First published in Piffle & Other Trivia #26, September 1997.
Copyright © Greg Egan and Russell B. Farr, 1997. All rights reserved.
Greg, thank you for agreeing to this interview. Please, in your own words, tell us about yourself.
I was born in Perth in 1961. I have a BSc in Mathematics. I've worked as a computer programmer, mostly in jobs supporting medical research of one kind or another. But I've been writing full-time now since 1992.
You've professed an interest in both music and movies. What are some of the artists you are currently listening to, and some of the best and worst movies you've seen recently?
Most of the music I'm interested in comes from people who date back at least to the '80s: Elvis Costello, Hunters & Collectors, Paul Kelly, The Smiths, The Violent Femmes. I buy new albums from the ones who are still putting things out, but I spend a lot of time listening to their old work. I listen to JJJ regularly, and I like a lot of what I hear, but I'm rarely grabbed by anything the way I was when I was ten years younger. About the only relatively new artists whose albums I own are Beck, and They Might Be Giants.
The best movies I've seen recently? I thought “Underground” was very powerful, though that's going back a bit. “Lone Star”, “Black Rock” and “Swingers” were all worth seeing. And I loved “Mars Attacks!”. “Lost Highway” certainly wasn't the worst thing I've seen this year, but it was the most disappointing, because I admire David Lynch so much, and I think he made some bad decisions with “Lost Highway”.
Do you ever feel the urge to go back into film-making?
No. My technical skills were very much at an amateur level, and by now they're both rusty and obsolete, so at most it would be a hobby that would take up more time and money than I can spare. Depending on how the technology evolves, I might end up doing some computer animation one day, but to learn what I'd need to learn and then create something substantial would mean putting writing aside for at least a year or two, and I'm not willing — or financially able — to do that right now.
Until a few years ago, your avoidance of conventions and other public appearances was as well known as your writing, much to the chagrin of many. Now, four novels, two collections and numerous Year's Best inclusions later, do you feel the last laugh is yours?
I think my non-attendance at conventions was never of the slightest interest to more than a handful of people: a tiny fraction of Australian fandom, which itself is a tiny fraction of the SF readership. A story in Asimov's is read by hundreds of thousands of people; the proportion for whom it would cross their mind upon seeing my name that I wasn't in attendance at Something-or-Othercon is negligible. But it's not a matter of having the last laugh, any more than I'm having the last laugh on … I don't know, the AFL for succeeding as a writer despite never going to their football matches. Fandom is about fandom, it's a great big social club; science fiction is just the pretext. I don't think many people in fandom really think otherwise. Bruce Gillespie says this all the time, and if I'm not qualified to know, he certainly is.
In your 1993 interview for Eidolon, you mention that it was “too early to quit my day job forever”. How are the prospects of quitting the day job forever now?
I've supported myself by writing since 1992, and I'm probably very nearly unemployable by now — not because my computer skills are all that dated, but because employers are likely to be put off by the long gap. So I hope I can keep this up indefinitely, but there's no guarantee that I'll be able to. Even if I have no trouble producing new work for another forty years, the publishing industry is sure to go through some major upheavals.
You've been extremely critical of what you describe as “Miracle Ingredient A”, or a truly unique Australianness perceived in much sf written by Australians. While this may well be the case, do you also agree there is a need to support Australian sf writers in order for them to hone their skills?
I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published, which involve slightly lower hurdles in terms of quality than the major magazines. And there are fiction fanzines and low-paying semi-prozines all around the world, including Australia, that exist precisely to fill that need. But the last thing I'd suggest is that anyone has a moral obligation to buy those magazines if they don't actually enjoy the contents. Being rewarded for anything other than the quality of their work is the fastest way to screw-up a writer — and it isn't only new ones who suffer from that.
How do you see the state of sf writing and publishing in Australia at present, both in terms of how it used to be and how it rates internationally?
Australian sf book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely. (Though not necessarily a UK one, because the Australian sales are such a big slice of the market for UK editions.) But I think the whole concept of “the state” of SF writing in Australia is meaningless. There are a lot of writers doing a lot of different things. Some years there are more and some years there are less. The idea that Australian SF writers go through cycles of improving and diminishing quality together — like vineyards having good and bad seasons — is just hilarious to me.
