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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Jeremy Lassen at Night Shade told me that you were not going to be coming to the United States at all.
No, at the moment I'm not. At the moment I don't have a passport. When the Iraq war started, I took a pair of very large scissors to my passport and sent it to the prime minister, Tony Blair, to express my shame at the British being involved in this unnecessary, immoral and illegal war. So I really have to wait until Blair goes. There's something very stubborn and pigheaded and stupid about me, it's almost like self-harm -- it'll do no real good whatsoever, but it just makes me feel better, makes me feel like I've done something, made some sort of sacrifice, to protest the war.
I wanted to run a theory by you. For years I've been reading all these great S.F. writers from the U.K. -- Ken MacLeod, China Mieville, Richard Morgan and yourself. And it seems to me that there is a growing anti-Americanism visible in all of your work -- if not explicitly, then implicitly.
I kind of see what you mean. It's hard to remind yourself it's not the American people; it's not everybody. It's a difficult thing: You've got to draw a line between the state, the figurehead, the symbols, like the flag or the president. And then it comes down to terms: Is it anti-American to be anti-capitalist? I certainly feel that the stuff I'm writing, the Culture stuff, in its own subtle way is anti-capitalist.
What I find interesting is the change in what America symbolizes. If you look back at science fiction from 20, 30, 40 years ago, the future often seemed to look a lot like America. Maybe it was just a product of the Cold War, but the future was often depicted like the original "Star Trek" -- the Federation seemed an awful lot like fresh-faced Americans spreading freedom and democracy through the galaxy. Now the United States seems to symbolize something quite different -- the complete triumph of the free market, the danger of having only one imperial superpower.
I think it comes down to this: I think it's kind of laughable that the free market is dictating moral goods. That's not what markets are about! It just seems so farcical to me. We've still got so much to learn about the way the universe works -- physics, biology, chemistry, any given science. And yet, somehow the assumption in a lot of science fiction, the underlying assumption, is that somehow in terms of economic science, we are there! We've done everything -- there is no more to discover, we've got the best system, and here it is, isn't that great? We'll just take it to the stars. I just think it's daft!
It just seems to make more sense to me to look more long term than next year's profits or loss. I think the idea that this can all be solved by market forces seems almost fetchingly naive. And I guess that is coming out now in a lot of science fiction. As for the future, I think the future stopped looking American pretty much when you think back to "Blade Runner," and "Neuromancer," when it started to look more Japanese.
But that was during a phase when the Japanese economy was in its bubble. Since the crash, you've seen a lot less science fiction focusing on Japan.
So we'll see lot of Chinese-based science fiction soon.
You call the idea of the free market reigning supreme as almost "fetchingly naive," but when I read about the Culture, I feel you could say the same about that future. It's a great place, but how do we get there from here?
Ah yes, I have cunningly managed to sidestep that part.
In "A Few Notes on the Culture" you imply that the race of beings that make up the Culture aren't actually human -- as in we don't get there from here...
Yes. That's one thing. I have sometimes in my darker moments, suspected that we -- humans, human society, our species -- are incapable of anything like the Culture. Because we are just too damn nasty. But on the other hand, I'm not, in principle, against genetic modification. I think we could make beneficial genetic improvements to ourselves, I mean, just supposing there was a bigotry gene, that was responsible for racism, and sexism and anti-Semitism -- all the bad "isms" -- suppose you could get all that out. You could end up with something like the Culture.
