I write in a genre in which, at first glance, the concept of home seems very remote. Some of my novels are set, not just ten or twenty years in the future, but five hundred thousand years in the future, when everything we take for granted today will have disappeared. Other novels I've written are set in a world that looks something like ours, but which operates by very different rules. Such worlds seem the very antithesis of what we call "home", in which very little is familiar, and nothing can be taken for granted.
The concept of home is a flexible one, though, like that of family. To me, home is somewhere both familiar and well loved. I can feel at home somewhere I haven't been to for years, or indeed never visited at all, yet feel alienated and uncomfortable somewhere I go every day. Home is a place that operates by rules I understand. The people there speak my language, and I have an instinctive affinity with the things they talk about. Home is a reflection of me, in other words, and it can change with my mood.
Home is, in my opinion, as much a state of mind as it is a place.
People love fiction because it is escapist at heart. We love being swept up in the story, seduced by the characters, mesmerized by wordplay. We are not ourselves when we read a good book. We are hypnotized by the author's words; we become someone new, someone who is a blend of the book and us. It is a magical, alchemical process -- and, like both magic and alchemy, it is fickle. Take two elements that have combined quite successfully in the past; change one of them slightly, and there's no guarantee of chemistry. Favourite authors cannot always be relied on; recommendations, even from someone who knows you very well, don't always find their mark; genre classifications are just guidelines, not strict boundaries patrolled by guards who resolutely maintain border integrity.
It's my conjecture that what we seek when we read is, not an escape at all, but a return. In fiction, just as in life, we love revisiting the characters, landscapes, feelings and philosophies that move us. In fiction, just as in life, we find homes to return to when perhaps we don't feel at home in our real surroundings, when we are lonely or understimulated, when we feel uncomfortable, or rejected, or are simply looking for a change.
The genre market is vast. People find homes everywhere. A lot of them are represented here, during Writers' Week. I feel an obligation to represent those readers who find their home in places other people would find confusing, pointless, even repugnant. We all tend to gravitate to one or two of the major camps -- crime, romance, speculative fiction, literary fiction, etc -- and we naturally differentiate even more than that. Some crime readers delight in the hard-boiled; some romance readers prefer their passion unveiled. We gravitate to favourite authors, familiar themes, unique styles, identifiable perspectives; we pull up our comfy chair and put our feet up by the fire. We're home at last, in our heads.
Fantasy writers were frequently fantasy readers as children. The first book I remember enjoying was an early reader's edition of Sinbad, published in 1935 and handed down to me by my mother. I must've been about five or six years old, and I was deeply impressed by it: I loved the novelty, the adventure, the language, the sense of myth I'd already picked up from fairy tales and the like. I read it many times, and wanted to read more books like it. My love of The Children's Sinbad led quite naturally to speculative fiction, in the form of science fiction and fantasy. I became a voracious reader and collector of trashy Dr Who novels, but some good work slipped through too. I was encouraged toward The Lord of the Rings, which I devoured whole in a day or two, then reread many times. I scoured libraries for anything similar.
This pursuit imprinted on me an affinity for certain narrative and conceptual patterns that only grew stronger with repetition. When we're younger, everything is new and strange; positive experiences lead to positive reinforcement and soon enough my plastic, youthful brain crystallized into a shape that retains the same basic features today. The novelty, adventure and language of Sinbad are still key hooks for me: if a book fails to deliver on one of those levels, I quickly lose interest. Mystery is another quality I regard very highly in a story (another thing my mother passed on to me was her collection of Agatha Christie novels), and that accounts for my sideline interest in crime fiction. In recent years I have learned the intellectual thrill that can come from non-fiction reading, finally realizing that another aspect of reading science fiction that I subliminally enjoyed was that some of it is actually about science. I have several fictional homes, now, that I can slump into with equal comfort.
Reading broadly reveals that every genre has imaginary worlds with which it lures its readers. Anyone who has read J.R.R.Tolkien will recognize the dense forests, snowcapped mountains, and tumbling rivers that overflow from the fantasy genre's larder. Science fiction, until recently, groaned under the weight of superluminary starships and square-jawed men in silver suits. Crime is no different, with its mean streets and locked-room abattoirs. Romance revisits a mythologised Victorian era with prurient excess. Literary fiction gets lost in interior labyrinths that sometimes seem to go forever before the Minotaur is glimpsed and revealed to be the self. And so on.
All have their adherents, and their strengths. Speculative fiction is just another place to lay your hat, and while it may seem unfamiliar at a casual glance, consider that magic realism is a conscious return to the dreamscape, which we visit every night; dark fantasy brings us closer to the unconscious nightmares we do our best to avoid; hard science fiction is constrained by the laws of the real, which underlie everything we see around us. Contemporary fiction -- fiction that is set supposedly in our world, right now -- is no more real than speculative fiction, no less of an escape -- for what's the difference between reading about life in a country you have never visited and a world that never existed at all? The distinction to me seems perfectly arbitrary. We're taking both authors on faith: we're holding their hands as they guide us into a place that we hope to find familiar, on some level or another. Even if we respond to pure novelty, to being delivered something totally unexpected and completely new each time we open a book, then that too is an expectation we hope to have met. That, too, is a sort of home.
