A Mammoth Project

Stephen Baxter is Britain's premier current writer of "hard" science fiction--SF shaped by scientific realities. He has twice been shortlisted for the normally US-dominated Hugo Award (the Oscar of SF), and the British SF Association recently voted his The Time Ships among the top 10 SF novels of the last 50 years. For Amazon.co.uk, Baxter talked to David Langford about his novel Mammoth in a cosy cyberpub.

Amazon.co.uk: Steve, you're best known for spaceships and cosmology. This story about mammoths, from the mammoth viewpoint--is this a deliberate move in a new direction?

Stephen Baxter:

Amazon.co.uk: The SF fans' soundbite description is "Watership Down with mammoths." Does this make you nod or wince?

Baxter: Well, since I've been using that line to pitch the book for the last couple of years, I suppose I nod. All I need is to inflate it by 21 more words and I can take it to Hollywood.

Amazon.co.uk: Words like: "The part of the mammoth heroine Silverhair was written for Sigourney Weaver..."

Baxter: But I'd also mention other fine works in this sub-genre, such as Garry Kilworth's. I know not everyone is a fan of anthropomorphic books (greetings, Harlan Ellison!). And as a hard SF writer, this is the furthest I've strayed into fantasy. But the great advantage is that it let me dramatise all the complexities of a mammoth's life. Other than the language, I tried to give my mammoths no wonderful powers. You won't see them wearing clothes or living in buildings or working magic. They're just mammoths who can describe how they feel, so in that way they are like the rabbits of Watership Down . I even grounded their "language" in the communication modes elephants use--growling, stomping, touching, trumpeting. And I tried to describe how the mammoths' different senses have shaped them. Elephants/mammoths can hear low-frequency sound, so can hear and communicate a very long way. So they must have a sort of audio map in their heads, shaping the world around them.

Amazon.co.uk: You mention them feeling things like far-off earth tremors and continental drift...

Baxter: I did extrapolate this a bit to give them a sense of deep time, of the Earth's long rhythms, reinforced by their own oral legend tradition. Elephants/mammoths are giant, long-lived beasts who are aware of and shape their landscape; I wanted to express that with this metaphor. Of course it's still fantasy; a mammoth with anything equivalent to human speech would no longer be a mammoth. But it's all reasonable poetic licence, I think.

Amazon.co.uk: Well within the SF rules! You did some heavy research as well, didn't you?

Baxter: I did use Internet resources a bit. Didn't get much help from the academics, actually, as many of my questions--like "did mammoths sweat?"--couldn't be answered from the fossil evidence.

Amazon.co.uk: So you based those answers on real-world elephants?

Baxter: Yes. This is probably valid. There are two surviving species of elephant, the African and the Asian; mammoths were closer genetically to Asian elephants than African ones. Of course the conditions they lived in were very different, and that affected things like their reproductive cycle. But they seem to have had the same social structure, means of communication...I did a lot of museum research on mammoths--going to the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, for example--and also went out to the big game parks in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana, to watch elephants at first hand. Which was a stunning experience that was reflected a lot in the book.

Amazon.co.uk: What hit you hardest there?

Baxter: I'm a city boy and though I've travelled a lot it's mostly been to more or less urban landscapes. To see those giant lands shaped by non-human forces was stunning. I was surprised how orderly it was, as these species separated by millions of years of evolution work together, in a way, to keep the whole mechanism working. And it's remarkably tidy. We saw one dead baby elephant; even that was being cleaned up by the buzzards.

Amazon.co.uk:

Baxter: It was, although I also read a lot of native African stories, which have a similar flavour. I was also inspired by Kipling's story of the sea cow, which was related to mammoths (but sadly, in the real world, extinct).

Amazon.co.uk: What put you on to mammoths in the first place?

Baxter: I got the idea from a BBC Horizon some years back, about mammoths stranded on Siberian islands at the end of the Ice Age, outliving the general extinction but becoming dwarfed. My first outline was about an encounter in the present between the last dwarf mammoths and stranded humans, from the human viewpoint.

Amazon.co.uk: So back then it was a stand-alone novel rather than, as now, Mammoth: Book 1 ?

Baxter: As I developed and researched the idea I got interested in opening it out further. After all, mammoths/elephants have a long evolutionary history of their own, and a very long history of interaction with man. Some theories say we're responsible for their extinction. Also, I started to wonder what we'd do if we did find surviving mammoths. Where would we put them? All of this past and future would be difficult to squeeze into my first simple idea. Eventually I hit on the idea of telling the story anthropomorphically, from the mammoths' point of view. The mammoths can plausibly recall their own long history, and we can follow a few mammoth "characters" as they struggle to survive in the modern world. This was the idea I pitched to Simon Spanton and Anthony Cheetham at Orion. But they suggested, rightly, that it was much too big for a single book. So there'll be three: The first novel is the modern-day encounter with the last mammoths (no longer dwarfs!); the second will be a "flashback" to the Ice Age, the mammoths at their peak, and the third will deal with their future. That one will be about Silverhair's child, Icebones, as the ending of Book one hints. I don't want to say too much about that yet... If Book one was Richard Adams, Book two will be Jean Auel, and Book three Arthur C. Clarke. Or maybe not.

Amazon.co.uk: Not a trilogy, then.

Baxter: No. I always hated trilogies! Particularly those darn Book Twos. These books, though interconnected, will each be standalone.

Amazon.co.uk: I wondered about the extreme unpleasantness of your main human characters: yes, they're drunken criminals, but even so the sadism of their leader "Skin-of-Ice" seems excessive...?

Baxter: Surely from the point of view of most animals, humans are figures from nightmare. That was the main thing I wanted to convey. Skin-of-Ice's plans don't make much sense; his actions are dominated as much by cruelty as by logic. I did try to balance this by showing him as the exception, and the humans who appear later are different again. Mammoth is entertainment; I was in no way trying to preach. But I wanted to explore how it must be to be an animal on the receiving end of human attention--powerful, cruel, unpredictable.

Amazon.co.uk: Any special reason for what you call the YA approach? (Actually it's barely noticeable, beyond some schoolmasterly information dumps like: "A human baby's body weighs less than the mammoth's brain.")

Baxter: I would hope this book should appeal, maybe more than most of my stuff, to YA readers. At that age you're a little more open to alternate points of view and exploring new worlds than later. The infodumps were conscious--a valid, efficient way to show the reader stuff that couldn't otherwise be portrayed, such as what the mammoths actually looked like. Robert Heinlein always said his YA books (if they were called that then) were just like his "adult" books except the protagonist was a teenager (if they were called that then). The same with me. In this case it just happens that the teenager is a mammoth. Otherwise I didn't compromise on the material, the language etc. Really, Mammoth is YA because that's the nature of the idea.

Amazon.co.uk: When you've finished with mammoths, what next? A return to the galaxy-busting SF of your "Xeelee" series?

Baxter:

Amazon.co.uk: Sounds like fun! Lastly, let me cheat: What question are you wishing I'd asked, because you have such a snappy reply?

Baxter: Are you looking at my pint?

Amazon.co.uk: Oops, it's my round...Many thanks, Steve.