Interview: Martin Millar, October 2000

This interview took place in October 2000, at the monthly British Science Fiction Association night in London. This interview previously appeared in Vector #215, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association.

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TB: You first published under your real name of Martin Millar, but the Thraxas books are published under the name 'Martin Scott'. Why the pseudonym?

MM: Just so as not to get them confused at first, and because I didn't think they were respectable enough for a proper author.

TB: Do you feel that fantasy's a ghetto literature?

MM: My reputation as an author - as Martin Millar - is OK, but my book sales …well, it keeps me going but it's not fantastic. Little, Brown probably wouldn't have been that keen to start publishing fantasy books by Martin Millar. As for fantasy being some kind of ghetto, I changed my mind about that quite quickly. I quite soon decided that it was OK to say it was me. But yes, at first thinking they were not respectable enough. Science fiction would have probably always seemed more respectable.

TB: Are the Thraxas novels selling better than the Martin Millar books?

MM: About equivalent. They haven't taken off to the extent we'd like, but on the other hand, with the way sales figures are on books in general, they're selling about equivalent in Britain and they're starting to sell in other countries. I don't really have proof of it yet, but it would be no surprise to me if they were to keep me going in my old age.

TB: How do you feel being labelled - as Martin Millar - as a cult author?

MM: I don't mind because I'm so used to it, but my dad groans every time he sees that. I don't like it too much really.

TB: The Martin Millar books have all been reissued, haven't they?

MM: They're in the process of being reissued. It'll be a while until they all come back out. It does mean that the book of mine which I get most email correspondence about, The Good Fairies of New York [hereafter Good Fairies], will be back in print in a while.

TB: That book, in particular, is very popular in Germany, isn't it?

MM: I get a lot of email from young German women who want to be fairies! I have fairies in my house that people have sent me, more than one from Germany. When I started off writing, twelve or thirteen years ago, Fourth Estate did sell Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation [Alby] to quite a lot of countries. That tailed off afterwards in most of them, but Germany carried on. I'm really not sure why.

TB: I could see Dreams of Sex and Stagediving [Sex & Stagediving] having a wider audience, because it's less rooted in the Brixton location. Perhaps the world of startup bands and pub gigs is more accessible.

MM: I guess so. I've suffered for this a little bit. It never seems to me that it particularly matters where books are set, if you like them. I've never broken through in America and I would seriously like to, and that tends to get stymied at the start with American editors saying 'What's this, Brixton? Our readers won't understand that'.

TB: You've put some of your rejection letters for Love & Peace with Melody Paradise [Melody Paradise] on your website.

MM: That was a strange experience, not being able to get Melody Paradise published. I had been kind of relying on Fourth Estate: it was a surprise to me when they didn't want to publish that book. I never really knew why that was. I think they just kind of changed direction, really.

TB: They seemed to be expecting something a bit grimmer.

MM: Yes. I'm not really a grim writer in that way. I could never have been Irvine Welsh. I was going to say I wasn't interested in people's sufferings, but that's not exactly right. I like to write about people who aren't in the best circumstances, making the best of it and having a good time. The trouble with Melody Paradise was that it was never going to be grim, because basically they were people who were going to have a good time in some manner.
I mailed a manuscript of Melody Paradise into the publisher. It went to an editor that I had never met, who was new at the company, and she didn't like it. That was about it really. It did make it quite hard to change publishers. If there's other authors at my kind of level, that's probably an experience they would have shared, trying to change publishers. Publishers like either taking on new people that they can build up, or taking on very successful people. But if you're in the middle, actually changing is difficult.

TB: Melody Paradise is a bit of a departure, because the previous novels are very urban, and this novel's set mainly in the countryside. The other novels are possibly more paranoid, less cheerful.

MM: Well, the first book, Alby, is very urban paranoia. I live in Streatham now, up the hill, but I lived in Brixton for a long time, so I wanted to write about that. The things that I really like, the books that I really like, and that influence me, don't really fit into 'urban paranoia'. If I was trapped on a desert island with just an English novelist then it would probably be P G Wodehouse - I'd probably want that to entertain me. I wouldn't really want to be reading about drug problems in the city! Everything I read is pretty old. Another of my big favourites is Somerset Maugham, and after reading a lot of Somerset Maugham, I consciously wrote a story in his style, or at least with his method of narration, which was published in Disco Biscuits . Melody Paradise is kind of an extension of that. It's me as Somerset Maugham reporting what I've been doing.

TB: Another of your literary influences is Jane Austen. You co-wrote a play about her, which was produced at the Edinburgh Festival. It's soon to be out as a book, isn't it?

MM: That's from a small publisher, Nick Hern Books, that specialise in play texts. They have paid us for it, but it's dragging a little bit coming out. The play was great, though; I wrote it with Doon MacKichan, who's a fairly well-known face on TV. She's one of the Smack the Pony women. I met her at an abortion rights benefit in Brixton. I can't remember how, but we just became friends, and we both liked Jane Austen, so we thought we'd write the play. We wrote it years before it got put on. It was the most co-operative thing I ever did. Writing is usually sitting at the computer, not speaking to anybody for a long time, and it was quite strange to be involved in this play. I was a bit dubious at first, but it was fun writing it with Doon. Then it had to go to a director and actors … That was really fun, I enjoyed that, and we got quite well reviewed, which was a big surprise to me.

TB: 'Jane Austen would spin in her grave', according to one reviewer.

MM: Which I say is a mistake. Jane Austen was such a mighty genius that I'm sure she wouldn't have spun in her grave. She had to live a kind of conservative life, because she was constrained by her circumstances, but I'm sure if she was living today she'd be a big media giant or something. She wouldn't be sat embroidering somewhere.

TB: Is the play going to be put on again in London?

MM: I wouldn't really think so, no.

TB: Any other plays, or theatrical productions, coming up?

MM: No, but … My favourite programme of all, maybe my favourite thing in the world, is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy is just fantastic: I love Buffy so much. So I thought I'd have a go at writing a film script, for a change, influenced by Buffy. Other than Buffy, one of my favourite films is Clueless - what a fantastic film, and it's Jane Austen again. As you can see I'm not really into the harsh realities of a lot of things, and my tastes are not really the harsh realities of life. I wrote a film script, which is a teen comedy set in Britain, which almost nobody knows about. And that's not really a very British thing, because our films are like Trainspotting and so on, but this is more a Clueless kind of thing. My agent has been sending it round film people, and they've managed to raise some interest…
This is part of my long-term plan to get to write Buffy. I get this film done, that introduces me to the film world, and I go to Hollywood and get to write Buffy … I had to connect to Sky, which I resisted for years, even though I like football: I thought 'I'm not bloody connecting to Sky, that Rupert Murdoch'. The BBC are just awful when it comes to the programmes they import. They have no respect for these programmes. They just kept messing around with Buffy, and I had to connect to Sky to keep up.
TB: In Sex and Stagediving, you create a computer game where there's a raft on the sea occupied by famous historical personages: you never put Jane Austen on the raft, though!

MM: It was a bit disrespectful. I do love Jane Austen: I don't know if she's an influence or not. She wrote such beautiful, perfect prose that I try to emulate her. And the world is so different now. Life is not the same these days. I've got a fairly short attention span. I need all the chapters of my books to be brief. So I could never really keep going at her sustained prose. However, after Alby, which contains slang, and incomplete sentences, I did consciously decide not to do that, and to form proper sentences and paragraphs, which is important to me. I think that's probably not important to anybody else. I like the grammar and the composition to be good. Maybe that's Jane's influence.

TB: Is there an element of magic realism in some of your Martin Millar books? The example that springs to mind is in Ruby & the Stone Age Diet [Ruby] where the nameless narrator goes down into the hall. He meets the postman, the woman from downstairs, and Ascanazl, the Inca god of lonely people. I had this flashback to Marquez and Louis de Bernieres, with the fantastic elements intruding into real life. Where do you stand on this? And are your characters seeing things that are real, or are they just taking too many drugs?

MM: I find that quite hard to answer, really, for that character. The narrator of Ruby was slipping out of reality at times, for reasons which are not entirely explained. It was more like he was building a fantasy world because of his loneliness and alienation, and just stepped too far into it at times. On the other hand it was slightly drug-induced. That's just what he thought.

TB: Quite a few of the narrators of your Martin Millar novels have magic in their lives. Or do they just concentrate hard enough on what's real to make it into something magical?

MM: Do they have magic in their lives? It's probably more fantasy than magic. Personally I have an extensive fantasy life: out shopping or on the bus or whatever, I find myself in various characters, some of which are really warped to a surprising degree. I think that everyone must do that: I'm sure that everybody must have some degree of fantasy life. I don't know how much everybody works it out. Scoring for Scotland has always been a popular one for me.

TB: There's the fairies, in The Good Fairies of New York, which is probably the point at which the fantasy world intrudes into reality.

MM: When it gets to the fairies, that's no longer the characters' internal fantasy lives, or the drug influences or anything. The fairies are meant to be real, which is a conceit, I guess. I always loved music. I never had any particular talent for it, but I did manage to play chords, and play in punk bands, which was fun. A lot of the crusties and squatters in Brixton played Irish music in pubs, and one good thing about Irish music is that if you're not such a good musician, you're kind of aware of the tunes, and you can join in. I liked playing with people, but I'm not a particularly good musician, so with the tin whistle and later with the flute, I started playing at the sessions. The fairies came out of that, out of my keenness for playing Irish music. I get slightly obsessed with things, and I always like to go with that, because it tends to lead to something worthwhile, like Irish music to the fairies, or Buffy to the film script. I'm always about to do another 'Good Fairies' book. Quite often it doesn't seem like quite the right time, but I'll definitely do another one some time.

TB: "How pleasant fairies are. I wrote a book about them once, and will do so again as soon as public disapproval for the first one dies down." (That's the narrator, one 'Martin Millar', in Melody Paradise). Was it that much disapproved of?

MM: No, it wasn't really: that was more or less a joke. Writing Good Fairies probably did end my chances of being a serious author - reviews in the Times, and the Booker Prize, and so on.

TB: Just how much of the narrator of Melody Paradise is you?

MM: This is the Somerset Maugham-influenced one. There's been bits of me in other ones - in Alby, in Ruby, in Sex and Stagediving - but those were more fictionalised and made-up. The 'Martin' in this one is more like me: anyway, it's meant to be.

TB: "My best endeavours in the world of literature have led to very little and I am now being superseded by younger authors with more enthusiasm and better ideas," he says. Is that how you feel?

MM: If I'm putting bits of me into it, I can put parts like that in: but I don't really think in such a depressed manner as the narrator in that one. But I do think in the Ancient Greek-obsessed manner of the narrator of Melody Paradise.

TB: Why Ancient Greece?

MM: I'm not sure, but it's a long-term interest. It's probably one of the oldest things I can remember being interested in. I can get really tedious on the subject. I don't know why. But I do love the thought of ancient Athens: I'd kind of like to be there - apart from the slaves, and the poor status of women - but I could institute constitutional reforms.

TB: You've worked it into various books, like the bag lady's delusion in Good Fairies - she is Xenophon …

MM: That might even be a plot weakness, really; there might have been something better for her. But they were very interesting, the Ancient Greeks. Such a huge outpouring of civilisation, and they were all fighting each other all the time, which was a pity. I kind of regret that. They left all these beautiful artefacts, and I just love them. I don't want to give them back.

TB: You managed to work the Venus de Milo into the novelisation of Tank Girl! Why did you do that novelisation - was she a particularly appealing character, or was it a lot of money?

MM: It was a lot of money. By the time they'd organised the contract between Jamie Hewlett, the originator of Tank Girl, and Penguin, the publisher, and the film people, it left me five weeks to write that novelisation, and the fee was £10,000. None of my other books was at a comparable rate. That's why I wrote it: it was such a lot of money for so little time. When I started writing my professional ethics took over and I thought "Well, I must just try and make this good". It wasn't a good film, and it really was a lousy script. I thought "Well, I just can't make this into a novel that isn't rubbish". So I tried to capture the spirit of Tank Girl. Tank Girl let me down in the end, because she was just an icon. I think most people who came across Tank Girl just saw the picture and thought "that's fantastic, what a great picture", but if they actually read the comics - well, I don't think they were particularly well-written or anything. But they have a good spirit and I tried to get that into the book.