Alienation from the familiar, a sort of literary jamais vu, is a condition I suffered from after a stint reviewing fantasy published in Australia in the early nineties. Pan Macmillan was the first local publisher to demonstrate that homegrown fantasy fiction could be profitable; the torch has since passed to HarperCollins and its Voyager imprint; now we see most major publishers at least dabbling in the field -- with varying degrees of success, of course, since every genre has its own quirks that an inexperienced editor or publicist can easily fall foul of.
I don't know what I expected, the first time I picked up a mainstream fantasy novel by a local writer. At first I wasn't disturbed at all to find myself in that familiar home: the maps with ice to the north, tropics to the south, and vast tracts of arable land in the middle; the inns and wizards and trolls and all those other tropes; the slightly stilted language; etc. But after quite a few books by local writers in the following years, the home began to look a little too familiar. After all, you don't go for a holiday and stay somewhere exactly like where you left. What's the point of that? I expected something a little less Eurocentric from people who live in a country that's about as far as you can get from Europe.
Of course, readers find this stylized Europe comforting, and the reasons why they do are undoubtedly complex. Did Tolkien kick-start this medievalist trend, or was he himself, consciously or unconsciously, echoing the Arthurian tales he grew up with? You might argue that the magical and heroic elements in The Lord of the Rings are part of the mythic baggage propagated by the British Empire, and which the colonies look fondly back to as we face an increasingly isolated and uncertain future. Do other cultures such as the former Soviet Europe or Asia respond to these stories as strongly as we do, and if not does that undermine the supposedly archetypal nature of the values readers might be responding to within them?
In our culture, the continuation of this mode owes a lot, I'm sure, to momentum. The British landscape is a familiar one that the colonial readers will instantly recognize. It carries with it a large amount of assumed knowledge that the writer can either build upon or tear down. It's not just the European landscape that we find familiar, but European myth, too. Elves, dwarves and giants are familiar tropes that every western child learns about as they learn to read. Serious treatments in more mature writings prolong and expand the experience of those myths. Readers of these works go on to become writers, and so the cycle begins again. Thus the mode is perpetuated
There's also, in some fantasy fiction (as in some crime and romance fiction), a relatively simplistic moral code that may be a drawcard. Bad guys dress in black, and the wizard in the pointy hat will save the day; no one has sex until they're truly in love. While I don't think that this is as fundamental to contemporary fantasy as the Eurocentrism--as there are numerous fine works of a morally ambiguous nature set in landscapes that are almost identical to Middle-Earth, just as there are numerous examples of simplistic moral universes to be found in plenty of other genres--I do think it is a feature found in many bad fantasy novels. Medieval doesn't necessarily imply simple, as the best genre writers know well.
When I decided to try my hand at writing in the fantasy genre, the natural thing to do was to follow the established form. I had visited there many times. It seemed a logical starting place. I soon discovered, however, that I had a great deal of trouble setting the scene in a way that felt honest to me, and after several false starts it finally hit me that I couldn't picture these sorts of places because I'd never been there. I traveled a lot as a child, but mainly through South Australia, the Northern Territory and to nearby Asian destinations like Singapore and Manila. I knew nothing about Europe except secondhand.
There's a risk when writing any sort of familiar landscape -- whether it's familiar from genre reading or actual experience -- of romanticizing it, of letting the authorial voice intrude on what the characters are actually experiencing. My inability to write in the standard fantasy form stemmed, in part, from a desire to portray my imaginary world realistically. As I hadn't visited a forest or a glacier, I couldn't appreciate their reality except in terms that I had read about in other fantasy works -- and those terms tend to be rather polarised. Forests are either light and soothing or dense and threatening; ice is associated with dangerous mountain passes or northern wastelands; deserts are lifeless barriers in which bandits are frequently found; and so on. I wanted to portray both sides of the story. The sea can be beautiful, yes, but it's also very dangerous. A desert is not as obviously fertile as a forest, but it does contain a rich variety of life. There are two sides to every vista, just as there should be to characters, and in order to make my fantasy novel work for readers I felt that I had to portray those sides as honestly as possible.
If I couldn't set the scene, how could I expect to carry off a full-length novel?
My first thought was to give up right there, because that Eurocentric setting seems so firmly entrenched in the field that not using it would be an unforgivable departure. It ran deeper than just swapping the compass bearings on the map so that the cold regions were to the south, not the north. The sort of landscape I was used to would have camels rather than horses, for instance, and it's hard to imagine a hero in the mould of Aragorn slouching to the rescue on the back of such a rough beast. In the world I knew there would be vast distances to cross that would, for the most part, contain nothing of interest. How could I fit that sort of landscape into a fantasy novel?
The answer, in the end, was to make the genre fit the landscape. I like fiddling with established forms -- not tearing them down, but giving them a slight tweak to make them seem fresh -- so this became an interesting exercise for me. The fantasy novels I have written still contain many of the usual elements one would expect of that genre -- like magic and villains and orphans -- but they're given just enough of a twist to fit the new world. All good fantasy contains a strong sense of place, and in this case I found that to change the landscape meant changing everything else too.