Gardner Dozois described you as “Perhaps the hottest and fastest-rising new writer to debut in SF in the nineties”. You've certainly established a voice for yourself in the genre, where do you see your writing going from here?
I don't have any structured grand plan; I just intend to keep writing about the things that interest me — some of which change, some of which don't. If there's any recent trend that might be showing up in my work soon, it's that I've put a conscious effort into updating my maths and physics education, which had grown very rusty. I'm reading postgraduate-level physics textbooks these days, rather than relying on popularisations, which is a good thing, I think. Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times, but I hope my work in the future will come from a much more informed position.
You've had three stories nominated for the Hugo Award, including two in the same category in the same year. How did you feel when you heard they'd been nominated? Have you ever given any thought to winning such an award?
I hadn't given much thought to the prospect of a Hugo nomination at the time it happened, but obviously once you're nominated, winning one seems a bit less far-fetched than before.
Going back to the 1993 interview, you said that you were “not really qualified to call myself a novelist yet”, and while you were writing 7 or 8 short stories a year you could see that tapering off. Has this happened?
Definitely. I had no short fiction at all published in '96, and I'll only have two stories published this year. Part of the reason is the time I've spent on novels, but also I've been taking longer to write stories lately. “Reasons to Be Cheerful”, which was published in Interzone in April, took me three months. I think it was time well spent, though; I'm happy with every word in that story. Obviously you can never say “No one could have done this better”, but when you can honestly say that you wouldn't personally change a thing, it's a good feeling.
Do you want to concentrate more on your short stories, which have been nominated for the Hugo, or your novels, one of which has won the Aurealis Award?
I think I'll always want to do both; the ratio will vary, but unless I made a conscious decision to stick to a particular form, I'd always find myself with an idea that really had to be one and not the other. And there are advantages to doing both. If I did want to write short stories exclusively, then I'd have to get a day job; there's no way I could make my living at it. And writing nothing but novels would be exhausting; I'd probably have to waste as much time between books recovering and psyching myself up for the next one as I now spend writing short stories.
Your most recent novel, Distress, was released at the end of 1995 to rave reviews. I believe your next novel is titled Diaspora, what can readers expect from this one and when can they expect to read it?
Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software. But some conscious software inhabits robots that interact with the physical world, and there are also some organic humans still around. The story concerns a violent astrophysical event which ravages the “fleshers”; that triggers a search by the survivors for a better understanding of the phenomenon, and for sanctuary from any future recurrences. It turns out to be a very long, and very far-reaching journey.
It's published in the UK on 15 September, so it should reach Australia by November or December.
What else can readers expect to see from Greg Egan in print in the near future?
I'll definitely have a story called the “The Planck Dive” in Asimov's early next year, which is basically about why it might be interesting to jump into a black hole. That will be followed by a 20,000-word novella called “Oceanic”, which is too complicated to summarise in a few words. I've only just started the next novel, though, so that's not going to be in print before '99. It's called Teranesia, and it's about evolution, the Indian Rationalists Association, the breakup of Indonesia, quantum mechanics, and sex.
Lastly, is Piffle & Other Trivia a silly name?
Extremely.
First published in noise! online magazine, January 1998.
Copyright © Greg Egan and Marisa O'Keeffe, 1998. All rights reserved.
Perhaps you could start by talking about Diaspora, what you hoped to achieve with it, and whether you feel you have achieved what you wanted. What direction is your work now taking you in? What drives you in your work? What vision do you have? How has your work changed over the years? What has become more important to you and what has become less important to you (thematically or otherwise)?
One of the main things I wanted to do with Diaspora was imagine what the future might be like if one branch of our descendants ends up inhabiting computers, and to show this world through the eyes of an insider who finds it all perfectly normal. In an earlier book of mine, Permutation City, people are just beginning to be able to make copies of their minds that run as software, and it's all still very difficult and traumatic, but when Diaspora begins there's a whole civilisation that has existed in this form for nine hundred years. So instead of adopting a contemporary perspective and treating the idea as deeply unsettling, I wanted to take it for granted and have some fun with the possibilities — without the characters having to have an existential crisis every five minutes because they're “only software”. I wanted to make it seem perfectly ordinary to be software, and very strange and limiting to have any kind of body, let alone one made of flesh.
