Michael Marshall Smith: Less Miserablism, More Gadgets

Interview by David Kendall

Originally best known for his short stories, Smith’s novels Only Forward, Spares and One Of Us have brought him sales and critical acclaim. Smith is published by HarperCollins.

Do you see One of Us as science fiction?

No. I see it as a mainstream thriller that just happens to be set in the future. I like the idea of there being generic genre fiction rather than mainstream fiction, which I find dry and drab, and devoid of anything interesting. I like the idea of a meta genre which allows you to combine horror, science fiction and crime. That’s what I’m interested in doing at the moment. I certainly don’t regard myself as writing science fiction, not least because SF writers tend to be very concerned about getting the physics right, or the ultimate logical consistency, and that’s not something I’m very interested in, as you’ve probably gathered from the books. It tends to be science fiction critics who give me the hardest time, simply because some of the physics doesn’t stand up. One of Us seems to be getting much more onto the ‘new books’ section rather than being put under; horror, crime or science fiction. Which is good because hardcore SF fans are not going to be very drawn to the book. It doesn’t have what they want in terms of space opera or mind-fuck science fictional ideas. I think I’m more trying to use the tropes of the different genres to enliven a kind of mainstream fiction.

People are keen to categorise things, not least booksellers. It’s set in the future, therefore it’s for SF fans, therefore we put it in the SF section so the "dweebs" can find it. That sadly tends to be the attitude of a lot of booksellers. I’m glad that One of Us is beginning to hit the mainstream shelves. Not that I have a downer on genre fiction. I’ve come up through genre fiction. What I’ve noticed is that people are much more wary of a genre influence in books than film. They will happily watch The X-Files and see Independence Day but seem much less likely to pick up a book which has a genre influence.

Yes. It’s almost as if it reaches a certain level of quality then they redefine it as mainstream.

I think it is changing. With One of Us it’s had reviews in the Daily Express, The Times etc. It’s possibly been helped by the repackaging as a thriller. The idea being to let booksellers and readers look at the novel and not prejudge it on the basis of what they think it is going to be. I certainly wouldn’t put it on this level but Brave New World, 1984, set in the future, does that make them science fiction? The Bell Jar is about a woman losing her mind, does that make it horror? No. Repackaging the book is to stop people making that snap judgement. They can read the book and hopefully find the kind of thing they would be looking for in normal mainstream literature but with some groovy-cool ideas as well.

It seems to be quite broad. Of the letters I get, something like ninety per cent are from women. Maybe woman are more likely to put pen to paper but from those it seems that it’s women aged 18-30. Why, I don’t know but that’s the feedback I get. I’m not trying to just appeal to the science fiction audience. I don’t read much SF. I read more horror than SF, and more crime than horror.

I think I’ve accidentally produced two different streams of stuff. The short stories, with two exceptions from the 35-40 published, are all set in the present day. They are set in a world which is only unreal in terms of things that unfold within it, rather than being set in the future. All three novels are set in the future. After writing short stories for six or seven years I sat down and started to write what was going to be a horror novel. I then decided I didn’t know enough to go on with it. I had this other five page idea, so I went with that and said I could do what I want; set it in the future, or tell jokes which I hadn’t done much of in short fiction.

Years ago, I was a semi-professional comedian. I was in Cambridge Footlights and they did a couple of radio series for Radio Four. But as that happened I was losing interest in straight comedy, and had started reading people like Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker and Dennis Etchison. So I got much more into that and for a number of years didn’t put any humour at all in the short stories. When I started Only Forward there was nobody expecting me to write a novel, there were no deadlines or contracts. Only Forward was as much fun as I’ve had writing and it turned into science fiction. It was bought by Harper Collins as part of a two book deal so obviously they were hoping I wouldn’t do a western or something next. And when I do sit down and think about writing novels they do tend to have that slightly futuristic aspect. There’s a short story collection coming out spring of next year.

