The Music of 2001: A Space Odyssey

The opening titles of 2001: A Space Odyssey forge an iconic bond between the simple, dignified fanfare that introduces Richard Strauss' tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896) and the astounding beauty of sunrise in space. In 1968, real life, with its mundane soundtrack of control-room procedures, hadn't yet produced live footage of a moon landing. But the realism of that sunrise, combined with Strauss' dramatic music, evokes a powerful response that has nothing to do with flashy graphics or pulse-stirring marches.

Two years after the release of 2001, on the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, astronaut Jack Swigert played Also Sprach Zarathustra to his listeners from the aptly-named command module, Odyssey. "This little tape recorder has been a big benefit to us in passing the time away on our transit out to the Moon, and it's rather odd to see it floating like this in Odyssey, while it's playing the theme from 2001," said Swigert during the second of the crew's telecasts. Minutes later, the world heard Lovell say, "Houston, we've had a problem". Hollywood, always trying to improve on reality, substituted Norman Greenbaum's hit 'Spirit in the Sky' in the film Apollo 13 (1995) - the 'wrong tape' being just another glitch on the doomed mission.

Familiar though the awe-inspiring combination of Strauss and sunrise is, it's atypical. The soundtrack of 2001, in common with other 'arthouse' films of the period, doesn't feature much music at all. On the whole, when something's happening, the soundtrack consists simply of the sound - or, during the space scenes, the absence of sound - of what's on screen. There are three audio layers of sound in the film - dialogue (a mere 40 minutes in a film that's 139 minutes long), music, and environmental sound. These layers hardly ever overlap. Music and dialogue are contrasted, rather than conflated. This is not background music, in any sense of the word, but another element of the whole.

2001 may have only narrowly escaped the typical expansive, space-age soundtrack. Kubrick originally commissioned a score from film composer Alex North: they'd worked together before, on Spartacus (1960), for which North had produced a suitably epic score. By 1967, when Kubrick approached North with the first hour of 2001 and his ideas for the atmosphere he wanted to convey, North had composed soundtracks for a clutch of successful films, including Cleopatra (1963), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), and Shoes of the Fisherman (1968).

Even before North began working on a score fitted to the script, however, Kubrick had been editing key scenes in the film using classical music as a temporary track. Arthur C. Clarke writes of seeing some initial edits: "Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream (1826) for the weightless scenes, and Vaughan Williams' Antarctic Symphony (1953) for the lunar sequence and the Star Gate special effects, with stunning results." Neither of these pieces made it through to the final cut. Perhaps Kubrick felt that, as existing 'soundtracks' - the Mendelssohn piece was written as incidental music to Shakespeare's play, and Vaughan Williams based his Seventh, 'Antarctic' Symphony on the film score he produced for Scott of the Antarctic (1948) - they were too directly evocative of other scenes. Instead, he turned to lesser-known works by contemporary composers, though he never relinquished Zarathustra or The Blue Danube.

Kubrick initially suggested to North that the soundtrack he'd composed could be combined with some of these 'temporary' tracks. Eventually, though, both composer and director felt that the classical pieces - divorced from whatever context or meaning they'd originally had - worked best without the distraction of a score more dutifully attentive to each minute of the action. According to Clarke, the composer never really got over the disappointment. "I had the hunch," North noted wryly, "that whatever I wrote to supplant Strauss' Zarathustra would not satisfy Kubrick, even though I used the same structure but brought it up to date in idiom and dramatic punch."

North's unfinished soundtrack, forty minutes long, is now available on CD, and has received favourable reviews. In contrast to some of his other work, it has a harsh, contemporary sound, not dissimilar to Ligeti's dissonant soundscapes. Some of the music does surface in the cinema, though: North reused his 'Space Station Docking' theme as the main theme for Dragonslayer (1981)!