I think I've succeeded in presenting that point of view, though the more I've succeeded, the more off-putting it might be for some readers. If it's disturbing to read about characters in the 21st century having a hard time being software, it can be even more disturbing to imagine people so different from us that they have no problem with it at all.
Diaspora probably took me about as far in that direction as I want to go. When I write about the far future, I'm not interested in pretending that all our current problems — things like disease, poverty, war and racism — are going to be with us for the next ten thousand years. Human nature is a physical thing, and eventually we'll transform it as much as we like. But those “temporary” problems are still enormously important to us, right now. So, although I've written a couple of short stories since Diaspora which share the idea that in the long run we'll find software the most convenient form — especially for space travel — I'm backing off now, and concentrating on the near future.
I suppose I have a vision of a universe that we're increasingly able to understand through science — and that includes understanding who we are, where we came from, and why we do the things we do. What drives me is the desire to explore both the details of this vision, for their own sake — things like quantum mechanics and cosmology, simply because they're beautiful and elaborate and fascinating — but also the ways in which we can adapt to this situation, and use what we're learning constructively.
I'm not sure that my work has changed in any particular way over the years, though I hope I'm improving stylistically, and getting better at characterisation. I think Distress was better in both respects than the previous novels; it's hard to talk about “characterisation” in Diaspora, since the worst mistake would have been to make the characters too similar to 20th-century flesh-and-blood people. What's important to me in every book is to push the ideas as far as I can, and to be as honest about the subject as I can. That never changes, but it does lead to different trade-offs. If you're dealing with some fairly elaborate technical issues, as I was in Permutation City and Diaspora, the writing has to be as direct and transparent as possible; trying to make it too subtle or poetic just renders it incomprehensible. In Distress there was room for more expressive writing, and I also felt I could risk leaving some things unsaid.
I was so fascinated to read (in another interview) you say that you believe there'll be conscious software in your/our lifetime, but that you don't think you'll live to see scanning. Can you expand more on this please and maybe give a brief explanation of what you mean for those not familiar with your work?
I'm fairly sure that there'll be software in my lifetime that's conscious, though how it will first arise I don't know. It might be something like a complete computer simulation of, say, a lizard in a virtual environment — in which case it could be as difficult to convince some people that this program really is conscious as it is to convince some people that animals are conscious. Or it might be something we evolve in a computer without any real connection to biology, or something we design to test a theory about consciousness. One worry I have is that we might produce conscious software before we know it, and put the software through a lot of suffering without even realising it. We're a very long way from that point right now, but ultimately it's a serious issue. It would be a horrible irony if, just as we were phasing out animal experimentation altogether and replacing it with computer simulations, some of those simulations turned out to be going through just as much pain as any lab rat.
“Scanning” is the term I used in Permutation City for the technique of completely mapping someone's brain — and preferably their whole body as well — in enough detail to re-create the person as software. In that book, I glossed over the difficulties. At the very least, you'd have to be able to identify all the trillions of connections between billions of neurons, and measure how strong those connections were. It might also turn out that you'd need to know a lot more detail about every individual brain cell: which genes were switched on, and so on. Current techniques, like CAT scans and MRI — magnetic resonance imaging — are still much too crude to give you that kind of information. So even when computers are powerful enough to run a program that's a “copy” of a human being, it could take fifty more years before we're able to scan a human being and create the copy.
What do you/did you think of cyberpunk? Do you believe it still exists or was it simply a product of the 80's? I used to be a big champion of it — in spite of its overwhelming maleness, I thought it was a space that girls and women could go crazy in (as in, have fun in), taking from it the best bits and leaving the rest behind, and write an amazing wonderful literature where we could do anything, be anything and not be defined in relation to men. That's the beautiful thing about sf — it allows for that possibility. It allows for any possibility (though I do prefer the scientifically plausible ones, which is one of the reasons why I like your writing so much). But now I think of cyberpunk as having been so much defined by a certain set of characteristics that it's impossible to separate it from them, one of which was the boy hacker hero, overtones of rock star, dressed in leather etc. And that image makes me feel so bored. And unincluded. So I've jumped from one extreme to the other... What do you think? Do you have any comments about any of this stuff? Moving away from cyberpunk, is sf in general a good space for people to go crazy in and invent new possibilities for human interaction?