Some new stuff. I’m finding myself able to write stuff that will be able to bridge that gap between the novels and the short stories. I believe that the same sensibility is present in both it’s just manifest in different ways. One of the reasons I like genre fiction is that each genre has particular tools for dramatising certain ideas; science fiction has its sense of wonder, horror has its sense of fear of death, crime is very good at dealing with emotions of aspirations and notions. If someone gets murdered, chances are it’s because someone hates them, loves them, or wants what they have. Crime basically boils down to emotions and aspirations. Each of the genres has tools with which to dramatise these basic human interests and impulses. Mainstream fiction also deals with these but if you bring in some of the genre ideas you can have the work functioning on two levels. Rather than saying someone’s died, isn’t that a downer, you can dramatise that in any number of different ways.

But didn’t Blade Runner redesign the genres to incorporate those three elements; sf, horror and hardboiled years ago?

Yes, and also early cyberpunk ,and also to a degree splatterpunk. I think it is the introduction of noir that has pepped up both SF and horror over the last ten years. Noir does tend to be a good tool for introducing a certain amount of emotional resonance, or environmental resonance into things.

But only one style of noir was brought in: a version of Chandler. Nothing on the level of Jim Thompson or John Macdonald. Doesn’t that, after a decade, prove just as limiting?

It is limited in the sense that it tends to be that very traditional style noir with wise cracking. I think that was a good thing because if there’s anything SF and horror needed it was a sense of humour and irony. But as you say, to bring in a more sophisticated voice like Thompson, or Ellroy, or the descriptive powers of a James Lee Burkes: actually, anyone called Jim! I’m a voice writer. I’m much less concerned with the plot of a book than I am with characters and the voice. I have a slight problem with the slipstream fiction we’re seeing over here at the moment simply because I think people spend far too much time polishing individual sentences until they ‘shine’, and it’s actually quite difficult to get from one sentence to the next. Basically it’s ‘creative writing course writing’. If there’s not a story in there I’m not bothered. Writing is not an attempt to prove how clever you are but an attempt to entertain other people. And for me that should be as transparent as possible. I write my books to be as easy to read as possible, and to be read as fast as possible because that’s how I think you get the hit of fiction. Saying that, I’ve just spent a long time reading the new Philip Roth, partly because you have to but also because he’s worth it. In a time when we’re competing with a lot of different media, if we can get something like the resonance of music, something like the thrill of film, something like the engagement of video games into books then we have a medium that can compete.

Not as a battleground. I don’t think that books will ever get replaced. There’s an experience you can only get from books. But if you see books, film, video games there is a kind of progression there. Each one is progressively easier to absorb, and I think writers should be aware of that. Once people have read a couple of good book they’ll carry on the rest of their lives but it’s getting them started.

Yes. As fewer things get manufactured in a higher concentration of places. I think people are losing track of what is important. We see ads now, where people "declare war on split ends". I think there are bigger issues around but because in certain areas, particularly in the States, there is a certain level of comfort, they are just leaving reality behind.

It’s a current theme. What good science fiction should be about, and what I hope I do in the novels, is use linear future as a prism to view the present. That’s always been a possible role for science fiction. But there is also the safe world on another planet which is basically moving chess pieces about an intellectual conceit rather than having any bearing on real life now. That part of science fiction doesn’t interest me. A review of Spares concentrated wholly on the physical difficulty of getting a mole to fly. I wasn’t doing a treatise on cloning when I wrote Spares. I think that scientists and people who get too wrapped up in science fiction think those kinds of subjects operate in a realm of pure mind. Whereas for me, it’s a self evident fact that whenever any new technology develops it’s the human heart rather than the human mind which thinks what can we do with that. The interesting thing is the interface between human nature and technology, rather than science and technology. It’s not the imaginative writer’s job to get the facts right. It’s the scientist’s job to get the facts right.

To convince or say, what if? So many things which looked like being science fiction for ever are now leaping towards us; transplanting organs from other animals etc. I don’t write with any great political point to make but I think it comes out anyway. If you try to write anything to do with society some sort of critique of it is going to come out. Whether anyone should listen to my critique remains to be seen.