Eschewing the exotic effects favoured by much SF film music of the period, Kubrick used Ligeti's atonal, disquieting pieces to convey menace and alienation, from prehistoric Africa to Jupiter and beyond. The brooding strings of Atmospheres (1961) heighten the insecurity of the apes awakening at the dawn of history out on the veldt. As they discover the monolith, the eerie voices of Ligeti's Requiem for Soprano, Mezzo-soprano, Two Mixed Choirs and Orchestra (1963-5) illustrate their fear and excitement. Kubrick uses the opening 'double whammy' of music and image - Also Sprach Zarathustra, sunrise - as Moonwatcher, almost in the shadow of the monolith, gazes at the bone in his hand and realises that it can be used. The music alone would indicate a conceptual breakthrough.

We've become used to frame-by-frame edits and sharp snappy cuts. As befits a film that Kubrick and Clarke both described as 'contemplative', some of the edits in 2001 have a calm imprecision, a lack of forced accuracy. It's particularly evident when the scene changes: the music, or lack of it, may not match that change for several beats, subtly increasing the viewer's sense of anticipation. One such moment is when the hurled bone becomes the spaceship. Three beats elapse, as though the music is being 'counted in', before, ever so softly, this new world - and new century - of mechanical perfection is reflected by Johann Strauss' Blue Danube (1867).

We see sunrise in space again, but here it's an inhabited space. The incomplete space station revolves to the strains of the waltz, evoking fairground rides with the faint echo of the oompah band in Strauss's glorious, predictable crescendi and rhythmic emphasis.

Those mechanical music-box harmonies, and the measured pace they force upon the viewer - the ineluctable slowness and precision of the docking procedure - are lost once the astronauts reach the interior of the station. Only in space, where there's no environmental sound, can the music be foregrounded. Music is the privilege of the distanced, godlike observer, watching as the shuttle leaves the station to land gently on the surface of the moon, with pizzicato strings.

The lunar landscape, with a crescent Earth hanging in the black sky (and the camera always facing Earth), is vast and empty. Ligeti's Lux Aeterna (1966) accompanies the moon bus over the dust towards the crater: then the Requiem's layered voices, first heard as the apes approached the monolith, herald the appearance of an identical slab. With a texture like insects humming, the Requiem builds to a climax that is never quite reached: as the men stagger at the sound of the monolith's signal in their helmets, the music fades away.

The Jupiter mission, out in the unimaginable emptiness between planets, is presented to the accompaniment of the 'Adagio' from Gayane (1942), a ballet by contemporary Russian composer Khachaturian. The simple, almost funereal melody is like a lament for lost Earth and for this frail venture of humanity. The Discovery's crew, though they don't know it, are already doomed, and they are very far from home, in a limitless night.

There's no music, and thankfully no muzak, in the future. The space station, the shuttle and the Discovery are calm, quiet workplaces, rather than leisure areas. Two songs survive: Frank's parents sing 'Happy Birthday' to him over a time-lagged radio link, with Khachaturian's melancholy music in the background as counterpoint to their cheerfulness. And HAL, dying, sings 'Daisy, Daisy', slurred and slowing, as Bowman disconnects the elements that comprise HAL's self. Whatever music Bowman treasures from his own youth - presumably during the Sixties, given his age- he leaves it behind, unheard, when he transcends. If anything, this emphasises his alienation and his insignificance: a favourite tune, like HAL's swan song, might add an element of warmth to his personality.

The interval on board Discovery is, paradoxically, one of the calmest and most cheerful episodes of the film. Once HAL announces that an antennae is failing, the routine is broken. Atmospheres is heard again as Poole goes out to check the antennae: when Poole's EVA begins, the music dies away and we are left with the claustrophobic sound of his breathing. Kubrick uses breathing rate throughout as a deceptively straightforward indicator of physical and psychological state. With none of the emotional response that music evokes, it's the simplest accompaniment available, and comprises a surprisingly large percentage of the film's audio track.