I don't want to lump all the things that were classified as “cyberpunk” together, because some of them were wonderful, and some of them stank. I think Bruce Sterling and Pat Cadigan wrote a lot of good books in the '80s, and they're still writing good books, and I don't care which ones are or aren't “cyberpunk”.
Having said that, reading about characters who think they're hip bores me witless — even if they're being sent up, though it's worse if they're being taken seriously. And maybe it's not a tragedy that computers have now become ultra-cool in some circles — though it's pretty funny to someone who's been programming since 1975 — but I'm far more interested in ridiculing the whole idea of caring about what's fashionable. Because once you do care, you're a slave. A lot of cyberpunk said, in effect: “Computers are interesting because cool, cynical men (or occasionally women) in mirrorshades do dangerous things with them.” If that really is the most interesting thing you can imagine about a computer, you shouldn't be writing SF.
I don't know if cyberpunk was worse about women that most other SF, but I doubt it was any better. In general, I don't think SF has begun to explore the possibilities for trashing gender stereotypes — and ultimately trashing gender itself. A lot of what passes for “SF about gender” just implies that we're sentenced to repeat the worst mistakes of the past over and over, for the next ten million years. I guess that's okay if you read it as a cautionary fable, but there ought to be a serious attempt to describe the future as well, and we certainly don't have that when most of what's written is either a nightmare of fundamentalist repression of one sex by the other, or predicts a world in which all the men, or all the women, have been removed.
SF ought to be the ideal place to invent new possibilities for human interaction, but there's a lot of conservatism even in SF. In Distress, the main character falls in love with an asexual person, someone who's chosen to have no gender at all. One reviewer in an SF magazine fell over laughing at the very idea of this. He literally couldn't conceive of two people being in love without some form of genital friction.
I was really interested when in the Ibn Qirtaiba interview you said (talking about “deep self modification of the personality”) that you were trying to map some of the dangers and benefits of that. I really have thought about sf as a genre in which people can effect change by mapping out dangers and benefits of any given concept. What do you think of sf's potential to effect change? A story like “The Moral Virologist” would suggest that you do think it has some potential, but then does sf have a broad enough audience to really touch enough people? Do you think that as technology plays a bigger and bigger part in our lives people will become more interested in sf (because it seems more relevant to them)?
I don't think SF will ever be enough, but it's the easiest place to start examining new technologies, a few decades (or centuries, sometimes) before anyone else is discussing them. Unfortunately, when you hear some politicians talking about things like genetic engineering it sounds as if the most recent piece of SF they've heard of — let alone read — is Frankenstein, or maybe Brave New World if you're lucky. And a lot of SF is biased towards alarmist possibilities and disaster scenarios, so I certainly wouldn't want people to start treating it as some kind of substitute for an informed debate on the facts: say, banning organ transplants from animals just because some hack writes a best-selling novel in which we all die from pig viruses that leap the species barrier.
All I can ever claim to be doing myself is musing out loud while I try to think something through to my own satisfaction. If what I write makes sense to some of the people who read it, or even just irritates them sufficiently, maybe it will stay in the back of their minds, and maybe they'll think the issues through themselves a few years sooner than they might have otherwise. But sure, it's a tiny, tiny effect, and it will probably be drowned out by all the noise the media will generate when these things are actually on top of us.
A month or so ago, I read a (trashy) article which listed a whole heap of movies that were out or soon to be out that all dealt with sf in some way. Some of the movies seemed stupid, and their links with sf tenuous, but nevertheless do you think that this is a sign that public interest in and appetite for sf is increasing? Or is it just a fad? Or even, just a coincidence?
