yay for Penguins!
This is pretty big. If the mods think it's too big, I can always post a link.
Interview was in August 2000 ish
CUBE: Your first and last Culture novels have their titles taken from the same
Eliot poem, is there any reason for that?
IMB: It's got a nice sort of circular feeling to the whole thing, I don't think
it'll be the last Culture novel. The last for a bit, because I'm taking a year
off. When I come back it'll probably be a mainstream book, and I don't know when
I'll write the next science fiction one. I can't imagine staying away from the
science fiction forever, because I enjoy writing them so much. So it's a
circular thing, which is in a way inappropriate as the line "Consider Phlebas"
comes after "Look To windward", but is Ok as it's a sort of backward looking
book. Looking back to the two wars, and what was going on.
CUBE: My question is more that given it's the centre of the poem, central to a
theme of death and rebirth, and that Look to Windward has all sorts of themes of
death and rebirth, the existence of heaven, are you coming from a particular
standpoint? Is the Culture really atheist?
IMB: The Culture is definitely atheist, in any sense that we would understand
it. At the same time, it would be possible through technology to have something
like Heaven if you want to. Assuming that the Human species carries on, it will
be up to us to want to do that sort of thing, but it won't be the heaven of
theology. You won't be able to go back and rescue people from the past. That's a
very silly idea, although it has been mooted. I hope it's going to be proved
nonsense, because the sheer egotism involved is just grotesque. Nothing that
grossly egotistic deserves to be correct.
CUBE: The idea of Soulkeepers and the ability to save yourself, that's something
which is pretty heavily denigrated by Quilan, who really doesn't like the idea
of it. Is that purely because of his situation, that he's seeking oblivion for
himself?
IMB: I can't answer for somebody else. To me it's an interesting use of future
technology that we aren't really anywhere near at the moment. It'll probably be
one of the last things we make, or may prove to be forever beyond us. It's not
one of these new surprise technologies, it's one we can anticipate and look
forward to. What I thought was interesting was the way that would interact with
a given society. The Chelgrians have a caste based society and I had to do quite
a lot of hand-waving to imply such a society is ever going to be able to make
the leap to become quite sophisticated, to become one of the Involved it may be
the novel's least plausible idea. It struck me that it might be a way for that
species to maintain a link between the sublimed, rather than always having the
Sublimed leaving the material universe. It's not an entirely original idea. I
thought it was interesting to track that to see what you could do with it.
CUBE: When you get a species that is further away from the human or humanoid, like
the Chelgrians, it tends to slow down the reading, I find. In the Culture
universe, everyone is still generally humanoid.
IMB: Well, mammalian, I suppose, not like the Affront in Excession, deeply
weird. They are relatively normal, but you'd still need CGI to get them fleshed
out.
CUBE: Do you have them fully drawn out?
IMB: No, that's not my job. Spaceships, yeah, they're easy. Kind of a given.
CUBE: Inversions is technically a Culture novel, isn't it?
IMB: In a very dry sense, yes, but in every other sense it's not, it doesn't
have all the other stuff.
CUBE: Were you happy with Inversions? Some people found it a little disappointing.
IMB: I was very happy with it. I wanted to write something where it wasn't
possible to say "We have a problem, happily here's a solution, a bit of
technology, which will solve it." The sort of thing you get in Star Trek where
they start talking nonsense. "Route the subcounduit through the X- Force
field...". There's a sense of that in any SF. What I wanted to write was SF which
was demonstrably in a different period. Still with humans. The limitations were
that of a society at that stage, where there is artillery but no handguns.
I think if you have expectations, coming from Excession where you have all these
madly named spacecraft whizzing around the galaxy, and expect something similar,
you will be disappointed. My job, in a way is to try something new, which was to
intertwine two plots, which have surprise endings.
CUBE: I think you'll probably get a lot of comment on the crowd-pleaser section of
two people discussing ship names.
IMB: You had to have some way of doing it with at least some semblance of wit,
so it became a dual using ship names to threaten each other.
CUBE: My favourite is i said i've got a big stick (which is written in a small
font to suggest speaking softly), and when I saw that, I wondered thought it's
such a comic-like device, playing with the image of a word to manipulate its
meaning. Are you interested in writing comics at all?
IMB: Not really, at one point, the artists SMS and I thought of doing something
together. What it boils down to is the same as offers I've had for games and all
sorts of stuff is that I'm not a team player. Even someone whose ideas I respect
would be hard to work with
CUBE: But you do get people like Alan Moore who are not really team players, but
still are able to put so much detail into their directions that he dictates what
he does...
IMB: Yes, but Alan Moore's a genius and I'm not.
CUBE: So films don't appeal.
IMB: People come along and want to make them, but I don't want to get involved.
CUBE: Is there anything currently in production, not just floating in production
hell?
IMB: Yes, Espedair Street looks as though it could be going ahead next year.
Wasp Factory is still in the courts. The Bridge has been optioned, or is about
to be. (a brief pause as we try to envisage how on earth you could do a film of
The Bridge). Player of Games has been optioned, too.
