Novelists are always told to include all the telling details, but I’ve heard that that’s one sign that someone is lying to you, is if they’re trying too hard or if they’re including too much detail.
I think, in the name of being able to continue to lie convincingly, assuming that I ever could, I try to avoid information about how to sound plausible, because I think the more test-conscious you become, the more obvious your deceptions become.
As a matter of reality, when you’re writing, it’s always about sleight of hand. You include just enough detail that people start to fill in the rest for themselves and then they think that you’ve described something perfectly, whereas what you’ve actually done is indicate. You’ve drawn a vector drawing and they’ve then filled in the colors and the surfaces on it.
I have to do that a lot, because I tend to pick things which are impossibly difficult to describe. Like the state of mind of being a genius, which is not something into which I have insight. What you have to do for that, particularly a mathematical genius, is to—my arithmetic is poor, my math is completely untested because I never got passed arithmetic stage at school. I have the qualification that you take when you’re sixteen that you have no choice but to take it. I have that in math but nothing else, and everything to that point is just brute calculation, you don’t get to do any proper mathematics. So, in any case, I have no grip, as a matter of personal experience, on what it’s like to be brilliant with numbers, but I read G. H. Hardy’s book, A Mathematician’s Apology, which is absolutely fantastic, and the first thing that I realized was this was an account of a creative life. The fact that this guy worked with numbers and I worked with words does not alter the fact that everything he says really about the experience of being G. H. Hardy is very familiar to me from being me, in terms of work and how you feel about it.
That was very nice, but then specifically in terms of numbers, what I did with Angelmaker and the brilliant mathematician in Angelmaker was just keep telling everybody that she was brilliant and then give her an insoluble mathematical problem and she solves it. If you balance the emotional flow and the action right, when she does something that feels impossible, instead of saying “Well, that’s just impossible,” people go, “Well, of course it’s impossible, except that it’s not impossible, just really, really hard, and she’s a genius, so she’s done it.” Then they believe and they invest more and more in the idea that she’s brilliant, and then she becomes effectively magic, which is great. That’s exactly what you want. If you start trying to write down a clear account of the thought process in her head, first of all, you have to be a genius or go find someone, and second of all, you have to be a genius to understand it, and so the novel’s going to get slightly derailed while everyone goes running off to try and look up what the hell that paragraph was about.
Actually, I had exactly the same experience. I had read Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and the character, he’s good at blowing up bridges. In my head, I remember that there was a lot of detail about how to blow up bridges, and then I went back and analyzed it, and there’s almost no detail on how to blow up bridges, but there’s a lot of detail about how it feels to have the confidence that you know how to blow up a bridge.
That’s the gig. For me, it’s the same with action sequences. I have a better understanding of action sequences because I have this early, incompetent, but nonetheless comprehensive martial arts education, and so I know what the body mechanics feel like, and I know what the crucial point of any sort of physical exchange is going to be. I know where the moment is when one person takes the other person’s momentum away from them or moves their center of gravity somewhere they didn’t want it to be. I understand how that works. I just can’t do any of it.
I don’t really bother to tell you the terribly exciting flurry of blows, which in a movie would look really great but on a page is just dull, but I do tell you about the crucial moment where the person who is grabbing you by the wrist is suddenly the person who is now flying through the air and how that feels, and people respond to that. They get very excited by the action sequence. It’s not exactly a piece of sleight of hand, but it’s the one detail you need, as opposed to the twenty or thirty that might look like a good idea but actually aren’t.
Speaking of hands, your author photo in this book … you have some writing on your hand?
I do. And it’s actually even relevant! That photograph was taken at the end of a festival a couple of years ago when I was writing Tigerman, and the text is, if I can remember, a reminder to me that there is a book called The Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys by Mick Farren, which had a passage about a seasonal madness that comes into play in a place where one of the characters is living, and I wanted to go back and reread that to remind me about the effect of geography and seasonal shift on mood.
When I went back and reread it is exactly what we’ve just been talking about. It has very little of that in there. It just happens, and it’s really affecting, and it’s powerful because it’s very well done. And then there was also a note to reread Ned Beauman’s book The Teleportation Accident, which is absolutely fantastic. It’s completely nuts. It’s basically this incredibly long science fiction shaggy dog story with some of the funniest, goofiest passages in it. You’ve got to take a good solid run at it, because it’s quite densely written. Ned’s a very, very good writer. He’s irritatingly talented and young. He drives me crazy. He’s also really nice, which makes it worse.
But if you want to get into it, it’s this goofy, strange, disturbed story about a guy who is basically a kind of slacker party society guy in Berlin, who’s also a theater designer rebuilding this extraordinary theatrical mechanism. It gets stranger and stranger as it goes on, there’s a kind of Lovecraft aspect to it, which is very small, but then there is another science fiction aspect about actual teleportation, which is strange again.