I don't know if public interest in SF is increasing, or if Hollywood will ever let real SF onto the screen. I had high hopes for Contact, and quite a few good things made it into the movie, but the ending was a complete betrayal of everything the book stood for, and everything SF stands for. Or do you mean movies about SF, rather than SF movies? I did read a review in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction which discussed three films “about SF”. The reviewer included Chasing Amy, because the major characters are all superhero comic-book creators. The other two were a lame comedy about an SF writer's relationship with his mother, and a historical biography of Robert E. Howard, who wrote the Conan the Barbarian novels!
What are your plans for the immediate future? What are you working on at the moment? Excuse me being a vulture, but when will we have more new work from you?
Right now I'm working on a new novel called Teranesia. It's about the Indian Rationalists Association, the breakup of Indonesia, quantum mechanics, evolution, and sex. It won't be finished until the middle of next year, though, so it will be published sometime in 1999. I also have a new collection of stories coming, called Luminous, but I don't know yet when that will be out.
First published in Spanish in Gigamesh, July 1998.
Copyright © Greg Egan and Carlos Pavón, 1998. All rights reserved.
Well Greg, first of all thanks a lot for allowing us to have the opportunity to talk with you via the net. We really appreciate your kindness and your generous collaboration in the making of this special issue.
Although I know you're going to disagree with me, I have to start by asking you about your well-earned status in the field. Now that your career seems to be really taking off world wide, your works are being translated into not a few languages, and you begin to be recognized as one of the best writers in the field, how does it feel to be at the top of the genre?
I'm not at the “top” of the genre by any means, but I do have some loyal and enthusiastic readers, which is very gratifying. I'm very happy with the way things have gone for me over the last ten years. I've been writing since I was a teenager, but it wasn't until 1988 that I decided to try to make a career of it, and I thought it would take at least 15 or 20 years before I'd be able to make a living as a writer. So I've been lucky, and I'm grateful.
At the beginning of your career you wrote an unpublished vampire novel, The Effects of Feeding, and your first published stories in Interzone were horror. In the past you've said that you might return to writing horror if you “find” a good idea. Have you found any ideas, or are you simply not interested in horror any more?
Those early horror stories worked the way a dream works; they made no sense at all on a realistic level, but in a short story you can sometimes get away with suspending logic and just using imagery to get to the heart of the matter. I think “Scatter My Ashes” was the best of those stories; it was about a kind of endlessly reincarnated being who lives inside every serial killer, created by the media's obsession with the subject. But when I tried to apply the same technique to a novel, it just didn't work. I kept wanting to provide a coherent explanation for everything that happened, and horror novels that do that just end up being bad science fiction.
In Permutation City you developed a cosmology which irrevocably led to the conclusion that the existence of God is a logical impossibility. What in your opinion is the alternative to “inventing” Gods for explaining the obscure mysteries science cannot illuminate? And do you think that embracing science as the new God for the third Millenium is also a mistaken way of trying to comprehend the universe around us?
The basis of science is just systematic honesty, and there's nothing we can't be honest about, even if we can't yet see precisely how to explain it. The alternative to pretending that you can explain anything with the word “God” is just to be patient, and to work hard to identify the way things are, rather than the way you'd like them to be. At any given moment in history, science has to treat some things as fundamental: certain laws of physics appear to explain most of the phenomena we see around us, but they can't themselves be explained any further. Over the last few centuries, there's been a lot of progress in combining separate laws for different kinds of phenomena into a single, coherent explanation, but there's always still a level that has to be taken for granted. But that's not a flaw in the scientific method; it's just the way things are with our present level of knowledge. There are people who think that if you ask the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” then the only meaningful answer is “God”. I can understand why they feel that way, but I don't think that's really an answer at all.
I don't know what you mean by “embracing science as the new God”, unless you mean abusing science to support particular political and social agendas. Science is a tool for discovering the way things are; it's then a completely separate matter to decide the way you want them to be. It always infuriates me when I hear politicians and economists using the word “rational” when they really mean “selfish” — or when opponents of rationality also try to pretend that the two things are the same. I don't think we should look to either science or religion as a basis for morality; science explains where some moral instincts come from, but that still doesn't tell us whether we should accept those instincts or not. But science is the only way we can hope to get the facts straight, about the world we're living in, and the consequences of our actions.