I remember when I first read Neuromancer, and I came on to it quite late, after I’d written Only Forward. At that point the Net was just this thing that wireheads knew about. Now it’s so huge. In good ways and bad ways, it’s taken over our lives. At the moment the web is one of the most boring places I can spend time because it doesn’t have anything unique as a medium to offer. Nor is there any kind of quality filter in operation. Information may want to be free but so do butt-head opinions.

There is one thing about the Net which seems unique: that click, click through links of information, through the flow.

Yes, the linking of information and also the serendipity of what you find, that is something the Net has to offer which is a relatively unique experience. I think a new genre of hyperlinked and interactive entertainment that is prose based will definitely develop. At the moment it’s not something I’m very interested in because I like to be told a story which someone else is telling me. I want to hear their experience. I don’t want to interact with their story. I want to have a glimpse inside someone else’s mind, not to have another manifestation of what’s inside mine.

Because of everything else, the screen writing and the novels, I’m certainly writing less short stories. Which is a shame because I do love short stories. In terms of where it’s going overall, I’m pretty certain the next novel will be set in the present day. Only Forward was five hundred years in the future, Spares two hundred, One of Us only twenty years. I don’t see myself writing historical fiction but I think I will stop in the present day. It would be more of a challenge to write without the range of gadgets you can have when you set a novel in the future. Looking at what has been popular in the last few year: Bridget Jones, High Infidelity, these are books that show people other lives, and reassure them about their own. It’s not necessarily where I want to go but it would be interesting to play around with it for a while.

It’s coming along. I’ve done an adaptation of Weaveworld for a TV miniseries. Hell of a job. Eight hours of TV about the same carpet, but it was a great thing to be involved with. Sadly it ran aground on "personality problems." After the dust had settled they gave me a ring to start the second draft. This is after seven months of silence by which time I was late starting One Of Us, so I don’t know what’s happening with that. I’ve done an adaptation of Celestial Dogs by Jay Russell. Steve Jones and I have a production company called Smith & Jones, imaginatively enough, which is dedicated to producing low to medium budget homegrown horror genre material. One of the things I’m very keen to do is write a sharp London horror movie. We put in a bid for Hellraiser V about a year and a half ago, bringing it back to London, introducing a lot of London based stuff like the Hawksmoor churches and the Hellfire Club but basically they weren’t interested. Although my novels have been in the science fiction area I still feel more of an allegiance to horror as a genre than I do sci-fi, not least because it was the horror rather than the sci-fi genre that nurtured me.

It is a market but like everybody, if you make something, you want it on a bigger scale. There certainly is a market for straight to cable horror movies. It’s a big market but we’d want to pitch it for a major theatrical release not least because it would be nice to see more of that stuff around.

And on TV we’ve had only American Gothic that was horror based, and reasonably intelligent, in the first half dozen episodes at least.

I only saw the first seven or eight myself but I was just happy to see something with that amount of zest on television. It was great to see someone saying here’s a genre which people tend to think is just about vampires and all the rest of it, and really going for it. The first episodes were really, really good. The same with Millennium. I think that if they’d given themselves a slightly wider brief so they didn’t have a serial killer every bleeding week, then it would have been more interesting but again, stylish, punchy television. Any number of things, including The X-Files has demonstrated that there’s a huge market for this sort of stuff, and it’s great to see it being done, and it’s a great shame to see shite like Invasion Earth being done. Time after time, particularly in England, people in broadcasting think let’s have crack at this. Trying to replicate something which is already on the wane. I was one of the writers called in to have chat about it, and I very quickly picked up the fact that they had no idea of anything that had happened in genre fiction for the last thirty years. They were just trying to jump on the bandwagon. So I didn’t get involved and it turned out to be a heap of crap that it was. Which was unfortunate. Again, it’s an example of the mainstream only getting an interest in genre when they think there’s money or ratings involved, rather than actually liking the material for its own merits and trying to do something new and different with it. There’s an upcoming Channel 4 series that sounds as if it might be better. I hope that I’m going to be adapting my short story The Owner for that. I’m waiting for final confirmation on that.

It’s almost as if there is a celebration of mediocrity in the genres. It doesn’t matter how bad a science fiction series is within a couple of years there will be a convention on it, and people will dress up as the characters, and insist on seeing the actors involved. Make it terrible and people will like it.

