Amazon.co.uk:
John, what inspired you to write a first science fiction novel
after decades of producing criticism, weighty reference books and other
nonfiction?
John Clute:
This is like asking a fly, "What inspired you to be caught in
amber?". One step at a time, says the fly, and there you are, stuck into a new
life.
Amazon.co.uk:
It began with an old, abandoned project, didn't it?
Clute:
You remember the Elite computer game tie-in project that Paul
Barnett thought might give him, you, me and others the chance to write some fun
space opera and make dough? I did a portion and outline a while ago--five
years? maybe more?--and stuck it in a back drawer when the project failed to
come off. Then--even though I knew I would never really ever write a space
opera that much resembled that synopsis--I gave the portion and outline to my
agent along with some other stuff. And he sold it to Tim Holman at Orbit, who
knew me well enough from previous projects to know that whatever came out in
the end, it wouldn't much resemble what he'd contracted for.
Amazon.co.uk:
What I remember of the Elite game was that you travelled between
space stations and never actually landed on a planet, so we had a free hand to
invent exotic worlds. Which you have certainly done... But why a novel at
all?
Clute:
The deeper reasons for writing fiction, after a couple of decades
of writing almost nothing but a couple of stories, are hard to uncover. I know
I did want to demonstrate, to myself, the truth of the conviction, which I'd
made something of a mantra of, that nonfiction and fiction were intrinsic, that
they were a coin with two faces--rather like the contrasting jack and flyte
faces of the double-minded AIs who populate the book.
Amazon.co.uk:
I'm going to ask you more about those words in a moment. Something
that struck me about Appleseed
is its playful contrast between a
classic space-opera plot of adventure and revelation, and the gorgeously
elaborate language of the telling ...?
Clute:
It is playful, but also a dead serious way to thread the
labyrinth. Which, I think, is what the baroque forms of SF like space opera can
do, if their authors--authors such as
Dan
Simmons or
Iain Middlename
Banks or
Paul
McAuley or
Michael
Swanwick--want to. A simple, classic story line is a thread.
Where it leads, one hopes, is to a sense of the unrelenting richness of the
realities which attend that thread. A successful space opera is therefore a
kind of wedding.
Amazon.co.uk:
And Appleseed
sometimes hilariously marries
different threads of language, where SF "tractor beams" and "nanoforges" jostle
on the page with high-flown words such as "azulejaria" and "mappemonde"
(tactfully defined in your Author's Note), not to mention "herm", "kenosis",
and "pleroma", and then the slangier "Okey dokey", "pong", and "spam". Again,
both playful and serious?
Clute:
I think the same answer applies. But also, I would suggest that my
opportunistic use of various registers of the English language manifests a
sense of the dangerous freshness of English at the present time. I am what you
might call a minor Elizabethan, bathing in the surf of a tongue which
(magically) is no longer old. John the Baptist the Lesser. So who's going to be
Shakespeare?
Also: I know I don't really sound remotely like
Gene
Wolfe--but he is an obvious influence on anyone writing SF who
finds intoxicating any play with the various registers of English.
Amazon.co.uk:
Why should English feel fresh today? Because SF has conquered the
media universe and SF terminology is everywhere? Because the Net is
cross-fertilising computer geekspeak with a dozen other jargons, all flooding
back into the language?
Clute:
Both those suggested tributaries of novelty in the Big DataBlitz
of English as she is swum in are part of the picture. Also the several
significant streams of English (like Indian English) parallel to, and often
intersecting with, the Daddy strain.
Amazon.co.uk:
Loved the speeches of your alien Mamselle Cunning Earth Link--all
that Joycean jumble of tones and vocabularies. "You homo sapiens guys
notoriously yclept chugalugs of galaxy! Far-famed tough skins, plus gold
hearts!" Tough work to write, or sheer fun?
Clute:
Sheer fun to do in first draft, because it's just like going back
to the rag-and-bone shop and finding it full of bargains. Hard work in second
draft, to make it all scan. Sheer fun at the end again.
Amazon.co.uk:
The Appleseed
galactic view of humans as randy,
pheromone-spraying stink bombs is suitably deflating (until eventually it's
turned around a little). What led you to that?
Clute:
Living in Camden Town. Looking into the mirror. Pretending to be
the child that sees the Emperor naked (which is the ideal angle of view for any
writer). It also helps make the plot work.