It turned out, in the end, that the only way I could write a fantasy novel was by coming full-circle: to set it somewhere from the real world in which I felt at home. This is an unusual practice for me, given my propensity for setting stories in places that don't actually exist. Once I'd decided to do it, though, the choice of location was obvious. My mother's family comes from an area on Eyre Peninsula around a small town called Cowell, about six hours drive from Adelaide. It's a small, dry town on a silted-up harbour with sand dunes a short drive away. I spent a lot of time there when I was younger, and it is and will always be a place to which I feel a very strong connection. This place -- surrounded by endless scrub, and low, ancient hills -- became the setting for The Stone Mage & the Sea, the first novel in my series, released last year by HarperCollins. Its sequel, The Sky Warden & the Sun, visits locations further north of here: the deserts, the salt lakes, the scoured-down mountain ranges of Australia's interior; the concluding volume, The Storm Weaver & the Sand, takes me back to the coast, to Kangaroo Island, and more familiar scenery.
Europe is a long way away from the settings of The Stone Mage & the Sea. There isn't a forest in sight, not a single snowflake, and no rivers; instead, there's the sea, the sun and the sand; there's space and dryness and the terrible struggle to survive.
But it's not Australia, either. One of the great things about working with your home in the genre of speculative fiction is that you change it as much as you like -- or even destroy it, as I've done several times in other works. This is a fantasy world I like to think I know well, to which I instinctively respond.
Hopefully other people will respond to it too, and perhaps one day even learn to call it home.
I make no bones about being a science fiction writer -- although, technically, I guess I should call myself a speculative fiction (SF) writer, since I write fantasy novels as well as sci-fi. I talked a little about the fantasy series I'm working on this morning, and I won't repeat all that now. I'll just mention that it's set in a mutated version of South Australia, where everything kinda looks familiar but isn't, underneath. I'm also working on a series in which uploaded copies of human minds are all that's left of humanity after a superior alien race wipes out Earth and all the flesh and blood people in the process. There's also a third series: in between writing the so-called "serious" stuff, I get to muck around with X-wing fighters and Jedi Knights and all the cool toys George Lucas lets some of us play with when he's not using them. When I've got all the other things out of the way, I write crime/science fiction crossovers, where future police procedurals and science intersect.
In the past, I've set novels as far away as 500,000 years in the future and as close as 70. I've written short stories about immortals and the very mortal, about this life and the afterlife, about the small and the very large, about humans and aliens, about the trivial and the dangerously significant. The future holds novels set in underground lakes, in artificial worlds, and in our world shattered beyond recognition.
Perhaps that why, as an SF writer, the question I'm asked most often by those unfamiliar with the field is: "Where do you get your ideas from?" This comes in a variety of forms: "You must have the most amazing dreams." "I wish I had your imagination." "You must be very clever." Etc. It all amounts to the same thing: SF writers, judging by the outlandish things in their books, must have more imagination than anyone else. Where on Earth -- or off Earth -- do they get it from?
Imagination is something I'm fascinated with because it's so easy to take for granted. We're taught as children to imagine all sorts of things, but when we grow up the encouragement dries up, and we sometimes don't even notice it when we do use it. As a result, anyone who makes a public spectacle of their imagination, like SF writers, stands out as different, and we look for explanations.
This assumption that SF writers are somehow blessed with an extra allocation of imagination, like we're born with an extra limb or something, is, from the inside looking out, an odd one. While it's true that a lot of SF writers tend to carry some extra weight, it's usually not in the form of useful tissue [around the middle, or the head]. And there is no evidence to suggest that imagination is something physical at all: a part of the brain, perhaps, a mental muscle that flexes -- et voila! there's something new.
If imagination's not physical, then, what is it, and where does it come from? Is it an immersive form of escapism, a form of conscious dreaming, or a semi-divine muse that fuels creativity and artistic expression? Or both? Looking up the dictionary is possibly the least imaginative way to approach any topic, but I did it anyway. Collins says that imagination is: "the faculty or action of producing ideas, especially mental images of what is not present or has not been experienced": "mental creative ability". If we take this definition, creativity and imagination are more or less synonymous: the ability to create from nothing.
Collins also defines imagination as: "the ability to deal resourcefully with unexpected or unusual problems."
Some theories hold that the ability to imagine gave early humans an evolutionary advantage, and it is this that made us dominant over every other species. The ability to consider the effects of actions that haven't occurred yet, to extrapolate, theorise, plan, ponder the past or wonder what's happening elsewhere in the present -- all this relies on imagination. Without it, the theory says, we're just animals.
If it's true, then every time someone stops to consider what effect their actions might have on the world, they're using their imagination; they're being creative. That doesn't mean that people spend every waking moment writing novels or making sculptures or singing arias everywhere they go. They're just being people, and not everyone is taught to use their imagination the way artists do. Teachers, labourers, pilots, terrorists, cake makers, textile workers, pastry chefs, scientists, police officers, politicians, priests -- they're creative in their own ways, as part of their own vocations. Even if you're not trying to do anything particularly clever; even if you're just thinking about something completely mundane. The most basic conscious thought requires imagination, for the world inside our heads is one built entirely out of symbols that have no objective reality.
I find it slightly amusing that these evolutionary theories take imagination in a full loop: evolutionary scientists used imagination to come to the conclusion that we owe our evolutionary success to imagination. And it goes without saying that without imagination, we wouldn't have a theory of evolution at all. Without imagination, we wouldn't have art, science, morality or ethics, dreams, or anything like that. We would be just another other hairy mammal trapped in the moment, wordless and uncreative.