Why did you put God in One of Us?

Two reasons; one because I tend to be driven to write the novels purely by what I am interested in at the time. Just before starting OOU, I had some general ideas including the memory/dream caretaking ideas. This came to me in a dream. I woke up one morning knowing that my job was having other people’s dreams for them. During that period there was a series of ten or eleven coincidences, synchronicities just to do with religion but also because in each of the three books there has been an interest in other realities: a semi-Gnostic view of the world. It becomes which Kantian grid do you use to understand what you experience; ghosts, UFO’s, Earth mysteries etc. I wanted to try, in not too superficial a way, to point out some of the parallel there. Which, again, is not the newest idea in the world but it was what interested me at the time.

I think sometimes the best way to deal with serious subjects is to make them funny. I’ve had people who’ve said that if you’re tacking these big subjects then slow down on the jokes because they undermine it. I think that if you are dealing with a heavy subject then you will lose people very quickly if it’s just heavy all the way through. Films are a different experience. It tends to be at least two people watching a video, hundreds in a cinema, so you have to tell the story in such a way that it has that blanket approach. With the novel you have a one-to one relationship with the reader, and it’s a very good medium for saying "trust me and let me take you from here to there". I think humour can allow people to relax and allow themselves to be taken. Also there are people who just read the books because they’ve got gags in them.

For me when God appears in the suit it undermined my interest in what happens to the characters later. I felt I was too much in Red Dwarf territory.

I think the last act of One of Us, particularly the last chapter is going to alienate a lot of people, it already has. It’s the way I wanted to write the book. It’s only my third novel. I’ve got an awfully long way to go in terms of developing the tools with which to try out these things, but it’s my best attempt yet of throwing out a few ideas and seeing if I can say anything interesting about them. To a degree, more than anyone, the person who has to be able to put with what I do is me. I have to write it and read it without putting it in the bin. It has to appeal to me, and I have a short attention span, and like lots of different things.

When I say short attention span, I mean to say it takes me six months to write a novel, and I would find it difficult to conceive it taking longer than that. Not least because one now has to produce them every year or eighteen months. If six months of the year are taken up with the novel, then you’ve only got six months left in which to do anything to base the next novel on. How people finish one and start the next the following day I just don’t know.

In America Overlook Connection are publishing a special edition of Spares.

That’s basically Spares plus the first chapter which was cut, and four short stories which have some bearing on the overall theme. There’s an introduction by Neil Gaiman and an afterword by me.

I’ve always found it fascinating that horror, probably the most criticised of the genres, has this great respect and love of the book as a physical thing. It’s with horror that you get all these limited editions, these leather bound tomes.

Yeah, I think horror readers really like their fiction even more than sci-fi readers. They have a respect for the book both as an object and for what it contains. They care far more than in the mainstream, where it’s a fashion accessory ,or something you have to read because everyone at the office are talking about it.

I enjoy it, especially on the day you finish, which almost but not quite makes up for the previous six months of tearing your hair out wishing you had a proper job. It’s what I can do: it’s what I want to do.

That’s absolutely true. The money I’ve made out of writing has come mainly out of film options rather than anything else. Spares and One of Us have both been optioned. I suppose I think that novels are the most important means of communication. I think books have the potential to open doors and change people’s lives which nothing else has, and I say that as someone who adores movies.

I remember hearing this debate at a sci fi convention ,and some geek wittering on about whether this particular interstellar drive would work. If you’re writing a straight down the line science fiction novel and you want to get people on planet A to planet B you can do it one of two ways; you can describe the journey, how the ships works, and then have you people landing on planet B: or you can go Planet A, cut, here we are on planet B. I’m much more interested in the here we are on planet B version. I prefer to allow people to fill in their own gaps.

I prefer the slightly more intuitive method. I think people are prepared to believe in these things. You don’t have to tell people the dark is frightening, so you don’t need a chapter telling you all the things that can happen to you in the dark. Credit the reader with a little intelligence and imagination. Books have a kind of hypnotic effect, there’s no sound, no light, just words going straight into the right brain. That’s something you don’t get with other mediums.