Most of your work so far tends to end up leading to metaphysical territories. Most of your characters, by rationally analyzing ad nauseam the world around them, end up transcending rational factuality and embrace metaphysical explanations. Is that because you think science will always have to follow the tracks of “reality”, that we can never attain “total knowledge”, or is it because you like the metaphysical in itself, that you think it's a necessity and a valuable resort for humans to understand the world?
I think what happens in my novels is that the border between science and metaphysics shifts: issues that originally seemed completely metaphysical, completely beyond the realms of scientific enquiry, actually become part of physics. That happens in reality all the time; if you spoke to a chemist from the 18th century about manipulating single atoms, they'd laugh at you as if you were talking about angels dancing on the head of a pin. There are parts of quantum mechanics where all we have is a mathematical formalism, a recipe for making predictions, and it's a question of metaphysics to ask what's “really” going on, because no experiment can say which interpretation of the mathematics is correct. Maybe it will stay that way, but maybe in twenty years' time there'll be a single, definite answer — so the question won't be “metaphysical” anymore. The situations I write about are much more speculative than that, but I think it's the same kind of thing. I'm writing about extending science into territory that was once believed to be metaphysical, not about abandoning or “transcending” science at all.
Today real science seems to be catching up with SF. Some of SF's most popular clichés are coming to life with quite a good periodicity. For instance, cloning is beginning to bother society with its ethical possibilities, above all with regards to the cloning of humans. How do you envision the moral debate that will arise from all these scientific advances, when most of the “developed” societies in the world are struggling to accept euthanasia or alternative family models?
Medical technology is probably going to keep offering us new choices like this for the next hundred years, but if we analyse them carefully I don't think it's all that difficult to make the right decisions. Human cloning seems to me to be an utterly pointless thing to do — and since the failure rate would be very high, and no one could predict what medical complications the clones might face later in life, I think it ought to be illegal. Some of the debates around medical issues tend to be very emotive and uninformed, but there's often a more sensible outcome in the long term than you'd imagine from listening to people's first responses. It's hard to believe some of the nonsense that was spoken about heart transplants when they were first being done; there were people seriously claiming that the recipient would take on the personality of the donor. Claims that you could “resurrect” a dead child or spouse with cloning are just as absurd, and I think that when the noise dies down, everyone will understand that.
In the battle between strong AI defenders and strong AI detractors you seem to be clearly allied with the strong AI militia. Assuming that the existence of self-conscious AIs is a matter of time, why do you think that some scientists are so focused in trying to prove that the human brain cannot be reduced to a “simple” chain of algorithms? Don't you think that this is an erroneous point of view, since the question here does not lie in mimicking the human biological brain, but in attaining a different inorganic form of consciousness?
I think you're referring to Roger Penrose, who's argued in The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind that computers could never be conscious. Penrose is a brilliant physicist and mathematician, but I think he's been misled by his intuition on this. The way computers work at present is vastly different from the way brains work, and I think Penrose is ultimately rebelling against the idea that humans are as boring and stupid as twentieth-century computers. Obviously we're not! But I think he's let a false comparison between the most primitive computers and the most sophisticated organic brains distort his reasoning. Once computers have been given the same built-in tools, the same flexibility, and the same breadth of education as human beings — which is easier said than done, and might take a century or more — they will be as conscious as any human being.
You've explained your Subjective Cosmology cycle by saying that what you were aiming for was to transcend the “normal” visions of the world by “seeing through some subjective aspect of our ordinary picture of the universe, and catching a glimpse of a more objective reality behind it”. Would you say that this is applicable to most of your writing?
I suppose most of my writing is about coming to terms with aspects of reality that go against our intuitive sense of the way things are. It's hard to make this dramatic these days; four centuries ago, people could get quite upset about whether or not the Earth went around the sun, but at the turn of the century, when Hubble showed that there were galaxies outside the Milky Way and the universe was billions of times larger than anyone had thought, no one but astronomers and physicists cared! So I like looking for new possibilities that are just as shocking, now, as the heliocentric theory was when it was first suggested — ideas about the structure of spacetime, or the structure of the human mind, which show that we still haven't come close to accepting how strange the universe might be.
You've been criticized for aiming too high but not fulfilling the expectations you had created. What would you say to these critics? Don't you think that a writer (or any kind of artist) has to follow his own rules and despise the rest?