That's the theory, anyway. It certainly seems reasonable to me to define the act of creating something in our minds that has been in the world before and might never be at all -- a circumstance, a poem, a theory -- as imagination at work. It might be reasonable to accept that wondering about the world -- asking the question "what if?" -- separates humanity from the rest of the great apes:
- What happens if I leave my notes at home? [a big one on my mind this morning]
- What will happen if I steal that money?
- What if I try to kiss her?
- What if I die?
Without a doubt, this same question is the core of all fiction:
- What if a woman commits a murder and tries to cover it up?
- What if true love forms between two feuding families?
- What if a man obsessively hunts a big fish all across the ocean and finally catches it?
These sorts of questions are exactly the sort I ask myself every day as I write. The only difference, I'd argue, between me and other writers is that I let the ideas flow freely, unconstrained by consensus reality.
- What would happen if the sky fell?
- What if aliens invaded earth?
- What if we cured death and could all live forever?
If I want the sky to fall in a story, then I'll make it fall, and find a way to justify it, too, to keep things interesting. In that sense, I'm still a child, letting my imagination run wherever it wants to. The fact that I can make money doing it is an added bonus.
Other writers train their imaginations -- or have them trained by early reading experiences -- to follow different paths. We all end up in the same place. The art of writing is the art of taking an imaginative vision and communicating it in a way that makes it seem plausible, making it connect. It's that connection with the reader that really matters, not whether the story features Swiss clock-makers or intelligent fungus on a small moon of Neptune. At the heart of each story lies the same question, the same instincts, the same creativity.
*
To me, envying someone's imagination is like envying the fact that someone else has a head, or two arms. We've all got it. It's nothing special. And yet it is special; it's the most special thing in the world, if only we took the time to notice it.
SF writers get their ideas the same way every writer does: we watch the world around us, and take what we need. We've just trained ourselves to imagine in ways that are appropriate for our genre, just as the romance writers have trained themselves to write in their genre, and the literature writers have in theirs, and so on.
People focus on the ideas in SF novels because they seem so outlandish, but it's no different imagining a world that doesn't exist to imagining one you haven't been to. What does France look like? I have no idea, and as a result would find it very hard to set a story there. The same problem applies to characters. What sort of temperament might you expect of a Zulu tribesman? Beats me. They're as alien to me as Darth Vader.
I don't claim to have any more imagination than anyone else. I simply keep my imagination fit by pumping it full of information and regularly exercising it.
Training my imagination involves constantly seeking new ideas through magazines, books, people, and so on. Since I write science fiction, I read New Scientist, Scientific American, and textbooks on fields that interest me. I read in the genre, and I talk to writers, readers and scientists about their work. This essential work is work, but it pays off in the same way that eating the right foods promotes muscle growth.
Just having the information isn't enough, though. An idea can be as simple as a new collision between facts, so keeping those facts moving is important. Combining them in new ways can be achieved by idle speculation, recording my dreams, letting the mind freely associate and watching what happens. This is the magical phase that happens without conscious control. I can't order my imagination to produce a new idea, but I can create the right conditions in which they appear. The more ideas you get, the more they come. Some days I despair of every getting them all down, and many SF writers I know have the same problem -- so the last thing you should do, next time you meet one, is offer them some of your own. We've already got our hands full.
Overtraining occurs when I've pumped myself full of the same sort of information or worked on one thing for too long. I know it's happening when the ideas don't come naturally as I'm writing. For someone with a healthy imagination, there's no such thing as writers' block; there are just days when I can't be bothered trying. If I find myself staring at the screen, really wanting to write but genuinely unable to think of what comes next, I know it's time to do something else for a while.
Just as repeatedly performing the same motions can cause injuries to real limbs, so too can repeatedly following the same sort of imaginative paths lead to atrophy or decay of the imagination. Overworked imaginations can be easily fixed. Exposing yourself to new stimuli can do it: reading magazines I normally wouldn't, driving a new way home from work, or listening in on strangers' conversations. A measure of chaos is good in any ordered system.
Another useful method is doing nothing at all, or doing something that allows my mind to think unconsciously for a while. Instead of banging my head against the screen, I'll sometimes take a long shower, or meditate, or go for a drive nowhere. When I first started writing, I used to hop in my car and drive to the beach, which was only ten minutes away. Usually, before I’d got half way there the idea I'd been searching for would appear. Later I found that at around the twelve-minute mark during meditation I'd be reaching for a pen to jot down something that had occurred to me. Every writer is different, but it all comes back to the same thing: relaxation is an important part of any exercise regimen, and that goes for the imagination muscles too. They may not be real muscles, but that doesn't stop them behaving as if they were.
*
That's my idea of what imagination and creativity is, anyway, and how I apply it. It's not some god-given mind-blowing force that sweeps through a lucky few and lights up their brains for an hour or two while they spew forth some masterpiece that only future generations will truly comprehend. It's not the brooding melancholy of artists anticipating that sweeping force, moping about in coffee shops and waiting for their muse to hit them over a head with a light bulb. It's not a gift we should be envious of, or need to aspire to.