TB: She did strike me as in the same spectrum as Elfish and Melody Paradise. Tank Girl is completely self-obsessed and vain, like quite a few of your other characters are.

MM: There's something appealing about heroic vanity. Lux (in Lux the Poet) was my first heroically vain character. Think back to the teen movies and American teen TV; you come across that character in there, but I can't quite think of a British equivalent. Alby was always worried about being ugly and grotesque. Lux, who is in some ways a kind of anti-Alby, is just so pretty and so good-looking. I think that must be nice. Tank Girl's vanity was different, but that fitted into the whole thing.

TB: Someone just gave me this review, which you may not have seen, of Alby. "A look at Thatcher's Britain from the point of view of a comic collector with a bad speed habit, a milk allergy and Triad enemies. It's for anyone who's ever wondered what life is really like in London in the Eighties, and anyone else who likes to read cyberpunk and is prepared to overlook a total lack of cyber'.[Science Fiction Eye, #5] So, are you a cyberpunk author then?

MM: No, not at all. I guess it was Thatcher's Britain. I never really felt that at the time: it was just what life was like, through that period. I was never thinking about Margaret Thatcher.

TB: They seem quite dated to me: I reread the Brixton novels and there's a real sense of period as well as place.

MM: There are some things that I would realise, in the way that Brixton has changed: the squatting and suchlike is very different now. There may be more things. It's too hard for me to comment on, being inside them. I really like to write about people, generally, and about friendship. I've really never tried to write cool characters, or make them hip in any manner. I was just interested in them as people, and all this stuff that they were surrounded with in the Eighties are just the things that I was surrounded with. I guess that's come and gone now, but when I wrote Alby, about 1984 or 1985, Brixton was not hip. At the end of the 70s and start of the 80s, if you couldn't really afford to live anywhere better, you went to live in Brixton. Slightly later there were the riots, and Scarman, and it developed a kind of hipness around it. But that was accidental as far as I was concerned.

TB: Onto the Thraxas books … it seems that it just came as a shock revelation from the publishers: guess what! Martin Scott is really Martin Millar! Is that how it was, or was the connection just not particularly advertised?

MM: The pseudonym was partly my idea at first, and partly theirs, because they wanted to establish it as a different author. It was outed by me. I think it struck me one day that if I was American, there's no way that I'd be hiding books that I had published.

TB: How did you start writing them?

MM: I didn't write the first one for money at the time. I'd finished Good Fairies, and I had some time before it seemed right to write another novel. And I always like being busy: I get itchy and unsatisfied if I'm not writing something. I wrote a version then, and that lay about for a couple of years. I had quite liked it but not been too concerned about it. It wasn't until the time when I had the publishing problems that I looked at it and thought "well, that wasn't bad, I should try and make money out of this." I have a slight Scottish Protestant thing about earning a living, and it seemed better to me to be earning my living by writing Thraxas under a pseudonym, rather than not doing anything at all. I had some good fortune, because my agent handed the Thraxas manuscript to the right person, which was Tim Holman at Little, Brown. He liked it. I had written it as short stories at first, and at his suggestion I rewrote it as a novel. Then he said he'd publish it, but he wanted three. It wasn't actually a trilogy, it was just three in a series. And they're pretty short, you know: you could fit three of them into various meaty books that you see on the shelves. They're probably the same length as the Brixton novels: about 60,000 words.

TB: The first three all came out in 1999, but you'd been working on them for quite a bit before that.

MM: I wrote them quite quickly. The first one was written a long time before. I can't exactly think how long I took to write the other three, but certainly within a year.

TB: Isn't Thraxas' world rather grittily realist for a fantasy novel?

MM: I have quite a lot to say about Thraxas that would probably not be apparent to anybody else reading them. For instance, Thraxas being fat is very important to me. He's the only large character I've ever written, and that's quite liberating, because I have an uncomfortable relationship with food. Most of the characters in my books have been thin: nobody eats enthusiastically, and I don't eat enthusiastically. Having Thraxas as an extremely enthusiastic eater, and being large, is almost therapeutic for me.
Another influence from real life is that I get to write about a character in a chain mail bikini. My other books have been heavily influenced, in rather a good way I think, by hardcore Brixton feminism. Having a character busting out of a chain mail bikini was kind of liberating. I always liked my Red Sonja comics when I was young, and I could never get that out in my Martin Millar books. As for the gritty realism … it's meant to be a city which is somewhere between ancient Rome and medieval. It's dirty, and there's bad weather, and poverty and suchlike.

TB: One thing that did strike me about the Thraxas novels is that he's more mature than your other narrators.

MM: Yes, he's reached the 'cynical about life' stage.

TB: He thinks people should cut their hair and get jobs!

MM: In the same way that he's able to eat properly, or over-eat, it's a release for him to be grumpy at these young people with funny hair. I don't personally feel like that, but I just like writing him. He could probably do with being slightly more grumpy and unsympathetic, but I have problems making my central characters too unsympathetic. They end up a bit friendlier than I intended.

TB: You write in the first person, and in the present tense, a great deal.

MM: The Brixton books were present tense because I liked that, and then I moved into the past tense, thinking that it was really time to grow up. Thraxas was just back to the present tense because it seemed to suit the detective theme. It would have been nice to write them in a completely noir manner, but that is a very specialised art. I don't think many people can do noir detective fiction really well.

TB: Especially noir fantasy detective fiction.

MM: Yes, it would be very hard to pull that off.
I'm unashamedly fond of Tolkien. I still use The Hobbit as a comfort book. What I would have most liked to do would be to set the investigator in the world of Tolkien, because I thought that would be rather funny, really, to investigate things from The Hobbit, into Minas Tyrith and over to Mordor and suchlike. But I knew there was no point doing that because there's no way that the estate would have allowed anybody to do that.

TB: You've done it on a different level, subverting the myth of the nice, friendly, pretty elves.

MM: I'm not a theorist about science fantasy or fiction, so I'm sure I have nothing particularly original to say about it, but one thing that always struck me, that I didn't really like, was that Tolkien's orc civilisations are savages, but that's not really credible. Any time you've got swords, then you have blacksmiths, and there'd be a king, and there'd be religion, and a whole culture grows up. Likewise, the elves couldn't all just be happy in trees, because society is never like that. Maybe a lot of them will be happy in trees, but there'll be some things going wrong, jealousies and stuff like that, so I was interested in that as well.

TB: Well, the other problem with Tolkien is that he hasn't got enough women.

MM: Well, his women are just awful, really, and they're idealised figures.

TB: So you've introduced the chain mail bikini - and the Association of Gentlewomen, which is a fine thing.

MM: Yes - the feminist organisation. Makri is meant to be very intelligent as well as a savage fighter, the reason for her wearing a chain mail bikini is to get tips as a barmaid.

TB: It's a shame that the Thraxas novels are marketed as comic fantasy: there's a lot more to them.

MM: I don't mind the comic fantasy aspect. We haven't got to the World Fantasy Award yet. I have something to say about that with regards to the marketing. The first Thraxas novel is up for the World Fantasy Award, which is judged at a convention in Texas on Sunday. [NB: IT WON!] I think the judges of the Award have already made their decisions, but I'm kind of hopeful about that. I've never won a prize for anything. I have no inside information except that Little, Brown tell me that they want to offer me a two-book contract, to do two more - which kind of makes me wonder "Oh, have I won the prize or something?" And they say they want to put them out in rather more serious covers.

TB: Who do you read, in fantasy and SF?

MM: I read hardly any contemporary things, because in contemporary non-SF writing, I don't find too much that I like. The reason, really, is that I just avoid contemporary literature so I can write my own. I've had a childhood and youth, growing up pretty happy with Michael Moorcock books, his long series of Eternal Champion books - he's no doubt a strong influence for my fantasy thoughts. I am more a 'books about Ancient Athens' person than a contemporary literature person. The fiction I read is mainly from the last century.

TB: In Melody Paradise, the narrator is asked: "Will you write the Ancient Greece book that only ten people will read?" Well, will you?

MM: I tried that. I tried to reincarnate Lux the Poet in ancient Greece, and it just didn't work very well. That was my best idea for writing a book in Ancient Greece, so I'm stuck on that now. I just would love to write something which was set in Classical Athens, but I'm not able. I'd have a slight worry that nobody would want to read it. At the start of my career I really couldn't give a fuck who liked the first book, and I didn't think anyone was going to read it anyway, and so I wasn't really bothered what I wrote about. The second one was the same. I just changed over the years - you've got to make a living. I would rather never have to think about what people are going to think, or what people are going to buy, or read or whatever, but I can't really avoid it. I regret that but it's true.

TB: Are you an optimist or a pessimist?

MM: I think I'm a pessimist. I'm not completely pessimistic. As I've got older I've become more career-oriented, in fact: I like my career in writing, and I refuse to give up. I'm fairly ambitious about various things, ambitious in a way that I wish I'd been when I was younger. When it comes to income, health, personal relationships, I'm pessimistic.

Claire Brialey: You seem to have a knack of writing short short stories which maintain the authorial voice of your main 'Martin Millar' novels. Is writing short stories something you particularly enjoy doing, or find easy to do, compared to writing novels? And will there be a collection?

MM: I like writing short stories a lot, but I don't do it for pleasure. I've collected nine or ten of them on my website, and they're all commissioned, which is why I start doing them. Yes, there probably will be a collection some time. I do like writing odd bits, but I might get slightly carried away with the thought that they have to be funny. I'd probably find that if somebody asked me to write a short story I'd have to be amusing in some way. That probably comes from P. G. Wodehouse, who wrote very funny short stories. I often mention P. G. Wodehouse if someone comes to interview me for the NME or something, and it always just gets me a blank look.

TB: Martin Millar, Martin Scott, thank you very much.

Interview: Philip Pullman, August 2000

This interview took place in August 2000, at Lexicon, a small literary convention (Unicon 2000) held in Oxford, England. An edited version of this interview (of which this is a lightly-edited transcript) previously appeared in Locus #479, December 2000.

