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by Gary Dalkin

Ken MacLeod and Tricia Sullivan have both have contributed stories to Improbable Botany, a new anthology of SF and fantasy on botanical themes. Here they talk to the anthology’s editor, Gary Dalkin.

Ken MacLeod

Gary Dalkin: Your contribution to Improbable Botany, The Bicycle-Frame Tree Plantation Manager’s Redundancy is a stand-alone story set in the same world as your novel Intrusion. Heather at Wayward Plants (the publisher of Improbable Botany) was especially intrigued by the bicycle-frame trees and other synthetic biology elements in the book, but just how did the story germinate?

Ken MacLeod: The bicycle-frame trees and synthetic biology aspects of Intrusion had been inspired by art projects by Daisy Ginsberg and James King, who visited the Genomics Forum in 2010 and gave slide-show presentations of their work including Daisy’s Growth Assembly: www.daisyginsberg.com/work/growth-assembly

It struck me that there was more to be done in that world, exploring its botanical manufactures and soft totalitarianism, and that story was the result.

GD: Do you think you will explore other botanical matters in future works? There’s been comparatively little botanically-based SF written over the years. Have you any thoughts as to why this might be?

KM: Well, plants aren’t obviously exciting—unless they move and sting, as in The Day of the Triffids, or cover the planet as in Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse, or die off and leave us to starve as in John Christopher’s The Death of Grass ... But synthetic biology and genetic engineering open up new possibilities, and because plants are simpler and cheaper and more socially acceptable to modify than animals, I expect more real technology along those lines and thus more botanical SF (and technothrillers) in the future. I have no further ideas about plants for the moment, but who knows?

GD: You began your career with two series of novels, the Fall Revolution quartet and the Engines of Light trilogy, but since Engine City in 2002 completed the latter sequence each of your books has been a self-contained, stand alone work. Now, with The Corporation Wars: Dissidence you’ve returned both to the trilogy format and to space opera. Uploaded dead war criminals conscripted to fight an outbreak of robot sentience in an extrasolar system (to quote the description on your blog), would seem quite a change of direction from Intrusion and Descent. So why space opera now, and why a trilogy? The title of the new series would suggest concerns about capitalism remain important to the work.

KM: After the War on Terror, fundamentalism, healthism, and capitalism, I’d pretty much run out of hot social topics ... No, actually this series came about because out of several pitches to my publishers it was the one they were excited about, and it became a trilogy because that’s how excited about it they were.

As sometimes happens it was the idea I’d given the least thought to, so I had to do a lot of reading and thinking to develop it. And as I did I became more excited about it myself—it’s a kind of space opera I haven’t done before, with quite a bit of combat throughout. It’s not really military SF, however: the chain of command is very short.

The set-up is that around the end of this century there’s a global war between (mostly) non-state forces of two opposed movements, the Acceleration and the Reaction. In the aftermath both are smashed, and a new world democracy and a new economic settlement is established. Humanity has basically decided to settle down to a long and happy retirement. Some of the fighters who have been killed but whose brain-states have been preserved find themselves, a thousand years later, revived in robot bodies (and VR environments for training and recreation) to fight conscious robots in an extrasolar colony mission. Some of the rebooted veterans take this as their chance to refight the old conflict...and then it gets complicated.

Where capitalism comes in is that the future society is on the surface a utopia where machines do all the work, but under the hood the engines of it are automated, AI-run corporations, competing fiercely. Utopia with Chinese characteristics, if you like.

GD: It sounds really intriguing. I’m looking forward to it and I can see why your publishers would be excited. So much so, that Orbit are publishing each book six months apart. When you wrote your previous series the books were published at the then traditional rate of one a year. What challenges does the faster schedule present for you as a writer? Is it an approach you welcome, or a necessary evil in an age of instance access?

KM: The faster schedule applies only to this trilogy. Now in theory it shouldn’t present a difficulty, because I had a good lead time. Unfortunately I got caught up in other things in 2014, not quite all of which were my own fault, so I’ve ended up more or less writing them at six-month intervals! I had the outlines of all three worked out, but in the course of writing I’ve made changes, and I’ve had to rework things on the fly. Bottom line: don’t try this at home, and if you do, make sure your projected trilogy or series is shovel ready before you pitch it.

