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

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more