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TB: I noticed in the programme book that there’s an early novel of yours that doesn’t seem to have been reprinted, Galatea
PP: Oh, Galatea: I’ll talk about that one. There’s another one, too, which I don’t talk about. Galatea was published in 1976, I think: published by Victor Gollancz in this country, and Duttons, I think, in the States. It’s a book which I remain fond of. I think Gollancz had a fantasy, or science fantasy, list at the time, and it had this limited life in this country, but it continues to lurk in the States. Each time I go over there and I’m signing the books which are currently in print, someone comes along with a second-hand copy of Galatea and asks me to sign that. Also there’s a chap at R____? University, I think, who’s apparently teaching it, using photocopied stuff, and there’s a fellow in Seattle, University of Washington, who wrote a chapter on it in a book about post-modernism – in which he also talks about Dean Martin, Andy Warhol and somebody else. I’m very happy to belong to that company. So, Dean Martin and I are icons of post-modernism. But I hope it’ll come back into print, because it is a book which I remain fond of. I don’t know how you’d classify it; but then classifying anything is terribly hard. I don’t know what’s fantasy and what isn’t fantasy. I suppose sort of magical realist … it’s a year or two too early for the magic realist thing, otherwise it’d have ridden that wave, but it didn’t.
TB: You’ve been quoted in several places as saying that you don’t read much fantasy, that you think fantasy isn’t a worthwhile form of literature.
PP: Don’t tell them! [gesture at audience]
TB: I think they’ve guessed! Can you expand on that?
PP: You invite me to the lion’s den and then you say …
TB: We’ve got you surrounded now.
PP: What I mean by that, what I’m getting at, rather clumsily, by saying that, is that what I remember of the fantasy that I’ve read – and I have not read much modern fantasy, I have to say … I haven’t read much modern fantasy – by modern I mean post-Tolkien. I read Tolkien when I was an undergraduate at this very college, 35 years ago. I met Tolkien, and I’ll tell you my Tolkien story. Upstairs, in the Rector’s lodgings, 32 years ago. What I remember from Tolkien was that here was a book full of the most tremendous excitement, with a narrative skill that left me breathless, and which continues to teach, I think, three very interesting things about the quest story, which is the basis of The Lord of the Rings, but which didn’t actually tell me very much about being a human being. I found more of that in Jane Austen, for example, than I found in Tolkien. Maybe that’s my fault, not Tolkien’s fault, maybe that’s not what people go to Tolkien for: but that’s what I was mostly interested in. I was mostly interested in the sort of literary experiences I was getting from George Eliot and Jane Austen, more so than what I was getting from Tolkien. In the book that – I suppose it’s fantasy – Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife, and in The Amber Spyglass which is coming out in November – what I’ve tried to do there is use the apparatus of fantasy to say something that I think is true about human psychology and about the way we grow up and about the difference between innocence and experience and so on. Now, I know that I’m missing a lot, and I know that each one of you could instantly quote me half a dozen books of fantasy which do this: I’m accumulating a reading list. I will eventually read all the things I should have done. Would you like to hear my Tolkien story?
Audience: [frenzied yips of assent]
PP: When I was an undergraduate at this college – this was Tolkien’s own college. He was a Fellow here for many years, but he’d retired by the time I came here to read English. Now, in my day – I think it still goes on, but they might have stopped it now, I don’t know – if you were unfortunate enough to read English at Oxford you had to study this filthy language, Anglo-Saxon, which we all hated. It’s just full of barbarous, horrible sounds, and there’s no literature in it, and all the rest of the stuff. That’s what we thought then. So, we weren’t very keen on Anglo-Saxon. Nevertheless, for some reason, the Rector of Exeter College was kind enough to invite me and two of my friends – all of us reading English – to dinner to meet Tolkien. This was in 1968, when everybody was being Hobbits, you know, we were all going about being hippies. He was pretty famous then. We went into dinner upstairs, in the Rector’s Lodgings – thank God I was not sitting next to the old boy. One friend was sitting on his right, the other on his left. He turned to the first one – he knew we were all reading English – “Tell me,” he said, “how are they pronouncing Anglo-Saxon these days?” My friend, who was as idle and ignorant as I was, could only sort of gasp and goggle. So Tolkien, slightly displeased, turned the other way and said, “And did you enjoy The Lord of the Rings?” – to which my other friend had to say, “I’m awfully sorry, I haven’t read it.” So – well, I could’ve answered that question, but I couldn’t have done the first question. So that’s my Tolkien story: I have actually met him. But I’ve read The Lord of the Rings, indeed, but not for a while. So, what I’m getting at when I say .. when I make what appear to be disparaging remarks about fantasy, are only functions of my ignorance of what the best fantasy is. Because my main interest, as a writer of novels, is in saying something which I believe to be true about the way which I think we are. I haven’t … I didn’t see that in Tolkien, and so I haven’t read much fantasy since.
TB: It’s quite easy to group your work into three or four sections: there’s the books for younger readers, at least one of which – Spring-Heeled Jack – is partly a graphic novel. You’ve said before that comics were what you read as a child, what influenced you a great deal: have you ever considered doing a full-length graphic novel?
PP: Yes, several times; but what I’d like to do is draw it, as well as write it. In fact, I do go to drawing classes – I have done for a number of years – the little illustrations in Northern Lights are something that … I did them, so look, I’m a professional illustrator, I’m proud to say, as well as a writer. … I do go to this drawing class, when I’ve got the time. It’s a life class. What annoys me when I see illustrations is people whose bodies don’t fit together; the shoulders don’t work or something. So I thought I ought to go and study how do people’s bodies work, so I went to this drawing class, which means I’m now fully equipped to write and illustrate The Child’s Book of Nudes. I can’t do clothes yet! Actually, faces are the difficult thing. If you want to tell stories, you have to be able to draw faces. What I really, really admire, in the work of the very greatest comic books artists – for example, Hergé – is that, in a work – in any of the Tintin books – you will find a large cast, each of 2which, each of the characters can be perfectly distinguished in terms of their features. They always look different from each other. You can always tell that character when they turn up. And furthermore, each character can have a range of different expressions on their face, and still be recognisable as that character. Now that is the hardest thing of all to do, and once I’ve been to enough drawing lessons and drawn enough faces and so on, and learnt to do that, then I’ll do my graphic novel.
TB: And will that be another Penny Dreadful?
PP: Well, that would be fun. I don’t know what it’ll be yet, but I have got this ambition. I love comics. I used to read – well, some of you are old enough to remember the Eagle – Dan Dare – wonderful stuff. When I was a boy in Australia – we lived in Australia for about 18 months when I was about nine – that was the first time I saw American comics, I mean Superman and Batman, in their pre-self-conscious, post-modernist stage, when they weren’t dark. I loved these things; I felt such a thrill when I first saw a Batman comic: I can’t compare it to anything else, really; just this sudden excitement of seeing this way of telling a story. It was so new to me and so exciting to me and so vivid and so powerful. I can remember the thrill to this very day. Comics … newspapers used to be delivered – the boy used to ride along the street and throw them onto the lawn. I remember each week when the bundle arrived with my comic in, I used to race out there and get it. I still feel that excitement now.
TB: I just described these as Penny Dreadfuls, and Jim in the Sally Lockhart books reads Spring-Heeled Jack and so on. Are they actually original Victorian tales retold?
PP: Well, Spring-heeled Jack was a character in Victorian penny dreadfuls. He was, like Batman, a costumed super-hero. Spring-Heeled Jack’s costume – he was supposed to look like the Devil, so he would put springs in his heels. Which incidentally I saw in the paper the other day, some Russian’s invented now, did you see that? Petrol-powered spring-heeled boots, which you can bound along on.
TB: How do you steer?
PP: Well, I don’t know: you lean? By bouncing off walls, probably. The idea was that he was dressed as the Devil and he would turn up to rescue ladies in distress, to apprehend villains and all this sort of stuff. There were huge numbers of these penny dreadfuls, in series; there was the Deadwood Dick series, there was the Wildfire Ned series, and all this sort of thing. Most of them have vanished, because they were printed on cheap paper and nobody thought they were worth collecting anyway, and so they’ve gone the way of a lot of popular literature. But there is a collection in the Bodleian Library here, the John Johnson collection, if anyone’s interested. You can go and look at some of these things, which have been preserved and which still exist. I think they’re fascinating, they’re lovely; I just feel a sort of warm glow when I think of these things. When I was doing my penny dreadful cum graphic novel, I took Spring-Heeled Jack as my hero, and just sort of wove a story around that. It’s partly graphic novel, as you say: it’s got speech balloons and it’s got little poems; but it’s got text in between. This I found quite hard to do, because there’s a curious thing that happens when you write a story in pictures; it is in the present tense, whether you want it to be or not. Pictures are in the present tense. But the text in between the pictures was in the past tense, like a conventional story. So there is a sort of disjunction, a not-quite-fit between the text and the pictures, which I never really solved. I did another story in the same format, called Count Karlstein, which is based on – well, not based on, set in – the world of German Romantic ghost stories, legends and this sort of thing. In the same style: a graphic novel with elements of text. Still there’s this basic contradiction between the past tense of the narrative and the present tense of the pictures – which I find very interesting, and I can talk for hours about it, but I won'’ say much more about it. I could solve the problem by writing the text in the present tense, but I don’t like doing that, so I’m stuck.
TB: The Sally Lockhart books – I suppose you could call them expanded penny dreadfuls. They do have that sort of … that same narrative structure: excitement, chase, denouement .. except there’s far more moral depth to them.
PP: I’m grateful to you for saying that! I hope there is. I hope also that  - going back to the notion of telling a story rather than showing it in pictures – I was able to use the tone of voice, the tone of the narrative … the controlling intelligence that’s telling the story, if you like, has a tone of voice. This is different for every book that you write, and part of the difficulty when you begin a book comes from – as those of you who are writers, and I know there are some here who are – you’ll know this – one of the most difficult things to do when you’re starting a book is to find the right tone of voice to tell it in. That’s partly to do with how much humour you can expect to be understood; there’s a sort of shared space of humour between you and the reader, how much you can rely on that and how much you have to tell them before they understand what you’re saying is funny. Sometimes it’s quite a lot! But it’s also something to do with the basic narrative problem which faces a director of films: I don’t know if anyone knows David Mamet’s very interesting book on directing films. He says – I’m not quoting exactly – the basic question for a director of films to decide is ‘where do I put the camera?’ and that is really the basis of ‘where is this coming from?’ Where am I seeing this from? How close am I going to the action, how far back can I go, how much is in focus. If it’s a shot with narrow depth of field, so you isolate someone against a suggested background, it’s a different effect from if it’s all in focus, if you have a very small aperture, in photographic terms. All these things are story-telling decisions that I find fascinating and very interesting. They’re more under your control, you’re more able to do that sort of thing, if you write in the third person not in the first person. Which is why I always prefer to write in the third person. When I was doing the Sally books, I found that that suddenly became available to me, that sort of tone and that control, of where things are seen from, of what tone it’s reported in, and so on. So that’s what I was having fun with in the Sally books, and will continue to have fun, because there’s going to be more.
TB: Oh yes, The Tin Princess is finally coming out in this country. What took so long? That’s been out in the States for six years.
PP: Well, it’s been available in this country, theoretically; in other words it was published by Penguin. They published it six or seven years ago, Puffin published it; they did their best to conceal its existence from the public, and consequently few people heard about it and it wasn’t widely sold. It only very recently – well, comparatively recently – went out of print in the Penguin edition, because Scholastic wanted to republish it, together with the three – the first three Sally books, but they couldn’t get the rights, because Penguin were saying ‘yes, it’s still in print, there are three copies on a shelf in Swindon!’ So Scholastic couldn’t get rights! Anyhow, it’s coming out in November, I’m very glad to say.
TB: And you say that’s not the last one …
PP: It’s not. It’s the last that I’ve written, the last so far, but I certainly want to write more. I like those characters, I like the way they interact with each other, and I want to see more of Jim and Adelaide in particular. I want to bring the events up to the mid-1890s before I’ve finished. There’s a sort of background theme of photography going through the books. Sally meets this young photographer, Fred Garland, in the first book. Fred’s uncle Webster is very interested in photographic experiments, and in The Tiger in the Well they’re building the first sort of apparatus to photograph motion. Experiments of this sort were going on all over the world, of course. There were the Mybridge photographs in America, there were the French experiments of the Lumiere brothers for many years, and so on, so this was very much of the time. And because it relates so closely to story-telling, to the way we tell stories in pictures, I thought it was an interesting thing to have going on in the background of the stories. And I want to bring it up to the mid-1890s because that’s when the first true cinema films were made, the first true moving pictures were shown. That’s a theme I want to continue, and in 1896 or so, Sally’s daughter Harriet will be 16, which is a good age for her to have an adventure, I think, so we’ll do that.
TB: One thing that struck me about the Sally books is that they’re marketed as children’s’ or young adult books, and there are certainly some very adult moral questions raised in them. In the third book Sally is in a position where she may have to barter sex. How much of the moral undertone are your target audience – who are your target audience, and how much of the moral undertone will they get? How much will just pass them by?
PP: Well, this is a very large issue. The whole question of who books are for is a terribly difficult one. The most difficult question I ever found to answer is ‘who do you write for?’ The honest answer is, I don’t write for anyone, actually, except myself: I write for the story. But inevitably publishers want to know – well, it’s not so much publishers. Bookshops want to know who your audience is, and librarians want to know who your audience is, and parents like to know what sort of age it is, because they’ll buy books for children without reading them themselves necessarily, and they want to know whether it’s ‘suitable’ for a twelve-year-old or something. I haven’t the faintest idea. My ideal, and what I would like to consider myself doing – what I do like to consider myself doing – is the old notion of sitting in a marketplace, where all kinds of other transactions are going on around me. People are buying food and selling food, and somebody doing tricks over there in the corner, and the pickpocket over there, and there’s a public hanging over in the corner, all sorts of stuff. And there I am on a bit of carpet with a hat in front of me, telling a story. And whoever wants to stop and listen is welcome to do so. I do not put up a sign saying ‘this story is only for twelve year olds’ or ‘no children welcome here’ or ‘only women need be interested in this story’ or anything like that. I don’t want to exclude anyone, because as soon as you say ‘this story is for such and such a group’, what you’re actually saying as well is ‘this story is not for anybody else’. I don’t want to do that. I would like to tell the sort of story which brings children from play and old men from the chimney corners, as somebody used to say. I’d like to tell a story which is entertaining and interesting, in necessarily different ways, but nevertheless to all kinds of people and all different age groups. I’m lucky enough to be able to have an audience which I know is mixed like that. Most of you here are grown up, I’m delighted to see you, and I’m delighted that I have an audience of grown-up people. I’m also delighted to have an audience of young readers as well. But I do not write for one section or for another section. I tell the story that comes to me that wants to be told, in a way that would entertain me if I were reading it. That’s what I do. I haven’t really answered your question: I’ve dodged it.