I make a living from my imagination, so it's in my best interest to keep it healthy. Other people apply their imagination to very different pastimes: being a lawyer, or driving a truck across the Nullaboor Plain, or just daydreaming like some of those people up the back. That seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do, a perfectly worthy use of creativity, just as worthy as being a writer. Saying that someone has more imagination than someone else is, by inference, saying that some people have less imagination, or none at all. To have no imagination at all would be like wedging your eyes open so you can't dream.
And who in their right minds would ever want to do that?
This is my big
chance. Not in the sense of literary
recognition, although being invited to speak at AWW is without a doubt a
tremendous honour. I mean that this is
my big chance to talk about all the things that I'm banned from talking about
at home. As this convention's sole
speculative fiction [SF] writer, it's my duty to illumine each and every member
of this the audience on the worth of my chosen genre, or make a fool of myself
trying.
I can hear my girlfriend
groaning. It's Kirsty who has to put up
with my ranting about newspapers that don't review SF novels, awards that go
unnoticed, books that are overlooked when it comes to literary prizes, and
magazines that single out SF as a genre they don't want to see in submission,
not to mention some of the very important subjects like life extension and
fresh water management that will shape much of the coming century but are
rarely discussed seriously today...
Perhaps "banned"
is too strong a term, but I don't think I'm overstating things when I say that
there exists a large gulf between the mainstream literary scene in this country
and the one in which I move, just as there's a wide gulf between mainstream
society and science in general. This is
a shame--and an even greater shame that it's not just evident in this country,
but around the world. Fixing the
problem would take more than just one speech at one literary festival, but I
figure you've got to start somewhere.
I spoke earlier today
about where my interest in SF came from.
I blame my mother. She gave me
the first fantasy book I remember reading, and things have snowballed from
there. I was always the weird kid who
would rather read than go for a walk, or play sport, or do anything else,
really. That didn't make me so strange,
I think. I didn't understand kids who
only wanted to talk about football, or tanks, or stamps. We all have our obsessions. The fact that more people might share yours
or mine doesn't mean it's any more right.
It's still an obsession.
But I think I was more
obsessed with reading in general than I was with reading SF. I also read a lot of crime novels,
particularly Agatha Christie, which is also my mother's fault. I drifted into fantasy in high school, then
horror, and when I left high school I started looking even further, seeking the
"Aha!" of something new rather than the "mmhmm" of stuff
I've seen a thousand times before. I
made it my mission to read a bit of everything: thrillers, romances, westerns,
poetry, high-lit. I liked some of it; I
thought some of it was garbage, or just not to my tastes. That I keep coming back to SF confirms that
it's offering me something that I can’t get elsewhere.
That doesn't, of course,
mean that it's better than anything else.
I just like it. I understand
it. I get it.
That doesn't mean, either,
that I like all of it. Some SF is also
garbage or not to my tastes. Science
fiction isn't all about square-jawed men in spaceships fighting off aliens to
save the scantily-clad princess, although what Hollywood serves up as SF might
lead you to think so. The majority of
SF in print hasn't been that way for fifty years.
So what is it? I don't really know. The trouble with defining science fiction is
that it's about science, and how do you define that? Science can be about physics and rocket engines, yes, but it's
about a lot more than that, too. It's about wondering why the sky is blue, or
where caterpillars come from, or what happens when you mix two different
coloured paints together. People
imagine science to be a scary distant thing, like a horrible grandparent we
don't want to visit, but it's about learning how things work. It's about asking questions and trying to
find answers. We do this every day and
it's not scary. We just don't realise
that it's science.
So
if science covers so many things, then science fiction can too. You don't have to be a scientist to
understand it. You don't have to have a
degree to read it. I don't have a
degree in anything, and I write it quite successfully. You just have to be able to tell a story, to
describe characters, and to set a scene -- just as you would in any other
genre. SF writers work just as hard at
that as anyone else. The art in science
fiction is as important as it is in crime or literary fiction.
Of
course, I'm generalising outrageously here.
Not all SF writers are potential Nobel Prize Winners, just as not all
literary fiction or romance writers are potential Nobel Prize Winners. Some people write SF for the money; some
people write it because that's all they've read. I'd argue that these writers are down the bottom end of the pool,
and either stay down there or get weeded out while the best go on to succeed.
And,
against all odds, some SF does break through.
Some of you may be thinking that you have no interest in science
fiction, and some of you may actually be right. But others... When I
first met Kirsty, who has no interest in SF, I went through her shelves and
pulled out four books that fit squarely in the genre. William Gibson's great crossover novel Neuromancer is
undoubtedly SF. So is Orwell's 1984
and Huxley's Brave New World and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow
and (dare I say it) James Bradley's The Deep Field.
Some
of these books are also sophisticated works of literature. That doesn't mean that they can’t be SF as
well. I'm not aware of a rule that says
a book has to fall into one genre only.
It seems strange to me, then, that the best of SF is so often swept up
by the mainstream so we can no longer claim it. Some of the mainstream's best writers (Thomas Pynchon, John
Updike, Margaret Atwood, P.D.James, Joyce Carol Oates, Doris Lessing) have
strayed into the SF field, often and unwittingly following paths trodden by
many writers before them. If SF is a genre
that might every now and again produce a masterpiece, or a field many great
writers consider fertile on occasions, I wonder why it's so difficult for some
people to allow that it might actually be worth looking at.
