Tom Norton doesn’t like Carl because he scares him, but his skin tone isn’t the issue, he scares him because of who he is. And I’ve met guys like this, guys who have been in British Special Forces. There is something to them. I don’t feel threatened by them, but that’s just because I’m pretty in touch with my feminine side and don’t kid myself about my masculinity, if you like. One my most interesting correspondents, a captain in the American military told me is that in America, we have a real problem because males who don’t do military service have a real issue with soldiers and ex-soldiers. They react badly to them, they prickle around them. The only exception is guys who have a strong social mission like priests or teachers. I said at the time, could it not be that the kind of men who become priests or teachers are probably the kind of men who aren’t into that whole headbutting business of fighting it out for dominance of the herd. If you choose to become a teacher, which is a tough job, with poor rewards, or if you choose to become a priest, it seems likely that the things that drive you are not the things that drive the average male.
Males are competitive, and if you wheel in a man who’s very good-looking, very magnetic, very strong, very tough, most other males are not going to have a good word to say about him. And nor would I!
Do you remember in Bloom County when Opus is going out with Lola Granola, and her ex shows up? Bart Savagewood, I think he’s called. He’s a test pilot for the US Navy, with a 3-inch waist and a 96-inch set of shoulders. Opus is introduced to him, and just hates him on sight, because he can’t compete . . . [laughter]
It’s another of those truths that no one wants to address, and especially in politically correct terms, we don’t like to think that we react badly when our masculinity is threatened, because we don’t like to think that we still have that trait or competitive display in us. But the trick is that you accept it, and you laugh at it, and then you have a handle on it.
I have to confess that I’ve taken a certain amount of flak for being anti-American, which is harsh. I’m a big fan of America both in general political terms and in terms of the culture. I really like it there. The books I read, the music I listen to — what isn’t American is heavily, heavily influenced by it. But what constantly perplexes me about American culture generally is the depth to which the race thing is buried, and how unbelievably charged it is.
There’s racism everywhere. I mean, we’ve got plenty of it here in Britain, and go to Europe and you’ll find it there, as well. It’s not like it doesn’t exist on this side of the Atlantic. But the levels to which it’s buried in the American consciousness are really frightening — such as the rapidity with which some readers leapt to the idea that Sevgi is white because A) she’s the protagonist and b) not African-American, and so, by definition, since she’s white, and he’s an African-American — that can’t be good.
Sometimes you talk about this issue in genetic — and thus quasi-racial or sexed — terms, but you also raise important environmental factors as well. It’s really not clear the extent to which this competitiveness is hardwired after all, even for the thirteens.
That’s right: The idea is that the accepted stance of 2107 is that this is down to genetics, but then you’re given insight into the way they were trained and conditioned from an early age, and you think, bloody hell! If I’d been put through this from the day I was born, I’d be pretty psychotic as well. And right at the end, Sevgi’s father says if it’s true that this is written into your genes so deeply, why did they bother to train you the way they did? They didn’t trust you to turn out the way they wanted, so they made damn sure of it.
What I was trying to do there was to flip-flop the way things are now, which is that there is an underlying assumption that genes don’t determine anything, it’s all conditioning and environment. We’re still living with the heritage of the lurch to the left in the social sciences over the past sixty years, and so there’s an assumption it’s all about environment. And underlying that there’s a little bit of evidence and there are a few people saying, hang on a minute, maybe this is about the genes. So I wanted to flip it: everyone’s going to assume it’s about the genes, but underlying that would be some people saying, wait, what about environmental factors?
The truth as far as I can see it is that it’s always going to be about an interaction between the two. You’re not made by your genes, but your genes will give you the predispositions, and the environment will then tick them off one way or the other.
But the book is speculative in the pure sense of the word. If pressed by someone who said, look, you wrote it, is it about the genes? I would say, well, I don’t know. My personal sense of it is, I’ve read a lot of Steven Pinker, and I think he makes an awful lot of sense. And generally speaking, when I’m reading science, if it’s bad news, then I tend to think they’re probably right. The universe is not a nice place, and we’ve survived in it as a species which means we’re probably not very nice in many ways either.