With HAL dead, the film, symphonic in structure, shifts into its third and final movement: 'Jupiter and Beyond'. The ghostly chorus of the Requiem is heard once more as the monolith guides Discovery into position. Europa looms as the bass rumbles like distant thunder. As the Star Gate opens, male voices in the Requiem seem to cry out in anguish, like a legion of the damned falling into Hell. And Bowman - and the viewer - are off on the 'ultimate trip', Ligeti's Atmospheres accompanying a lightshow more reminiscent of The Pink Floyd than of serious atonal composition. The unfocussed blur of the experience is reflected by the music's disorienting turbulence. Gradually the music slows and gentles, though it's still punctuated by sudden bursts of feedback-like dissonance, as Bowman's alien surroundings become recognisably a landscape. And finally the music resolves into plaintive dying falls of brass, and Bowman's pod alights in an impossibly 18th-century salon.

The trip isn't over yet. Wordless, distorted vocals, muffled as though heard through a diver's or a spaceman's helmet, contrast with the clean white lines of the room. The music is Ligeti's Adventures (1962): an original recording conducted by Ligeti himself was altered, without permission, for the soundtrack, and the composer took legal action against Kubrick. The original piece features much clearer, oddly sexual vocalisations: though compelling and disturbing in its own right, it's too recognisably human for the definitively alien setting. This Bedlam chorus emphasises Bowman's confusion, especially as he encounters himself and the music fades.

True to form, Kubrick doesn't lessen the impact of Bowman's encounter with the monolith by introducing music, mystical or otherwise. The Blue Danube might suit the room, but it's been used exclusively for space shots, and has more to do with mechanical precision than with the quasi-mystic revelations impressed upon Bowman by his experience. Music at this point, as the elder Bowman witnesses the appearance of his neonatal self, would be a cliché. The silence is deafening.

But at the moment before transcendence, the distant rumbling of the kettledrums - almost below the threshold of hearing - signals that another shift has occurred, as it did with Moonwatcher out on the veldt. And this time there's a sense of resolution, of something both evolving and coming full circle, as Bowman's mystical rebirth sends him back towards the blue Earth. Something new has begun: and on that note, Kubrick leaves his audience with the familiar strains of The Blue Danube, a reassurance after revelation. The film itself lasts, blank-screened, for a good five minutes after the final credits - just Strauss' waltz playing, soothingly, in the dark.

The big-budget space epics of later decades may have commissioned stirring soundtracks from seasoned names, or up-to-the-minute (and thus swiftly outdated) songs from that year's popular stars. Kubrick's use of Ligeti might as well have been bespoke: the chances of his audience being familiar with it were low. But the sweetly familiar waltz is an elegant distancing device: Richard Strauss's version of a momentous dawn as dramatic as any visual cue.

Working with existing recordings, Kubrick edited scenes to fit his 'temporary' soundtrack rather than demanding music to fit a completed scene. Well before the first pop video, this is film shaped by music rather than vice versa. Perhaps that's why the music assumes such importance in 2001: not an afterthought, not wallpaper, but an integral part of the cultural artefact that is 2001.

Atom -- Steve Aylett

"The city sprawled like roadkill, spreading more with each new pressure. A grey rain slicked Campag Street - cars slewed through smoke and collided with pieces of the Brain Facility. Little flames dotted the rubble like Zippos in a darkened stadium…"

Welcome to Beerlight, Steve Aylett's cyber-noir vision of a near-future metropolis with a comic-book aesthetic and a cartoon morality. Down these mean streets a man must walk: meet Taffy Atom, whose card reads 'Private Defective' - and that may not be a typo. Atom is the naked detective, with mysterious origins and ambiguous motives: occasionally he dons a huge black coat and plays shamanistic clarinet at the Creosote Club. His business partner, Madison Drowner, upholds the tradition of the smart, mouthy babe who can look after herself and take care of any trouble-makers, whilst mixing a mean cocktail and creating psychoactive weaponry (rather like Gibson's Chrome). Atom's security consists of Jed Helms, whose human head has apparently been grafted onto the body of a bulldog-sized fish:
    "What kind of goldfish is that? It's a monster!"
    … the fish snarled, "Define your terms, meathead."
    Joanna's bulk wired with shock. "It's talkin' semantics!"
Add a selection of stock characters from the golden age of cinema - criminal masterminds, dumb bodyguards, blandly perfect blondes - and mix in a generous measure of post-modern irony and a few SFnal devices, and you'll have Atom.

