Politics Is What Humans Do

Richard Morgan interviewed by Martin Lewis

Richard Morgan is the author of five acclaimed SF novels, including the Takeshi Kovacs series of military cyberpunk novels starting with Altered Carbon (2002). His latest novel, Black Man, is set in a near future where the USA has fractured into three independent states. Carl Marsalis is the titular black man, a genetically engineered "variant thirteen". Thirteens were created to be super-soldiers but it is not long before a backlash starts. Slurred as "twists", as the novel opens they are no longer the heroes of Middle Eastern wars but monsters to be feared and hated. Marsalis operates under license, satisfying this fear by hunting down others of his kind. Abandoned by the UN he instead employs his services for the vast corporation colonizing Mars, helping them hunt down an escaped serial killer. Clearly inspired by contemporary events, Black Man is a fast-paced action novel that still manages to grapple with meaty political and social issues. This interview was conducted by email in August 2007.

Martin Lewis: You are one of those overnight success stories who was plugging away for ages before suddenly making a splash. On your website you describe the rapid process of publishing your debut novel, Altered Carbon, as: "Gollancz published it, Hollywood bought it, I gave up my day job. Eight months. Just like that." What did that feel like?

Richard Morgan: Initially, fantastic. Fourteen years of trying (without anything at all to show for it), and then a three book deal out of nowhere. You can probably imagine. But then, as the good news piled up, the reviews, the enthusiasm, the film interest, I got increasingly numb to it all. There’s only so much life-fulfilling good fortune you can take at any one time, only so much adrenalin you can secrete. By the time the film deal rolled around and I quit my day-job to write full time, I’d been living on full spectrum delight for about a year non-stop, and I was pretty much beyond feeling anything but slightly dazed.

ML: Were you still writing during this period?

RM: Yeah, I was banging steadily away at the word processor all that time, not to mention still holding down my day-job at Strathclyde University. Thing is, I was initially picked up by Gollancz at the end of 2000, but Altered Carbon wasn’t published until February of 2002; meantime, they told me to go away and start in on a second novel, and I did, in something of a disbelieving trance, but steadily, as I said. I think during that period, if anything, the headiness of having finally found a publisher acted as a supercharger on my writing. There wasn’t really any sense of pressure either, because for the vast majority of the time I was working on Broken Angels, Altered Carbon hadn’t yet hit the shelves – all the accolades and hype were still to come. And by the time that did hit, I was pretty much done with the Broken Angels manuscript so it was too late to worry.

Then of course, the film deal went through by the end of the year, and I was able to quit my day-job. That was very helpful at the time, because a lot of people reacted badly to Broken Angels when it came out the following Spring – they objected variously, to the shift away from future detective story towards space opera/military SF, to the more static, conversational sections and deeper character work, or in some cases simply to the darker tone and ramped up amorality. And the film deal basically gave me the freedom to say so what? I’ll write what I damn well like, rather than feeling under pressure to do a crowd-pleasing Altered Carbon copy. And I remain very grateful for that Hollywood money, because it allowed me to maintain that stance while I built up a back catalogue of work I could feel proud of, rather than just one that would pay the bills.

ML: Hollywood might have bought the rights but given how these things work I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to appear. Presumably you'd love to see your novel on the big screen though?

RM: Well, I’m ambivalent – obviously, you want the impact of a movie version, the widescreen thrill of it, and that’s without even mentioning the publicity and the increased book sales that will inevitably follow a movie. But at the same time, there’s always the sneaking suspicion that not enough of your original vision is going to survive the translation to the big screen medium, that you’re going to end up with Johnny Mnemonic, not Bladerunner, as an end product, and that would be a great shame. Perhaps fortunately, the whole thing is out of my hands anyway, so I just keep my fingers vaguely crossed, and try not to give it too much thought day to day. Got to live in the now, y’know.

ML: Film is obviously a big influence on the novels. Is it right that Market Forces originally started off as a screenplay? Would you still like to write a film?

RM: No, I really wouldn’t. Market Forces the screenplay – written long before the novel, yes, bulked up from an original short story I’d failed to find a publisher for – was a miserable experience for me. In the end, it felt like being stuck in that garbage compressor in Star Wars. Struggling to keep your head above water, flailing about looking for something to brace against an ever-tightening sense of constriction as control of the project slips from your grasp. That wasn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just the nature of the beast. A movie script is never a finished product, at best it’s only ever a working template, and you never really own it the way you do a book. Screen-writing requires you to be pragmatic, amenable to compromise, endlessly sociable and a good team player. I score very low on all of those, which is why I write novels.

