Ian McDonald 2009 Interview
Ian McDonald is nominated for his novel Brasyl.
Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. What’s the appeal of science fiction for you?
For me it’s not so much a thing of reading but a way of thinking. Science fiction is my way of looking at the world. It’s a compulsive neural twitch to look at events, history, technology, society and ask, ‘what would happen if I changed that, tweaked that, that was ten times larger or smaller, came back in one hundred years time?’ I can’t help but think this way--but I find it not a disability but a useful mindset. It’s enquiring, it assumes nothing will stay the same, it embraces change and it looks to possibilities, it assumes there will be a future and it broadens the horizons from the ‘Me! Me! Me!’ mindset endemic in Western 21st century society. It’s a way of navigating the now. And at it’s very best, it dazzles you with wonder.
What was the inspiration for Brasyl? What kind of research did you have to do?
After ‘River of Gods’ I had a slightly heightened awareness of places that science-fiction forgot about, but which have the potential to become major political, economic and cultural players. India was obvious --China has always been much more prominent in SF thinking of Asia, because the SF worldview is very much a US-centric worldview. I had an idea that I wanted to explore the Many World Theory: I’ve always been fascinated, scared and seduced by Brazil and it seemed a nation that better expressed than anywhere that sense of worlds, universes, lying next to each other, quite inaccessible to each other, but which can sometimes open on to each other into moments of madness. You get that sense in cities like Rio and Sao Paulo, where the social jump from even one end of a street to another can be from a palace to a favela. Parallel and inaccessible universes literally next door to each other. Brazil is huge --it’s larger than the conterminous states of the US, it’s almost completely unknown to us Northerners, who see nothing more than a bit of bootie-shaking at Carnaval, or the occasional performance by the Selecao, the national soccer team --who seem well on their way to becoming the Harlem Globetrotters of world soccer, alas, or wring our hands at the fate of the Amazon. Seemingly separate world, but all connected. Yet here is a huge, vibrant melting pot American culture that is completely its own thing: one of the things I love about Brazilian music is how it invents a totally different black music tradition from the one in North America. And beyond those obvious markers, the country is a blank to most people, hence the fair few comment on The Interweb from reviewers who ‘didn’t get all that Spanish’. Put it all together and it’s obvious…
What made you decide to structure the book using three timelines/characters?
It’s a book about connections between the disparate, specifically the quantum connections between things and, being me, I was perversely drawn not to the huge difference between parallel universes --the classic Hitler/Napoleon/Confederacy/Vikings win-- but to imperceptible differences between universes, that over time add up. So you see someone you think you know and slowly realise, hey; they’re not from round this neck of the universe at all. It’s a fun way of playing with identity, and questions of identity run all through Brasyl; it seems to me another Brazilian cultural trait, a sense of looseness of identity, of being happy to be several social selves in one body. It was originally just two timelines: the near-future Sao Paulo of Edson and the Rio of Marcelina… but as I read more about the history of the country, it became obvious that I had to set something in the past. Brazil’s history of stunning and appalling, and the late Mission period, before the Jesuits were expelled because they were the only force for social good in the colony, who spoke out against the mass enslavement, and thus destruction, of the Brazilian natives. As it turned out, that was the but I enjoyed writing most. I’ve always had a thing about the 18th century, it’s the fusion of elegance and refinement with brutality and passion.
What was the most difficult thing you encountered when writing Brasyl?
The inevitable one of not being Brazilian, the same as not being Indian, American, a citizen of any one of the ten thousand (and counting) cultures of my general purpose far future Clade. But then that’s the whole trick of any writing, as it is of acting, of people knowing you’re not what you pretend to be, but convincing them sufficiently. ‘The Other’ starts at your eyelids, I find. All writing is trying to extend ‘you’ into the rest of the universe that is ‘not you’, and communicate that. I try and immerse myself in a world over a long period of time: the River of Gods/Cyberabad Days (out now!) world has been evolving since 1999. I researched Brasyl for two years before writing a single word. I mass a colossal amount of information, most of which I never use, but if I don’t put in the spade-work, Ill never know whether it’s needed or not.
Moving on to your other writings, what are you currently working on?
I’m tunnelling into ‘The Dervish House’, part three of the unofficial ‘New World Order’ trilogy. It’s set in Turkey in the not-too distant future, five years after it joins the European Union (something the current government wants very much). There’s the usual pother of intermingling stories, told over five days and focused on a diverse group of people who live and work in an old converted dervish lodge in a tatty corner of Istanbul. Why Turkey? Look at it on a map. It’s immediately obvious that this is one of the planet’s strategically important countries. It’s undergoing a manufacturing boom. And when you go there, you realise how endlessly rich and fascinating the country is. Their history goes back to the very limits of human imagination. It’s been the highway of Empires and been capital of four empires itself.
When you start a novel or a story, do you have an agenda beforehand or is it something that surfaces as the writing progresses?
A bit of both. I have the science idea, some tool in the science-fictional trope-box that can be beautifully expressed through the society and history of that country, and which can change it, illuminate it in ways different from our Atlantic-centric thinking, and which the people can make entirely their own. I have the social and political set up well in advance, the triggers for social change which are the energy source for the book. It’s nice still be to be able to write a political novel --and SF is at its heart deeply political because it’s the way the world can be. As I write, things come into clearer focus, ideas that seemed brilliant and vital are dropped because they’re clunky, the whole edifice breaks forward. And I’m still sourcing material as I write. It’s kind of intense, like method acting. However, I’ve never yet thrown a Christian Bale on set.