In fact, there's something very cinematic about Atom. At 137 pages - more of a novella than a novel - there's little space for much in the way of plot development. Elaborate metaphors and slick, accomplished prose adorn (or obscure?) a fragmentary plot, the main strand of which concerns the theft, pursuit and recovery of Kafka's brain, stolen from the City Brain Facility by the scheming Candyman. Lightning-fast cuts from scene to scene, and from tableau to action, heighten the noir effect. Blade Runner set standards for the look and feel of futuristic urban noir: it's a setting into which Atom fits neatly, albeit with a satirical Western flavour.

Slaughtermatic, Aylett's previous excursion into Beerlight (he also writes contemporary crime) succeeded because of a serendipitous match of plot and style. It was a stylish take on the old time-travel paradox about travelling back in time and meeting yourself: what if you shoot that self? Atom, less narrative-driven, elevates style over substance to a degree that will confound the traditional reader. That said, this novel has the charm of a superbly-crafted animé film, though perhaps one without subtitles.

This Immortal -- Roger Zelazny

This Immortal is the earliest of Zelazny’s explorations of the solitary, long-lived hero who – in different guises – recurs throughout his fiction. This fast-paced, Hugo-winning novel (expanded from the 1965 novella ‘…And Call me Conrad’) reads like a pastiche of Homer and Hemingway. The ‘immortal’ of the title, Conrad Nomikos, is a centuries-old, retired freedom fighter who’s seen post-holocaust Earth abandoned by humanity. Embittered by the failure of the struggle, he finds small consolation in his role as Commissioner of Arts, Monuments and Archives. The humanoid, blue-skinned Vegans, who’ve taken in and sheltered the remnants of humanity, are fascinated by the tragic history of the Earth, and by the social problems the refugees bring with them. Earth has become a pleasure resort, and most of humanity is content to forget its ancestral home and create a new civilisation offworld.

Conrad becomes tour guide and protector to a Vegan ambassador and his human followers - one of whom, at the behest of the Returnist movement RadPol, has joined the tour expressly to kill the Vegan and save the Earth from alien rule. Despite his best efforts, Conrad’s past as Konstantin Karaghiosis, folk-hero and founder of RadPol, comes back to haunt him. Too many people know who he is – or was – and, if he’s betrayed the cause, are prepared to kill him in order to get at the Vegan. Meanwhile, the radioactive Hot Places are throwing forth hazards of their own – satyrs, zombies, and the Black Beast of Thessaly, not to mention an anthropologist who’s gone native and knows far too much about ritual cannibalism. Conrad must complete a set of labours worthy of a modern-day Herakles before he can receive a surprising legacy.

The mythological framework – Homer’s Greece, recreated by the Promethean fires of radiation – is delicately drawn, and the slow, melancholy decline of human civilisation is conveyed without melodrama. This is a dated future, though. This Immortal was written at the height of the Cold War, when nuclear devastation was the Armageddon scenario of choice: it is nevertheless the narrator’s attitude – rather than the socio-political background – which now seems outmoded. Despite the exotic backdrop and the motifs of death and decay, the tourists behave like guests at a Swinging Sixties cocktail party: flirting, gossiping and upstaging one another. Conrad’s – and the author’s – casually sexist treatment of the females in the group may seem patronising to a reader hypersensitised by the recent trend towards political correctness. There’s a macho sensibility to the whole narrative that recalls Hemingway: not necessarily a bad thing in an adventure novel, but here the blending of fantasy with gritty realism is less assured than in Zelazny’s later work.

The Chronicles of Amber -- Roger Zelazny

"It was starting to end, after what seemed like most of eternity to me…"

So, paradoxically, begins Nine Princes in Amber, the first volume of Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber – a series that eventually comprised ten volumes, published between 1970 and 1991. This Fantasy Masterworks compendium edition contains the first five novels: Nine Princes in Amber (1970), The Guns of Avalon (1972), Sign of the Unicorn (1975), The Hand of Oberon (1976) and The Courts of Chaos (1978). The second sequence of five volumes, whilst entertaining, is less epic in scope.