GD: Pretty much the day this issue of Shoreline of Infinity is published we’ll be voting on whether or not to stay in the EU. You’ve said that as an writer of the left you were more or less expected to be in the Yes camp during the Scottish independence referendum, but actually voted No. Now we face a comparable choice regarding the UK and the EU. You have written that after the votes were cast in the Scottish referendum but before the result was announced that you felt a Schrödinger’s Cat moment, of two possible futures unfolding. Regarding the EU it would seem the natural left position would be to stay in, and the argument to leave is certainly being driven overwhelmingly by the right. Yet there are strong voices on the left also arguing to leave, albeit for very different reasons. Given your politics and your close experience of the Scottish referendum, where do you stand regarding leaving the EU, and again, do you have that Schrödinger sense of very different futures hanging in the balance?

KM: Although the EU referendum is a big deal, it doesn’t seem quite so fraught with significance as the Scottish referendum.

I’ve always been opposed to UK membership of the EU, basically for the same reasons as the traditional Labour left (Tony Benn et al) opposed it. I’m even old enough to have voted no in what was then called the Common Market referendum. Now I’m well aware that things have changed since the 1970s, but the basic arguments for popular sovereignty have not. I was against Scottish independence for much the same ‘Old Labour’ reasons, and likewise it’s quite possible that I’m just sticking with an outdated left position on both issues.

However, on a more personal level I have a good reason to hate the EU for what it’s done to a technology that changed, and may yet even save, my life: vaping! The incoming Tobacco Products Directive covers electronic cigarettes (quite unreasonably) and smothers them with finicky, burdensome and needless regulation. The principles of EU regulation are supposed to be: necessity, evidence, proportionality and subsidiarity. The relevant article of the TPD violates every one of them. Having followed every step of the process, all I can say is if that is how the EU makes laws, I want no more of it.

Tricia Sullivan

Gary Dalkin: Your story for Improbable Botany, Who Lived in a Tree, offers an unusual perspective on a radically transformed London —it is narrated by a tree. Without giving too much away could you explain something of how the story came together?

Tricia Sullivan: I’ve been a tree freak since I was a kid. I just love them, and I spent a lot of childhood time around trees and up in their branches. I considered trees friends, so maybe in some ways the story was a wish fulfillment fantasy. I wrote it in the fall of 2012, and I’d been reading about ideas for the greening of London (plant walls, etc) and also about the ‘internet of plants’ from Stefano Mancuso. I wanted to play with the idea of a symbiosis between humans and plants in which the connective talents of trees could be exploited for mutual benefit, so I took a big stretch with the research and let my imagination go. I think it would be much nicer to inhabit a living London than a stone one.

At the same time, I was going through a lot of anxiety about my parents’ ageing. I wrote the first draft while my father was alive and more or less OK, but I was very aware of the increasing frailty of both parents, who lived 3500 miles away and would have nothing to do with the Internet. So it’s a story of the rise of the plants, but also of the decline and death of old creatures and old ways. When I came to revise the draft for submission a few months after my father’s unexpected death, I was struck by how personally prophetic the piece felt.

GD: The notion of human-plant symbiosis, and of the ‘internet of plants’ is so intriguing, and such advances are being made bio-engineering, that I wonder if you have any thoughts about why botanical SF remains so comparatively under-explored? It would seem fertile soil for the imaginative writer.

TS: Well, Sheri Tepper did The Family Tree and I think Kameron Hurley has done some SF with plants. And of course, Jeff VanderMeer has done fungi. I’m sure there are others. I suspect the lack is down to commercial viability. A lot of SF nowadays stands on the shoulders of older generations. History provides a cultural shorthand that means writers don’t have to work too hard conceptually if they don’t want to; they can focus on e.g. their thriller plot, or other aspects of the work that interest them. However, if you break into a whole new region—like plant symbiosis—you’ve got the full weight of socio-scientific speculation to carry all by yourself, in addition to working all the party tricks of commercial writing. Novelists, anyway, have got to have all the storytelling and worldbuilding solid as rock if they want to sell their work, because publishers are extremely risk-averse. So it would be a fantastic challenge to writers to have a go, but not a small one.