Amazon.co.uk:
Yes, I have a mirror like that too.... Onward: your Afterword
gracefully acknowledges several SF borrowings. I think I spotted others, such
as Greg
Bear's "partial" personality subsets, and witty "Made Minds" that
nod to Iain M
Banks, and fantasy masks and metaphors for cyberspace/AI doings
that look back to Vernor Vinge's "True Names". In short,
this future tapestry celebrates many things you love in SF.
Clute:
I forgot to mention partials and Minds. They are consciously
echoed. I have never read "True Names", so the Mardi Gras version of cyberspace
is plucked from unconscious levels of the network of stuff you half-hear, and
think you own afterwards.
Yes. Allusions celebrate. They also well up in the mind of a
writer who has spent most of his life, as a critic, in attempts to work them
out.
Amazon.co.uk:
Was it demanded by the logic of space opera that you have alien
bad guys who seem inherently horrible and inimical to
Appleseed
's ideal universe of perfect Minds and good
dataflow?
Clute:
The Harpe are (or seem) utterly villainous partly because space
opera asks for that. The implied under-message of the question--that it is
politically incorrect to depict, even in a space-opera context, a horrible
species--seems to go a bit far, somehow. In Appleseed
, humans
tend to speak fairly highly of their own species; but I don't think the book as
a whole countenances a good humans/bad aliens rhetoric. I wouldn't go so far as
to suggest that Appleseed
is an exercise in unreliable
narration; but it is certainly the case that we should read some ironies into
how the Harpe are rendered. I mean, in the end you might say that the Harpe are
sinful in human eyes because they eat their siblings raw, while we, on the
other hand, normally insist on eating our own siblings cooked.
Amazon.co.uk:
Ha. Speaking of siblings, I thought I saw a family resemblance to
some of your other literary offspring--intensely argued Encyclopedia of
Fantasy
entries on recurring motifs such as masks, gorgons, thresholds
and their guardians, and the "face of glory". Is Appleseed
continuing this exposition in SF terms?
Clute:
The E of F
motif entries were consciously designed
to make a pattern (very rough as yet) of ways of understanding how fantasy
story works. They are how the story threads its way, I thought. So it's not
surprising that--without any deliberation on my part--they became visible
glints in the thread of Appleseed
.
Amazon.co.uk:
I especially liked the new insight that AI Minds must wear some
kind of physical mask to interact with mere flesh people, and that this summons
up a slew of mythic mask-associations.
Clute:
Regarding the marriage of AI and Mask, I feel at the moment like a
blind man nudzhing an elephant. I think there is an intuition there, an
extrapolative insight, but I'm just toe-deep into it. I suspect there are a lot
of other blind flesh sapients nuzzling the same thought.
Amazon.co.uk:
Can you expound a little about your twin minds making up a full
Mind--what you call "flyte" and "jack" masks forming a double face like the god
Janus? Why those words?
Clute:
The two terms apply, in the first instance, because I wanted them
too. But there is something of an argument (or at least a history) behind the
choice. "Flyte" is a word which means to contend, scold, harangue with sharp,
edged words. It is usually spelt "flite," but I have always thought of it with
the hanging Y ready to scar you. That seems appropriate to the mask of the Made
Mind which faces out into the world and copes with the world. "Jack" is of
course Jack-in-the-box. The jack mask will pop out, but its home is within. As
I say in the novel, "all planets are jack."
Amazon.co.uk:
Do I correctly read Appleseed
's dramatic final line
as what SF critics call a slingshot ending--a pointer to what must follow but
needn't be told, rather than a mere sequel hook?
Clute:
Sure. But there is more story to tell, after (or before) this one
lands. I'm beginning to get down to a SF novel called Earth
Bound
, which will be set in the deep past of the
Appleseed
world, but will stand alone for most of its length.
The novel to follow that is to be called The Garden of Uttered
Names
, a phrase which appears in Appleseed
with
reference to Eden. Everything is gonna end happily!
Amazon.co.uk:
But we can expect more Clutean criticism too?
Clute:
Am also ready to go, as soon as Liverpool University Press wants
to proceed, with a collection of essays (some of them new) and reviews, to be
called The Darkening Garden
. That "Garden" appears in two titles
is not accidental.
Amazon.co.uk:
I look forward to it!
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