A man wakes, amnesiac, in a hospital bed, survivor of a car crash that he believes was no accident. He begins to piece together his identity: Corwin, son of King Oberon of Amber. Amber is the one true world that lies at the logical centre of an infinite array of possible Shadows. Oberon is missing, presumed dead: Corwin’s least-favourite brother Eric has usurped the throne: and now Corwin, exiled for centuries, is rapidly regaining his memory – and his ambition. The stage is set for Machiavellian plotting by assorted combination of Oberon’s surviving children, together with a cast of, literally, millions of ‘Shadow dwellers’, the unreal and thus expendable inhabitants of the Shadow worlds visited by the Amberites.

When Nine Princes was first published, Zelazny’s reputation rested on clever SFnal reworkings of various mythologies: the Hindu gods in Hugo-winning Lord of Light, the Egyptian bestiary in Creatures of Light and Darkness, and a post-apocalyptic Classical pantheon in This Immortal. Men like gods – with all-too-mortal failings – people his novels, which are typified by strong characterisation, exotic scenery, and a pacy blend of hard-boiled prose and soaringly poetic imagery.

Distorted echoes of Earth’s legends and literature people the various Shadow worlds through which Corwin and his siblings pass. When any possible destination is just a journey away, and every scion of Amber can manipulate the stuff of Shadow as they move through it, the only limit is the Amberite’s – or the writer’s – imagination. Keats’ Belle Dame Sans Merci lurks in her lakeside pavilion, waiting to distract Corwin from his hellride to the Courts of Chaos, cosmological antithesis of Amber. Odin’s raven Hugi (or a Shadow of him) drops by for breakfast, and Lancelot du Lac battles demons on the road to Avalon…

Thirty years ago, the fantasy genre was still heavily influenced by Tolkien. Zelazny’s iconoclastic creations proved that fantasy epics don’t have to be powered by magical spells and good intentions. Corwin can journey to any possible world: but that’s an innate ability, not an acquired skill, and all of Oberon’s children can do the same. Brand and sister Fiona are sorcerers of note, but most of the family prosper – or otherwise – through a combination of brute force and personal charm. Their attitude to sibling rivalry is suitably bloody-minded, too.

The Chronicles of Amber present an epistemological, rather than a moral, conflict. Order and Chaos may be equated to Good and Evil elsewhere, but, as Corwin discovers, life isn’t that simple. There’s evil, in a sense, to be conquered: but that’s in the form of a traitorous sibling cabal, rather than a Miltonian war between Amber and Chaos. If there’s a moral element to this story arc, it’s that Balance should prevail.

Zelazny being the writer he was, though, morality and epistemology share the limelight with choreographed fight scenes, the long struggle to maturity of near-immortals, and the memory of chestnut trees in Paris in 1908. The sheer joie de vivre is worth the trip, even if the setting’s no longer fresh.

The Proof House -- K J Parker

At the close of The Belly of the Bow (1999), Bardas Loredan had just committed an unforgivable crime – a sin of the kind that, traditionally, begets Furies and divine vengeance (and phrases like ‘a Use of Weapons for the fantasy genre’). The conclusion of the trilogy, then, surely features Fate knocking on the door, and subsequently the head, of the offender. Right?

It’s not that simple: The Proof House is not your regular heroic fantasy. This is a world whose ecology is mercifully free of elves and dragons. The gods, if not yet dead, must be hiding, since no one believes in them any more. The heroes – like Bardas Loredan, whose claim to fame in this concluding volume is that he’s survived the collapse of a siege tunnel – are only too ready to tell you that it could’ve been anyone.

