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Mar
19
Richard Morgan on new novel Black Man
Posted in: UKSFBN Talks To on 19th March 2007 by UKSFBN admin
Brit SF-noir author Richard Morgan's new novel, Black Man is a skillful blend of investigative drama, serial killer thriller and high-octane science fiction action-blockbuster. It's driven by incredibly strong characterisation and a multi-layered plot that takes on a wide range of sociological and psychological themes. And without a doubt it's his strongest novel to-date.
While the book isn't published until May 17th, I managed to get my hands on an advanced reading copy and, having enjoyed the book immensely, I thought I'd strike while the iron was hot and ask Mr Morgan a few questions about some of the ideas he's chosen to explore in the book.
UKSFBN: Firstly, could you give us a brief synopsis and an idea of the general flavour of Black Man?
Richard M: Black Man is set in the aftermath of a century of ill-advised and poorly regulated genetic experimentation, where an otherwise fairly successful global (and extra-global) community is struggling to come to terms with the legacy of the human damage done over the previous hundred years. I suppose you could draw a parallel with the way in which we now struggle with the human consequences of previous centuries of colonialism.
Carl Marsalis, the black man of the title is one of a series of engineered humans, in his case engineered for combat, who have been modified not so much in any physical aspect as in the way they think and feel. It's a specialism based on designed aptitude, and the book aims to show, among other things, that the aptitudes required or desired by our society are often very frightening things.
In tone, Black Man is quite similar to my Kovacs novels, in that it's a fairly high velocity crime-and-conspiracy thriller with a noirish lack of obvious good or bad guys – but the book addresses issues that the Kovacs series could only ever really meet obliquely because of the sleeving technology. Simply put, in the Kovacs universe physicality and death are problems that can be sidestepped. In the world of Black Man, as in our own, they aren't. You have to meet them head on.
UKSFBN: Would I be right in thinking that Black Man is set in the same milieu as your Takeshi Kovacs books, and if so, how does it slot into the ongoing timeline?
Richard M: Not really. Anyone who's read the Kovacs books is going to recognize certain recurring themes: the colonization of Mars, here seen in its early (though surprisingly successful) stages, the predominance of supra-national bodies and corporate interests, an on-going war between modernity and religion. But that's all these things are, themes, points of social and technological interest that continue to fascinate me.
"I am passionately interested in a number of areas of science, most notably those that shed light on how life in general and human beings in particular work..."In fact, the science of Black Man looks very different to the science of the Kovacs universe. Interstellar space travel is still a very long way out of reach and the body switching technology of 'sleeving' has not developed at all. Some of the virtual reality systems available to the characters may seem similar to the stuff Kovacs is used to, but it's all a lot cruder and while there's an understanding that in the future it might be possible for humans to be copied across into machine space, there's no suggestion that this will ever cross over into being able to swap bodies.
The essence of this book is that whatever hand you're dealt in terms of physical existence, that's substantially what you're stuck with.
UKSFBN: In your introduction to the book, you give credit to some of the background reading that has fuelled this particular round of ideas and concepts. Do you make a point of trying to stay abreast of current scientific and cultural thinking as a jumping-off point for your own extrapolations, and do you think that this is something that's common to all science fiction writers?
Richard M: I don't consciously try to do this – perhaps I should! I know that a lot of other SF writers do – but I am passionately interested in a number of areas of science, most notably those that shed light on how life in general and human beings in particular work: evolution and evolutionary psychology, genetics, social sciences and so forth. And I'm also a bit of a politics and current affairs junkie, so I tend to read a lot of political commentary and analysis.
Most of the books I mention in the acknowledgements I'd either already read before I started work on Black Man, or they were on my shelves waiting. One or two, I chased down specifically once it was clear what track I was on, but the bulk would have been on my recreational reading list anyway. In a similar way, I have an abiding interest in cosmology and what I suppose you'd call popular theoretical physics (I'm not good enough at maths to handle the unpopular kind!) and who knows, one day something in those books may provide the seeds for another book – though not so far.
"...you tend to write about the things that fascinate and perplex you, because those are the areas you're inevitably drawn back to..."I think, basically, unless you're some kind of genre hack, you tend to write about the things that fascinate and perplex you, because those are the areas you're inevitably drawn back to when you try to create something of your own, the areas you want to have your say on, the themes you want to explore and the points you want to make or refute. And it's not really going to be any surprise when you find that you already read widely on those same subjects in your free time.
UKSFBN: You've steered clear of painting this particular vision of future society as either a distinct utopia or dystopia; instead the message seems to be that human nature will always result in certain patterns and structures arising and predominating. Do you think that even with the current pace of technological change and looking at the differences between our own world and that of the early C20th, this will still pretty much always be the case?
Richard M: I had a curious experience at Worldcon in Glasgow a couple of years ago. I and a number of other writers were accosted after a panel by an East German woman who told us we had a responsibility NOT to write dystopias, because it was our job as science fiction writers to provide people with some hope for the future.
