Yatterings

What started you writing?

I have always loved to read, and when I was in college I began to write poetry and then short stories, just to see if I could. I felt the urge to try it.

I gather that you lived in Washington DC and Nepal. Did these inform the writing of your current series?

Very much so, although I never lived in Nepal, but merely trekked there with my wife in 1985. We lived in Washington briefly before that and then from 1988 to 1991. I wanted write about the National Science Foundation, and they are based there, so it became natural to use the area as the setting for the novel. When I began the book I admit I was thinking to have a little revenge for the things about the place that I disliked while living there, but in the end I found that writing the book allowed me to be reconciled or to recall the things about it that I had enjoyed. So that was nice.

In The Years of Rice and Salt and the Science in the Capital, you have a grand narrative overarching the human story. Is sf about the individual and their actions within society or should sf be about the larger narratives?

My feeling is that all novels are about the relationships between individuals and society at large, and at their best they can say a lot about these relationships. You need both to have a really full novel.

This trilogy appears to contain a manifesto. Was this intentional or did it fall that way in the writing?

I thought of the trilogy as inhabiting or inventing a genre that I think of as “utopian black comedy,” and so there are various manifestoes in it, some held consciously by the characters as plans for action as they face an example of abrupt climate change — these are the characters’ manifestoes as you might say, rather than mine personally — then also the trilogy as a whole has contained within it parts of the usual utopian manifesto, which says that history could be the story of progress in human organization, and that it would be better if we thought of it so and did what we could to enact what part of it we can in our time, then passing the project along. So that utopia is the name for a certain kind of dynamic process in history rather than any set end state. This would be a good re-definition since there never will be any set end states to history. Among other writers H.G. Wells was very insistent on this re-definition of utopia (clearest in his novel A Modern Utopia from 1905) and I think all utopian fiction has or ought to have this manifesto embedded in the action of the story.

You explore a sense of the utopian in your novels. Is this a hope that society can get there or a basic optimism in humanity?

Maybe both. I think science fiction has a basic underlying utopian impulse in it all the time, really; even dystopias are warnings not to go certain ways, with the idea we could do better. And all science fiction suggests there will be a human future and that it will make an interesting story, and this in itself is a utopian thought. So, for me, it’s a good way to make my political contribution to the world, and also a good way to find new stories to tell, challenging but interesting, and that is a key consideration. If you want to write good novels about our moment in history, this moment, you are driven to write science fiction, because that’s the world we live in; then once you’re writing science fiction, the utopian narrative is one of the most problematic and stimulating. It’s like new territory crying out to be explored, or maybe the cry comes from inside the explorer actually, but you see what I mean.
Should sf be about the present day and can it ever adequately define contemporary narratives?

Yes, at least certain kinds of science fiction are very clearly about the present day and the cast into the future is a way to express more clearly or with metaphor power as in poetry, things happening now. Really, since we live in a science fiction novel now, sf is the genre that is the most realistic. That being said, sf is very big, and there is lots of room for the stories that take place so far in the future that the huge potentialities of technology are being explored in ways that make it less about now than about what now suggests in possible in the centuries to come. This too is a very valid form of sf and one of the strengths of the genre. If you take all the future as your field of play, the possibilities for various kinds of good novels are greatly enlarged. So, looking at your question, I’d say no, it’s not a question of “should” — sf CAN be about the present and is powerful when it is, being both direct realism and a kind of heightened symbolism at the same time, but it can also be truly “about the future” sometimes and still be quite fine.

You mention some grand ideas, such as re-salting the sea. Do the big ideas interest you or is this an exploration of the current science and different ways of living?

Well, these “geo-engineering” or terraforming ideas are being discussed now by scientists, but they are controversial because we really don’t have a handle on the feedbacks and the unintended consequences, and with only one planet to call home, we can’t afford to make things any worse than they are now. The re-salting of the Atlantic is a specific response to the Gulf Stream stalling, and is hypothetical and presumably would be less dangerous than many geo-engineering actions being discussed these days. In my book they also try to pump ocean water into dry basins and up onto the Antarctic ice shelf, and even release bio-engineered lichens to draw down more carbon from the atmosphere, an action which I regard as extremely dangerous and not a good move (as some of the characters make clear). So, I am interested in these ideas only because they are real ideas in the real world now, and can be explored in science fiction as scenarios, to contemplate them in more detail perhaps. In other words it’s just part of that particular science fiction novel’s project.

Can religion, politics and science co-exist given the current climate of both Bush and Dawkins?

A crucial question for our time! What I tried to do in that trilogy is explore various ways of thinking about this, as story lines. In other words the plot of the novel tries to think about the issue in some new ways, suggesting there are things that science and Buddhism share and can say to each other. I also feel very strongly that there are spiritual, religious, political and ethical dimensions to science as it is practiced in our world, that need to be more fully recognized and discussed, and that this would be good for science in its interactions with the rest of human culture. I’m also seeing the scientific community try to intervene in the climate problem in a way they never have before in history, and this too will be one of the central events of our time. So — in essence they already co-exist, but uneasily and with much mutual incomprehension.

I gather that your next book is about the birth of science. What made you pick that topic? You are the third major writer in the last couple of years to explore this, the others being James Morrow and Neal Stephenson. Why do you think this topic is so popular?

I have not read any of these other books, so I don’t know what these writers were up to, what interested them, etc. For me the attraction was to Galileo and his story, so interesting in itself, and then also illuminating for what it says about the nature of science and the science/religion problem that Galileo got caught up in. It’s a really complex and interesting story, and for me that’s the main attraction. Also, the better we understand that story, the clearer we might be able to be about the science/religion questions we’re dealing with now. So it has its use value to us now, but most of all, for me, it’s a great story to tell.

I get the sense that you comment on life and how it ought to be lived in your novels. Is this fair comment and is this a purpose of literature?

Yes, sure. To me this is what novels are for. By reading them you get to live other lives and get inside other minds — that’s the effect anyway. It’s fun — it’s like any other art — we go to art for fun, for the thrill, but the thrill is of recognition and of a heightened sense of meaning. I think our values and our sense of meaning come always in the form of stories we tell ourselves. We are all addicted to stories and take in many every day, we seek them out, in headlines or on TV or in conversations of all kinds. We mostly know what we know in the form of stories, and we even give some stories special status as sacred or told to us by God or whatnot. I like to think all stories have about equal status, with none privileged in particular, but all together making up what for me is something sacred or religious. So for me literature is a kind of religion but also fun, or fulfilling in some way even deeper than fun (which for a Californian means very deep indeed) maybe just a basic hunger that we have for other people. Novels are very good at feeding that hunger.