Magic? Well, there’s the Principle, which teaches (rather like Time Travel 101) that there’s one right and proper way for history to go. If anyone attempts to use the Principle to change the course of events, history becomes self-adjusting and generates a coherent, if not comfortable, alternative route to a logically-equivalent conclusion. (Does it matter, in the long run, which city falls, or which man dies?) Way back in Colours in the Steel (1998), someone set a curse on Bardas Loredan: the wrong curse. Everything that’s happened to him, his family, his former secretary and his business associates can be traced back – albeit tortuously – to that mistake. If it was a mistake…

Actually, there’s more than a tinge of the conspiracy to this trilogy. Alexius the Patriarch, well-meaning originator of the wrong curse, is convinced that it’s all his fault, and spends the rest of the trilogy attempting to make amends. Bardas’ sister Niessa, with a lifetime’s experience of manipulating family, friends and colleagues, has an entirely separate agenda. Their brother Gorgas has always had Bardas’ well-being and happiness at heart, sometimes beyond all reason: an unsettling case of brotherly love that’s definitely too much of a good thing.

Freud would have found, in the Loredans, extensive material for a study of the dysfunctional family. K J Parker’s characterisation is subtle enough that the Loredans’ behaviour is simultaneously shocking and convincing: not an easy feat when the characters in question are borderline sociopaths whose family motto might well be a reversal of the old saw about being cruel to be kind. They’re the real (anti) heroes of the trilogy – as much instruments of Fate as they’re its victims.


Colours in the Steel used the metaphor of a sword being tempered in fire: The Belly of the Bow described the strength that comes from being under pressure, like the wood in the inner curve of a bow. Bardas Loredan’s ‘promotion’ takes him, as overseer, to the proof house, where armour is tested to destruction for weak points and flaws. In amongst the exhaustively detailed descriptions of every stage of manufacture, there’s plenty of room for metaphor and allegory – and for chillingly prosaic battlefield scenes (mud, blood and folly) which reveal more than a passing acquaintance with military history.

This was never the sort of trilogy that would end with everything neatly wrapped up, married off or killed: there are plenty of unresolved threads to tease the mind long after the book’s been closed. The Proof House is a fitting and unpredictable conclusion to the trilogy, executed with enough artistry, humour and intelligence to set it apart from the summer crop of fantasy epics.

A Short, Sharp Shock -- Kim Stanley Robinson

A man is drowning in the surf: hands pull him ashore, next to a female swimmer with close-cropped hair. When he wakes again she’s gone, prisoner of the Spine Kings. The man with no name is a solitary stranger in a surreal place, where a single ridge of rock – the Spine – circles a gigantic planet.

Having no other purpose or destination, he sets out to rescue the swimmer. On the way, he encounters strange and fascinating characters: tree-people with shrubs growing from their shoulders, sorcerers who dance every night, women with second heads. The tree people gift him with a name, Thel (meaning ‘treeless’), but they can’t tell him of his origins, or their own.

Gradually it becomes apparent that this isn’t simply a heroic quest with rescue as its goal. Thel and the swimmer (who remains unnamed) meet, part, and meet again as they journey west along the Spine. Thel – who may be a traveller from another world – suspects that the Spine is unnatural. He asks each group of people how the world came to be, and listens gravely to the cosmologies they recount.

The sorcerers are perhaps the most credible. The gods (who ‘fly through space in bubbles of glass’) argued over aesthetics, and whether beauty is an independent quality or if it depends on love and loss. The world of the Spine is their experiment; it has been made as beautiful as possible, while ‘leeching every living thing of love, to see if the beauty would yet remain. And here we are.’

It’s a credible cosmology because Thel constantly regrets the passing of time: each time that he recognises beauty, he is overwhelmed and wishes the moment to last forever. But he’s no native, and he is still capable of love: it is the concept of past (and the expectation of future) that he lacks.

It’s not clear whether the swimmer is a native or not. Near the end of the book, Thel realises that she doesn’t share his language: "when she said arbitrary she meant beautiful, and … when he said ‘I love you’, she thought he was saying ‘I will leave you’". Eventually both are transformed, and their different origins become explicit. Whether the narrative is as circular as the Spine, and that transformation is simply the start of another cycle, is less clear.

A Short, Sharp Shock, Kim Stanley Robinson’s self-declared fantasy novel, is available in a mass-market edition for the first time since its small-press publication in 1990. It’s more of a novella than a novel, but here – as in his short stories – Robinson proves that he doesn’t need exhaustive detail to create a world. 

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.