You’ve featured a wide variety of countries/cultures in your books and tackled various causes. How do you decide to set your stories in this or that place?
Big, brash and overlooked --particularly by the US. Places that offer a completely different interpretation of the US-centric values and tropes of Science Fiction. Aliens come to Earth: okay, so what if, rather they land on the White House lawn, they land in East Africa? (Chaga/Evolution’s shore). Or India, where my particular take on artificial intelligence seemed to mesh perfectly with a predominantly Hindu democracy emerging as a major information technology centre. For Brasyl, as I said, I’d long wanted to explore the wilder shores of quantum theory, particularly the idea that quantum computing, because of its code-breaking powers, might be tightly regulated, and that a pirate quantum computing culture might evolve --and that seemed strangely South American. And Sao Paulo is so essentially science-fictional. The rich commute from tower-top helipads… how can you not love this?
What’s your definition of third world?
It’s not an expression I use any more. I like ‘developing world’. Third world, to me, reveals an old-style Eurocentric thinking: The First World is the Old world, then there is the New World (including Australia --so it’s clearly developed from British Empire thinking), and then the rest is the supposedly impoverished and struggling Third World. Except it’s not like that. India and China are motoring up to become major world players, Brazil is the regional superpower in South America and has ambitions to play a role commensurate with its size on the global stage. Information technology is a great leveller --I’m fascinated by the way that African villages have cellphones before they have a land line, and find exciting and innovative uses for them totally suited to their needs that we would never think of. There are political and social markers that I would think of as ‘underdeveloped world’: corruption, a weak state but a powerful government, reliance on families, lack of access to finance, poor rule of law, male gun culture, theocracy… They’re always the most interesting to wrote about.
What was the biggest hurdle you faced breaking into the industry?
The second third and fourth stories. The first one you sell is easier, because you’ve cried blood over that little gem, you polished it to a gleam over maybe years. Then you realise you need to follow that up --momentum is a key play in writing, maintaining a steady rhythm of work and delivery. But, for me, it’s been disgustingly easy. Sorry but that’s the truth. I didn’t have years of trawling through the slush pile, things fell towards me, which is odd for someone writing in a science-fictionally isolated place like Northern Ireland, at that time, which was the end-game of the Troubles, when everyone knew it was over because there was no clear win for any of the players, but no one could move first to finish it. It’s been a charmed life. Then again, there’s that second novel of which I do not speak: ‘Out on Blue Six’… I did suffer a big set back when I lost my first US publisher in 1996, and it took a good few years to recover from that and get working with Pyr, who may be small, but that means they have heart and soul and passion and rock mightily. On the upside it did mean that I had to get a day job, which has turned out to be a blessing, in that I get to meet Real! People! (well, as real as you can get in an animation company)
What’s been the most rewarding experience so far?
Writing? Rewarding? People are rewarding, the world is rewarding. Being part of a global science-fictional community, one that likes to talk and shout and argue and pulls together when the family is threatened from the outside, that’s very rewarding.
How has the present you differed from the Ian McDonald of two decade ago?
Well, there’s not an atom of me in existence then that is part of me now and yet, somehow, a sense of me persists. This is mystery, and I still maintain that keen sense of mystery that is the heart of SF. I’m older than I think, which baffles me. Writing seems easier now, so I mistrust that, as anything that seems too easy may not be very good. I’m duller, grumpier less tolerant of fools but keener to the tiny joys of life.
Ian McDonald’s mother is Irish, Fatrher Scottish, was born in England but has lived for almost all of his forty something years in Northern Ireland, more specifically, in that narrow strip of land along the southern edge of Belfast Lough. From that vantage he’s seen the Troubles start and also, he hopes, end. His first story was sold in 1983 to short-lived but very glossy local SFF magazine Extro. He bought a guitar with the money. His first novel, Desolation Road came out in 1988 from Bantam Spectra, this year PYR republish it for the first time since then in the US. His most recent novel was the Hugo and Nebula nominated Brasyl, just out from PYR in the US and Gollancz in the UK is Cyberabad Days, a collection of stories from the future India of his 2006 novel River of Gods, including Hugo winning novelette The Djinn’s Wife. In progress is a new novel, The Dervish House, set in near-future Turkey. In daylight hours he works for local animation company Flickerpix.
Charles A. Tan is the co-editor of the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler and his fiction has appeared in publications such as The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories and Philippine Speculative Fiction. He has conducted interviews for The Nebula Awards and The Shirley Jackson Awards, as well as for online magazines such as SF Crowsnest and SFScope. He is a regular contributor to sites like SFF Audio and Game Cryer. You can visit his blog, Bibliophile Stalker, where he posts book reviews, interviews, and essays.
2 comments so far.
I just recently “discovered” Ian. What a joy, a pleasure, a wonder. Every reward has been well earned. I look forward to finding as many novels as I can.
1. tom on 27th May 2009 at 1:46 am
I’m a big fan of Ian. Always follow up on his work since the Desolation Road.