Yatterings

Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is one of those books which makes you sit and think about the world and reminds you of stuff happening anyway. If the authors currently hacking the century like Neal Stephenson and his spelunking into the inner cogs and James Morrow are taking on the zealots for both science and religion, Millet does something else. She reminds me of the Bomb and the insanity of the evangelical zealots and their ties with politicians who would, I suspect, actually like to use the nuclear threat. (This is a Bad Thing before anybody mistakes me). Its another way of looking at the century. Anyway, she kindly agreed to answer a couple of questions for me about the book.
How easy or difficult is it to use characters who are in the near mind’s eye, such as Oppenheimer and Fermi? How did you balance fact and fiction?

I didn’t balance them at all, I just ran with the facts I was attracted to and built a world of my own around them. All the physicists I wrote about, Oppie and Fermi and Leo Szilard, were great subjects for imaginative fiction because they were intellectual and political and thought a lot about morality. I was interested in how different they were from their creation - so complex and subtle, and then comes their baby, the bomb. Infinitely simple.

How tempting was it to use quantum physics and also post-modern philosophy to realign the world for the scientists?

On the quantum physics, not at all, given I don’t know it from a hole in the wall. In terms of philosophy I have a little more ground to stand on, but it’s pretty shaky. But the bomb is an excellent backdrop for the world of po-mo culture, certainly.

A thread is the thought that the scientists have given to their creation and its implications. However the fundamentalists and politicians have not thought their own actions through, in a way they come out as the demons. Faith and politics stifle the crusade, turning it into a war. Does this come from a feeling that this is the case in the modern US?

Yes. There’s a war against science raging here, and also a war against imagination.

Do you feel that the 1960s and the peace movements are as relevant now as then, particularly in the light of the current escalation of conflict? Did this make you choose the subject for the book?

I don’t know that it’s those movements that are relevant; I think they marginalized themselves pretty effectively after the 70s. What is relevant is our remarkable capacity for destructiveness. We’re a civilization led by sociopaths.

What brought you to satire? What are its challenges as a genre in terms of not getting carried away but not preaching?

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart isn’t straight satire of course - it’s not as formal as that - though I do like satire. Pure satire doesn’t preach, in my opinion, but it’s often a little flat and two-dimensional, and I didn’t want that, I wanted a fuller, more fluid, messier world for my story.

Lydia Millet is shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award.