Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #223 (9 page)

"There had to be a reason why someone would be genetically modifying animals: the most pressing reason would be a food crisis. There had to be a reason for the food crisis, and Brazil will find out very soon that in the Amazon it's plundering a resource it can't replace. Also, genetic modification has tended to take place in third world countries. Western countries don't like that sort of thing going on in their back yards, and third world countries are hungrier. When you're hungry, you don't look too hard at what's written on the label."

Guilty pleasures

Green is currently writing stories to expand the background he created for two of the stories in this issue, ‘Butterfly Bomb’ and ‘Glister'. He reveals the appeal of the world he has created is that he's been able to strike the balance he was looking for between ‘scientific correctness’ and the human conflict at the heart of all great storytelling.

"I started out reading SF stories set in simplistic universes in which spaceships with big plumes of flame coming out the back flew into a universe dotted with planets more or less like Earth. I still find a guilty pleasure in this sort of thing—that's why I like Jack Vance so much. He's not Mr Scientifically Correct but he's a superb writer. I wanted a universe that was plausible, but a little bit like the Jack Vance sort of environment. I like a relatively low level of tech in my tales but, at the same time, it has to be plausible. Hence the network of tunnels that people built in the past between various solar systems. These planets have Earth-like environments because they've been terra-formed in the past. That sort of detail is necessary to keep the believability. Frankly, Jack Vance got away with flirting with the preposterous because he's a much better writer than me."

Green's stories are distinguished by their thematic and stylistic variety: his work for
Interzone
has included hard SF, post apocalyptic mystery, surreal philosophy and speculative satire. And it's been enthusiastically received. His story ‘The Clockwork Atom Bomb’ topped our 2005 Readers’ Poll and went on to receive a Hugo nomination for best short story. But, remarkably, Dominic Green is yet to have a novel picked up for publication: he has, he tells us on his website, wallpapered his home with photocopied rejection slips. Green feels stories have a sell-by date so he has resisted the urge to store them for re-submission at a later date.

"If you accept the analogy of novels being a writer's children, who wants to shove their children in a cardboard box?"

So he's offered four manuscripts online for free: two works for younger readers
Saucerers and Gondoliers
and its sequel
Sister Ships and Alastair;
and two adult SF novels
Smallworld
and the wildly entertaining
Abaddon
(homepage.ntlworld.com/lumfylomax/).

"
Abaddon
started out as a simple idea. It asks what if the Bottomless Pit of the Book of Revelation really did exist? Where could it exist? What would its effect have been on history? How could it be explained? If stories involve willing suspension of disbelief, our first duty is to make the fantasy world as similar to the real world as possible. I used to be a programmer, and customising an existing working program involves making the smallest change necessary to achieve the desired effect—in fact, I believe that's a phrase from Asimov. In
The End of Eternity,
the Minimum Necessary Change is what Asimov's time controllers apply to history to alter its course for what they believe is the better. Change one detail, small or large—change nothing else. In Alan Moore's
Watchmen,
the MNC is that superheroes actually exist. In Niven and Pournelle's
Footfall,
it's the reality of fithp. In
Abaddon,
it's the existence of the Pit. Once you've made the change, everything else should click into place logically—otherwise you'll fall into the horrid trap of Keeping on Making Stuff Up, and eventually that leads to internal inconsistency and
deus ex machina.
Reading stories like this is like being in that playground game of Cowboys and Indians where the cowboy refuses to lie down dead because he's wearing an arrow-proof vest, forcing you to invent tungsten tipped Indian exploding poison arrows, starting an arms race that can only end in force fields and kryptonite. When this happens in SF, it is called ‘E.E. Doc Smith'. On the other hand, this is coming from the man who gave you a flying saucer piloted by the Easter Bunny. Hush my mouth."

No miraculous rescue

The self deprecating charm that informs Green's conversation is an integral part of his writing. His most unsettling and complex ideas are leavened with effortless wit and fascinating story arcs. And, as we talk, it becomes clear that the secret of his success in this respect lies in his refusal to see the role of writer as a transmitter of privileged perceptions. Green wears his formal learning lightly, but he knows his stuff and knows exactly what he doesn't like.

"Percy B. Shelley gave us ‘Ozymandias', but he also gave us ‘On launching some bottles filled with Knowledge into the Bristol Channel', a poem which clearly indicates that, before he filled his bottles with Knowledge, he'd mainlined their former contents. I don't claim to have Knowledge that lesser human beings don't have. I did a whole bunch of bloody awful jobs in the early nineties recession, among people who had virtually no educational qualifications at all, and you know what? They could do their jobs just as well as I could, and better. Granted, their jobs often involved lifting package A off machine B onto machine C and repeating for eight hours, but that's not the point.

"Shelley believed he could illuminate distant benighted populations by sending them artsy notes folded up in bottles. At least I
know
my stories are bullshit. Stories are lies, after all—real life doesn't have happy endings, daring last-minute rescues, conversations where people don't interrupt one another, and space drives that push on the Holy Spirit. But I like to think my lies are white ones.

