John was the second fly to fall in my soup. He's probably my all-time second-fave sci-fi writer after Douglas Adams, and since I can't talk to him anymore, chatting with Mr Scalzi was a big deal for me. Aurealis split the interview into 3 parts, the second of which was published on SoundCloud, but I'll load a transcript here as Part 2.
So youāll try to take yourself out of your
comfort zone?
Sure,
like Star Trek, right? So many things
we have now have already surpassed what they had in those shows.
So consciousness transfer is still something that is very
definitely science fiction. That said, I donāt think the consciousness transfer
is the interesting thing, but more what it allows you to do. In the case of Old Manās War it really was the most
efficient way to get old people into new bodies. I didnāt see the value in
injecting old people with chemicals or nanobots to strengthen their old bodies.
I think in that particular case there are two things
going on. The fact that you have a dynamic range of material meant that there
was the potential for more of an emotional connection. With humour, or with any
emotion, if you keep hitting the same note over and over people are eventually
going to become tired of it and itās going to be less effective as you go
on. So if youāre writing in a humorous
mode you still need to have those moments of seriousness.
In
your latest book, Lock In, remotely
controlled robotic bodies called threeps are developed to give those suffering
the ālocked inā form of Hadenās Syndrome a greater degree of freedom. It
basically allows sufferers who are trapped in their own bodies to interact with
the world, but the long game of the corporations is for the technology to be
used to give older people more freedom of mobility. Do you see this as humanity
simply trying to avoid getting old? Or are you suggesting this type of
technology could be the next step in our evolution?
Interview:
John Scalzi
Part
1
By
Chris Large
(Love this Picture)
Hugo award winning
author, president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
(2010-2013), feminist and all-round super-powered good-guy John Scalzi spoke
with me in this three-part interview in early 2015. Check out Part 1 below, originally published in Aurealis #81.
Johnās latest book, Lock In, is a near-future murder-mystery
set against a backdrop of a world ravaged by a disease known as Hadenās
Syndrome. Hadenās victims suffering from ālock inā find themselves unable
to move or communicate with those around them and must instead utilise
specifically adapted technology. I asked John about his inspiration for the
story and more broadly about his writing style and philosophy.
Welcome
to Aurealis John, I really admire your writing style which comes across as
sparse and uncluttered. Does that come to you naturally in the first draft?
I really donāt write drafts. I write and
then edit as I go along and when Iām done, I send it off so what you see is the
first draft. But I think actually itās just the way that I write. Most of what I do is heavy on dialogue.
The dialogue itself is sparse in description. If youāre talking to someone,
unless youāre describing a specific thing, [description of it] just doesnāt
come up and unless it has something to do with the story itās better to leave
it undescribed. Give that to the reader to imagine.
There are a lot of readers who really
dislike my style because they want their six-page descriptions of beasts, and
what people are wearing. I have no criticism of that. People like what they
like and Iām a big fan of giving people what they want. At the same time, I
find description very boring to write and if I spent a lot of time writing it I
think it would become clear to people that I was bored. So yes, itās naturally
part of my writing style. Itās easy for me to do it that way. That said, the
things that you find easy to do can become a crutch, so every once in a while
Iāll write something thatās heavy on description, just to force myself to do
something I wouldnāt typically do.
Yeah, you have to. My comfort zone is
dialogue, which is very easy for me to write ā and humour. So every once in a
while I will intentionally write something different. A good example of that is
a novella I wrote several years ago called The
God Engines. When people read it theyāre like, āWere you in a bad place
mentally when you wrote this?ā But no, I was actually gleeful when I was
writing it because it was fun to do something that I donāt normally do. The
whole point of it was to avoid my comfort zone becoming a trap. You donāt want
it to become a comfort cage.
And
that lack of description youāve talked about also allows you to be a little
deceptive at times, doesnāt it?
I think thatās possible. I mean I
certainly have left things out that later a reader will assume Iāve brought up,
but actually they have just filled in with their natural bias. When that
happens I think thatās kinda fun and interesting for both of us.
You
seem to enjoy the body-swap theme, or the idea of taking a consciousness out of
a body and putting it somewhere else, whether itās into a machine, another
body, or some kind of human/alien hybrid like in Agent to the Stars.
I donāt really think itās a conscious sort
of thing. I donāt dwell on mind-body duality. For one thing, consciousness
transfer is something that is still very definitely in the science fiction
sphere. We donāt have brain or consciousness transfer as part of our daily
lives at this point, so when you use that as an element in a story, youāre
definitely writing science fiction. Something thatās very difficult to do these
days, particularly if youāre writing near-future science fiction, is to keep up
with technology. Technology advances in leaps and bounds and sometimes the
things you write end up being overtaken.