Now that's a hugely arguable point on a whole number of different levels – first there's the question of whether writers have any responsibility at all other than to entertain (and maybe not even that), then there's the small matter of whether a novel should answer questions or simply pose them, and whether a sombre dystopian warning is worth more than a bright didactic future (obviously I tend to think it is). But it did leave me thinking, and when I started putting Black Man together, I thought I'd make a concerted effort, if not to create a utopian future, then at least not to make it too dystopian either.
The thing is, I don't believe that progress towards a more just and civilized society is impossible, and I think the strides we've made in the last hundred years in all branches of science and culture demonstrate exactly that possibility of progress in motion. After all, who'd swap life now for life in the Victorian era? But in the end, that possibility of progress is only that, a possibility, and it's ultimately dependent on how well we can understand and discipline our own nature and tendencies.
I don't believe that progress towards a more just and civilized society is impossible ... But in the end, that possibility of progress is only that, a possibility...It's a slim, slowly extending line of potential, and it isn't hard to de-rail. Look at the invasion of Iraq and the so-called 'war on terror'. All the cultural, social and scientific advances of the last century couldn't prevent that debacle. Look at the struggle over Palestine, which shows no sign now of being any closer to a peaceful resolution than it was in 1948, and may, if anything be tipping towards worse.
These failures in civilized behaviour are clear examples of hormonal and genetic drives in action, knee-jerk gut feeling driving out reason and restraint. Greed, revenge, xenophobia – welcome to the human genome. Human nature simply is not civilized in the sense that we understand that word, and we only stand a chance of avoiding a dystopic future if we recognize that fact and get on top of it.
UKSFBN: The main protagonist, Marsalis, struggles against both his own nature and his early nurture. Is there a lesson in there for the reader: that with discipline and determination we can rise above our background and current situation and achieve whatever we feel we're capable of? Or is it more a case of it being a narrative device to generate the internal conflict that makes Marsalis so dramatic a character to read?
Richard M: Well, I try not to hand out those kind of lessons too glibly, I don't think it's becoming in a writer, not least because at the end of that road is Spiderman 2 and excruciating lines like "Oh Peter, there's a little bit of a hero in us all". And who'd want to end up there? Well, box office takings aside, that is :)
Marsalis, like any noir hero, is tough and determined and hard to stop, but those qualities tend to come with the territory – I don't think I was trying to say anything particular about them per se. What I was more interested in was the way in which human society creates larger-than-life images of heroes and monsters, and then attempts to force real individuals into those roles in order that the world around us should make some kind of simplistic, storybook sense. This is a deeply buried human tendency and, going back to what we said earlier about civilization, I think it's high time we realized just how treacherous that tendency is, and how much damage it can do.
UKSFBN: Another major theme of the book seems to be the dichotomy between the application of reason and the pursuit of a solution by violent means; it's sometimes unclear which is deemed to be preferable, depending on the desired results. What's your own philosophy of conflict resolution? Should reason always be preferred, or is might sometimes right?
Richard M: Well, in an ideal world, obviously reason would always be the way to go. Negotiated settlements are pretty clearly better for all concerned than violent altercations. But the world we live in is very far from ideal, and so reason very often breaks down and what emerges instead is usually violence. That's not to say that violence is necessarily a good alternative – it's simply what tends to happen when reason fails and people get locked into a hormonal, genetic response.
...in an ideal world, obviously reason would always be the way to go. Negotiated settlements are pretty clearly better for all concerned than violent altercations."So I've tried in Black Man to present the violence not as a strategy so much as an inescapable consequence of stupid and short-sighted policy decisions elsewhere in the human infrastructure. And once the violence is unleashed, it's very hard to see the right and wrong of it all, not least because that judgment is such a subjective thing. One man's terrorism is another man's fight for freedom. One man's justice is another man's brutality. And so forth. And above all, our attitudes to violence are, even in very general terms, going to be conditioned by our own genetic and social programming.
Take Marsalis himself – he's an exponent of violence, in effect a tool honed for the purpose of providing a violent response, and that makes him not only good at violent acts, but also comfortable with them. So he's likely to see a violent resolution as apt, not because it necessarily is, but simply because he's been built to see it that way (and there is of course a none too subtle allegorical echo here of straight-forward male genetic tendency and how it views things).
Other characters in the novel come from a different set of pre-dispositions, both genetically (several of them are women) and professionally (they are largely members of the law enforcement community rather than soldiers), and so they are set up to see, or at least look for, other, less savage resolution strategies.
The world Marsalis has to operate in is one in which the feminizing tendencies we see around us today have gathered strength and speed, and led to a social tipping point where non-violent solutions start to be viewed more positively at a genetic as well as a rational level, and so – self-fulfilling spiral – you end up with a social matrix in which such solutions are more likely to come about and to have positive outcomes when they do.