TB: Certainly the moral issues in the Sally books – I was actually reminded of another great young adult trilogy, being the Earthsea books, by Ursula Le Guin.
PP: Which I’m ashamed to confess I haven’t read.
TB: Damn, there goes another question!
PP: No, make the point, because …
TB: The first three Earthsea books, I would say, are a coming of age trilogy: three complete, separate tales, taking the protagonist from a young boy to an old man. But there’s actually a fourth book, Tehanu, which was published quite a lot later than the first three. That is really quite a harrowing read for somebody who read the Earthsea books as a child, and comes to Tehanu as an adult, because it’s got child abuse, rape, murder – lots of nasty things. It’s not a nice book – well, it’s not an easy book. I had a similar feeling with the Sally Lockhart books, that a child reading them would probably go back [to them as an adult] and see more.
PP: Well, if they do, then I’m pleased. But I can’t be held responsible for my readers being upset if they’re too young, because I don’t say at any point ‘this story is for nine year olds’. Adults who are responsible, such as teachers and librarians and above all parents, do have a responsibility here. Give a child a book without necessarily reading it all, but having a look at it, then the parent themselves bears some of the responsibility if the child is upset by the book. I don’t think the author does, because the author has to tell the story that he or she wants to tell. It’s usually not the author who puts ‘For nine year olds’ on the cover; publishers do that. But as I say, my aim is to tell a story which does have other resonances, if you like; some of them being moral. That’s not to say I set out to preach. I’m in the wrong trade if I set out to preach. When you undertake a task of any length, of any sort of intellectual weight, when you set out to write a book that’s going to take you seven years to finish, as I did with His Dark Materials for example, then necessarily you do have some sort of moral commitment to it: you do it because you think it’s a good thing to do. You wouldn’t spend seven years doing something that you didn’t believe in with some part of your moral being. So there is that dimension to it, yes. If that’s what people want to see and talk about then that’s fine; if they want to go for the story and ignore the other stuff equally that’s fine. I’m not telling them how to read any more than I’m telling them which people are allowed to and which aren’t. I just tell the story that I want to tell.
TB: The one of your books that’s received most strong comment for its content is The White Mercedes, recently republished as The Butterfly Tattoo.
PP: Yes, annoyingly. I wish they hadn’t done that.
TB: Why did they do that?
PP: The idea was, it was originally called The White Mercedes, a story about teenage love, basically; it’s a tragedy. When Macmillan republished it they said that the marketing people …if you have a story with the name of a car in the title, girls won’t read it. I merely report that! I goggled and said ‘what nonsense’ and they said ‘well, can we think of another title?’ I wasn’t particularly keen on the title The White Mercedes in the first place, but they told me it would help sell lots more copies if we called it The Butterfly Tattoo. Being unmotivated by anything but the highest motives I thought ‘jolly good, more money!’ so I agreed to it. But in fact it hasn’t done as well as it did when it was called The White Mercedes, so I think they were wrong. .. Your question wasn’t about the title, though, was it? It was about the content.
TB: It’s actually quite a graphic and unsettling tale of teenage love.
PP: Yes. Not as graphic in this country as it was in the States.
TB: Oh really?
PP: It was – I won’t say ‘censored’ in this country, but they suggested I tone down the sex scene a bit in this country. So I did, because the story didn’t entirely depend on the graphic qualities of the sex scene. But they didn’t suggest that in the States. In the States, you see, they have this category called ‘Young Adult’, and ‘young adult’ books can be full of sex, violence, rude language – whatever you like. If they’re called ‘teenage’ books or ‘children’s’ books they have to be very much more fussy about it, but because it was marketed as young adult I could be as rude as I liked.
TB: [to audience] Has anybody got an American edition? … I suppose I’ve managed to wind everybody up madly by not talking about His Dark Materials yet. .. So what would your demon be?
PP: Well, I don’t know, because, it’s an essential thing about demons – I don’t know if anyone’s got a copy of NL with them, because I could read you the passage –
TB: Has anyone not got a copy with them?
PP: [retrieving a copy from adoring audience member] I’ll just read you the passage which explains this. It’s when Lyra’s going to the North, she talks a lot to an old sailor about all sorts of things. This sailor is actually based on a sailor I talked to when I was a small boy, on the ship on the way to Australia, because everybody went by ship in those days. That’s how old I am. And this old boy on the ship showed me, among other things, how to sweep the floor properly. What you should do is you push the broom away from you, you don’t pull it towards you – that’s unseamanlike. Anyway, Lyra’s talking to this old sailor about demons: she says ‘why do demons have to settle?’ because, for those who haven’t read the story, everybody has a demon which is a sort of animal spirit companion which can’t go very far from you and remains with you all your life. Now, the big difference between children’s demons and grown-up demons is that when you’re a child your demon can change shape. It can be a rat, a cat, anything you like, anything it likes, from moment to momenTB: depending on your mood and your thoughts and feelings. But in your years of adolescence, when puberty strikes, then the demon’s power to change vanishes, and your demon settles down in one fixed form which it’ll have for the rest of your life. That’s your demon. Now Lyra says ‘why do demons have to settle? I want Pantalaimon (that’s her demon) to be able to change for ever. So does he.’ And the sailor says ‘ah, they always have settled and they always will. That’s part of growing up. There’ll come a time when you’ll be tired of him changing about and you’ll want a settled form.’ ‘I never will; says Lyra. ‘Oh, you will. You’ll want to grow up like all the other girls. Anyway, there’s compensations for a settled form, like knowing what kind of a person you are. Take my old demon. She’s a seagull. That means I’m kind of a seagull too. I’m not grand or splendid or beautiful, but I’m a tough old thing and I can survive anywhere and always find a bit of food and company. That’s worth knowing, that is. And when your demon settles, you’ll know the kind of person you are.’ And Lyra says, ‘Suppose your demon settles in a shape you don’t like?’ ‘Well, then you’re discontented, ain’t ya? There’s plenty of folk as’d like to have a lion as a demon, and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they’re going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is.’ So, you see, you cannot choose your demon, and so no matter how much I might like to have a bird or a cat or something graceful or elegant, I’d probably turn out to have a crab or a slug. But one aspect of this business which has been picked on by some critics, notably in America – somebody criticised me for being terribly class-ridden and British and snobbish because all servants are people whose demons are dogs. This critic thought that I was saying if your demon’s a dog you have to be a servant. It’s not like that at all, as Lyra explains elsewhere to Will (who doesn’t know about demons). “If your demon turns out to be a dog, that means you’re the sort of person (and there are plenty of those about) who enjoys knowing where they are in a hierarchy, who enjoys following orders and pleasing the person in charge”. There are people like that, and they make good servants. We don’t have servants any more in our society but we do in Lyra’s world. If your demon is a dog that is a sign to you that that’d be a career that you’d enjoy doing and that you’d be good at. So that’s what having a demon says – one of the things that having a demon says to you. But I do not know what my demon would be, and I cannot choose. The way to find out what your demon is, is to ask your friends to write it down anonymously. Then you will find out.
TB: There was one point about demons which – you say, I think, right at the beginning of Northern Lights, that somebody’s got a demon of the same sex as themselves, and this is very rare. Now, does that indicate homosexuality? Or what?
PP: I don’t know. There are plenty of things about my worlds I don’t know, and that’s one of them. It might do! But it might not! Occasionally, no doubt, people do have a demon of the same sex; that might indicate homosexuality, or it might indicate some other sort of gift or quality, such as second sight. I do not know. But I don’t have to know everything about what I write.
TB: But you can make it up as you go along …!
PP: To a certain extent, but then you discover the rules of the world that you’re building as you build them, I’m sure you’re aware of that. I can’t suddenly invent a rule that contradicts all sorts of things that have gone before. Nor do I sit down consciously and work out the rules, draw up the constitution of the world before, as if one were drawing up a constitution of a bowls club or something. It doesn’t happen like that. To some extent, it’s rather like what happens in mathematics, where you discover things – for example, the realm of imaginary numbers. Are they invented or are they discovered? As soon as you discover – as soon as you come across this notion of imaginary numbers, you realise that it is a realm which has its own laws, which has its own things that you can’t contradict and which in turn allow you to do other things with the rest of the natural numbers and so on. It’s partly like that when you’re exploring a world in a book that you’re writing. You’re sort of discovering it as well as inventing it. So there are other things, no doubt, I haven’t yet imagined or thought of about demons. I do find it’s a very rich idea, and right at the end of AS, after 1200 or more pages, I was still discovering new things I could do with this human-demon link. In a way, it’s the best idea I’ve ever had. I don’t know all of it; so, to answer your question, ‘maybe, yes, but who knows?’
TB: Pass.
PP: There are some places where I don’t want to follow my characters. There are some places where one would not want to follow one’s characters. One doesn’t follow one’s characters into the lavatory; very few books do. James Joyce does, but – if it’s important for the story to follow your character into the lavatory, of course you do. But in most cases it probably isn’t. There are some places where one, out of natural courtesy or storytelling tact, or whatever it is, you don’t go. Perhaps that’s one of them.
TB: I’m very interested in Lyra’s world. Is it an alternate?
PP: Yes.
TB: It’s very difficult to place exactly what year it is there. Most critics seem to think it’s late 19^th century, and I can make a good case for it being mid-20^th. What are the major differences?
PP: The notion is that it’s the present day, because when she comes through into our world, or when Will goes into the world where they meet, it’s the present day for Will: it’s our …you know, 2000. So it’s the same date in Lyra’s world. I purposely didn’t give a date. But it is the same date. The idea is that the worlds split apart at some date in the past and developed differently. Some things have gone ahead, other things have remained static or developed differently – the technology’s different and so on. Now this is based on – comes out of this notion of multiple worlds, which is familiar to readers of popular books of physics and Scientific American and this sort of stuff, there’s a man at Oxford called David Deutsch[?], who’s written and lectured widely on this notion of parallel worlds. I find it very intriguing. Apparently, the nature of certain experiments in physics, such as the double slit experiment, with light – photons and so on – if you think through the consequences of that, says David Deutsch, you are left with no alternative but multiple worlds. There must be other worlds than this one, other universes than this one, with which there is no contact. And yet the double slit experiment – in other words, what goes on in one world affecting what goes on in another – must indicate that there is some sort of interaction. So this notion of multiple or parallel worlds is a wonderful gift for a storyteller. All you have to do is invent a way of getting from here to there. So you invent a knife that cuts a hole in them, and there you are. In a sense, the problem of how to get from where we are – which is the everyday world – to that ‘other place’, which is where the adventures happen, is one of the basic science fiction questions. Jules Verne invented a huge great big gun to fire people at the moon. H G Wells invented this stuff called cavorite[?], the antigravity stuff … Does anybody know that marvellous book Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay? [show of hands] I was sure some of you would. Well, in Voyage to Arcturus the technology consists of back rays. Light that goes outwards, like the light from these light fittings, that’s ordinary rays; but there’s also a special secret sort of light that goes back to its source, hence ‘back rays’. Now, in order to get to Arcturus, the scientist – whose name I’ve forgotten – has bottled some rays from the star Arcturus. These are back rays, and they fuel the rocket ship by means of these back rays. Nonsense, of course. But that’s just another way of solving the problem of how to get from here, which is dull, to there, which is exciting. The notion of parallel universes is just another of these ways of going from here to there. I don’t fully understand the physics of it: I don’t even partially understand the physics of it. I know enough to fake it, for somebody who’s about as knowledgeable as I am. The function of research, incidentally, for a novelist – because novelists have to do something very different from what non-fiction writers do. If you’re writing [non?]fiction, or science, or something, there’s a certain obligation at some level for you to tell more or less what you know to be the truth. When you’re writing fiction – or if you’re a journalist! – it’s different. If you’re telling a story, of course, you don’t have to tell the truth. What you have to do is not to be truthful but plausible. The function of research is to enable you to invent convincingly. That’s what I do with my research. I read enough to enable me to make up more stuff in a way that would fool me if I were reading it!
TB: So, in Lyra’s world, the Church – which is a Calvinist church with no Pope – is a lot more powerful. Actually … what are the differences in that church? Is there a Christ, is there a Messiah? And what’s his demon?
PP: I hadn’t thought of that! I wanted to have a world in which the Church was powerful, and I wanted to make it a Church with competing bodies within it. Rather than have a Pope in supreme command, I had a sort of collegiate church with different bodies. There’s the Oblation Board, there’s the Consistorial Court of Discipline, the Society of the Holy Spirit and so on. All these are different power bases, and depending who’s in charge of each one at the time, this one can be more powerful, and that one can be … go down a bit, and so on. So it’s a sort of warring, or rather a squabbling, body which enabled me to sort of play the politics of one off against another. And rather than have one body of doctrine and one authority, I could invent the bit I needed for this story and then go to another story and invent another bit. And it didn’t matter if they contradict. Damn, the real world contradicts itself a hundred times a minute! You can be over-consistent in a story, and rather than spend all my intellectual and imaginative energy on making this world entirely full and self-consistent throughout every little nook and cranny, I spent my energy writing the story, getting the narrative right. I let the reader’s own imagination make up any gaps. If you want to think of what demon the Messiah might have had, feel free to do so! No one will contradict you. What I did do, though, for the sake of – the one thing I did think important – rather than drawing up a constitution of all the different countries and all the rest of it, and thinking of a detailed economic history, and all that sort of stuff, I did think it was important to have a coherent … I suppose you could call it a myth … an underpinning central creation story for the whole of the trilogy. I discovered this as I was writing, bit by bit, and every so often I’d break off from the narrative and rewrite the myth, and refine it a bit more. Written down, it takes about five or six pages, but it’s not explicit in full anywhere. I might do a companion volume, I don’t know yet, in which all sorts of things are spelled out in greater detail, such as the alethiometer and how it works, such as the myth in the background and so on and so forth. But the myth was very important to me because it did give a sort of imaginative consistency to the whole thing. I knew that I was always, whatever point in the story it was, I was writing against the background of the same big central story which was underlying all the other stories. Just as in Paradise Lost, the Judaeo-Christian creation story underlies that without ever being fully spelled out. Milton needed that, and I needed my myth. So that was the thing which I spent time working out.
TB: Is it the same myth for Lyra’s world as it is for ours?
PP: Let’s put it like this, it’s the same myth for all three books in the trilogy. There are aspects of our world which resonate with and reinforce the things that happen in Lyra’s world; there are things that are unique to our world, and don’t. But then there are billions of other worlds; we only see a very small handful of them. The central myth is the central story for all of them, rather than for any one in particular.
TB: Since you mention Paradise Lost, I can mention the critical comment that His Dark Materials is a sequel to Paradise Lost.
