Great Writing, a volunteer run alternative to the BBC’s defunct Get Writing program, has the first part of a two-part interview with me online today:
Science fiction is one of the most vibrant forms of literature. It’s one in which traditional storytelling is still very important; using narrative arcs to build tension and having likeable, identifiable and sympathetic characters – they’re the key elements of most successful work. In that sense it’s a great reaction against a lot of modern literature which tends to deride those things or replace them with more experimental forms – some of which is quite good but it’s not something that suits my own palate. I think as a literature of ideas or a literature of speculation SF speaks to me, because we live in an era where the future is not only up for grabs but also steadily overtaking us. It’s hard to make sense of those two things without a literature of the ideas of what it means to live in an era of change. The stories and novels that I write are increasingly about change and how people cope with it. Not specific changes per se but about the idea of change in general. Futureshock and then some…
For example, what does it mean to live in a market economy that’s almost perfectly competitive – such that your goods go from having a 50% margin at the time that you invent them (because no-one else offers a comparable good in the market and so you can charge whatever you want for it), to basically a 0% margin in six months, when global competitors can move in and drive the costs down and down? What does that mean as a citizen? What does that mean to people as entrepreneurs? I think they’re good questions to ask and they’re the kind of things I try to answer in the stories that I work on.