If
I sound defensive, it's not on my own behalf.
Honest. I know what I am. I do write the big spaceship stuff, and I'm
not afraid of using a cliché when it's needed.
Such space opera novels come easy for me. While I don't
doubt that I could write a straight crime novel, or a thriller that features no
genre elements at all, if I set my mind to it, why buck the flow? I'm in this for the fun of it, as well as to
make a living, so I don't see the point in making it any more difficult for
myself. Beyond stretching myself to
make sure I don't stagnate, which I think is important for any artist, there is
a limit to how much work I can, or am willing to, do.
I
just want to stick up for my colleagues who are writing excellent material that
is, more often than not, being overlooked.
Authors like Sean Stewart, Tim Powers, Connie Willis, Bruce Sterling,
James Morrow, Damien Broderick ...
Hardly a spaceship among them, and brilliant writers all. It seems terribly unfair that they should be
lumped in with me, who makes no bones of his limitations.
*
Another of my favourite
topics is the distinction between being an SF writer in Australia and what life
is like being an Australian SF writer.
I may sometimes be grumpy about the former, but most days I'm pretty
damned excited about the latter. I live
here in Adelaide, and have done for most of my life. Salman Rushdie, when he was here as a guest of Writers' Week in
1984, described Adelaide as the perfect place to set a horror story. "You know why all those films and books
are always set in sleepy, conservative towns?" he asked. "Because sleepy, conservative towns are
where those things happen. Exorcism,
omens, shining, poltergeists. Adelaide
is Amityville, or Salem, and things here go bump in the night."
I don't know if that is
true, but part of me would certainly like it to be. Adelaide is indeed a sleepy, conservative place, and a very
beautiful one, too. I like to think of
it as a big country town rather than a small city. The pace is sedate for the most part, there exist several
generous support mechanisms for the Arts, and the cost of living is the lowest
in the country. For anyone thinking to
survive on a low income while attempting to break into an artistic field, I
would've thought Adelaide the obvious place to live. The old myth that you can't succeed as a writer without living on
the Eastern seaboard is so patently untrue when it comes to me that I'm sure it
is just that -- a myth. There may be
the occasional grisly murder to shock Adelaide's residents out of their
slumber, but probably no more per capita than in any other major city, and that
added spice is only grist for the mill.
I've set many stories here, and have even destroyed the city entirely a
couple of times. It's fertile territory
as a home and a setting, for it is a place of contradictions: a town of
both churches and pubs is always going to be.
I could be biased, but I
think the evidence is tipping in my favour.
The need to be in Sydney or New York is decreasingly urgent for writers,
I think. I sold Metal Fatigue, my first
solo novel, to HarperCollins without ever meeting the publishers
there. I rewrote my second novel, The
Resurrected Man, without
once meeting my editor Stephanie Smith.
Two years ago, I conducted a negotiation between five major publishers
here and in the UK with just two phone calls to London, and until last year I
had never once spoken to my US agent.
The Internet makes doing global business a cheap and convenient option;
whether I'm here or in New York doesn't really make much of a difference, as
long as my work is good.
*
This enabling of global
networks by the internet is definitely one of the factors that makes the
present an exciting time to be writing science fiction, no matter where you
happen to be living. It is this that,
in part, has contributed to the formation of a robust local SF scene. When I say "robust", I don't mean
to discount anything I said before, or imply that it's always been this
way. My awareness of the SF field in Australia
begins in 1990, when I first became aware of it. Back then, life was hard for the stubborn souls trying to eke out
a living in the industry here. Faced
with few options at home, they were forced to sell abroad and felt the full
effect of the tyranny of distance in the effort. This was before the major US and UK magazines started shrinking
and folding, but even then it was hard to convince overstocked editors to
notice writers, artists, reviewers or editors from the other side of the
planet. Australia was a backwater, a
stagnant billabong cut off from the main flow of the genre.
Things have improved
greatly since then. Some of the writers
who were struggling in the 80s and 90s have since gone on to great overseas
success. We have a new and burgeoning
fantasy publication industry right here on our doorstep. Major genre movies and TV series are filmed
in Sydney and Melbourne with some regularity.
Numerous new magazines and small presses have sprung up, signalling a
vitality not just in writing but in editing and publishing as well.
Things are looking so
good, in fact, that some people have speculated on the possibility that this
might be some sort of Golden Age. I
don't entirely agree. This argument
rests on the fact that a handful of Australians are doing well in the US --
much better, than Australians have done before. Personally I believe that these successes owe more to increased
communication between the two markets than to any sudden upsurge in talent
here, robust scene or otherwise.
Australian writers are as competitive now as they ever were; we simply
have the means today to get that point across to more editors and readers
alike.
*
So what's a day in the
life of an Australian SF writer like?
It's probably not very different from that of any other full-time
writer. I do seem to be in a minority,
though, in that I only want to write novels.
That's what I set out to do, way back in 1990 when I started writing
seriously. Writing copious amounts of
short stories, reviews and articles along the way just seemed a means to an
end. For me, it worked, and now I've
attained that end I can give up all that other stuff and concentrate on what I
enjoy.
