Freezing author poses in a field outside Bradwell Power
Station.
When the
photographer Will Ireland turned up at Althorne
railway station I thought why not head down to the River Crouch? There’s some
nice enough scenery down there that could be used as a backdrop. However I was
forgetting that I was not in Crete where car parking is easy, but in England
where someone wants money or some busybody complains. We ended up at the power
station because, well, what kind of backdrop do you have for an SF writer?
After posing in a field for a while I was reminded of that phrase (I think), ‘The
most dangerous industry in Britain,’ from The Edge of Darkness when security
guards came out to see what we were doing and take down details. Apparently
they had decided not to release the dogs. Mr Ireland helpfully suggested that
they did, while he sat in my car and took pictures of them chasing and pulling
down the author.
This photograph shoot was all to accompany an interview that’s
appeared in this month’s
issue of SFX. Apparently there’s a not so good review
of Dark Intelligence in there too but I’m not particularly bothered about that.
Fan opinions are what count and I’ve already seen some reaction prior to this…
Anyway, since the interview was just sampled I thought
it worthwhile publishing the full text here:
SFX Interview
SFX: The
new book, where did it spring from? (Without quite wishing to ask where do you
get your ideas from..)
Neal: In
a way my readers are a little bit responsible for that. What has happened here
is similar to what happened in my 5 book Cormac series. In the first book,
Gridlinked, I wrote about a character called Mr Crane – a rather large android
made of brass – and the readers came back at me about that saying just how much
they enjoyed him. The third book of the series I wrapped around Mr Crane. It
was called Brass Man. But it was also my choice because I’m a fan at heart and
really enjoyed writing about Mr Crane too. In Dark Intelligence I’ve revisited
another character who first appeared in a short story called Alien Archaeology
in Asimov’s and then in an off-shoot book from the Cormac series called The
Technician. This ‘character’ is the blacklist AI Penny Royal. My readers rather
liked that creation, and I like it too. Also, after writing a dystopia trilogy
set in the near future of Earth, I felt the need to return to the Polity and do
something sprawling. The ideas? They turn up at the keyboard as I write.
SFX: A
key theme seems to be transformation, and the effect of physical transformation
on the psyche. Were you always consciously exploring that theme, or did it
develop through the writing?
Neal: The
theme of transformation has developed through the writing but has also been
there right from the start. It was in some of my earliest short stories, for
example the immortality imparting virus, spread by the bite of a leech, in a
short story called ‘Spatterjay’, which formed the basis of my trilogy beginning
with The Skinner. Immortality is another constant theme in my books – physical
immortality through medical technology and through the recording and backing up
of minds. Another of those stories concerned both ‘Always With You’ included a
doctor mycelium inside the protagonist that kept him alive during a battle with
one of the bad-ass aliens that appear in Dark Intelligence – the prador. I’ve
been working with these from the start and thinking more and more on the second
element you mention: the effect of transformation (and immortality) on the
psyche. In The Skinner, for example, I looked at the ennui of immortality and
that appears again in Dark Intelligence.
SFX: There
are plenty of horror elements in the book, errm, just how nasty is your
imagination? More seriously, is there a desire to shock? If so, why?
Neal: My
desire is to entertain and the horror elements, and the violence – the conflict
– are a large part of that. Simply flick through the pages of SFX and point to
a book, film or game that doesn’t contain them. I think you’ll find that
difficult. There’s a large element of the voyeur in all of us of course. I
guess my problem developed from when from a book about writing I read that
there should be conflict on every page. I thought that meant exploding
spaceships.
SFX: How
does the novel fit into the existing Polity timeline?
Neal: Dark
Intelligence starts a little while after the events in The Technician. The
latter book was a sort of off-shoot from the second book in the Cormac series,
The Line of Polity, but set twenty years later. So Dark Intelligence, and the
ensuing two books of this trilogy, are set just a little while after the Cormac
series and some centuries before the Spatterjay series.
SFX: Going
back, were you someone who always wanted to be a writer?
Neal: Like
so many people I had no idea what I wanted to do when I left school, beyond get
some money in my pocket and go down the pub. I did, however, have many
interests: biology also specifically mycology, chemistry, electronics, physics,
painting and sculpture. I used to flit from one interest to another but not
achieve much beyond learning a little more – it was after I was at school, for
example, that I learned how thermionic valves and then transistors work. I also
read a great deal – mostly science fiction – and at school wrote my first short
story, which the teacher complimented (thank you teacher), and as a result
writing became another of my pursuits. Over many years I inevitably wrote a
fantasy trilogy. Only when I was in my mid 20s did I realise that writing was
something that could incorporate all my other interests and only then did I
really focus on it completely.
SFX: Was
there a breakthrough moment when you thought, yeah, I can do this?
Neal: For
me there was no sudden break-through moment. I paused at every step up the hill.