Yeah. You look at Captain Kirkās
communicator and youāre like, āThatās adorable. All you can do with that is
make phone calls?ā My cell phone is so much more complex than Kirkās
communicator itās not even funny.
Then for Lock In [Johnās latest book, released in late 2014] very simply I
wanted to posit a disease that was terrifying. For most people, being locked
into their body would be terrifying. But I also wanted the people locked into
those bodies to be able to participate in the outside world. Thatās where using
the threeps [remote robotic bodies] ā which is not technically consciousness
transfer, itās really like driving a very cool car ā comes in.
You refer to yourself as a feminist on
your blog and in various forums, and your books are often structured to portray
gender equality.
When I say that Iām a feminist itās the
very basic belief that women have the same rights, responsibilities, obligations
and opportunities that men have ā or they should. And Iām also very conscious
that by saying Iām a feminist thereās a lot of baggage that comes with that,
including, āOh God, hereās another guy saying heās a feminist, and now heās
going to speak for all women everywhere!ā So thereās a lot of stuff
that goes with that and Iām very cognisant of it. At the same time, particularly in the last
couple of years, there have been so many people ā particularly men ā whoāve
just lost their minds on the internet about women.
A couple of years ago I wrote quite a
lengthy piece on my website about why I did not call myself a feminist because
thereās so much intellectual and academic reading and responsibility that comes
with that revelation that I am cognisant I donāt have. But the last couple of
years have convinced me that someone like myself, who believes in the very
simple feminist idea of equality between men and women, and rights, opportunities
and obligations, should say so. Then
again, Iām not the worldās best feminist. I still have moments where I show my
ass, and people are more than happy to point that out.
Be that as it may [being
a feminist] is something that I think itās important for me to say right now.
With regard to my characters, itās never
been a problem because generally speaking Iām a believer in the philosophy that
if youāre going to send a message, use Western Union. That is to say donāt use
the fiction to get up on a soap box. It brings the story to a stop and so Iām
very careful not to do that. If you believe in equality, and you believe in
matters of representation then youāre going to put into your worlds the
representation you want to see.
I believe that sometime in the future we
will see more women in more roles and so my worlds reflect that. I believe that
we will see a wider spread of ethnicity than we do in science fiction
literature right now and so I put that in. Here in the United States in the
next twenty or thirty years, non-Hispanic whites are going to become less than
50% of representation. Itās not a stretch to imagine that in the future itās
not just going to be straight, white dudes doing all the cool stuff and so itās
not a big deal to put that in. In the Human
Division, one of the things that happened was that with the named
characters there was 50/50 representation between male and female. I didnāt
bring attention to it. The reason I did it wasnāt to say: āHey, look what I did.
Arenāt I awesome?ā It was simply to have it there. And for about a year nobody
seemed to notice until some dude sent me an email saying āYou sure have a lot
of women in here.ā
I
said, āNo, itās actually not a lot. Itās just 50/50.ā
As
youāve said, you find humour easy but in your first book, Agent to the Stars, you deal with one of the least funny things
ever: a holocaust survivorās story. Agent
to the Stars contains a strong contrast between what is essentially a
humorous first-contact story and something which is not funny at all.
It wasnāt difficult for me to address the
Holocaust because, quite honestly, it fit the mode of the story, which is a
story about Hollywood. And as everyone knows, if you want an Oscar you go back
to World War II. This was joked about in the show Extras. There was an episode with Kate Winslet where she was
playing a nun who hides Jews from the Nazis and she says, āYeah, Iām gonna win
an Oscar for this.ā And what did she win her Oscar for? She won it for The Reader which is about her being a
prison guard at one of the concentration camps. Rarely has the humorous aspect
of that situation been so clearly proven in real life.
My character in Agent to the Stars wants to get respect and her way of doing that
is to take on this very serious role about the Holocaust, even though this
particular character is horribly
unsuited to the role. If you have this beach blonde, Californian girl saying āI
wanna play a 50 year old Holocaust survivor for this movie,ā people see the
inherent humour in that and you can use that aspect to build the emotional
range of the story. That helps to give you the serious beats that make the
humour more successful, and thatās a lot of what humour is. Itās not just the
funny bits, right? What makes successful humour is the pacing, is the rhythm.
You have to be able to give people those respites, so thatās what talking about
the Holocaust, in a very superficial way, did for this particular story.
Johnās
answer to this question, and subsequent questions about Lock
In, contain some major spoilers. As
someone who read and enjoyed the book immensely, I donāt want to ruin it for
anyone so Iāve contained all the major spoilers within Part 2 of the interview,
which Iāll post here shortly. You have been warned!
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