Some writers [like Kirsty]
enjoy doing just about anything: not just reviews and short stories, but board
games and ads and agony aunt columns, or whatever comes their way. I envy them this capacity. These days, I don't seem to write anything
between 50 words and 100,000 words in length.
It's either a haiku, or part one of three in a new series.
But that's the way I like
it. I talked earlier today about ways
in which I keep my imagination active. My ideas come from everywhere, just as they
do with all writers. Sometimes a friend
will say something that triggers a thought that leads to the all-important
"What if?" question, like, "What if snowed in Adelaide in
January?" or, "What would it be like if sea levels rose by one
hundred metres?" Sometimes I'll
read an article in a magazine and the same inspiration will occur. Every now and then I'll have a dream worth
turning into a story. (My novel Metal
Fatigue started off that way, for instance.) There are many parts to a story -- pacing, setting, concept,
theme, etc -- and ideas for all of these come from many places. When all these little ideas collide in just
the right way, a story jumps out. The
trick is to keep the ideas moving around, and new ideas coming in, so the
chances of a creative collision keep going up.
The chances of a creative
collision happening these days are pretty high. I keep the good ones, and let the less interesting flow by. If I miss one, if I don't write it down in
time and I forget it, that can be frustrating, but I'm pretty confident that
another one will come along that's just as good. I do worry that one day they might dry up, but I suspect that
this will only happen when I become complacent and start to assume
they'll come, when I stop encouraging the circumstances in which they're most
likely to occur.
So that's how I spend most
of my time, when I'm not writing: encouraging those creative collisions by
engaging in passive or active research.
Passive research is what I call the process of browsing through various
sources, not really knowing what I'll need or what will stimulate an idea. Active research tends to follow up an idea
I've already had and will hopefully stimulate new ideas that will, in turn,
modify the old idea, or even lead to me discarding it for a new and better one.
Information, as I said
before, comes from all sorts of sources, including books, magazines, and
friends who just happen to be experts (and, let's face it, everyone's an expert
in something). People are
probably tired of technophiles waving the flags of the Internet and the World
Wide Web, but we only do it because they are genuinely useful. There are web sites that email me the latest
developments in various fields every day; I can sift through these and choose
the ones that interest me most. There
are email lists on which specialists discuss various arcane issues before they
appear in either papers or stories.
Search engines enable me to find such obscure things as road maps of
Ontario or how to swear in Polish (both of which I needed to know for The
Resurrected Man).
Because there's no strict
boundary to speculative fiction -- as there is, say, for historical fiction,
which might limit research to what life was like in 1820 New Hampshire; or
crime fiction, where knowledge of police procedurals and forensics are a
prerequisite -- my research topics tend to be pretty diverse. In recent months, I've pinned down the precise
names and locations of over a hundred neighbouring sun-like stars in order to
create a 3-D map. I've read a series of
papers on Lake Vostok, a newly-discovered subterranean lake buried many
kilometres beneath the Antarctic icecap that may be similar to oceans
scientists hope to find under the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. I've researched the names and traditional
uses of Central Australian plants, and travelled through the Flinders Ranges
and Yorke Peninsula to experience the scenery first-hand. I've read books on the Kabbalah and comparative
mythology for one project, film noir and the history of the 20th
century for another. Two themes my
fiction constantly returns to are immortality and post-humanity, and I read
frequently in those fields. I have
books on stage magic, vampirism, the history of writing and Godzilla waiting to
be read.
But research isn't
confined just to facts and figures, or to the search for ideas. Research into the genres I write in is also
very important. Great books have, I
believe, five successful components -- plot, character, background, style, and
novelty -- and in the case of speculative fiction, novelty is a key selling
point. I don't believe that an author
has to have a completely new idea to succeed -- indeed, I make a living from
taking old ideas and presenting them in a new light -- but presenting an old
idea as if it were new is the kiss of death for an SF novel. (This, by the way, is the reason why the
occasional incursion of mainstream authors into the SF field is often
unsuccessful. Without some sort of
knowledge of the field, it's far too easy to reinvent the wheel.) SF, like any other genre, ebbs and flows in
its tastes; fads like cyberpunk and space opera come and go, and trying to
catch the wave too late usually results in disaster. All authors of all genres need to read in their field in order to
keep up with it -- and I can only wonder why anyone would want to write in a
field they don't read. It's not
as if the chances of making a lot of money are terribly high, and no one ever
succeeded at doing something they didn't like.
*
One of the best ways to
encourage ideas is to write. I'll admit
that this might be a gross generalisation, but I personally find that letting
the words tumble out builds up a sort of momentum, a flow, and ideas occur
naturally as part of the flow. Not just
speculative ideas; I'm talking about ideas for character, setting, dialogue,
etc. A science fiction novel must have
these components as well as those that make it recognisably genre, and getting
into the right frame of mind helps these appear.
It doesn't always work
out. I'm not so arrogant or foolish as
to suggest that every word I write is final copy, or that every idea I come up
with in this process is good. A lot
aren't. It's simply much better, in my
opinion, to have a finished work -- be it a novel, a short story, a poem, or
anything -- than the idea for one floating nebulously in my head. Getting something down is better than
getting nothing down at all. Everything
can be fixed, afterward -- and even if it can't, I learn through mistakes. Of the hundred-plus short stories I've
written, there are forty or so that will never see print but which, I am sure,
helped in some way to make the sixty published ones better.