GD: Any publisher which operated without any consideration of risk would presumably not stay in business long, but to be extremely risk-adverse would seem to be contrary to the very nature of truly imaginative fiction. Have you personally found problems with this conservative (with a small c) tenancy in publishing, and would you say this risk-aversion has been consistent throughout your time as a published novelist, or have things become better or worse?

TS: I’m lucky in that I’ve never had a big problem selling my SF to UK publishers, and I’ve never had a publisher try to tell me what to write in the sense of ‘we want to see space opera’ or something. Every SF book I’ve written, I’ve sold to a major house, no matter how bad the sales figures that came before. The failure of my work to pull in readers is where I suffered for a lot of years, thinking, ‘If only I could write something easier and with broader appeal...’ because I desperately needed the money. But the breadth of appeal of one’s work isn’t something one can control, necessarily. For me that was tough to accept, more so than anything publishers did or didn’t do.

The state of the industry is a bewildering topic and publisher risk-aversion is the least of it. I’ve had no choice but to decide to write for love, in the cracks of my life, and forget the money. There is no money, for most of us.

GD: Where do you think genre publishing might go now, in a commercial sense, and can traditional publishing survive when readers are rapidly becoming accustomed to 99p, or free, self-published e-books, and even e-books by name authors regularly being sold for next to nothing?

TS: I think anybody who could answer that question would get a pie, and they should certainly tell the rest of us post haste. From the authors’ point of view the rise of crowdfunding offers another way to get paid, and many authors are going hybrid (mix of self and trad publishing). Social media opens new avenues. Take Kameron Hurley. She has built by hand the platform she stands on, and that’s above and beyond her skill as a novelist. That’s a lot of work, and not everyone has those extra skills or the sheer determination to keep making noise. I reckon it helps to be extroverted or to be able to fake being extroverted—or, as in Kameron’s case, to be driven by strong emotion. Aliette de Bodard is another luminous newer writer who is beginning to achieve name recognition by sheer hard work: years of writing copious short fiction, blogging, working social media, networking, late nights, no pay, hard hard work—and she, too, is burning with a drive for something larger than herself. Again and again, I’m seeing risk-takey writers bootstrap themselves into their careers.

GD: You’ve blogged recently being inspired by Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible to let go of your ‘various science fiction induced hang-ups’ about what you ‘could or could not write’. And the result is Occupy Me. There is a sense that real science is outstripping where most SF is prepared to go, and now you are now considering a PhD in physics. If it came to a choice, can you see yourself leaving SF completely behind for a career in physics? And where next for your fiction, given that you wrote “Kaku takes the attitude that the impossible is a set of shifting goalposts”?

TS: I love writing, and when it comes to science fiction I am the real deal. At the same time I’ve already flipped a switch in my head that assumes I’m finished insofar as publishing goes. With that acceptance comes a great sense of freedom. My mojo is high. Full-time study plus part-time work plus family plus writing is my reality. If I do a PhD will it make more demands on my energy than that? Probably it will slow my writing down. I’m fairly difficult to stop.

Doing science and/or teaching science means playing a part in human progress, no matter how small or devalued a part (and I have no illusions there). I want use my abilities in service to the world in the years that I have here.

I’m writing a super girly SFF mystery right now for Gollancz, Sweet Dreams Are Made of This. After that I’ve got a fair chunk of my intergalactic breastfeeding novel on deck. This is the Sea builds on the cosmology I started setting up in Occupy Me and will be therefore completely whacked-out. It’s dirty work but I feel like someone has to push the envelope. I haven’t figured out the mechanics of the science/story interface because I’m dealing with technologies that are really, really different from the ones we have a narrative shorthand for. I try to write from angles that are underexploited, that yield insights you don’t otherwise get.

I will go on bewildering people as long as given licence to do so. It’s good for me and them, bit of brisk exercise never killed anyone.