PP: Well, I’d be very flattered if it were seen like that. I only mentioned Paradise Lost because it was the starting point for me. I’ve loved that poem ever since I was 16 and we did it for A-level at school. I found it intensely enthralling, not only the actual story – the story of the temptation and so on – but also the landscapes, the power of the poetry and the extraordinary majesty of the language, which excited me then and continues to excite me now. It’s – I’m not making any claims that I’m anywhere near a hundredth of the class or power or whatever of Paradise Lost: it would be monstrously presumptuous to do anything of the sort. Paradise Lost was a starting point; that’s all. I do have a slight advantage over Milton, which is this: as William Blake said of Milton, ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of angels and heaven, and at liberty when he wrote of devils and hell, is that he was a true poet and of the devil’s party without knowing it.’ When you read PL the force and truth of this comment becomes clear to you; because all the imaginative energy is with Satan. When he talks about God and the Son, Christ and the angels and heaven and so on, the temperature goes right down. But when he’s with Satan, especially in the first books where they’re planning what to do, the engagement is total. He says it isn’t. But it is. And this is borne out in that wonderful story of the old 18th-century squire. Now, somebody reminded me of this, and I wish I could remember where it does come from. This old, near-illiterate 18^th-century squire – I think it was 18^th-century – squire or lord or something, being read to by his rather better-educated butler, out of Paradise Lost. The old boy's sitting there with a pint of port in his hand. At one point he bangs the arm of his chair: ‘By God!’ he says, ‘I don’t know what the outcome may be, but this Lucifer’s a damn’ fine fellow and I ‘ope he may win’. He was responding to Milton … engagement, you see.
TB: Somebody’s also said that if these were ‘grown up books’, then the viewpoint character would be Lord Asriel, and not Lyra.
PP: Well, maybe: I’m not sure about that. This is not his story; it’s Lyra’s story. And it’s not told by her either. It’s told from this favourite viewpoint of mine, which is the sympathetic but slightly sceptical narrator. The narrative voice is outside Lyra; it doesn’t stick with her all the way either. Occasionally it goes off and talks about something she’s not aware of. And so I’m able to say things about Lyra that she herself would never say: I think the third chapter of the first book, describing the background to her life and the way she lives her life as a child in the city of Oxford, I think I say at one point ‘in many ways she was a coarse and greedy little savage’, which no child would say of herself, or of another child. This is an adult voice talking about her. I don’t think that’s quite right, the point which you’ve just quoted. I think the story is Lyra’s, no matter who’s reading it.
TB: She’s the Child of Destiny, isn’t she?
PP: Well, yes. Now this is made clear … this is where we come to the point where I say ‘ah, but you haven’t yet read the third book’.
TB: That’s because you haven’t published it!
PP: I hadn’t finished it until last week!
TB: Again!
PP: This is the … she is going to be placed at a point where something depends on what she does. This does not mean that she herself is of extraordinary importance. I’m very wary of books in which somebody’s born to a particular destiny or is gifted by nature with supreme, divine gifts. Lyra’s a very ordinary little girl. There are hundreds of Lyras in Oxford. I used to teach Lyras when I was teaching. There were thousands and millions of children like Lyra, and Will, in every country in the world. There’s nothing special about her. She’s only special by virtue of the fact that at some point she will be placed in a particular situation where the fate of a lot of things depends on what she does. It’s not her, it’s not special to her: she’s a very ordinary child. And this is something which I stress throughout, and especially in the third book. There’s a phrase which comes into the third book and which occurs in the last line of the third book, especially, so it does have a particular emphasis, which sums up what I mean: and the phrase is ‘the republic of heaven’. We’re used to the kingdom of heaven; but you can tell from the general thrust of the book that I’m of the devil’s party, like Milton. And I think it’s time we thought about a republic of heaven instead of the kingdom of heaven. The king is dead. That’s to say I believe that the king is dead. I’m an atheist. But we need heaven nonetheless, we need all the things that heaven meant, we need joy, we need a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, we need a connection with the universe, we need all the things that the kingdom of heaven used to promise us but failed to deliver. And, furthermore, we need it in this world where we do exist – not elsewhere, because there ain’t no elsewhere. The Republic of Heaven is the notion which is given its full expression in the third book. The whole thing’s been leading up to that. In keeping with that, Lyra is a very ordinary child.
TB: But she inspires a great deal of loyalty and love and protective instinct, from a great many people – nearly everybody apart from her actual parents.
PP: I’ve known children like that. She’s not divinely blessed or gifted. The point I’m making is that ordinary people are capable of great deeds, not that great people do extraordinary things occasionally – but that ordinary people can do them, when pressed, when they need to: which I think is a republican notion.
TB: I think she’s maybe not that ordinary in that, for a twelve-year-old, she actually has quite a developed moral sense. At one point she is more ready to trust somebody because she finds out that he’s a murderer – which I thought was a very interesting moral point. She doesn’t want some weak person: she wants someone who will fight for what they believe is right.
PP: This happens near the beginning of the second book, when she meets Will for the first time. Will is the boy from our world. He and Lyra meet in this sort of third space, a world which is new to both of them, so neither of them know their way round. Lyra at first is afraid of Will because, coming from our world, he doesn’t have a visible demon, and she doesn’t know if he’s alive or a ghost. She’s frightened of him. So she asks the alethiometer, and the alethiometer gives the exact answer which Lyra would understand. ‘He is a murderer’, it says. (The alethiometer, for those who haven’t read it, is this truth-telling instrument which she learns to read by intuition). The alethiometer knows Lyra; it knows what she will appreciate and respond to. If it said ‘he’s in trouble, he’s had to run away because of this and that’, she wouldn’t be nearly so interested. She needs at that point to admire, trust and rely on him, so it tells her that he’s a murderer, which is glamorous – dangerous – exciting – so she does.
TB: So she is an ignorant little savage, really.
PP: Yes! But because it’s a book about growing up and because, what I began by saying, my only interest in stories is in stories that tell us about ourselves, she does of course develop and grow up and learn in the course of the three books. And at the end of the third book, of course, we discover what form her demon will settle in.
TB: [to audience] I told you I wasn’t going to ask that one!
PP: But it’s not a poodle!
TB: The third book; delayed.
PP: No, not delayed. What gives you that idea? … It wasn’t delayed, it was prematurely announced. Publishers in this country and in America made the great mistake of listening to me when I said ‘yes, it’ll be finished in 6 months’ time’.
TB: But making things up is what you do for a living!
PP: Exactly! They sort of jumped the gun; before they had the manuscript in finished form on their desks, they said ‘it’ll be finished in the autumn, it’ll be published in May’. I kept seeing other things I wanted to do to fiddle with it, so I didn’t let it go until it was ready. I’ve heard all sorts of rumours; someone wrote to me and said ‘is it true that it had to be withdrawn because it was blasphemous?’ And somebody else – there’s a story going round on one of these Internet sites that I delivered it to the publishers but then asked for it back again. It’s all nonsense. All that happened, really, was that the publishers said that it’d be ready before it was, and I absolutely refused to let it go before I thought it was ready. I finished the first draft last August; I finished the complete rewriting and cutting of about 200 pages from it last March; then it was in a state where I could show it to my editors, here and in the States. They made their comments – always very helpful and useful – and in the light of those, in the light of my further thinking, I went back and did some more work on it. It’s just last week that I finished doing the proofs for this country and the States. I was thinking of other bits I wanted to put in and putting them in right up to that stage as well. So, it hasn’t been withdrawn, it hasn’t been delayed, it hasn’t been prosecuted for blasphemy – it’s a pity, really, that’d get a lot of useful publicity. It’s just that I took my time and I was not going to let it go until I was ready. It’s now ready, so that’s it, and it’s coming out in November.
TB: Despite leaving us with all those dreadful cliff-hangers at the end of book 2.
PP: Well, what do you expect? I want you to read it! If I’d said ‘here ends book 2. In book 3 this will happen, and it’ll all end happily’ or whatever… of course I want people to be left in suspense. That’s what story-telling’s all about. It’ll be out on the first of November.
TB: Promise?
PP: Well, it’s out of my hands now. If it’s delayed now, it’ll be the publishers’ fault, so you can blame them. It’s going to be out on the first of November, no doubt, no question. I’ll actually be in the States then, because I’m going over on the 12^th to do a three-and-a-half week tour with far too many cities, and I’ll be coming back on about the 4^th. So I’ll be doing a publicity tour of this country at the beginning of the second week of November, for about ten days or two weeks or something. Then I shall be buried, I think.
TB: On the Random House website, there’s a section on the alethiometer. Was that your work?
PP: They had the nice idea of having a bit of background on each of the books. I wrote the stuff on the alethiometer, which actually Scholastic are going to publish as a separate little pamphlet in this country, either to coincide with publication or just before it, so it’ll be available here as well. I did that; it was rather fun to do that.
TB: Were you influenced by the Tarot?
PP: Not the Tarot specifically, but the notion behind or underneath the Tarot, yes. The notion that you can tell stories, you can ask and answer questions, and so on, by means of pictures. We come back to pictures again. What did influence it were those extraordinary devices they had about the middle of the sixteenth century – emblems, emblem books. There was a great vogue for these things. The first emblem book, I think, was published in 1544 in Italy. The idea was that you had a little moral …a little piece of wisdom encapsulated in a verse, usually Latin, usually doggerel, and a sort of motto, and illustrating those there was a picture. A favourite picture was a hand coming out of a cloud, holding a heart – no, two hands, one hand coming out of a cloud holding a heart, another hand waiting to receive it, and the hand waiting to receive it has an eye in the centre of its palm. Now the moral of that is that you receive a gift of somebody’s heart, but first look, and make sure what it is that you’re getting. So these were illustrations of trite and banal little moral points. Another favourite one was the helmet of a suit of armour, lying on the sand with bees flying around it. The idea of that is the things which once were instruments of war are now turned to peace. They’re all rather everyday little things, like ‘look before you leap’, or, ‘penny wise, pound foolish’. Trite little, silly little, ordinary everyday observations; but, given this extraordinary semi-surrealist air by being pictured in emblem form in these rather curious little woodcuts. This was another source for the alethiometer – the idea that you could make a moral point or give information or whatever by using pictures. So I invented the alethiometer using a mixture of conventional symbols, such as the anchor, which is a traditional symbol of hope, and ones I made up, and I wrote out this long sort of recipe for how to use the alethiometer itself. And then I discovered, in a book of emblems in the Bodleian Library, something rather similar. It looked as though somebody had actually drawn the alethiometer. But what had happened was that in this particular emblem book, which was published in about 1620, somebody had invented a way of fortune-telling. You were supposed to cut this thing out, and you put a pencil or a stick through the middle of it, and you twirl it like this and, wherever it falls … you ask a question and you twirl it. Wherever it falls refers you to a number inside the book, and you look that up, and that’s the answer to your question. So people were using this sort of thing in that sort of way. And then, of course, there’s the Tarot, as you mentioned: there’s the Chinese I Ching …all sorts of ways of divination. There are dozens and dozens of ways of interrogating the universe, basically, and the alethiometer is the one I made up for this book.
TB: Any chance of any of your work being televised or filmed?
PP: Well, the film rights have been sold, but all that means is that the company that bought them has the right to make a film. It doesn’t mean they have to. They have a limited number of times they can renew the options, I understand: after that the rights revert. I don’t know how it works. So the film rights were sold quite early on, but the company who bought them – Scholastic Films – they do make films. They made a film of the Lynne Reid Banks book, The Indian in the Cupboard. But mostly what they do is try to put a package together consisting of screenwriter or finished screenplay, and director and star, and then they sell that package to a big studio. They were going to wait until all three books were out before they decided what to do – whether to make it one film of the three books, or to make three films, or to make one film of the first book and forget the others, or to change Lyra into a boy … have Danny La Rue playing the bear, or something … Stranger things have happened! So I don’t know. What I do know is that I shall have nothing whatsoever to do with it, because that way lies frustration and grief. The writer of a novel only has power at one point in the film-making process, but no other: the only point at which you have power is when you sell the rights to someone who wants them. The only power you have is that of getting more money than they want to give you. That’s all. If you think you have any rights after that, if you think you’ve got any power – you haven’t got any power at all. Sometimes, as a sort of sop, they give you a casting consultancy or something. Did I read that J K Rowling was insistent that there should be an English boy playing Harry Potter? And they said ‘yeah, sure, we’ll do that, by all means’. So they auditioned 400 English boys and they ended up giving the part to an American one, as they’d intended all the way along. So it doesn’t mean anything.
TB: Which brings me nicely onto, what do you think of Harry Potter?
PP: I haven’t read them all; I’ve read the second one. I read that because I was judging the Guardian Children’s Fiction Competition. They sent me the proof of the first one before it was published, which is now worth five thousand quid or something …and of course I gave it to Oxfam, like all the other books I get for review. It didn’t seem to be my sort of thing, the first one, so I didn’t read it, and I read the second one because I was judging the competition. I thought it was all right. It was inventive, it was funny, it was all those nice things. I didn’t read the third or the fourth because I wasn’t sufficiently … it didn’t do what I want books to do. It didn’t tell me very much about being a human being. It was a jolly, funny, school story, I thought. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s my impression.
TB: Why’s it so successful?
PP: Who knows? It’s a mystery. Publishers and writers talk about this all the time. ‘Why? Why? Why not me?’
TB: Could it be you? Would you want to be that successful?
PP: I don’t think so. In terms of children’s books, which is what they’re labelled as, they’re already successful. They’ve been bestsellers in most lists, and so on. My books are already commercially successful in terms of children’s’ books. The Harry Potter books are successful in terms of Big Macs, on that scale – the number of hamburgers McDonalds sell, they’re that successful. It’s a different sort of scale. Everything about Harry Potter is on a different sort of scale. The phenomenon – I can’t really see a connection between the phenomenon, which is extraordinary, and the books, which are pleasant but not extraordinary. That’s my feeling. But good for her. Actually, I feel quite sorry for her, because that amount of money and attention and fame and everything else, must be kind of disorienting, don’t you think? I have the same publisher in America – well, one of my American publishers is the one who bought Harry Potter for the States, Arthur Levine[?]. I had a meal with him in Chicago, back in May, and I said ‘how’s she getting on? What’s her life like now?’ He said ‘I don’t know. I’m not allowed to reach her.’ He can’t get through to her, and he’s her editor.
TB: That would explain a lot, actually. Have you seen the size of that fourth book?
PP: I do think she’s in a terribly difficult position, and I do feel quite sorry for her. I do sympathise … I envy the money, of course – who wouldn’t want that much – but on the other hand, think what that would do to your relationships and your friends. How can you suddenly be …it’d make your life very difficult, I would think.
TB: But you’d quite like to find out?
PP: No, I don’t think I would. I’ve got as much money as I want, and I’ve got as many readers – I’ve got far more readers than I ever thought I would have, and I’m invited to nice events like this, and get to listen to interesting questions and meet nice people, and so on. I don’t want anything else. I don’t want more.
TB: That sounds a really good place to stop! Thank you very much, Philip Pullman.
PP: Thank you.

