Flies in the Soup - John Scalzi

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.

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.

John’s latest book, Lock In, is a near-future murder-mystery set against a backdrop of a world ravaged by a disease known as Haden’s Syndrome. Haden’s victims suffering from ‘lock in’ 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 don’t write drafts. I write and then edit as I go along and when I’m done, I send it off so what you see is the first draft. But I think actually it’s just the way that I write. Most of what I do is heavy on dialogue. The dialogue itself is sparse in description. If you’re talking to someone, unless you’re describing a specific thing, [description of it] just doesn’t come up and unless it has something to do with the story it’s 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 I’m 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, it’s naturally part of my writing style. It’s 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 I’ll write something that’s heavy on description, just to force myself to do something I wouldn’t typically do.

So you’ll try to take yourself out of your comfort zone?

Yeah, you have to. My comfort zone is dialogue, which is very easy for me to write – 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 they’re like, “Were you in a bad place mentally when you wrote this?” But no, I was actually gleeful when I was writing it because it was fun to do something that I don’t normally do. The whole point of it was to avoid my comfort zone becoming a trap. You don’t want it to become a comfort cage.

And that lack of description you’ve talked about also allows you to be a little deceptive at times, doesn’t it?

I think that’s possible. I mean I certainly have left things out that later a reader will assume I’ve brought up, but actually they have just filled in with their natural bias. When that happens I think that’s 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 it’s into a machine, another body, or some kind of human/alien hybrid like in Agent to the Stars.

I don’t really think it’s a conscious sort of thing. I don’t dwell on mind-body duality. For one thing, consciousness transfer is something that is still very definitely in the science fiction sphere. We don’t 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, you’re definitely writing science fiction. Something that’s very difficult to do these days, particularly if you’re 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.

Sure, like Star Trek, right? So many things we have now have already surpassed what they had in those shows.

Yeah. You look at Captain Kirk’s communicator and you’re like, “That’s adorable. All you can do with that is make phone calls?” My cell phone is so much more complex than Kirk’s communicator it’s not even funny.

So consciousness transfer is still something that is very definitely science fiction. That said, I don’t think the consciousness transfer is the interesting thing, but more what it allows you to do. In the case of Old Man’s War it really was the most efficient way to get old people into new bodies. I didn’t see the value in injecting old people with chemicals or nanobots to strengthen their old bodies.

Then for Lock In [John’s 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. That’s where using the threeps [remote robotic bodies] – which is not technically consciousness transfer, it’s really like driving a very cool car – 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 I’m a feminist it’s the very basic belief that women have the same rights, responsibilities, obligations and opportunities that men have – or they should. And I’m also very conscious that by saying I’m a feminist there’s a lot of baggage that comes with that, including, “Oh God, here’s another guy saying he’s a feminist, and now he’s going to speak for all women everywhere!” So there’s a lot of stuff that goes with that and I’m very cognisant of it.  At the same time, particularly in the last couple of years, there have been so many people – particularly men – who’ve 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 there’s so much intellectual and academic reading and responsibility that comes with that revelation that I am cognisant I don’t 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, I’m not the world’s 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 it’s important for me to say right now.

With regard to my characters, it’s never been a problem because generally speaking I’m a believer in the philosophy that if you’re going to send a message, use Western Union. That is to say don’t use the fiction to get up on a soap box. It brings the story to a stop and so I’m very careful not to do that. If you believe in equality, and you believe in matters of representation then you’re 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. It’s not a stretch to imagine that in the future it’s not just going to be straight, white dudes doing all the cool stuff and so it’s 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 didn’t bring attention to it. The reason I did it wasn’t to say: “Hey, look what I did. Aren’t I awesome?” It was simply to have it there. And for about a year nobody seemed to notice until some dude sent me an email saying “You sure have a lot of women in here.”

I said, “No, it’s actually not a lot. It’s just 50/50.”

As you’ve 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 survivor’s 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.

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 it’s going to be less effective as you go on.  So if you’re writing in a humorous mode you still need to have those moments of seriousness.

It wasn’t 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, “Yeah, I’m gonna win an Oscar for this.” 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 “I wanna play a 50 year old Holocaust survivor for this movie,” 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 that’s a lot of what humour is. It’s 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 that’s what talking about the Holocaust, in a very superficial way, did for this particular story.

In your latest book, Lock In, remotely controlled robotic bodies called threeps are developed to give those suffering the ‘locked in’ form of Haden’s 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?

John’s answer to this question, and subsequent questions about Lock In, contain some major spoilers. As someone who read and enjoyed the book immensely, I don’t want to ruin it for anyone so I’ve contained all the major spoilers within Part 2 of the interview, which I’ll post here shortly. You have been warned!