ML: What have you been watching recently?

RM: Very little on the big screen, to be honest. There seems to have been a great dearth of decent movies on general release this summer. The last really good thing I saw at the cinema was probably The Last King of Scotland, and that was ages ago. On the small screen, I’ve been working my way through the third season of The Wire on DVD, which suffers from a certain amount of long-term series sag, but is still far and away the best TV drama around right now.

ML: They aren't in the same league as The Wire but SF TV is experiencing a bit of a boom at the moment. Do you watch Heroes or the new Battlestar Galactica?

RM: I don’t really watch a great deal of TV, so the majority of this stuff is under my radar. I think I did catch a glimpse of Heroes a few weeks back, but I have to confess I wasn’t all that impressed. Despite all the good things I’d heard about its humanity and grayish moral tones, this still seemed fundamentally to be about Good Guys and Bad Guys and Big Abstract Struggles between Good and Evil (in the segment I saw, a magical sword that can only work for Good, or something? Super-powered bright young things under horrible duress from evil black helicopter backed governmental types?), and that’s not a dynamic I have a lot of time for in fiction. Like I said, it was just a glimpse, and I haven’t seen Galactica at all, so I’m more than happy to be convinced that I’ve misjudged this new wave on too little evidence. But as you say yourself – this stuff just isn’t in the same league as The Wire. The question we ought to be asking ourselves as genre practitioners and fans is Why Not?

ML: Moving back to your novels, Black Man has had a pretty positive critical reception. What responses have you had to the novel from fans?

RM: In general, the readership have responded more or less in line with the critics – which is to say there’s a consensus that this is the best thing I’ve written so far, by some considerable margin. And of course, that’s very gratifying – you always hope that you get better with each book, but I think as an author you depend on that outside opinion to fully gauge what you have or haven’t achieved; basically, you’re standing too close to ground zero to assess the novels you write with any degree of objective honesty. And enough people whose honesty I trust have told me this one is something special, so I’m starting to believe that maybe it is. Of course, there is a certain small but vocal contingent among the fans who hated Black Man, but what their complaints seem to boil down to is this book isn’t Altered Carbon. Well, no – that’s why there’s a whole other title on the front cover. And as I think I mentioned above, I’ve been dragging that critique with me ever since my second novel came out. It would appear that there are readers out there who just want the same thing duplicated over and over again, like a baking tray full of Big Macs. I really can’t help those people – they need to go back to reading tie-in novels.

ML: You appear as Richard Morgan in the UK and Richard K Morgan in the US. Iain Banks has said in the past that he regrets using his middle initial but am I right in thinking you prefer the "K"?

RM: Well, there’s a venerable genre tradition, isn’t there – Ursula K Le Guin, Philip K Dick, Robert A Heinlein, Peter F Hamilton, Robert E Howard, Vonda N McIntyre, Maureen F McHugh, and that’s just off the top of my head sitting here. Must be something to do with the rhythm of the thing. In fact, while I really don’t like my middle name, I do quite like the bare initial, and I had originally asked to be Richard K Morgan on both sides of the Atlantic. But then Gollancz decided to go with a logotype-led cover, and said the K would get in the way and did I mind dropping it? And not being a prima donna about these things, I said sure, why not. So now, just like Iain there, I’m stuck with the difference.

ML: On a slightly more contentious issue, it is titled Black Man in the UK and Thirteen in the US. I assume Black Man is your preferred title. What necessitated the trans-Atlantic change?

RM: To be honest, that’s still a matter for some debate – I’m not sure if it was fear that black interest groups would react badly to a book called Black Man written by a white guy, or fear that a white-bread American SF readership would feel alienated by a science fiction novel called Black Man. Certainly, the various African-American readers I’ve spoken to on the tour I just got back from seem to feel it’s the latter. I’m really the wrong guy to ask – you’d need to speak to my US publishers to get a certain answer.

ML: As a white writer did you have any concerns about tackling race in the novel?

RM: Not really, no. I mean, obviously you want to get the detail right, you want to be convincing, because when all is said and done, that’s your job as a writer. But there’s really no reason why, with a reasonable degree of sensitivity, someone white shouldn’t be able to write black characters (or vice versa). And it was a lot easier for me than for a more mainstream writer, because this book was never going to be about existing racial contexts anyway – it deals with issues of racism and xenophobia in general, but in the end it’s set in a future I invented, and that makes me the biggest resident expert on any contexts that future entails. And that’s a nice position to be in.

