Flies in the Soup: John Scalzi Part 1.5

Interview: John Scalzi

Part 1.5 

By Chris Large

WARNING – CONTAINS SPOILERS OF EPIC PROPORTIONS

John, 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?

I don’t want to use the phrase “next step in our evolution”. I think that’s a loaded phrase. But say if you were 75 years old and your mobility had been compromised simply by being 75. Your knees are shot, you might be overweight, or you might have a bad back or anything that makes it more difficult for you to do the things you used to do. Then you get offered the ability to have this robotic body that basically allows you to go around like you’re a twenty year old. Why wouldn’t you do that? You wouldn’t necessarily use it every day, but if a group of friends wanted to go mountain climbing in Yosemite, would you take the 75 year old body, or would you take the android body? If you get the full sensory experience from the android body I’ll take that and stand at the top of Half Dome and go “Yep, here I am.” Because you are not limited to what your body can do.

For me it’s a no brainer that anyone would want to use this technology if it was possible to use it. I don’t see it as evolution any more than glasses are evolution. In the book, the reason the Threeps are used exclusively by the Hadens is that in order to use it you need to get a neural network and brain prosthesis which is highly invasive. When I was world building I kinda thought of it like this: liability would be insane because you put this stuff in someone’s brain and what if something goes completely haywire? Your company’s going to be sued. Whereas somebody who is already locked into their own body is willing to accept that risk. So that was part of my world building as to why one group would have this technology but not others, but eventually other groups are going to want that opportunity and the companies that are addressing the Haden market would want to address the rest of the market because the rest of the market is so much larger. It’s not just the Haden’s sufferers. It’s everyone because everyone gets old.

Moving on to your Lock In protagonist: Rookie FBI agent Chris Shane, Chris’ skin colour isn’t an issue for most of the book. As we discussed earlier on, if something doesn’t need to be described, why describe it, right? Chris is suffering from Haden’s Syndrome and is locked into his body but then a third of the way through the book it becomes clear that he’s black. We also said earlier that the reader will make assumptions if things aren’t spelled out for them and I made the default assumption of white male.

I wanted Chris’ parents to be interesting and in this particular case it just seemed the way to go. I didn’t really give it too much thought in terms of building it. I knew I wanted Chris’ dad to be an athlete. I knew I wanted to reflect the trend here in the United States in terms of who marries who. So I didn’t think that 40 years into the future anyone was going to think anything of it one way or the other. The funny thing to me actually, is that we’re talking about Chris, and you’re talking about Chris as a he.

Yes, I was. And you know what? You totally got me. I did not even question it [Chris’ gender] until the end. This is going to contain massive spoilers and I don’t know how we’re going to put this into the interview, but I read the protagonist as a white guy, right? But then when I went onto a forum after reading Lock In and was asked if I read Chris as a girl or a guy, I was like “What? No! He did not just do that!” 

What was really fun about that was that I knew when I was going in that I was going to do it that way because having someone who was a Haden, it was not going to be an obvious issue. I knew people would apprehend Chris as the Threep, not Chris the dude, or Chris the woman. It was Chris the Threep. That being the case there was no reason to specifically gender the character and I decided before I started writing that I would not gender Chris. 

I did it for a couple of reasons. First, in the context of the world I was creating it was something that could be done. Second was the writing challenge of “How far can I get away with this?” It helped that Chris is written in first person so Chris does not have to reveal gender one way of another. 

People’s apprehension of Chris is not going to be “He did this,” or “She did this,” so that made it a little bit easier. But really I just wanted to see if it could be done and whether people would pick it up, because that was part of the writing challenge for me. Dropping in the fact that Chris’ dad is black and his mum is white, so he’s actually bi-racial, would make people question their own assumptions because they’ve been thinking of Chris as a white dude because that’s the default so I knew that would be a jostle. I didn’t necessarily want Chris’ gender to be a jostle. I didn’t want that to be something people thought about until they closed the book and they went online to discuss it with other people and it was brought up by someone else. And I’m really happy about the fact that not only did I get it past a lot of readers, I got it past my editor! And when he read it he was like “Oh, this is great! Blah blah blah blah blah.”

And I was like, “Great! What did you think of Chris?”

And he said “Well, you know, he was a really good character. It was really interesting what you had him do.”

And I said, “Well, why do you think Chris is a he?”

And Patrick was like, “Oh! My God!”