CUBE: I can see how that could be an easier film to make, very location-based.
Talking of the Bridge, I was recently surprised how many parallels with Alasdair
Gray's Lanark there were. Were you trying to do a sort of East coast answer to
Lanark?
IMB: In a way, yes, one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, Lanark
gave me the belief that it was possible to write something like that that would
work.
CUBE: Structurally it is very similar.
IMB: I think it has a more fixed, definite structure than Lanark, because it's
modelled on the exact topography of the Forth Bridge itself. It's almost like
the whole book is homage to Lanark.
CUBE: How happy is Ken MacLeod that he now gets all of Little, Brown's publicity
machine behind him while you're on a break.
IMB: It's not something I'd ever talked with Ken about, but I suppose it's
possible that there can be such a thing as too much publicity. I'd hope that
ordinarily I don't take publicity away from him.
CUBE: Is there any secret around who the third Evolved party in the Chelgrian
conspiracy is supposed to be?
IMB: Oh, yes! No, I never decided. It's not that I'm not telling you, it's just
that I well... you never know. There's always these little links between the
novels. What's called the Azadian crisis is mentioned in Inversions, referring
back to The Player of Games. There's something like the "Post-Excession Debacle
Standing committee" in this one.
CUBE: There's always been the hazard that Science Fiction is a ghetto that
mainstream audiences just will not pick up SF books. Can you think of any good
reasons for that?
IMB: I think there's a technophilia thing [among SF readers]. It's more English
than a Scottish, but there's still something which is up to our elders and
betters. There's a huge university/Oxbridge prejudice against acknowledging it.
There's a humanities bias that sees science as a trade. The idea of technology
being cool is frowned on. There's a fear of the future, fear of technology, the
way things change lives. Abstract ideas and physical things change, and there is
a fear there of the things SF glories in. Gadgets, new ideas, looking into the
future. It's inevitably uncool, nothing is more dated than last years SF, or
even last decades. The epitome of that is "What we'll all be wearing in 50 years
time"... Oh my God. At the same time, whatever you're wearing now will always look
daft in ten years time.
CUBE: So surely people shouldn't worry too much.
IMB: I know, but people will obsess about being cool. SF is probably the least
cool genre. Except perhaps westerns. The way SF is experienced it's usually not
very good SF, being one of the most successful genres in the movies, so there
are so many great-looking SF movies. There are some stunningly good films, but
all the good ones are let down by the little details, like using parsecs as a
measure of time. Always having noises in space? Only Kubrick didn't.
CUBE: So, [trying to trip him up] hyperspace, the fourth dimension?
IMB: Yes, it's the gap between. The whole thing about the four dimensional
universe is analogous to what we would look like to a flatworlder. The
hypersphere is actually nested. So, there's our four-dimensional universe which
looks like a huge beachball has bigger and bigger universes nested outside.
There is however, a still point in the metaverse, multiverse, whatever, so that
it restores what Einsten kind of lost. Completely mad, of course.
CUBE: Are there any scientists you're particularly borrowing from?
IMB: No, no, I made up that one myself. I also think there's a possibility of
travelling from one universe to another. Overlaying all this is the energy grid
in whichever way you go. Older and larger, smaller and younger. That's where the
energy comes from. It's a lot of hand-waving nonsense.
CUBE: A bit Magnus Pyke?
IMB: Where's Magnus when you need him? At least it's original hand-waving
nonsense.
CUBE: Going back to Consider Phlebas, I have to re-read it as I completely missed
the point, that the hero was a bad guy.
IMB: A lot of people did. I had a lot of confused comments. In the technical
Greek sense he is heroic and is destroyed by his own obsession. To see it
through, to be a good soldier it leads him to his destruction.
*BIG HAIRY SPOILER ALERT*
CUBE: Is the idea of someone being a good soldier important? Huyler is supposedly
a good soldier, as he forces the plan through, but is really a traitor, so there
is a feeling that the military is something that you're not keen on.
*OK, YOU CAN LOOK NOW*
IMB: It'd be awfully nice if we didn't need them, wouldn't it, but they're
always there. The Use of Weapons is probably the Ur-text for that sort of
discussion. Zakalwe has a very wide repertoire of things that he has to do. He
is trying to be honourable all the time, but at the end we find out why he is
being honourable. He committed such a disgraceful act, a terrible thing. Yet, by
the time you get there, if I've done my job properly, you should quite like him.
I think a lot of it does come back to Zakalwe and that epitomises my feelings. I
think a lot of it is also due to my family background in North Queensferry.
There were a lot of formative years where we'd be away for a whole day with my
pals having adventures, there wasn't the sense of fear. A lot of it was in
military bunkers and gun emplacements scattered about the whole peninsula. Most
of aunts and uncles had been in the Navy or the Wrens. When I was a kid, WWII
had only finished nine years earlier and there was a big hangover from that, so
many books and films and television applied to war. It was always there.
CUBE: Does that make you feel soldiers have to be less than perfect to counteract
that?