Interview: Tricia Sullivan, April 2000

This interview took place in April 2000, at the monthly British Science Fiction Association night in London. This interview previously appeared in Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association.

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TB: Are you a cyberpunk author?

TS: All my editors seem to think I am: it never occurred to me that I was, but ... what do you think?

TB: I'd say that your second novel, Someone to Watch over Me, was certainly more cyberpunk than either of the others, in that it has somebody able to watch another human being via an implant – not by magic, not by telepathy, but by a distinct physical device. In some ways that’s become a cyberpunk cliché, but you had quite a different take on it. Your emphasis was resolutely on the people involved, their humanity – not their post-humanness, their integration with technology or their ‘cyber nature’. You're still talking about faith and the unconscious, and the body, and humanity.

TS: I guess a big problem of mine is that I don't really know my science fiction, I'm not very literate in the field, and I'm fairly sure that a lot of the clichés that are in my books are actually there because I simply don't know any better. I'm just using that device because it helps me to get at something that I need to get at. Which is why the question 'are you cyberpunk?' makes me uncomfortable, because I don't really feel that I know what that means. I respect some cyberpunk authors – I certainly respect Pat Cadigan greatly – but the idea that I was working in territory that was already so well established by other writers … well, I was just too naïve to realise that. It’s not so much that I had a different take on it, as that I didn't even know there was a take to have on it. Probably by that time it had seeped so much into the popular culture that I just thought, 'Well, I'll put a chip into somebody's head and that'll solve that problem, and then I can get at it.’

TB: You were writing a novel and that was a whole new way to get into it.

TS: Essentially, yes.

TB: So when we say 'it', what's 'it', in Someone to Watch over Me?

TS: Identity and individuality, I think. When I first started writing Someone to Watch over Me I thought that I was writing about how we all interpenetrate each other through mass media, the idea of whether you can really know another person, the idea of empathy: those kinds of issues. But by the time I got to the end of it I realised that the only thing I was really writing about was writing. I had written one novel already and I had the experience of people coming to me and saying 'you wrote this, you said this, you meant this' – and I'm going 'huh?' I didn’t know how to deal with the fact that a reader could encounter me in such an intimate way, a way that I had absolutely no control over. Someone seeing things in my book that I don't know are there, that are probably unconscious and totally unintentional and maybe very embarrassing. Realising that it's so intimate and trying to come to terms with that: that's why I put one character literally inside another person's head, because when you read a book that's what you're doing. Every day I sat down at the typewriter I had to come to terms with the fact that I was actually engaging with people that I didn’t know. I wasn't going to be able to hide anything from them, because no matter how hard you try when you're writing, the truth will out.

TB: There's a theme in all your books of the division between body and mind, and then the division between conscious and subconscious. In all three books there's someone who feels they're going mad, or who has very good reasons for thinking that somebody else is controlling their mental processes in some ways. In Someone to Watch over Me Adrien attempts to deal with it by taking more control of his body – he's doing karate to get back in touch with, or regain control of, the body. That was an image that really brought out the split between the mind as something that can be interfered with, and the body as something you live in.

TS: I have a lot to say on that because it's sort of a pet topic. I had an experience when I was about 12. I had a virus: it was Reye’s syndrome and I was in the hospital and lost my memory for about two or three days. I remember waking up around the bed were all these drawings of horses and things like that. I was really keen on art when I was a kid. I had done the drawings but I didn't remember doing them. It was such a strange thing to look at them, and have someone saying 'yeah, you did that, don't you remember doing that?' and not remember. I think maybe that was the seed to all of this that now preoccupies me; the realisation that consciousness is such a thin membrane on such a big ocean. There's so much going on that you don't know: the body, the evolutionary history, all of those things that are in you are so mysterious. I have this ‘inner Nazi’, this internal control freak: I think I am that way because I know that I don't have a prayer of ever controlling anything. Physical instinct, I think, governs so much more of what we do than we like to acknowledge, or are comfortable acknowledging. I feel only marginally in control of myself at any given moment, and it's probably why a lot of my characters are like that.

I don't believe in the mind/body dichotomy. I wish I'd never been exposed to that kind of Descartian split. Even language – we don’t have a word for the two together. This separation, which is not a real separation, has somehow become inculcated into us so that we have to think in terms of 'this is my body and this is 'me', I'm up here somewhere' – which is just not the case. I'm always trying to get away from that.

TB: Some of your characters demonstrate that there are ways in which that dichotomy could be real. In Someone to Watch Over Me there’s an old woman lying in a bed, in a state of sensory deprivation: she is living through other people. In Lethe, your first novel, there are characters who can’t trust their minds, and a whole group of people who can’t trust their bodies.

TS: I grew up in suburban America. What you do there is essentially, you watch TV, and you live through what you watch on television and what you go to the mall and buy. The character 'C', in Someone to Watch Over Me, who's sensorily deprived, is living vicariously: that's just an exaggeration of what we all essentially do in modern society. We’re all – I won't say 'victim' to that, but we're all kind of complicit in that kind of relationship with the world. In Lethe, where they all turn into these aquatic baby-killing monsters at adolescence, is just a sort of exaggeration of what it feels like when things get out of your control. I do think that children have it in a way that we don't, and that somehow when you cross over that barrier between childhood and adulthood you lose something that I don't know if you can ever get back. Kind of an animal relationship with the world, an intuitive, natural relationship with the world that just goes. I think that maybe the tragic quality of the transformation in Lethe is just a reflection of what I feel happens.

TB: They lose everything, don't they? They lose their memories as well: their memories go into – I keep wanting to call it a collective unconscious, which it isn't really. It’s a forest mind: a way in which the people still out on land can somehow tune in to the memories of those who’ve transformed.

TS: The way Lethe ended had a kind of romantic ending for me, with the idea that once they go out to sea they become something else, and maybe they have a shot at something different. There’s the idea of a transition to some more primitive form, or some genetically engineered more primitive form. And maybe they're being relieved of consciousness, which on some level I probably perceive as a burden. Tsering, who is an old woman trapped in a young girl's body, is carrying the burden of being an adult, and taking care of children that she knows are going to leave her. To me, when she finally gets to make that change herself it's like being able to surrender to Nature.

TB: In Lethe there’s been three big corporations fiddling around with genetics, and then releasing a series of viruses upon the world. That leads to a completely hostile environment and a very distinct separation of pure humans from the mutants and the modified, who are actually a lot better-adapted to life on the altered Earth. Lethe was written back in 1994, way before genetically-modified crops, and Monsanto and so on. What do you think now? Is the current panic about GM foods a kind of early-warning of the future that you painted?