In fact, beyond that obvious need for writerly sensitivity, I don’t have a lot of patience with the kind of identity politics that says no white writer can (or should) deal with black character context. Because the obvious corollary to that is that no black writer should be writing white characters. And that neither black nor white writers should write Asian characters. And that male writers shouldn’t attempt female characters, and that women can’t write men. And that no-one under fifty can write about old people. And... It’s a ludicrous progression, and it flies in the face of the whole enterprise of literature. Writing fiction is an exercise in the use of imagination – you can be better or worse at it, make a better or worse job of it, but this political off-limits stuff is bullshit.

ML: Along with race, gender plays a huge role in the novel. How much is this informed by your own life experience?

RM: I think I had a relatively standard (lower) middle class British upbringing, which is to say my mother and father both fulfilled fairly traditional gender roles for the times. My father was the breadwinner, my mother was a home-maker and worked part time as I and my sister got older. Parenting was a shared thing, but my mother was quite headstrong and my father quite easy-going, so I guess they met in the middle perhaps more than some extremely traditional parental models might have. Later in life, my mother discovered feminism, joined a women’s group and started volunteering at the local women’s refuge. By that time, I was in my mid-teens and I’d taken to borrowing a lot of what she was reading, so with that and the things she told me about the refuge, I got an early and forceful introduction to feminist theory and practice. That’s something that never really goes away, it’s like going to live in a foreign culture – once you’ve opened your head that way, seen things from that other perspective, the world never looks the same again.

ML: So your time in Turkey and Spain was helpful to you as a writer?

RM: Yes, very. It’s a powerful shock to the system to go and live in a place where millions of people exist day-to-day on a set of cultural assumptions markedly different from your own. As with seeing the feminist (or more simply the female) perspective on things, you are forced out of your accustomed world-view, forced to consider its validity as against any other. The result is ultimately very empowering – you come away with a far better sense of what is of real value in your own culture, and of what could really do with being changed. Plus (if you can beat your own nasty knee-jerk prejudices) you get an overwhelming sense of common humanity, a (one would think fairly obvious) understanding that at basic levels people are similar wherever you go – but you get that understanding at an emotional rather than an intellectual level. And then of course, there’s the wealth an experience like that brings to your life in terms of getting to know different food, different music, different languages, different kinds of humour ... and all of those will feed into your fiction, and make it correspondingly richer, more human and more textured.

ML: We've just touched on a couple of major social issues. There seems to be a bit of a split between the Takeshi Kovacs novels and the standalone novels. Are Black Man and Market Forces deliberate attempts to examine political and social questions in a way you couldn't with Kovacs?

RM: Not at all. That’s to say, I didn’t consciously set out to write a political novel with either Market Forces or Black Man, or for that matter to avoid politics in the Kovacs books. All my novels start out from roughly the same point – I spin them up out of character interaction, brief scenes and confrontations, and then look to see what direction I can roll the material in. In some cases, that’s going to involve a more overt political context than in others. Market Forces went from being a duel between two savagely competitive City types to a full dress portrait of the society that would allow such confrontations to be its defining characteristic. Along the way, it ended up becoming a critique of macho neo-liberalism and the American Business Model. Similarly, Black Man started with a disaffected bounty hunter trawling the Mars Prep camps on the altiplano for fugitives, and a disaffected ex-cop wrestling with a ghost-ship-makes-port scenario borrowed from the Bram Stoker tradition. The political contexts came later, as the story opened up. But you could also say the same thing about the third Kovacs book, Woken Furies, which is among other things a pretty extensive examination of revolutionary politics, but started life as a scene of violent confrontation in a wharf-front bar. Or we could talk about the political context of the war in Broken Angels, and Kovacs’s attitude to it. In fact, the truth is that with the possible exception of Altered Carbon itself, there’s a pretty strong political current running in all my work – and even there, in Altered Carbon, I think my politics came through pretty clearly for anyone who was paying attention. The thing is, as far as I’m concerned, politics is a part of life, and any novel which has any hope of describing human existence in a halfway decent fashion will have to have a political context. If your characters and situations are apolitical, then they just aren’t realistic. Politics is what humans do, it’s practically our defining characteristic as a species.

ML: Have we seen the last of Kovacs?