IMB: Good question, I don't know. What it means, I don't know, but I'm fairly
ambivalent about it. It may not be so nice to have armed forces, but it might
not be nice to not have them. The Culture needs one, as it never knows what's
out there. It's pretty unequivocal that the Americans are the strongest nation
on earth, the only threat would come from outer space. However for the Culture
who are out in outer space, and where there are other Involveds it can be
assumed that there are societies in some form that are much more powerful than
even the Culture. You have to take precautions. Scratch it and it'll scratch
back.
CUBE: Did you have fun with the nanomachine assassin at the end? That was very
nasty.
IMB: I got to the end and thought "God this is nasty". Yeah, the book was going
great until then and suddenly my vicious side spilled out. [Cruel Laughter]
CUBE: I was wondering what was going on, as it appears out of nowhere halfway
through the book, and everything else seemed wrapped up. Was that intentional to
keep us guessing?
IMB: Oh, absolutely. The only very slight clue is the structure of the Contents
page. Not so much from the titles, but spot the indentations. The airsphere is
indented once, the killing machine twice. I was proud of that. The
disembowelling, especially. It's only because he's had his skin stripped off and
his entrails ripped out that he's light enough to be bounced like that.
CUBE: Have you tested it on anyone?
IMB: No. I think it's a fairly gentle book until then.
CUBE: Except the fairly arbitrary killing off of a character who is set up to save
the day from the airsphere. I felt that was a little like The Shining.
IMB: Yes, he was a bit of a macguffin, a red herring. More like a chance to step
outside the story. To give context to what was going on.
CUBE: Pronunciations are a little difficult. Masaq' for instance, why does it need
an apostrophe?
IMB: It's trying to get into English what people would pronounce in a non-
standard atmosphere. It looks better. Masak wouldn't work. There are a lot of
names in this one. I like using Culture names, just to deliberately make fun of
them. For example, when Kabe hears the emissary is coming, he says to Ziller
that the Chelgrian names are almost as long as the Culture's. Where what their
names mean are sort of hidden inside, the Cultures' are just an affectation,
really.
CUBE: After having such success with the adaptation of Crow Road do you think the
rather nasty reviews for Complicity were fair?
IMB: No. It wasn't as good a piece of cinema as Crow Road was a piece of TV, but
I thought it worked very well. I wanted a premiere for that. Go along and get my
kilt.
CUBE: And Catherine Zeta-Jones.
[Note added 1/4/4, a week before the interview, some film or other (Zorro?) had premiered in a theatre in Edinburgh with CZJ and Connery...
IMB: No, it wasn't to be. Maybe Espedair Street. I've written the songs. I can't
play any given instrument at all well, but I can play all the MIDI kit. It's not
very big and clever, and I'm not proud of it. What I love about sound processing
is that you can correct your mistakes. It's just like word processing. As long
as you know what you're trying to say you can do anything with the patience and
a good programme.
CUBE: You've never been tempted to put long poems and songs in your books?
IMB: I have! I'm very good at disguising them. There's two poems at the start
and the end of Use of Weapons. There's one in The Bridge and there's quite a few
weird quotes of lyrics in Espedair Street.
CUBE: But you've avoided the Tom Bombadil route of appalling poetry.
IMB: There's always the danger, but I've tried to do it subtly and you didn't
notice, so...
CUBE:There's a bit in Look to Windward where you reincarnate a character after on
galactic cycle. How long is that?
IMB: I think it's fifteen million years. The implication is that there are no
humans left and no sign of the Culture anymore.
CUBE: I found Kabe pretty difficult to visualise.
IMB: Yeah, he's sort of triangular, there's a very bad drawing of him in SFX.
CUBE: I kept getting the image of him being something like the Eye in the Pyramid
with legs.
IMB: No, he looks like a bit of sculpture. He's not so monumental that he can't
do a little dance in the snow. He does connect with bits of scenery, thought
furniture, lights and so on. I'm not sure I can entirely visualise it.
CUBE: That's interesting, as I was talking to a friend the other day about whether
the visualisation of a character was important. I find I can usually skim over
it, but occasionally it's foregrounded by important differences. You obviously
give characters descriptions, but do you visualise them as always being like
that.
IMB: I frequently have to go back and remind myself what their hair colour is
like. So, no I don't really.
CUBE: So they're fairly functional, nebulous?
IMB: I don't have a clear view of them. I think a lot of authors visualise them
as an actor or actress, a friend. I've never actually done that. The editor of
the Caledonian in Complicity looks a little like Richard Wilson. It's never
happened before or since, so I don't know what all that was about.
Do you give the characters voices?
No. Apart from Kabe, who is big so he has a deep voice. The silver-skinned
emissary is something like Niles from Frasier. I think some writers do, as it
helps them to visualise them, imagine them being someone you know. It's just not
something I've ever felt the need to do. Bascule from Feersum Endjinn has a
distinct mangling of a voice. I found out later that his name was something to
do with a bridge, like Tower Bridge, to do with the hinging part. I just chose
it because it rhymed well with rascal. |
