I’m delighted to announce that the incredibly gifted Justina Robson is the latest writer to contribute her thoughts to the What The Author Says feature on our site (we’ve now added a page listing the books which have this feature added to make life easier for readers). I’ve been an admirer of Justina’s intelligent novels for years (of course I am not influenced by the fact that we both contributed to The Alien Online, no, not at all… Actually, that’s nonsense, that just encouraged me to read her work – there’s nothing like sharing thoughts about books with people who love good writing to make you want to read more) so I’m very happy to post what is a very interesting insight into not only the BSFA nominated Living Next Door to the God of Love and how it came to be, but also into the freedoms and restrictions a writer working in the fields of fantastical fiction encounters. It is slightly too long to fit into the book’s entry on the main site, so I’m very pleased to post the entire thing here:
“I wrote this novel after a suggestion by Peter Crowther, where he asked me if I’d ever written something I really wanted to but just never had the guts to do… He was interested in collecting a short story or a novella from me and I thought this would be some kind of novelette. At the time I had been working on a science fiction novel that had gone a bit dead on me and I started this with a clear intention of pleasing myself rather than anyone else.
Since I was about fourteen I’d been writing mostly fantasy. A lot of what I read and wrote circulated on some very common archetypes of myth and story, in particular The Demon Lover in his various guises and in his alter ego form as The Redeeming Angel. Dracula is part of this mythos, and so is Storm Constantine’s Wraeththu series, among hundreds of other works in the romantic genres. I wrote some unsuccessful novels trying to find a new way to approach this, but was never satisfied. When I started Living Next Door I realised that one of the things that stopped me was that as a pure fantasy novel I would never be able to actually discuss literally what I felt was one of the important things about this myth, namely that the encounter with the Lover/Angel figure is a deeply personal and almost entirely self-referential experience. The Lover/Angel is much more of a projection of oneself, in other forms, than it is an entity with a separate existence.
Science Fiction however, would let me do almost anything. In a Science Fictional world people can and do discuss what happens to them in the language of psychology if they need to. I wanted to be able to have some chance to do that because I wanted some of the characters to realise the depth of the main protagonist’s dilemma, and by extent what I think is the dilemma of the present age, namely, if we all know that ourselves and our experiences are shaped by others through nurture, as well as our form by nature, to what extent are any of us the independent individuals we like to imagine? Relationships change who we are, like engineering, and the dream of the Lover/Angel is a way of trying to locate personal power, a kind of self engineering through intention…well, I wanted to explore this – what happens if such a dream of power was fulfilled, or thwarted? What responsibility do we have to others in relationships if we are their engineers?
The book is filled with large and small scale struggles between individual and community, self and other. I wanted to come down on the side of Love, to prove it was the only reasonable way of relating to others, with compassionate understanding; we are each other…don’t know if I made it, but I wanted to try. That’s what I thought I was writing about. Once again when I read it I realise I keep making the same statement about a posthuman world – there is no such thing as a post human world, for us, because we won’t be in it. The dreams SF used to give me, about going beyond my limited experience and possibility are just dreams…even if the stuff that dreams are made of was manifested, like in this novel, my dreams are just the dreams of a short-lived, essentially powerless and insignificant ape in a big and mysterious cosmos. But you can’t live from that perspective. It’s inhuman: with total insignificance comes the loss of all meaning and that is either a revelation which liberates or damns you, depending on how you deal with it.”
Fri, Mar 17, 2006
Books, General, Interviews