However, I tend to think that if the explanation is simple, it’s probably wrong. So this is never going to be a simple case of, yes, it’s these genes that do this. It’s going to be a question of, do these genes get expressed or not? How is it influenced by diet? What happens if the woman who gives birth to this child has previously given birth to this child? All this stuff comes into play, and it’s never going to be straightforward. But I do think we’re going to have to wake up, and shed our old-style leftist pretensions, and take a hard look at what human beings actually are.
This may seem like an odd connection, but one thing that’s striking about the difference between the world of Thirteen and the Takeshi Kovacs world is the strong sense of embodiment, and living with the body that you have.
The Kovacs books were enormously fun to write, and I had a lot of fun playing with that concept. (It’s not my concept, I borrowed/stole it from many other practioners over the years. I think the first person I can give an official credit to is Robert Scheckley, whose Immortality, Inc was written in 1958 or something. ) It does let you off the hook in terms of consequences. I made a fist of showing that eliminating death doesn’t solve your problems; in many ways it just gives you more. But there’s always the thing that you can get out of this body. And that, regardless of how easy or difficult it is, does change the game. And the point with Thirteen was, I wanted a situation where you were locked into your physicality, and there’s nothing you can do about it. A point I tried to leave lying around for those who wanted to find it is that Marsalis has more in common with ordinary humans than either humans or he have with the coming generation in 2107, because those guys were going to have gene platforms that can be switched on or off more or less at well, and you can take a chemical and cure a tendency more or less for a generation or so, and you can choose not to have a tendency your parents gave you expressed. And that’s something ordinary humans don’t get to do, nor does Marsalis. He’s locked in to what he is.
One last question: One of the things that I’ve always noted in your books — right from the beginning of Altered Carbon, and I’ve got dozens of these marked across all of them — is the way you write about mirrors. You write about them a lot — characters are always seeing themselves in them . . . . What’s interesting about mirrors?
I think the essence of noir — I think this is something I borrowed wholesale, and not really consciously, so I’m making this up on the fly — is that it’s quite introspective. That’s one of the joys of it. It can be really violent and headlong narrative, but always at the heart of a genuine noir narrative, you have this issue of where is the evil really coming from? Most noir heroes tend to be pretty self-loathing. Again, I think that’s a wisdom that the noir genre has and has kind of stumbled on in some sense. Especially if you’re male, and maybe female but I don’t know because I’m not female, but if you are male and have the slightest bit of self-knowledge or honest intellectual sensitivity, sometimes you’re going to be in the position of that Turkish guy who says, “sometimes it sh
ames me to be male.” That’s an extreme way of expressing it, but if you’re paying attention at all you become aware very early on that males are pretty second-rate when it comes to social mores. Behaving well, if you like. They may make worse parents, they’re not as reliable. We score low on all the stuff that nowadays we would say makes good citizens. Now, that’s a huge generalization, but, in general terms I think that we males are not set up for citizenship in the same way that females are, and that’s something that comes up in the book.
Noir writers detected that, maybe without even consciously realizing it, and so you have this very strong male protagonist in most noir fiction, but he’s keenly aware of his own thuggishness, if you like. He’s keenly aware that it’s not like he’s the white knight and the stuff out there is dark and evil. He’s aware that this is in all of us. And so I suspect that mirroring happens a lot in noir because it’s a genre that’s concerned with what’s inside, as well as what’s outside. In noir plots the assumption tends to be that the system is corrupt: what appear to be the bad guys might be the bad guys, but what appear to be the good guys might be bad guys, as well. There’s a sense that things are rotten, and that this is the human condition.
I think I borrowed all of that. I just carted the whole lot out of the shop without looking at it too closely. I suspect that somewhere woven into that is the idea of the protagonist taking a long hard look at himself, and having to acknowledge what’s in the mirror.