"...'alpha male' these days is a relative term ... the pack leader from one context is quite often going to look pretty sick trying to be top dog in another..."That's not to say that there is no violence in this society, because there is – people get murdered, there is rape and robbery, both the female police officers in the story have had to kill criminals in the line of duty and don't have much of a problem with the fact. And the new feminised reasonableness, generally successful though it is, is far from evenly spread around the globe. But violence is nonetheless a shrinking problem in this world rather than a burgeoning one. Put crudely, violent crime is down, on both the local and the international level.
In the midst of this, Marsalis represents an uncomfortable harking back to a time and a set of situations where this wasn't the case, and so the other characters don't react well to his methods. But it turns out the situation he's been called upon to resolve is also part of the long hangover from that previous time, so his methods and pre-dispositions are not necessarily the wrong ones in this case – he may in fact be the ideal man for a very bloody and unpleasant job.
UKSFBN: Do you know any 13-style alpha male types personally, and if not, then what would you do if you met one?
Richard M: I think thirteen tendency as I've envisaged it is very rare in modern humans, so no, thank god, I don't have any of them to deal with in my day to day life. And alpha male these days is a relative term – in any social context you'll find the pack leader type, but the pack leader from one context is quite often going to look pretty sick trying to be top dog in another. Imagine (evil grin :D ) some of the vociferous literary lions we've got in genre fiction and how they'd fare in Deliverance country, where your alpha status hinges on how good you are at stalking, killing and skinning big animals, or fixing truck engines. And vice versa, come to that!
One of the reasons that modern western society is such a pleasure to live in is not because the alpha males have been driven out, but because the way you become an alpha male has been socially modified to the point that it doesn't have to involve butchering your enemies, raping their women and slaughtering their children any more. Success has become subject to (genuinely) civilized protocols, and it's also diversified to the point that there are a lot of different contexts in which to compete, almost all of them free of violence.
UKSFBN: And finally, could you tell us what you're working on at the moment, and what's due to be published next? Have you written any more comics or is that something you feel you've tried and have done now?
"...what I'm writing now is my first dip in the fantasy pool..."Richard M: The comic-book thing is certainly on hold at the moment, but that's really logistics rather than a personal preference. I've got some nice ideas, and some sympathetic ears at Marvel and Vertigo/DC, and in fact my own US publishers, Del Rey, have talked about me doing a graphic novel for them – but right now I want to focus on getting my next novel up and running.
My own genetic wiring is pretty classically male, in that I have a hard time concentrating on more than one thing at any given moment, so sidelines like the Black Widow stuff I did for Marvel tends to slow me down badly elsewhere. And what I'm writing now is my first dip in the fantasy pool (working title Land Fit for Heroes, publication some time in 2008 if I make my deadline), which is a new area and requires a corresponding level of close attention.
The plan is to carry over the noir sensibility of the Kovacs novels into a fantasy setting, and brew up some old style sword and sorcery alongside, but in practice that's not quite as simple as it sounds. I have a lot of old stylistic habits to unlearn, and a fair few fresh tricks to learn, if I'm going to get this right. So other projects are having to take a back seat for a while. Once Land Fit... is rolling, that may change, but I'm very wary of committing myself to too many things at once and ending up doing none of them very well. Whatever I turn in, I want it to be the best fiction I know how to write, delivered at the highest possible level of focus.
Like I said, classic male genetic profile – what are you gonna do? ;)
Richard Morgan's Black Man will be published by Gollancz on May 17th. There's a review of the book - by yours-truly - over at www.thegenrefiles.com if you're interested.
You can find out more about the author over at his official website, and Black Man can be pre-ordered now from [Amazon.co.uk and other good online retailers. Who knows, maybe some high street stores are taking reservations already, too.
Black Man will be published in the U.S. later in the year under the title Thirteen and the author name 'Richard K. Morgan'.
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[...] An interview with Richard Morgan about his new novel Black Man (which, I have to say, despite not getting on with Morgan’s fiction in the past, sounds promising) [...]
[...] Check out the interview here. [...]
[...] 4 - Richard Morgan on new novel Black Man “Brit SF-noir author Richard Morgan’s new novel, Black Man is a skillful blend of investigative drama, serial killer thriller and high-octane science fiction action-blockbuster.” I’ll be chatting to Mr. Morgan at Eastercon, BTW. (tags: writer author interview novels noir sf scifi fiction science Man Black Morgan Richard) [...]
[...] Via Big Dumb Object I see the UK SF Book News Network has an interesting interview with Richard K. Morgan about his new novel Black Man, or Thirteen in the US. The interview confirms the impression of political concern that is woven into the Takeshi Kovacs novels, and if anything reveals Morgan to be surprisingly strong in his own opposition to violence. How this meshes with the Quellist philosophies expressed in the Kovacs books isn’t clear. Morgan also reveals his next novel will be a foray into fantasy. Posted by: Redag | [...]