I don't know exactly which critics you're referring to, but all I can say is that I try to make every book as true to its subject matter as I can — but exactly what that means with some of the subjects I'm dealing with can be very much a matter of opinion. And when people's expectations have been formed from the genre's worst clichés, I certainly don't want to fulfill them.
Greg, it is obvious that you have a very original vision and your fiction has a genuine mood and voice that is easily recognized as your own, but have you ever considered the idea of a collaborative work? What do you think a collaboration would provide to your writing?
I'd never do it. On a technical level, there's no problem that a single writer can't solve with enough research and imagination — there is no character or situation that it's impossible for me to write about. And on the level of overall approach, I don't believe that it's a novelist's responsibility to present every possible attitude to a subject within a single book; if readers want to read someone with opposing views to mine, there are plenty of places they can find them.
In your latest novel, Diaspora, you have virtually dispensed with human flesh-and-blood beings. By doing so you've given your characters the opportunity to develop and evolve with almost no restrictions. Apart from the literary virtues of this recourse, wasn't it a way of distancing yourself from the object of your exploration, a way to “objectivate” the subjectivity implicit in the fact that you yourself are an organic human being writing about the universe around you?
Certainly, the software characters in Diaspora are much more removed from me (and the readers) than any protagonists I've ever written about before, but that wasn't meant as an end in itself. I was just trying to be honest about what the future's likely to hold. Some writers are so obsessed with creating characters that readers can “relate to” — even when they're living in virtual reality, or a thousand years in the future — that they pretend that nothing important will change. I didn't want to do that. With the power to reshape themselves as much as they like, no one can seriously expect the inhabitants of VR to spend century after century just imitating us. And once they stop doing that, a lot of things that are central to our lives, right now, will either vanish, or come to be seen in a very different light.
Let's talk about the commercial side of the SF field and your relation to it. Every now and then we see reputable (and not so reputable) authors doing novelizations for movies, exploiting another (deceased) author's very well-known/well-thrashed universe, committing trilogy (or tetralogy) just for the sake of exploiting a setting or a future which's been profitable in the past, whatever they feel about it, provided it is going to sell. You once said that you were not eager to “prostitute” your work just for the sake of money, that you would go back to your regular job as a programmer rather than do a commercial by-product. Have you changed your opinion regarding this subject?
The whole point of being a writer, for me, is to have the freedom to explore the things I'm interested in; if you took away that freedom I'd have no reason to be a writer at all. I find writing very hard work, much harder than anything else I've ever done; if I tried to write about a subject that bored me, “just for the money”, it would be impossible. So I'm not even faced with temptation; it's like asking if I'm tempted to try to get rich by digging ditches or breaking rocks.
Anyway, no one has ever waved money in my face and begged me to write Blade Runner vs. Predator in Isaac Asimov's Robot City. I'm sure it's obvious to the people who manage these franchises that I'd be no good at it.
Your first passion was film-making. Can you tell us what you think of cinema as a way of expressing an artist's ideas today? Who are your favorite directors and who do you think will do justice to your stuff in an eventual filming of your work?
I still think the cinema can be an incredibly powerful medium. Films like “Underground”, “Fresh” and “Oscar and Lucinda” moved me far more than anything I've read for a long time. It's just a shame most SF films are so bad. The Coen Brothers are my favourite directors, but I wouldn't trust them to film anything I've written — and I doubt they'd want to. I did like “Twelve Monkeys”; that was probably the most logically coherent SF movie of the decade, which is pretty funny, considering that Terry Gilliam is not what you'd call a very analytical person. “Contact” was a complete sell-out, a betrayal of everything it was meant to be about.
Individuality is a subject omnipresent in your fiction. Do you think there's room for the total isolation from the other's points of view, that it is possible to remain a totally individualistic being?
I don't know whether it's possible to be isolated from other people's point of view, but I certainly don't think it's desirable. Individuality is a slippery thing, but it doesn't mean cutting yourself off from everyone else's ideas; it just means assessing them critically, and making the effort to contribute something original to your own beliefs. If we all had to find the truth for ourselves, no one would even get close. It would be like trying to live with only the things you could build with your bare hands. If you honestly believe that someone else's arguments are valid, the only sane thing to do is to accept them.