These days, as I said
earlier, I'm writing nothing but novels.
Last year I wrote four novels, and this year I have to do the same. That's by necessity, if not entirely by
choice. Two years ago, I received an
Australia Council grant to write four books: a trilogy of fantasy novels and a
stand-alone science fiction novel set in the distant future. Then my US editor at Ace Books asked for
something from Shane Dix and I to follow up our Evergence series, and we
committed to producing three books for her in about the same timeframe. Not a problem, I thought, getting on the
phone to the Australia Council to extend my grant period. Six books in two years. That's not so bad.
Then came the news that
Shane and I had been offered a trilogy set in the Star Wars universe. That's something you just can't turn down:
Star Wars books have a first print-run of 250,000 copies in the US alone; they
are frequently New York Times-bestsellers; and they pay well. The only problem was that the due dates
coincided with the other books I was committed to write.
I spoke to my agent about
it. (This was the first time he and I
ever spoke on the phone, at four o'clock in the morning, when the news came
through.) I said I was concerned about
meeting the deadlines. He said, just
try it and see what happens. If you do
it, great; if not, we'll sort it out then.
As Thomas Goodchilde once said, paraphrasing Nietzche: "What does not kill us, only makes us stranger."
So here I am, mostly on schedule thanks to a strict regime of writing at least 1500 words,
every day. This sort of routine sounds
gruelling, and it is, extended over two years -- but it is also quite
liberating. I said earlier today that I
don't believe in writers' block, and I mean it sincerely. There's nothing like a gun to your head, in
the form of a contract or two, to make you deliver. I can't afford to be too fussy about how I feel when I
start writing of a morning; I just have to do it. I have no choice. There's
no safety net.
*
And that, ultimately, is
the most terrifying and exciting thing about being a full-time writer, science
fiction or otherwise. It's hard to tell
what lies in the future. There are no
guarantees. I have plenty of ideas for
what to do once all these commitments are met, but until I start writing,
nothing is fixed. Some of my recent
projects have involved film and television, but nothing may come of these. For a while, I'll be free: free to do
whatever I want -- and that includes being free to fail, if I make the wrong
decision.
By the time I start
writing these new books, next year, the Star Wars books should be out. I can expect an increased profile, but even
that is no guarantee of long-term success.
What will that do to my non-spaceship work? Advance it? Kill it? The difficulty with becoming successful is
that you run the risk of being typecast.
I like variety when I write as much as I like variety when I read.
Luckily, I think, the
field can support the sort of diversity I want to produce. Never before has the field been so broad,
with exquisite hard science at one end and careful character studies at the
other. Lovers of both style and cliché
can find books to interest them, and the growth of media tie-ins, regardless of
their perceived effect on the genre as a whole, can only ensure that more
people are reading the genre, and that the broader market sits up and notices
its existence.
I hope it will,
anyway. SF is entering an interesting
and critical period -- as is fiction and the publishing industry in general,
with the advent of electronic books on the near horizon. Science, too, is in a state of excitement in
many diverse fields. From the scales of
the very large to the very small, we have advances in string theory to look
forward to, along with very high-energy particle accelerators and gravity wave
detectors about to commence operation, and new space missions seemingly
launched every week, some to explore entirely new worlds, like Europa and
Titan. On the human level, we have
insights into evolution and ageing to anticipate, along with entirely new
fields such as bioinformatics and proteomics stemming from our unravelling of
the human genome. Our knowledge of time
and space is being pushed in all directions -- backward and forward, outward
and inward -- and with each step, a myriad of new opportunities arise for the
observant SF writer. If readers ever
thought that SF was running out of ideas to explore, Greg Egan proved them
wrong in the early 1990s, and they will continue to be proven wrong as we move
further and further into the new millennium.
No matter where we stand, no matter how fast we run, there will always
be somewhere ahead of us, and SF writers will be looking ahead to see what's
there.
That my career as a writer
is subject to incredible uncertainty is nothing compared to the uncertainty
that faces us a race as we move deeper into the third millennium. Will global warming cook us? Will rising sea levels swamp us? Will we become a race of godlike immortals
or will we drown in our effluent? Not
one SF writer predicted mobile phones, personal computers or the Internet, but
that doesn't stop us trying. Not only
do we find the process enjoyable, but it is fundamentally important, I think,
to try. Better that than to stumble on
with our hands over our eyes, constantly surprised by what bumps into us out of
the dark.
I can speculate as much as
I like, but it's likely that only our children or great-grandchildren will ever
know for sure. How the future might
impact on them, on a personal level, is one of the many things that science fiction
can address -- and that, if nothing else, makes it utterly unique. I'm proud to belong to a field that asks
questions, that takes nothing for granted; I'm proud to belong to a field that
dares to push the boundaries of what we can imagine; I'm proud to belong to a
field that, at its best, combines science, our knowledge of the universe, with
fiction, the art of shaping something from nothing. I know that SF will never run out of stories to tell, so long as
we never stop looking around in wonder, and wondering "what if...?"