The whole thing is incredibly amusing, and when it gets to the very far end, the last couple of pages delivered a punch line I did not see coming that made me laugh a lot. I think it’s a great book, and I can’t even remember what it was, but I wanted so much to reread and reference it in Tigerman. Obviously I must have done it, because I finished the book and it was okay. So there’s some notes on my hand. It’s a genuine part of the process, although these days I tend to use Evernote rather more and the back of my hand rather less.
Just beneath that, your bio says that your wife is a human rights lawyer?
She is.
You mentioned there is all this stuff in the book about the Fleet and all the human rights abuses they’re doing. Was that influenced at all by hearing her talk about stuff she’s working on?
Absolutely. There is this extraordinary thing that is happening at the moment, where it’s possible that we’ll get some clarity on what did and did not happen on the island, and is not happening on the island of Diego Garcia, which is being subjected in the newspapers here at the moment as the possible sight of a black detention facility.
When I was writing Tigerman, Diego Garcia was in my head, having been on the news relatively recently because of the tangle the British government gets itself into every time Diego Garcia comes up, because the legal status of rendition in the UK is pretty clear cut. It’s basically not allowed. So if a rendition flight touches down in the UK, that’s a big deal for our government, because it means that they’re breaking the law, as far as I can see, anyway.
So every time that Diego Garcia comes up, there is a whole thing that happens and they go nuts about it. They got themselves into a tangle in 2004, 2006, and again in 2008. That was all very much in my mind. Then it went away for a while, and then, almost to compensate—due to the fact that the Ukraine just went into total catastrophe, and I had Ukrainian characters who made no mention of it, instead of getting that right—I got this Diego Garcia thing back in the news.
The great thing that right now I’m really treasuring, in that kind of horrified, I-can’t-believe-this-is-the-pl
anet-I-live-on kind of way, is that, as far as I know, the British government is currently maintaining that the crucial documents to a case that involves Diego Garcia were damaged in water damage in the archives of Diego Garcia in June 2014. It was an unusually but not ridiculously dry month in Diego Garcia. It’s one of those things where you’re like, “Okay, well, we’re just never going to know. You’re just not going to tell us, so whatever.”
One thing we were talking about in the last episode was how the climate for writing spy thrillers has been changed by Edward Snowden and all the revelations that have come out about all these horrible things our governments are doing. How does that affect your ability to write a spy thriller, when people are so suspicious of the “good guys?”
Tigerman isn’t really a spy thriller. It has an espionage angle. Actually more than that, it has a geopolitics angle; it doesn’t really have an espionage angle. So I haven’t had to go there. There’s an awareness of the possibility of surveillance in the book, but it’s quite lightweight.
One of the things that happens is, the way that the Sergeant and the boy first end up talking to one another is that they both take the batteries out of their mobile phones. They both have a habit of doing that. So there’s an awareness of that there. For me, it’s not a problem.
It’s, again, this thing about technology and the intrusion of our awareness of it into the conventional shapes of a spy thriller, because the U.S. in particular, but also, as it turns out, the UK, pours money into technological analysis of signals. A lot of stuff, we just decode it. We get it and we break it, or we do it with data. The other slightly terrifying thing about the drone program is that it seems to be that metadata is enough to get you drones now, which is slightly alarming. For me, it’s not a problem, it’s how the world is, but I can see if you’re writing a more conventional espionage, to those it’s a serious problem because it changes stuff, but I don’t think it shuts down those stories. You just have to be a little more complex about it.
I also wanted to ask you about this book you wrote a few years ago called The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. I’ve only read the description of it, but it says that you talk about how we risk living in a world which is designed to serve computers and corporations rather than people. Could you expand on that?
The point about The Blind Giant was it wasn’t supposed to be, as it were, a technology-heavy book about technology, so it wasn’t supposed to go out of date as quickly as it would if it was mentioning specific implementations of technology. It was more about the human aspect, how we deal with our technology, how we interface with it, and where technology becomes a cultural influence.
The business about building a world that’s actually intended for computers and corporations is perfectly pointed out if you’ve read Flash Boys, which is a wonderful read, the new Michael Lewis book about algorithmic trading and what happened there. That’s an absolutely fantastic read. The meat of it is, basically, it seems that for a period of a couple of years, maybe, the infrastructure of trading was reconfigured to favor a new model and almost no one knew.
So traditional brokers were at a massive disadvantage and they were losing really large sums of money per year because their own software, or the way that the trading system was laid out, was putting them at a disadvantage. That was partly about the construction of fast pipe between exchanges. I don’t want to get into it, because I don’t want to spoil it and also because I don’t want to say something someone could sue me for, but the book is a perfect example of that.