RM: For the time being, yes. That’s not some kind of Conan Doyle sulk, it’s not a Never Again thing. It’s just that right now I can’t think of anything fresh or interesting to do with the character. And I have a real horror of turning into a series hack, churning out endless, soulless clones of the same basic book. That’s not for me. I’m lucky enough to be making a good living from my writing now, and with that comes, I think, a responsibility not to abuse the privilege. That means pushing the envelope a bit, taking some risks, looking for something fresh to do each time. Otherwise, I might as well be laying out those trays full of Big Macs I mentioned earlier. It wouldn’t be writing then, it’d just be a job packaging product.

That said, if I ever come up with a way to do another Kovacs that does offer something fresh, then of course I’ll do it. I miss the old bastard as much as anyone.

ML: The acknowledgements to Black Man show someone who reads in wide range of subjects. Do you think this is important for a writer? Or is it just important for any human being?

RM: The latter, definitely.

ML: To pick an example, you quote the philosopher John Gray as an epigram to Black Man. What drew you to him and would you recommend that I read him?

RM: I wouldn’t exactly recommend Gray – he’s a miserable, misanthropic bastard even at the best of times, and reading his stuff is definitely going to spoil your day. He’s also a great one for laying down the law about things, which is a bit rich coming from someone who was a cheerleader for the Thatcher revolution in the eighties and now affects to despise neo-liberalism. I mean, a bit of humility perhaps, John? Would that be too much to ask?

That said, he’s a smart, well-read guy and he makes some interesting points (one of which forms that quote at the beginning of Black Man). And I’ve found that as I get older I enjoy reading erudite non-fiction by people I disagree with almost more than I do the stuff written by authors whose viewpoints I share. It makes you think more, because you’re looking for the holes in the argument, rather than nodding along with the flow.

ML: Despite these social and political concerns would you say your primary aim as a writer is to entertain?

RM: I guess...

Oh, look, there’s a lot of eloquent bollocks talked about what literature is (or should be) for, and I don’t have much patience with any of it. I think in the end it’s a meaningless question, rather like asking what trees are for. Trees have an enormous number of useful environmental functions, and you can make a whole lot of different things out of wood. But none of that implies purpose of any kind – the trees just get on and grow. I write because I like to tell stories, I just do and I always have. Necessarily, those stories are going to include all sorts of opinion, allusion and implication, because all stories do. But in the end I do this because I like it (and now because I get paid for it) – you always hope that other people are going to like it too (that’s the entertainment angle, I guess), because writing, like speaking, is an act of (or at least an attempt at) communication. But that wouldn’t in itself be reason enough for me to write, any more than people suddenly not liking my stuff would be a reason for stopping. You write because it’s what you do – what people make of it is their call.

ML: You are currently working on a fantasy novel called Land Fit For Heroes. What attracted you to the idea of writing a fantasy?

RM: Well, we’ve just talked about staying fresh, and switching genre like this is certainly one way to do that. But also, this is in some senses a case of putting my word processor where my mouth is; I’ve been talking a good fight for some time about trying to import the noir sensibility of the Kovacs books into a fantasy setting, and my publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have been kind enough to – quite literally – buy into the idea. I wrote some character vignettes, showed them to my editor in London, and that was that; three book deal, and down to work. Land Fit for Heroes is a working title, and as anyone who’s read any of my stuff will probably have guessed, it’s intended as a piece of irony about as subtle as an axe. [This novel will now be published as The Steel Remains - Ed.]

ML: So we've had SF noir, we are about to have fantasy noir, what about noir noir? Would you be tempted to do a mainstream thriller?

RM: It’s a possibility. I do like the noir crime form, and I have a few tentative ideas that might go to make a book in that genre. But whether those ideas will ever coalesce sufficiently to justify taking them forward and pitching to a crime publisher is another matter. As is the question of whether I’ll find the time!

ML: Looking at authors moving in the opposite direction, have you read Cormac McCarthy's The Road?

RM: Not yet. I picked it up along with No Country for Old Men back in January (I’d been meaning to read some McCarthy for some time), and of the two options, it was No Country for Old Men that commended itself more. That turned out to be the right decision, in that I really enjoyed No Country... and will no doubt get round to reading some more McCarthy some time soon. Whether that’ll turn out to be The Road or some of his earlier work, the Border Trilogy maybe, I don’t know. I confess the premise of The Road doesn’t grab me, it just doesn’t seem all that promising in either narrative or thematic terms. Then again, it is one of a number of science fiction novels attracting major mainstream attention right now, so I guess I really ought to have a look, for professional reasons if nothing else. Then again, the last time I did that, I bought Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go – which turned out to be an error of truly epic proportions.