Skip to main content

Paul McAuley - Four Way Interview

Paul McAuley won the Philip K. Dick Award for his first novel and has gone on to win the Arthur C. Clarke, British Fantasy, Sidewise and John W. Campbell Awards. He gave up his position as a research biologist to write full-time. He lives in London. His latest novel is Austral.


Why science fiction?

 For one thing, I fell in love with science fiction at an early age, and haven’t yet fallen out of love with it (although I have flirted with other genres). For another, we’re living in an increasingly science-fictional present. Every day brings headlines that could have been ripped from a science-fiction story. Giant robot battle: Who knew a duel between chainsaw-armed mech suits could be so boring? for instance. Or, Roy Orbison hologram to embark on UK tour in 2018. And looming above all this, like Hokusai’s famous wave, are the ongoing changes caused by global warming and climate change, which is just one consequence of human activity having become the dominant force of change on the planet. So the genre’s common tool box is increasingly essential for capturing in fiction almost any aspect of these strange fractured times, whether by satire, extended metaphorical riffs, straightforward extrapolation, or even realism.

 Why this book?

 Like many other science-fiction novels, a number of my previous books have incorporated effects of climate change in the background hum of their near futures. But for quite a long time – ever since a trip to a research station in Sweden, above the Arctic Circle, I’ve wanted to write a novel that deals with climate change head on. And instead of a dystopia or awful warning, to write something hopeful, a novel about a world in which global warming had not only caused all kinds of disastrous changes, but had also opened up new territories in the polar regions. There have already been a fair number of novels set in a post-warming Arctic, and in any case, the territories around the North Pole are claimed by various national interests. So I turned to Antarctica, which by comparison is a clean blank slate. If the ice melted, what use might we find for the new lands? How would we live there, and how would living there change us?

 What’s next?

 I’ve taken a break from writing because of personal circumstances, but right now I’m trying to get back by mojo by writing a short story set in my Quiet War universe. After that, hopefully, a kind of samurai western set a few billion years from now. 

 What’s exciting you at the moment?

 I grew up with the Space Age, and I’m still excited by the ongoing exploration of the Solar System by robot pioneers, and the fantastic variety and dynamism of the landscapes they’ve found. Who could have guessed that Pluto was geologically active, with glaciers of nitrogen ice, possible cryovolcanoes, and mountains of rock-hard water ice rafting in a sea of nitrogen ice? Or that the best places to look for extraterrestrial life would be in subsurface oceans beneath the icy crusts of moons of Jupiter and Saturn? It’s possible I’m gearing up to write more about this, perhaps as the venue for all kinds of pocket utopias and ectopias.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...
Post a Comment
Read more