Solipsism is another recurrent topic in your fiction: the Solipsist Nation in Permutation City, the Ashton-Laval polis citizens and the truly solipsistic and uncanny Truth Mines in Diaspora, etc. Do you think that solipsism can be a reliable philosophy to face the enigmas of existence? Do new technologies open a whole new range of possibilities for philosophies so conceptual as solipsism?
Solipsism means believing that literally nothing but yourself exists, and I don't think that's a reliable philosophy, even if it's hard to be certain of anything else. But in Diaspora I was trying to show that there are dangerous extremes in both directions; ignoring the external world for the sake of an abstract life of the mind puts you at risk of certain perils, but abstraction can also be the key to understanding the physical world. Certainly, technology is going to keep blurring the distinction between the information that we get from our raw senses, and both “realistic” images of non-existent worlds and new kinds of data extracted from reality.
Is it true that you have abandoned the anthropic principle, as Brian Stableford commented in one of his Interzone reviews?
There are lots of different forms the anthropic principle can take. If there are multiple universes in any sense — either the many worlds of quantum mechanics, or the evolving generations of universes born from black holes that Lee Smolin talks about in The Life of the Cosmos — then it makes sense to say that the explanation for any special properties that let this universe support life is simply that we wouldn't be here otherwise. We're in a universe that supports life for the same reason we're on a planet that supports life, however rare that is in either case.
I've tended to write about far more radical versions of the anthropic principle, where the whole structure of what we consider “the universe” only makes sense from the perspective of a conscious observer. In the cosmologies of Permutation City and Distress, it's meaningless to talk about a universe without life; the ordering of events in spacetime and the laws of physics only exist inasmuch as they create, or explain, observers. I think I've written as much about that extreme possibility as I want to, at least for a while, but there are still some subtler versions that I might explore.
Between the two following memes, which one would you choose and why:
I wouldn't choose either. But I would say that if you don't know the truth, you don't even know what you're trying to heal. The truth is never enough, but it's a good start.
In the past you've said that you were not interested in creating a universe of your own, that the idea of using pre-existing settings and characters was a restrictive tool in the long term. You only admitted the use of the same technology as a constant in some of your work. One of the most incredible technologies you have “created” so far is the Ndoli Device, which appears in one of your most praised stories, “Learning to be me”, and in “Closer”. Are you going to use the jewels again in future stories? Have you thought about the possibilities of a full novel set in a world under the influence of such a pristinely scary device?
Maybe I'll include them as incidental technology in a novel one day, but that could be tricky, because I don't want to repeat “Learning to Be Me”, but I also don't want to treat the jewels as a kind of dumb SF gimmick that the characters just accept unquestioningly. One reviewer complained that I talked about the software characters in Diaspora without going into all the philosophical issues of copying personalities! Maybe that's a reasonable complaint, because every novel has to stand alone, but after exploring those issues in so many other things I've written, there comes a point where both for me, and for people who've read the other books and stories, there's nothing to be gained by going over the same old ground.
You've written what you've called the “Subjective Cosmology” novels, which include the first (and only) quantum-punk novel, Quarantine, the most thorough exploration of self-aware software, Permutation City, and the frankenscience, TOEs-centered mystery Distress. These three novels are set in the near future (say 50 years in the future) and their time scale is more or less short. Your last novel, Diaspora, is your most stapledonian work to date, it is SF in its largest scale. Are you going to maintain this large-scale framework in your forthcoming Teranesia? What are the ideas you are exploring in it?
Writing about the far future is hard work. If you're going to do it properly, you have to face the fact that all your personal experience of twentieth-century life, all the ordinary things a writer can draw on without thinking, are irrelevant. So even though I find it worthwhile, it might be a few more years before I can build up the courage to do it again.
Teranesia is set in the early and mid twenty-first century. It's about evolution, the Indian Rationalists Association, the breakup of Indonesia, quantum mechanics, and sex.
This is the last question. If you visited Greg Egan twenty years in the future, what could you tell us about him?
He'll probably still be struggling to catch up with real science.
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