Skip to main content

Andrew Hunter Murray - Four Way Interview

Andrew Hunter Murray is a scriptwriter and fact-hunter for BBC2’s QI. He co-hosts the podcast No Such Thing As A Fish, which has had 200 million downloads, and has toured the UK, Europe and Australia. He also writes jokes and journalism for Private Eye magazine, and hosts the Eye’s podcast, Page 94. He is author of the science fiction novel The Sanctuary, published by Century.

Why science fiction?

Compared with ‘proper’ literature (big tongs there), sci-fi has had a slightly shonky reputation almost since the word go. It’s often seen as a slightly bonkers, pulpy poor cousin which you might read as a teenager before growing out of. But literally all the name means is that the story takes place in a world where the rules are somehow different, and explores human behaviour in response. Dozens of brilliant authors know not to be scared of it. Several Kazuo Ishiguro books? Sci-fi. Lots of Margaret Atwood? Sci-fi. The snooty view of sci-fi holds it back – but really it’s the loss of anyone not reading it. Plus, you can also have gigantic space spiders. 

Why this book?

The Sanctuary is an attempt to get to grips with the way the world is going to change in the next century, to present a vision of how things might go wrong, to show which utopians (read: billionaires) might try and swoop in to instruct the rest of the world how to live, and to tell the story of one young man discovering a seemingly perfect world on the brink of an enormous change. I think we’re all thinking about inequality now, and asking questions about the hyper-rich (a new category I’ve invented above the super-rich), so there’s a lot of that too. Also, my first book (The Last Day) was quite dystopian, and I thought it would be fun to set this one in heaven. Or, at least, somewhere which seems like heaven at first glance…

What’s next?

Another book, of course! Although I’m not going to say what it’s about just yet, because the idea is still at that lovely fragile stage where you can still see through the eggshell to the chick slowly incubating inside. And you don’t necessarily want to invite lots of people to look at the egg you’re growing because then the poor chick will feel lots of pressure and probably develop a complex. I’ve tried to think of a better way of describing this but I honestly think this might be the best one.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Book-wise? Whatever comes next. I have literally no genre boundaries so my next four books lined up are the first ever book by PG Wodehouse, a piece of fragile 1950s domestic fiction, a German memoir from the trenches of the first world war and some loopy seventies spider-based sci-fi. These are just the topsoil of the TBR pile and mainly I’m excited to bring it back to some sort of structural integrity.

Interview by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a digest free here

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more