One of the things I’ve been really delighted about over the years is the number of female readers that I’ve got. I was told, especially when I was writing Altered Carbon, even before it was published, most people who read it and liked it said, it’s such a boy’s book. And I keep getting reviews like this. One of the British reviewers for Black Man, for Thirteen said something similar — this is Andy McNab on steroids, this is riproaring Boy’s Own Adventure and stuff like that. But the truth is I’ve got a huge number of female readers, and I’m delighted by that, because I would hate to think I’m only talking to the male sex. I would hesitantly lay that at the door of this introspection. If you’ve got a hero who just thugs his way through the story, he’s utterly convinced of his rightness, and he wins the day — I think a lot of women aren’t interested in that. Whereas if you’ve got a guy who thugs his way through the story, but is constantly conflicted, and is aware that there’s something wrong with him — I think the female sex is far better at understanding that kind of introspection. Maybe that’s what works for them. It’s funny because I don’t think I’ve ever had — I have had a few complaints about the violence, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a woman complain about the violence. It seems to me that women will wear an enormous amount of violence and unpleasantness in their fiction, provided that something else is there as well. And where it doesn’t seem to work for women is when all you’ve got is that violence. This is why mainstream comics tend to be dominated by male readers, because they tend to flush away everything except that gleaming edge of violent capacity. It’s very hard to get interested in characters like that. The female readership (and there is one in comics, as well) is scraping around looking for the sophisticated interpretation, the angle or sense that there’s more than meets the eye, that inside these characters there’s something going on. And increasingly, of course, it’s women who buy books rather than men. So I’m very glad that I appeal to a female readership too, and not least because I genuinely believe that, without wishing to condemn any individual male anywhere, as a species, males very much are the problem. Say I had a child a one-year-old son or something, and I was dying. Given the choice between giving it to a male to rear and giving it to a female to rear, and this is a blind choice, with no other parameters or information to work from, I will give it to the woman every single time, and I think most courts, both in America and in Britain work off a similar assumption: Generally women will be better at bringing up children. The reason they’re better is that women are less likely to cave the kid’s skull in if he screams! It’s caveman stuff, but unfortunately it is what we carry within us. I think the sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner we can get on with running the world far better than we do at the moment.
And pretending we don’t feel like that only makes it worse . . .
Exactly! It’s crazy. It’s insane. We’ve nailed ourselves to these ludicrous images of who we’re supposed to be, who we think we are, and they’re impossible to live up to both for men and women. Women are nailed to this thing of having to be the whore in the bedroom, the cook in the kitchen, and the perfectly demure and presentable housewife everywhere else. This is the whole maid/mother/crone thing. But also males are nailed to this ludicrous vision of implacable strength, where you can’t be weak, and can’t show weakness. They’re such counterproductive stereotypes, because there’s no way anyone could live up to them. And if you did live up to them, it would destroy you. That’s a theme I think running through a lot of my work: If you really do live up to the male archetype, then you’re dead in an alley somewhere, because it will destroy you. Even if it doesn’t kill you physically, it will destroy you from within. Leaving aside actual functioning genetic psychopaths, I think if you look at most men who have survived a lot of physical violence, it does something to them
We’ve come full circle, haven’t we, to the untold cost of heroic deeds. This is what happens to you if you stick to that ridiculous image of manhood. It will wipe you out. And the same holds true for women who try to live up images of femininity. I’m a big fan of bringing everything out warts and all — let’s really have a look at this. That said, you’ve also got to tell an entertaining story, and there’s a balance to be struck there, obviously.
About the Author
Jason B. Jones teaches Victorian literature at Central Connecticut State University, in New Britain. His interviews and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such venues as PopMatters, BoldType, the Kenyon Review Online, and Bookslut. His website is The Salt-Box.
Clarkesworld Magazine - Issue 24 Page 4