Well, I’m glad I wasn’t the only one.

You should not feel bad. I had about twenty first line readers and really only one of them said, “Hey, I noticed that you’re not using pronouns. Is there a reason for that?” So there was really only the one person who noticed it. I mean my wife, when she read it, she naturally slotted Chris as a woman. And it’s been interesting to me how the breakdown goes. 

Almost all men see Chris as a dude, right? Half of women see Chris as a woman and half as a man. Part of that speaks to what our defaults are. I don’t describe a lot of my characters, how they look, unless it has a very specific bearing on the story so there’s no reason they couldn’t be whatever racial composition you wanted them to be. But almost everybody defaults to white, regardless of what race they are because that’s what we’re all so used to. So not describing people is not necessarily the same as having [diverse] representation, right? In this case the reason I did it this way was because I wanted to – in a very non-judgemental, not get-on-your-soapbox, way – have people think about what their implicit biases are after they’ve enjoyed the story and invested themselves in it and have it be non-confrontational. I’m not pushing them to think a certain way. You can get all the way through it without thinking about it one way or the other, and then you can talk about it. People ask me, “Well, is Chris a man or is Chris a woman?” and it’s like I literally do not know.

It’s entirely possible that Chris is neither. Chris could be intersex for example. Or, alternately, because Chris has spent an entire life using a threep, a lot of the gender expectations that are implicitly put upon us would not be put on Chris, because no one’s going to necessarily put a cute little pink sun bonnet on a threep or say that a threep can only play with particular toys or whatever. All the cultural baggage to do with masculinity and femininity won’t necessarily apply to someone in Chris’s situation.

So what that means is, let’s suppose for the sake of this particular discussion that Chris is female. Chris will not have the same gender pressures that a typical woman would. She would not have to conform to gender roles or to sexual roles. I mention in the book that Chris had a romantic relationship in college, right? I don’t specify with whom, but even if Chris was a woman and had a relationship with another Hadan who was also a woman, would they think about it in the same sort of gender/sexual sphere that the rest of us would, particularly when they live their entire life in a world where gender roles are not necessarily imprinted in stone?

One of the really interesting reviews said that I was just assuming that all the Hadens and all the threeps would have completely blank slates in terms of culture and gender and sexual and that wouldn’t always be the case and I think that’s absolutely accurate. So this what I’m thinking about when I’m writing but if this stuff starts oozing all over the story it’s not necessarily a good thing because fundamentally I want people to enjoy the story and not feel like they’re being lectured to, or that I’m saying “Hey! Look at this great utopian vision of gender and sexuality I’ve created!” Because... it’s not. So all that is there for people to explore later. Stuff about gender and sexuality. Stuff about disability culture, which is a whole other topic. It’s all there to be part of the world. It’s all there to be explored and unfolded and discussed if you want. But if all you want is the murder mystery you can go straight ahead with that.

Just to get back to the threeps, in the world of Lock In they don’t have any super-human abilities. In fact they’re quite fragile. If they get shot, they fall over like anyone would. From the point of view of the FBI, or on the policing side, why didn’t you give them any special abilities like armour plating, or speed, or strength?

I think there were a couple of issues. The first was you want them to be non-threatening. They don’t constitute a robot uprising because they don’t have any particular special abilities. But it’s also the simple fact that the majority of people using threeps were not born into a lock in situation. They were used to having human bodies. I think people underestimate the problems you would have adjusting to a body that was substantially more powerful than the ones they already have. The fact of the matter is, if you used to pick up a can...

*John picks up a soda can from his desk.*

Just by using an action like this. If you gave me a body that was four times as strong, I make the same action and this happens...

*John crushes the soda can with his bare hands like a boss*

Sure okay.

So basically you’d have a bunch of people with these bodies who would be buying trouble. We’d be giving them bodies whose range of strength and agility and everything else that does not match what they’re used to, or what is the norm. It sounds kinda ridiculous but it’s a user interface issue. Take a guy who has driven a Toyota Corolla his whole life and put him into a Lamborghini and tell him go as fast as he can, but then here comes the curb. You know what’s gonna happen to that car. It’s gonna go straight into the wall. You can’t just put people into Lamborghinis. That’s what super-strength or super-agility would be. They’d be a danger to themselves and a danger to others. So that’s why you have the Threeps being – aside from being non-threatening – why you try to replicate the human range of abilities.