Interview Through Authors Central

Last month the writer Jayaprakash Satyamurthy asked the following questions of me through Authors Central and I am finally replying.

Question: Radical thinkers seek to reshape the structure of our social and political institutions; the Phildickian strain of SF, which finds echoes in your work, portrays situations in which the fabric of reality itself undergoes fundamental transformations. Is one a metaphor for the other in your work, or is it something else?

Answer: I can’t help but read your question in a Zizekian way. You ask if the epistemological strangeness, the recursive quality in my fiction, is a symptom of my desire to change the sociopolitical world, but I would say that the opposite perspective is maybe more helpful. That is, our ugly social reality is a symptom of how we insist that epistemological strangeness, recursion, and other gaps in reality be denied.
“Ideology is a ‘representation of the Imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.’” -Althusser,On Ideology
Notice the doubling here. Althusser says that ideology is not the way people use their imaginations to represent the world, but rather is the representation of the way people use their imaginations. This means that ideology is not some false picture of the world but our false picture about our false picture.
An example that might clarify what I’m driving at is maybe tired, but it’s helpful. In the movie the Matrix the character Thomas Anderson comes to understand that his sense of himself is an illusion, however the unreliability, the gaps, the moments of deja-vu, all of these things let him in on the big secret that he isn’t who he thinks he is. Mister Anderson relies on the Matrix and his sense of not fitting within the Matrix in order to obtain any identity at all. In fact, it is his understanding of how he does not fit that makes him extraordinary.
When I write about worlds that fall apart I’m struggling to understand what kind of subject would be able to truly not fit. What I’m wondering is how can we disrupt the usual approach to these gaps, the usual ideology, but not in order to find a way to peacefully fit, but rather in order to alienate ourselves consciously.

Q: I’m fascinated by the use of language in SF. I’m intrigued by how most of your stories have first person narrators who seem alienated from their own emotions, or reticent about them, but deal with gadgets and other inanimate objects in great detail. Would you care to comment on the kind of tone of voice you convey and what it signifies?

A: I write in the first person or in limited third person because I’m basically a modernist. I want to create a convincing semblance of real life and the best way to do that is to admit that every story has an author. As to my characters emotions I think my reticence to write too directly about feelings comes from a desire to avoid being sentimental.
My characters relate to objects more easily than to each other because that is how people behave in the world. In order to be realistic I write about characters who relate to coca-cola bottles or television screens more naturally than to each other and like people in technological societies everywhere, my characters are made slightly uneasy by their own behavior and inclinations.

Q: There’s mundane SF and there’s ripped-from-the-headlines cyberpunk, and then there’s this stuff you do, which is a very different sort of highly plausible and near-future/parallel-now extrapolation from current conditions. How did you arrive at this unique ‘space’ – are there any rip-roaring SF operas languishing somewhere a in a trunk in the attic?

A: I think growing up in the 80s under the influence of cyberpunk and after NASA failed it was easy to see the near future as the only hope. Why write about some grand space mission when its so obvious that that such a vision is just a power fantasy? The future is not as good as it used to be, and it’s dishonest to pretend otherwise.

I also remember Gil Scott Heron’s ‘Whitey on the Moon.’ Heron’s song is, to my way of thinking, one of the masterpieces of what might be called Science Fiction poetry.

However, if I were to write a far future Space Opera style book probably the best approach would be to attempt to imagine a socialist utopia, and I think I’d try something along the lines of Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Man” in order to work out my own understanding of the dialectic that drives history. If my book with Tor is ever published and I become free to write another Science Fiction novel I think that is precisely what I will write.

Q. Several of your characters have a moment when they are staring at a mannequin. Kristy Swanson very much?

That’s some kind of tic that I’ve developed. I wrote the same scene into my most recent short story too, the character ends up looking at Naked Mannequins.
I have many literary tics. I’m always mentioning orange carpet in my fiction or describing the way sunlight passes through panes of glass. Everything is always on display in a shop window.
As far as the “Mannequin” movies go, I prefer the original from 1987 because I’m a middle aged slacker, and because of the utopian lyrics of Jefferson Starship’s “Nothing is Going to Stop Us:”
“And we can build this dream together, standing strong forever
Nothing’s gonna stop us now…”
That’s pretty close to a Reagan Era/Andrew McCarthy version of the Internationale.