TS: I hope not! I don't know. It's always weird when people ask me official science questions because I have a very limited grasp of these things. I find it difficult, emotionally, to get to grips with some of the things that I read in the popular science press about new things being done genetically. I suppose the theme in Lethe was the idea that nothing's really unnatural, and I guess there was a kind of feeling of the tail of nature lashing back, and coming right round and taking humans out of the equation. I definitely put a bit of a sting into that; it was wishful thinking. But I don't really dare to hope that there would be that kind of poetic justice in the real world: I think the likelihood of anything good coming out of it would be very slim. It's difficult, you feel like some kind of conservative religious figure if you don't like the idea of cloned sheep or whatever. I find it disturbing.

TB: In both Lethe and Dreaming in Smoke, you put your characters into a terribly hostile environment at various points. In Lethe it's the Earth, ravaged by disease and climate change. In Dreaming in Smoke it's an alien planet, T’nane, which looked just fine when they surveyed it. When it was colonised, though, it turned out to be completely different to how the survey painted it. The big problem on T’nane is the Oxygen Problem – how can they make enough oxygen to survive? In both of those novels you're playing with the ecology: is that a big concern, the ecological interaction?

TS: It’s a simple result of when you try to think of an imaginary world. You have the reality as we know it and you want to play around with it, and as soon as you do that you've go to make some concessions: change one little thing and you've got to expect there to be big consequences. In research for Dreaming in Smoke, I read about the origins of life on Earth and how fragile the equation is to produce just exactly the right mix. When I was thinking about the ecology of another planet it seemed awfully unrealistic to expect that planet to be just like Earth. It seems to be bypassing one of the big questions. I was just trying to take the speculation a little bit seriously and not make it an alternate world, just like this world except in a galaxy far, far away. I have a little bit of trouble swallowing that. I had to be able to have people there, they had to be able to function: it couldn't be a complete pit of fire, but I had to do something to make it clear that it was another planet, where the rules are not going to be the same. There wasn't an overlying moral purpose there: it's just practical.

TB: There's an indication, no more, in both those novels, that there’s a sort of planetary intelligence or mind. There’s an ecology working on a larger level than just the cells – an interacting system. In Lethe it’s the lywyn – a kind of vast forest-mind – and in Dreaming in Smoke it’s the planet, right down to the unicellular lumae. In Someone to Watch over Me, which is in some ways the odd one out, there’s the Deep – an artificial collective unconscious.

TS: I was trying to nail down the idea of, if you had a mind that wasn't a human mind, what would it be like? And with the lywyn it was pretty airy-fairy: I didn't really have a grip of what I was doing. It was almost like a fantasy device, with the trees, and the race-memory idea. With Someone to Watch over Me I tried to nail it down a little bit more by pulling in the whole computer idea and the idea of artificial intelligence. Then, in Dreaming in Smoke, there were two elements: the AI Ganesh, and the planet itself, and the interface between them. I think that maybe I got a little bit more focussed with that as I went along. I wasn't comfortable in Lethe with the idea of the lywyn because I couldn't put my finger on it rationally. It was a nice image, but it wasn't grounded in anything. As I went along I was trying to come up with some connection between the rational demands that my mind was making, speculating and extrapolating about a mind that alien to mine, and the intuitive ideas that I had, which were unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable. But I feel a little more comfortable about the underpinnings of the intelligences in Dreaming in Smoke. In fact the whole point of Dreaming in Smoke, I think, was the idea that if you try to mesh these two kinds of mind, the human mind and this possible mind, this alien consciousness. As it gets filtered through the AI, maybe the consciousness gets invented by that AI. There's this uncomfortable friction between possibility and actuality. What happens in Dreaming in Smoke is that the characters are trying to transcend their physical form. There’s this one physical thing, which is this big pond of prokaryotes, and then there’s this artificial intelligence Ganesh, which can be programmed to do things that theoretically, maybe, the human mind can't do. Then you've got humans: we're rooted in a biological intelligence which is our brain and our body. So it’s this kind of consciousness kind of wending its way from the human body through the AI and into something completely strange, and that’s where you get this kind of extreme friction and extreme physical and psychological states. I just find it difficult to imagine how you could have a nice chat with an alien.

TB: But in some ways it's happening at a subconscious level?

TS: Absolutely, because again I don't believe that the conscious mind is really worth two shits.

TB: That's when things happen – when people are asleep or in a different state of mind for whatever reason. And yet you’re still throwing in the physical, especially in Dreaming in Smoke –there’s an episode that several of us had problems with, the 'farming'.

TS: What do you mean, 'had problems with'?

Claire Brialey: The way I would describe it was that it was possibly one of the most horrible things that I had ever read, and the only reason to carry on reading was that I wanted to know what happened so much. It was quite revoltingly compelling; perhaps because it was very clear and clinical rather than gory. It actually made me feel physically sick but I couldn’t stop reading. That’s meant to be a compliment!

TS: I'm sorry! But really, it's so strange to hear that, because it's like – what I was trying to say about Someone to Watch over Me – you write something and you really just don't know what it feels like to be on the other end of it. It wasn't that fun to write, for what it's worth.

TB: It was almost like the physical putting the boot into the whole mental, cerebral side of it. That was the way into the system. It had nothing to do with whether or not Kalypso Deed was a child genius or whatever.

TS: That's right, it was her cells in the end. I never really thought about it like that before, but she was in this culture which had everybody parcelled out as to what they were going to be, what their skills were going to be. You choose a team to go into space, you've got to make sure you've got everything covered. She didn't fit into that, she thought she was worthless, useless: and she ended up, not through any effort of her own, being the most important person on the planet. But not through any kind of genius whatsoever, just happening to be in the right place at the right time and getting herself sliced up.

TB: Kalypso’s a good example of one of your non-feminist heroines, like Jenae in Lethe and, to some extent, Sabena in Someone to Watch Over Me. They sit there: well, they don't sit there, they fight back and they have attitude problems, but quite often it's the fact that they are helpless in the face of adversity or worse, and something happens to them. They don't take a gun in one hand and a petri dish in the other and go out and save the world: something happens to them. They all come across to some extent as victims. It sounds terribly damning, but all of them have nice little lives ticking along – for differing values of 'nice' – and something awful happens to them. For Jenae in Lethe it's when the Heads find out what she's been thinking, and try to burn out her brain. In Someone to Watch Over Me, it's the mental rape of Sabene, and in Dreaming in Smoke, Kalypso gets kidnapped, gets farmed, becomes completely alienated from the rest of her team, and then she gets blamed for most of it as well!

TS: That’s really interesting, because I grew up reading fantasy and science fiction in which all the heroes were men and then I discovered Marion Zimmer Bradley and Amazons, and I thought that was really cool. I have a background in martial arts. I like to think I have quite an attitude about me: the idea that I would be unfeminist is kind of shocking to me because I've lived my life in a very assertive way. From the age I was 7 until the time I was 12 I did not wear a dress or a skirt of any kind, I had short hair, I was often mistaken for a boy. When you say that these are anti-feminist role models ...

TB: Not anti-feminist, just non-feminist.

TS: I think that maybe I just have a different concept of what heroism is. I don't know what's so heroic about taking a big gun and shooting people. Survival is what's heroic. All of those characters are survivors. Sabena actually subverts the implant that's in her head ... she gets sort of raped, but she's not defeated by it.

I don’t think they are victims: things happen to people. You can't control what happens to you, you can only control how you react to it. I think they all find strength in what happens to them.

TB: They all fight back, definitely. None of them sit back and say 'I must deserve it', or simply lament their fates. It was just something that struck me – especially about Kalypso, in Dreaming in Smoke: she was so powerless. There was nothing she could do at all, because the things that she was good at – apart from being a wizard cocktail mixer and so on – all seemed to be irrelevant once the AI went down. She was almost this parasite, this freeloader, because she wasn't using what she could do.

Let's move on from the non-feminist heroines to the romances, the relationships. In Lethe and in Dreaming in Smoke you have very young girls ... I’m thinking of Tsering, who is effectively an adolescent.

TS: But she's 72 years old

TB: She's 72 and she looks about 12, and the male protagonist finds her extremely attractive while thinking that he probably shouldn't – and he hastens her descent into adolescence. In Dreaming in Smoke, Kalypso Deed is in a relationship that starts off as terribly antagonistic with a much older person, and in the end he is the only person to whom she can actually relate. It seemed to me that she'd grown out of her peers, and that they seemed irrelevant, and rather juvenile, to her after what she'd been through.

TS: With Kalypso and Marcsson I was very careful not to make that a sexual relationship. It wasn't meant to be romantic, even though she was female and he was male. It was more having been through something together. On the one hand, I always say that nothing's calculated in any of my books, but if anything was calculated I definitely made sure that those two never got it on: I didn't want to confuse the message I was putting out. I never thought of it: it just didn't seem right.

TB: I'd say that in the book, if there was anything unspoken between them, it was more a case of hostage syndrome, that she was starting to have sympathy for his views, sitting there trying to single-handedly save the planet. There was never any indication to me that there was anything sexual or romantic during the course of the book, but it just seemed that that might be one of the logical progressions of what might happen next.

TS: I suppose that's possible: it never crossed my mind. With respect to Tsering, it never occurred to me that that was the case. I think she was so much more together than him, so much more mature than him. The fact of her puberty being triggered and then her transformation, with all its implications, being triggered – I don't want to say it counted morally, but it counted for something. The idea that he was sort of taking advantage of her never really crossed my mind. If it did, I wanted to make it clear that he wasn't; he was the one left holding the kid, let's put it that way. She was the one that went on to the next stage and he was the one left to deal with the nappies.

TB: Another theme that comes up in all three books is music – not just as background, but as something with meaning, with different levels of significance to the characters.

TS: Music is what I would be doing if I was any good at it. I studied it in college. I think music is the best intersection of the mind and body – I say I don't believe in the two but I can't find a better word for it. It's the best expression of the physical and all the other things about us that there is. When I was in school I had the opportunity to study music in a kind of very free and experimental way because I grew up with no talent whatsoever. I'm totally tone deaf, I have no rhythm, I have no perseverance when it comes to practising instruments: but I happen to have a degree in music because I was able to study it. I love the psychological, psychophysical spaces that you can get at through music. And then when I graduated life had to move on. I think some of the things that I was exploring musically – that were of musical interest to me – got channelled into fiction, because I could put words together no problem, whereas the tools of music were foreign to me because I didn't come to it from a young age. I didn't come to it with talent, and I was never going to really get it off the ground. So I turned to writing, but then there's always this kind of yearning about music, because music scratches the places you can't scratch with words, and words are really inadequate. So I keep referring to music in words, even though it's just a reference, it's not really the real thing. It's like talking about food: you can't actually taste it, but it gives you a little kick anyway.

TB: In Someone to Watch over Me, music becomes a kind of path into the Self.

TS: Actually, I was interested in encoding things in general in Someone to Watch over Me. I played with the idea of encoding meaning in moves from martial arts, kata, karate, dances – which, looking back on it, really wasn't suitable. I was just looking for some other way that you could encode yourself in an abstract way, that could then be translated back and experienced by somebody. ‘C’ is this woman who is in a sensorily-deprived state, and is experiencing life vicariously through other people. She's ultimately subsumed by the character of Sabena, who she mentally rapes – puts her entire consciousness into. And yet because Sabena is a musician, an artist, she ends up taking over the one that's taken over her. I was never really quite sure who had taken over whom. Sabena, no matter what happened to her, always had this musical expression. Even when C was downloading all of her memories into Sabena, and she felt compelled to compose and write all these things down. In a sense she was a conduit, but by being the conduit she took over C and instead of being raped (going back to the ‘passive heroine’ thing) she was eating something. She was subsuming it within herself. I think that the feminine side of nature, the passive side of nature, passivity is not always what it seems. It can be power.

TB: I've heard rumours that you have written a fantasy novel under a pseudonym: is that right?