Years of nothing published at all then a short story in a magazine for which
payment was a free copy of said magazine. More stories published, the odd
novella, a couple of short story collections, even some money but not enough to
make me think about giving up the day job. I had an agent once hawking that
fantasy – no luck. I had novels taken by small publishers who crashed and
burned before publication. Yes, when I got a phone call from my first editor at
Macmillan that could be called a break-through, but I still didn’t give up the
day job for a couple of years. I swiftly learned that getting a book with a big
publisher doesn’t mean Champagne and big cars thereafter. What it means is your
publisher/editor asking what you are going to produce next year, which is a
step many fall flat on their faces over.
SFX: Of
all the jobs you had pre-full-time writing, which would you least like to
return to and why? And conversely, which would you happily do again?
Neal: I
guess that delivering coal for two weeks in the freezing rain just before
Christmas was the worst. Nothing like having to use a scrubbing brush to clean
parts of the body that should never see such a brush at all. I think it’s also
fair to say that I would hate to return to any of the highly physical jobs I
did. Even though I keep active now I’m still aware that I am of the age when
constant physical work starts causing problems: trapped nerves in the back,
tendonitis, cranky knees. A job I would do again (but I think to say ‘happily’
is pushing it a bit) is one in engineering when I was operating milling machines
and lathes and the like. But this would be the one when I was machining a wide
variety of components and also programming and operating CNC machines. It
wouldn’t be a similar job I had where the instruction might have been, ‘Neal,
here are 2,000 aluminium blocks. I want you to bore a hole in each and slice
the corner off.’
SFX: Crete:
are you still spending large amounts of time on the island? What’s your life
like there?
Neal: As
a writer, who of course can do his job anywhere he can take a laptop, it has
been good. I don’t have internet in my mountain house so I tended to get a lot
more work done! I could do my 2,000 words a day, which is my target when doing
the first draft of a book, then go swimming in the early afternoon. Food and
drink are relatively cheap, the temperature can climb into the 40s and the
light is intense. Mostly you live outdoors. I enjoy growing stuff in my garden
there that I can’t grow very well here. Chillies being a particular favourite,
but also all sorts of weird and wonderful flowers and fruits. Things are
relaxed and life there can be idyllic. However, it only reaches the above
stages after a lot of effort. Too many people move there on the basis of what
they saw on holiday and that isn’t the life at all. It can been quite a
frustrating and maddening culture shock. If you are not the kind of person who
has interests it can be boring – going to the beach has its limitations for
many, and many find their entertainment in a bottle. A lot make the move there
then after a few years give up and go back to Britain.
However, it is difficult for me to say much about my
life there now since it has changed radically this last year – my wife died of
bowel cancer last January. This year I did spent a lot of time walking in the
mountains, and swimming and kayaking in the Libyan Sea. This was mostly to try
and hold depression at bay. I have struggled to write, and to care about much
at all.
SFX: How
has it changed since 2008 economic meltdown?
Neal: It
depends where you go in Greece or in Crete. Generally it is not as bad as we
see in the news where the impression is given of rioting all across Greece,
when it is mainly just in Athens. However, in Sitia, where I get my shopping,
there are apparently 120 families on the breadline. In Lidl there is a large
basket by the exit where you can leave for them some of the food you’ve bought.
In Makrigialos, where I go swimming – a tourist area with a lot more money
about – change is not so evident. In fact the melt-down there is just a
continuation of how things have been going downhill with the introduction of
the Euro – tourists heading to other cheaper destinations, and businesses
steadily going under. All Greeks are now being hit by new taxes as the
government struggles to maintain its bloated bureaucracy while continuing to
act as if ‘austerity’ is just for the public. There are property taxes now for
people who are often described as property rich but dirt poor, and many simply
cannot pay them. It seems that every few months we see a new tax – often
abandoned when the government fails to collect it.
SFX: You’re,
as far as I can tell, politically conservative (I know, but best shorthand I
can find). Does that make you feel like an outsider in the context of SF
contemporaries who mostly seem to me to be left-leaning?
Neal: In
Britain the divisions between left and right are a joke. I look at the two main
parties in Westminster, supposedly left and right, and they both look like
Orwell’s pigs. They both consist of career politicians who are divorced from reality
by massive salaries, pensions and an over-privileged lifestyle. The true
division now, to me, lies between authoritarian and libertarian. I can be
described by that much-abused word ‘libertarian’ but, before anyone assumes
that means I’m a gun-toting bible-belter, I am a libertarian in the sense of
“classic liberal”. To quote: “individual well-being, prosperity and social
harmony are fostered by ‘as much liberty as possible’ and ‘as little government
as necessary’”.
Yes, I do sometimes feel like I slipped under the fence
and got into the SF world before anyone could release the dogs. I once chatted
with an SF writer who was ‘politically conservative’ (whatever that means) who
was amazed that I didn’t just keep my mouth shut and my head down. But my
contention was that, even if you are writing some way out stuff, truth is one
of your most important tools. However, I do tend to be more close-mouthed now
simply because, over this last shitty year, my perspective on what is important
in life has changed a great deal.