If you take the automobile as an example, imagine that today, a bunch of aliens dropped down from the sky and they say, “We’ll give you much, much faster transportation, personal transportation, but we’ll also just kill a certain number of you a year randomly. We’re giving you the teleporter device, but it’s only 99% reliable. Sometimes you just get vaporized. And by the way, you’re going to have to build rivers through your major cities of this foreign chemical that will kill you if you touch it.” Would you take the technology? No, but that’s the automobile. That’s exactly what we’ve done.
We’ve already reconfigured our world to make parts of it hostile to human life and useful for machines, and we’re doing the same thing with various bits of digital technology. The question is not, “Oh my god, how do we stop this from happening?” because it’s going to happen. The question is, “How do we constrain it? How do we make it serve us rather than creating systems that are basically born in the ring-bindered DNA,” as Neal Stephenson would call it, “of false corporate culture?” because big corporations are not always the best decision-makers for people on the ground. You see that in the fracking situation and governments likewise.
I find politics increasingly depressing, but that may just be an aspect of being forty.
One of the craziest things I’ve heard along the lines you were saying is I read about this proposal to create a line of hovering drones across the ocean in order to transmit stock market orders a fraction of a second earlier.
That’s the kind of thing that they deal with in Flash Boys. If the end point of the Flash Boys narrative is accurate, I think the impetus to do that may have faded away, but that’s also partly maybe because I didn’t properly understand the mechanisms of that kind of trading. What I do think is that it’s one of the areas in our financial world where we need to look very hard at what we are evolving. It seems to me that a lot of stuff, in finance, particularly, is emergent.
It will come along and if someone doesn’t really think about it and just starts doing it, they may make a lot of money and then that may crash the rest of the market, and we’re all back in 2007 wondering where all the money has gone. Actually, we don’t have to live like that anymore. We can say, “Okay, guess what, we are choosing this particular version of the game. We are not choosing your game because it will blow everything up, so stand down that way of doing business.”
I also wanted to ask you about this thing you said. You said, “A corporation is not a person unless I can punch it in the face for being a jackass.”
Seriously. Obviously, I’m not going to go around punching people in the face. That’s not really my thing, but the statement of personhood, unless the more mature version of that statement is actually something that I think John Scalzi may even had said on his blog, is that a corporation is not a person until and unless it can go to prison.
If a person commits murder, or even what we would call manslaughter, they can go to prison for that. Certainly we wouldn’t consider it an adequate punishment to fine them, say, a fifth of their income. That’s not acceptable. If you want a corporation to be a person, if they’re going to have the kind of rights of personhood that they are being accorded, particularly in the U.S., it seems to me that they also have to have the risk that goes with that. If you get caught doing something very bad, you can go to prison for the rest of your life. In a corporate sense, I don’t know what exactly what that would mean, but some states still have the death penalty, (which, as an aside, I’m not in favor of,) but if you’re in a state with the death penalty and you’re operating as a corporation and kill someone, I guess you should get the corporate electric chair and should just cease to exist as a corporation.
If you’re going to follow that metaphor in that direction, that’s where it takes it. I was being a little frivolous, so I said a corporation’s not a person until I can punch it in the face, which is, as I said, the cheeky version of all that rather more sophisticated stuff.
Do want to tell us about the next book you’re working on? I hear it has six main characters, alchemy, semiotics, time travel, and Greek politics?
So it would seem. I have a history of biting off more than I can chew because it’s kind of the only way I can feel the momentum increasing as I write. This is very much that. It started out with five characters, which I figured was enough, and then, in order to deal with one of the characters, I realized I had to have another one. There’s an issue about who is actu
ally the truthful narrator, if any of them are, and there’s a whole host, as you see, of different characters.
It begins with a woman under interrogation, and we’re seeing directly into her head. There’s a kind of surveillance state issue there. We talked earlier about the networked rats, so I am writing about that. Then we’re also dealing with a woman in the far past, a somewhat genderless entity in the far future, a Greek banker, and an Ethiopian painter. They are all looking for something that may or may not be the same thing and suffering from a problem that may or may not be the same problem. I’m a little bit daunted by it, but at the same time really enjoying it.
As long as it has time travel in there.
There is mysticism, time travel, various different iterations of the possibility of magic and science. I’m hoping it’s really going to blow people’s socks off. I’m halfway through the book. You can only ever be as sure as you are through the book. When I’m sixty percent of the way through the book, I’ll be sixty percent sure it’s going to be okay. Right now, I’m sitting here holding all the pieces and staring at them on the ground, thinking, “Oh my god, what have I done? Why did I not just write something very simple?” It seems to be it’s not in me to do that.
It sounds great. Nick, thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by David Barr Kirtley. Dave is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.
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