Excerpts from the interview:
‘‘One of the big questions for a genre writer is: Do you keep writing the same book, or do you try to top what you did last time and try something else? Do you want to get better at the same thing, or do you want to get better? I tend to bounce around — like a pinball — ricocheting! I’m interested in finding out what I can do with a story. How I can tell it to its best advantage. Can I do it in a way that hasn’t been done before? (I’m getting very interested in that.) If I’m using traditional narrative methods, how am I going to trip the reader up and try to keep him guessing? That’s an important part of the game of storytelling.’’
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‘‘The future’s not going to be simple. When cyberspace was a happening thing, people didn’t think that their cyberspace access might suddenly go offline as they were trying to hack through the black ice into some drug lord’s private bank account. In too much science fiction, technology is always on, always working. But technology doesn’t always work, and the ways it doesn’t always work are often interesting. When a new technology infiltrates society, there’s always something new that can go wrong, in ways you don’t anticipate.’’
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‘‘No technology has a single simple application; they all have all sorts of consequences and reverberations. And popular culture is just as complicated. Pop is no longer the monoculture we used to have, the rock ’n’ roll culture. There’s so much out there, in so many different little micro-niches, and who can keep up with all this stuff? Nobody can! What’s the difference between New Metal and Speed Metal? I don’t know, but somebody must! I’m shamefully ignorant about Hip-Hop and Rap and Garage, and they outsell every other kind of music. Years ago, you’d get your issue of Rolling Stone or Cream, and that was it; that would keep you plugged into the zeitgeist. Now the zeitgeist’s just exploding. In science fiction, it was certainly possible to read every important thing that came out ten years ago, but now you can’t do that either. It’s like some kind of supernova: we’ve reached the critical point where the gas is expanding in every direction all at once. This is challenging when you’re writing about the future, trying to construct something plausible. We realize the future is not going to be this single linear culture where everybody, all over the world, is doing the same thing.’’
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‘‘I’ve written two books in the present tense, Fairyland and The Secret of Life, both of which are about biology in the fairly near future. The third one — which I’m working on now — is also written in present tense, is also about biology. Three: that’s the number you need to make a stable configuration now, I guess. I hasten to add that theme is the only connection between them. They’re not set in the same future. I’m just interested in examining the various ways the new biology could affect the world. In Fairyland, biotechnology did work smoothly: you could make the constructs, the ‘dolls,’ and you could remake them, and it worked. The Secret of Life was much more about current ideas in biology and where that would lead, and what it might mean. The next one, set in Africa, is about what happens if biotechnology goes seriously wrong, so it’s kind of a post-plague novel, and it’s also about gene hacking. I think it’s going to be called White Devils.’’