TS: Yes, I've been writing under another name for the past couple of years: the name is Valery Leith and I'm doing a trilogy. Why I did it? Let me try to justify my shameless commercialism by saying that I really started out reading fantasy, which is true! I don't have a strong background in science fiction but I read Tolkien when I was eight years old, and I have read Lord of the Rings over and over again. That's where my speculative roots lie. I started writing this fantasy and my agent liked it and there was more money in it than in the science fiction: the science fiction didn't, at that time, seem to be going anywhere. The fantasy's turned into science fiction anyway! I had a complaint from my German editor that you can't have wormholes and time travel in fantasy because it gives everyone headaches. So, if I want to make any money I have to have another name and try to get a bit baser, because I obviously haven't hit it the first time round!

TB: Did you write the fantasy novels in the same way that you did your science fiction?

TS: No. It's more free ... I wrote it much faster, I wrote it much more casually, and because I was hiding behind this other name I didn't have to worry about whether or not it was clever, because nobody would know that it was me.

It's like putting on a mask: you get to free up other parts. The fantasy trilogy’s got a sword-wielding female protagonist, and – even though through the whole book she's soaked in blood and wearing rags – they put her on the cover in a little leather corset, and her sword was really pretty!

I had a conversation with the American art director about the cover of the second book. She said, 'We want to go with the female warrior for the cover because everyone liked it the first time. Well, what would she be wearing?' Essentially, they went to the Village and got an S&M costume for the model to wear – this little leather thing – and I think they wanted to use the costume again. But she was standing in this ice cave: it’s winter, she'd be wearing heavy furs. When I got the artwork back, it’s all cleavage: just a cloak with a little fur collar to give in to it being winter, and bare legs ...

TB: And the paperback of the first part – The Company of Glass– is just out?

TS: Yes, I've seen copies so it should be out soon

TB: Do you have plans for more science fiction?

TS: Yes, I'm working on something right now that I've been working on since 1992. It's a book about gender and – I think you'll quite like it, actually: it doesn't have any female victims in it, the victims are all male! It's examining what the world would be like if women really were in power ... I'm really terrified of it: it's really psychologically confrontational stuff. I haven’t managed to finish it: occasionally I have the courage to work on a little bit of it. I do want to get to it: I just have to finish off this fantasy thing. After people told me they liked the nastiness of Dreaming in Smoke, I've got a bit gutsier about going into the darker spaces.

TB: Questions from the audience?

Claire Brialey: I didn’t actually read Kalypso as a victim: I read her as someone who was victimised but nonetheless found ways to get by. Since she’s a teenager and the baby in her family unit, she spends quite a lot of time complaining that things aren’t fair, but she’s better at coping than she or anyone else expects.

Was there a wider theme you wanted to emphasis about the roles young people, young women, are expected to take in society?

TS: There was never a message or a consciously deliberated thing. At the time I was teaching ...well, I had come from a background of teaching, but I had studied education of the gifted, and had studied definitions of giftedness and intelligence. I probably had some stuff on my mind about what society values and what society rewards. I think that was reflected in this constructed society that had been made: the idea that everybody has a place and everybody has a function and that you're supposed to stick to that. Obviously I don't quite get on with that idea, or I wouldn’t have put Kalypso in, thrown her into the mix to mess everything up in a kind of obnoxious way. Also, there's something that was said earlier that struck me about Kalypso: she was essentially no use, but she ended up having a value in that society. I didn't intentionally set out to do that, but I suppose when you come from an academic background, education, you see everybody trying to structure everything and create frameworks to get people to behave the way that you think they should behave. There's this tremendous urge to see a 2-year-old come in and just knock everything down and mess it all up, and that's probably what I was succumbing to a little bit there. Yes, it's OK to have these theories, but it's much more interesting to see what really happens. I don't like too much contrived order, it's safe to say!

Roger Robinson: At the start, regarding the question about cyberpunk, you said you hadn't read that much. What were your influences, and how do you come from whatever they were to writing hard SF?

TS: The only thing I was reading at the time that affected me (and it probably only affected my style) was Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow. The idea for the story came from seeing a play in New York, called 'Someone Who'll Watch Over Me'. It had the Ella Fitzgerald song in it, and it was about these three guys who were in a prison in Beirut or Turkey or something. It's almost like a joke: an Irishman, an Englishman, and an American. They're all sitting there chained to the walls and they're all talking to each other. That's the whole play. At one point the American gets dragged off and presumably killed, but the rest of the play is just these guys talking. I had never seen a live play before, and it was brilliant. At the end of it I just remember how affected I had been by those performers and the playwright. The whole experience had been so physically and emotionally affecting that I felt that there was some kind of connection going on. With Someone to Watch over Me, all I was trying to do was figure out what happens when I experience something that you've done and you experience something that I've done. That was what was really on my mind, and everything else was trying to find a way to get to tell it that would be acceptable.

[Dr Andrew M Butler] Has winning the Clarke Award had any effect on the way you write, what you write?

TS: I think it was a tremendous shot in the arm, a tremendous boost. This time last year I had no plans to do any more science fiction for the foreseeable future, just because the sales were so bad and it's so much harder to write. Then, when I got that award, people came up to me that night and told me that they really liked my work … You know, I never had an idea that anybody's reading it, so it always comes as a shock when someone actually says something about your work. So yes: it was a tremendous boost, and I feel a sort of obligation to try to continue doing that, because when you win something so prestigious, suddenly you realise that maybe you might actually be onto something that you ought to stick to. So, yes, it has had an effect. It’s had no effect that I know of on my sales, or any of those obvious things: but it's definitely had an effect on me personally.

Lord Demon -- Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold

Lord Demon is the second of two novels, unfinished by Zelazny at his death in 1995, to have been completed by Jane Lindskold. As with Donnerjack (1997), Lindskold's influence is easily detected: it's unfair to judge Lord Demon as simply another book by Zelazny, or to assume that this is the novel Zelazny would have completed, alone, if he’d lived.

The background is vintage Zelazny, with a cast and setting borrowed wholesale from mythology and given an SFnal interpretation. The characters in Lord Demon are demons and gods from Chinese myth. Except, of course, they’re not really demons and gods: they’re beings from another dimension. After a war between chaotic and lawful factions some millennia ago, the losing side broke through into ancient China and fitted themselves seamlessly into the local belief system.

The narrator, ‘Lord Demon’ himself, is Kai Wren, a master craftsman who specialises in magical bottles containing pocket universes for the magically-aware to call home. Kai Wren is also known as Godslayer: in the war, he was the only demon to have single-handedly slain a god. Now he’s peace-loving and solitary, avoiding the company of other demons and confiding only in his human servant, Oliver O’Keefe.

One night, Ollie is killed, and the quest to find his murderer opens up a series of mysteries. Kai Wren acquires a human apprentice, Li Paio, and ventures back into demon society, embroiling himself in a series of feuds and alliances. Unfortunately, he learns the identity of one enemy just too late to avoid being transformed into a mere human …

If parts of that plot summary are reminiscent of Zelazny’s classic Amber series, maybe it’s no accident. There’s a number of Amberesque plot elements, and one very obvious reference to Nine Princes in Amber that’s almost enough to make one suspect the author - which author? - of archness.

Kai Wren, however, isn’t a typical Zelazny hero. He makes mistakes, and is forced to rely on others: he has romantic, rather than merely lustful, inclinations: and he’s much less egocentric and arrogant. In short, he’s more human than most of Zelazny’s protagonists.

Maybe it’s an indication that Zelazny himself was moving into a different, more mature phase as a writer: it seems more likely, though, to be Lindskold’s influence, overlaying Zelazny’s plot and characters with themes and motifs of her own. There are elements of this novel which aren’t classic Zelazny: animated coathangers, the land of lost socks, and a cute puppy called Fluffinella. But reading Lord Demon as classic Zelazny is rather missing the point: it’s a joint work, and perhaps the saddest thing about it is that it’s not a true collaboration.

The Stars Compel -- Michaela Roessner

This is a novel imbued with the scents and tastes of its setting – an alternate Renaissance Italy, where the precociously Machiavellian Caterina de'Medici (aged eleven) is threading her way through a maze of political and magical intrigues.

The viewpoint character is not Caterina herself, but Tommasso Arista, her cook. Tommasso isn't a mere kitchen boy, but an artist in his own right: apprenticed to Cellini, he is Michelangelo's lover and Caterina's confidante. His family tree includes not only prestigious cooks, but his grandmother Angelina – whose amazing recovery from a debilitating illness is popularly ascribed to her occult powers – and his dead sister Ginevra, whose spirit apparently lives on in a ruby pendant around Caterina's slender neck.

Tommasso's everyday life is drawn as a fascinating and frustrating melange of famous names, kitchen feuds, mouthwatering recipes and occult visions. His recipes are described in tantalising detail (this is most definitely not a book to read while you're dieting) and, while some of the epicurean details may seem anachronistic – were turkey and coffee well-known New World imports as early as 1530? – Roessner's research is sound enough in other areas to give verisimilitude to the more obscure details.

Tommasso understands only a little of the cosmic events unfolding around him - and so, perforce, the reader is similarly confused. It seems that Caterina is just one incarnation of a being who inhabits many planes, and who has chosen to be born into the nobility of 16th-century Florence in order to combat the forces of darkness. Caterina regains awareness of her greater self only in dreams, and during her waking hours has no knowledge of the choice she's made.

There's plenty to distract her, though. Her magical powers are gaining strength as she nears adolescence, and she is uneasily aware that a battle between good and evil is being fought through the streets of Florence and Rome. Caterina herself, Tommasso and her beloved cousin Ippolito are game pieces on the side (of course) of Good. Ranged against them are the villains of the piece – Alessandro de'Medici, ostensibly her half-brother but probably the Pope's bastard son; Lorenzaccio de'Medici, another cousin: and an array of necromancers, demons, assassins and politicians. Their aim is not clear, but indications are that it is Evil.

Those who haven't read the first in the series, The Stars Dispose, may find the plot convoluted and obscure. There is no summary of the events recounted in the previous novel: this, perhaps, is why the forces of evil seem no more than mildly unpleasant.

City of Diamond -- Jane Emerson

Proper space opera, and a nice thick book to boot. Not that I'd dream of booting it: this is one of the paperbacks which is doomed to eventual disintegration, since it's hooked me comprehensively.

The premise - which put me off when I first read the blurb - is that aliens have donated a set of three 'city-ships' (generation ships built of a strange rock-like substance) to a group of humans bound by a common religion, Redemptionism, founded by one Adrian Sawyer centuries before the beginning of this novel. Now the Cities - Diamond, Opal and Pearl - are in an uneasy state of truce as they roam the galaxy looking for (a) trade opportunities and (b) a couple of handy religious relics - which, given the futuristic setting, are likely to be far more than just trinkets.

What makes this anything other than just a run-of-the-mill space opera? Appealing characters, for one: if not a cast of thousands, there are certainly at least ten viewpoint characters, ranging from the Irish Zen-assassin Keylinn to the high-born, sheltered Iolanthe Pelagia, the Protector's new bride; from the sociopathic 'demon' (the technical term for those of a particular half-human, half-alien genetic background) Tal to this employee, the pragmatic petty criminal and social outcast Spider.

The society itself is compelling, and incredibly detailed, without the novel consisting largely of infodumps. Resources are strictly limited on a generation ship: Emerson does no more than hint at the Lottery which Spider has escaped. The Redemptionist religion is not explored in detail, but there is a hint of unpleasantly literal Catholicism: communion confers a mystical experience upon the faithful, and involves a fluid which turns out to contain real - alien - blood.

And the plot ... well, it is a space opera, and - even worse - it's the first in a series which looks unlikely ever to be finished. (Boo hiss!) Though it does stand alone - albeit with an rather unfinished aftertaste). There are enough plot strands - romantic, adventurous, political, religious and so on - to keep the action moving, and to make it difficult, at times, to discern either the key characters or the key plot strand - is it the alien relics, or the whole 'demon' thing, or the Graykey assassins?

But the entire novel is a delight. The whole 'Three Cities' setting, with its mixture of archaic practice (the Royal Hunt sounds positively prehistoric) and alien, incomprehensible technology, is in some ways more Renaissance than Regency. I can see why this was described as 'the bastard offspring of Heinlein and Heyer', though: it's a very mannered society (which is precisely why Tal is such an interesting character, an amoral individual viewed against the backdrop of an extremely structured society) - and there's a real sense of a somewhat claustrophobic space-dwelling society.