"My favourite
Babylon 5
episode was the one where John Sheridan is in prison, undergoing torture, and
it lasts the whole episode
. You know how long the programme lasts, you're checking your watch thinking, crikey, they're cutting it a bit fine with the rescue here. But then the episode ends,
and he's still in prison
. The message is clear. For people in prison all the way round the world, really undergoing torture, there is no last minute reprieve, and there is no miraculous rescue. That's why
Babylon 5
beats
Star Trek
till
Star Trek
cries like a little girl."

So is Green telling us these white lies simply to entertain us, or is there an intention to provoke as well? What does he want from his readers?

"Writing is like going for a really big shit. It's in there, and it has to come out. And when it does, your own always smells a lot better than anyone else's. I suppose a woman might compare it to having a child inside her that really needs to be born. I'm a man, so I'll compare it to having a shit. Why not? There are any number of reasons
why
it has to come out, of course. Anger. Fear. Reading other people's stuff and thinking ‘I could write something like that so much better'. Reading other, better people's stuff and thinking ‘I really want to try to write something like that'. The poignancy of a failed love affair. The desolate horror of the dream of the night before. An idea that is so cool you have to put it down on paper. A world 20 kilometres across with Earth-like surface gravity. A hole that goes down forever.

"I don't think my lies seek to educate. Rather, I think they seek to reach like-minded people who say to themselves ‘Yes! That
is
the way it would be'. In the event of Britain having an interstellar colony, it would be a bit crap, things wouldn't work very well, and we would end up sponging off the Americans. In the event of a technology existing that could be turned into a weapon that would destroy the world, yes, some bright spark would build one."

Green clearly relishes SF that takes its audience into uncomfortable places. I ask if he characterises his outlook as essentially optimistic or pessimistic.

"I'm
so
tempted to say pessimistic. In the early 1990s, it really did seem as though the world was about to sort itself out. Apartheid was over, the Berlin Wall had fallen, Russian and American ships had sailed
together
in the Persian Gulf against Saddam Hussein.

"Then everything changed. Sure, America decided to appoint a warm blancmange in a suit as their commander in chief, but that just seemed to illustrate the underlying Cthulhoid horror of the whole ghastly arrangement. We vote for leaders and expect them to run the world, but they are doing nothing of the sort. Instead, they are hanging on for dear life trying not to get thrown by a Malthusian nightmare that is galloping out of control. On the other hand, it is kind of cool watching it all fall to pieces."

I know Green has expressed deep concern at the increasingly crass and monolithic nature of our ‘official’ culture so I suspect his sense of amused bewilderment at the chaos of the human condition is cut with a darker emotion. I ask to what extent his work is informed by an angry response to folly and turmoil.

"When I started writing, straight out of college, I was convinced all the right-on chaps who went to demonstrations against globalisation were really only doing it to get it on with right-on girls, and as most of them seem to have become merchant bankers since then, I'm pretty sure I've been vindicated. But as I get older, I'm turning into them—apart from the fact that I still don't want to sleep with women with hairy legs. I started out in writing by trying to stick the boot into the daft things people on the bus come out with that made my blood boil, and that I hoped made other people's blood boil too. My personal favourite is ‘Gosh, I sure am glad nothing bad like the Holocaust is happening in the world today.'

"And even where rebellion is present in the world today, it's pre-packaged to fit the big media houses’ idea of what rebellion should look like—compare Pink with Jello Biafra. And another thing, Iggy Pop.
Iggy Pop
is on my TV screen telling me to buy car insurance. Truly, the ravens have left the Tower."

Dominic Green's Interzone Stories

Moving Mysteriously

#108, June 1996

Evertrue Carnadine

#112, October 1996

Everywhen

#118, April 1997

The Cozumel Incident

#121, July 1997

Queen of the Hill

#130, April 1998

That Thing Over There

#132, June 1998

Dream Blue Murder

#145, July 1999

Something Chronic

#159, September 2000

Rude Elves and Dread Norse Reindeer

#162, December 2000

Grass

#168, June 2001

Queen of Hearts

#173, November 2001

Blue Water, Grey Death

#175, January 2002

News from Hilaria

#179, May 2002

Heavy Ice

#187, March 2003

The Rule of Terror

#189, May/June 2003

Send Me a Mentagram

#192, November/December 2003

The Clockwork Atom Bomb

#198, May/June 2005

Butterfly Bomb

#223, July/August 2009

Coat of Many Colours

#223, July/August 2009

Glister

#223, July/August 2009

Greg Egan keeps a comprehensive
Interzone
index on our website: ttapress.com/interzone/eganindex

Copyright © 2009 Andrew Hedgecock

[Back to Table of Contents]

It was one S.I. hour after dawn. Although the deceptive marshmallow carpet filling in Hell's Point was glowing brilliant white in the steadily rising sun, Midas's primary was still well under the horizon. I knew this, because I had been standing out in the open for over two hours, and I was still not dead.