaders or to squabble just long and hard enough to keep the plot going. There’s never a dull moment…

With such a profusion of similar characters, it can be a little hard to care what happens to these people as they play out their epic destiny, because they aren’t always clearly enough differentiated for you to work out who is struggling against which principle at any given moment. If you’ve read the previous two books of the Dragon Star trilogy and the three Sunrunners books already, you may have them clear in your mind by now - this is the last book of six and it doesn’t really stand alone. Although the characters and plot are fascinating once you figure out who they are and what’s going on, the pace is slow and there’s more internal dialogue than action or description.

There are no loose ends left dangling after the last battle either - they’re all either neatly tied up, handily chopped off or conveniently sorted out for the next few books. Although there’s no sign of a new series, there’s plenty of scope for another trilogy following the struggles of the next generation and once you know who they are you really do want to know what happens to all the characters on the next page.

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996