L'interview en anglais

First of all : you came here last year, you came to the Imaginales in May : are you happy to be back in France once again?

Absolument! I adore France, it's tremendous to be back. When I left Utopiales last year, I said to my editor : I had a great time, I'd be very happy to be invited back – really, honestly, I'd be very happy! You know, I just made sure that he knew that I'd be very happy.
And I think I said exactly the same thing after the Imaginales, I just made it very clear. And I think by the end of this convention, I will be saying exactly the same thing again, saying : I'd be very happy to be invited to Utopiales next year! (laughs)

By the way, could you make a comparison between the Imaginales and the Utopiales? Are there real differences between these two conventions both based on imaginary literature?

Well, it's weird because they're very different in some respects. The Imaginales being focused on fantasy, and set in a park with tents, it has a very different atmosphere – and Utopiales, being set in this huge contemporary center, with that cutting-edge technology of these headphones just like the UN, having simultaneous translation! But at the same time, underneath that, you meet quite a lot of the same people.
For me, the biggest part of the convention is meeting again the people that I've met before and hanging out with them. So, underneath the superficial differences, there is this fact of catching up with people I met at this other convention. Which is awesome!

When will Escape From Hell be translated into French? Is it planned at Denoël?

Yes, it's planned about... I'm not sure what time next year, but it's out next year. It's being translated by the same person, Florence Dolisi, who translated Velum and Ink – so the translation will be excellent! I believe it's almost complete in that respect – and should be out at some point next year.

Ink has just been released in France, by the way. What do you think of the French edition? I think I know you've been working closely with the French illustrator ; could you tell us more about this collaboration, about the front cover?

Yes! With Velum, I was really pleased with the cover, by Daylon, and I sent an email to my editor, Gilles Dumay Oh, that's a great cover and I'm really pleased with it!. Then I met Daylon at Utopiales last year, and we started chatting at that point – he was thinking of ideas for what we should do in the cover.
We exchanged emails afterwards, and worked quite closely. I suggested the Arlequin as the focal subject, and he had an idea of using the posture of Shiva, hindoo god of creation and destruction - which is wonderfully appropriate for the Arlequin character. In Ink he's played by Jack Flash who's a force of nature, very much about creation and destruction. And with the ring – it could be leaves, it could be fire. It's a wonderful combination of images, which ties in to the leaf imagery there is at the end of Velum : the autumnal leaves. And it links wonderfully to this idea of the transition from autumn leaves to winter fire. You know, the saturnalian, pagan, midwinter solstice ritual, that kind of thing : at the very depth of darkness, you light the bonfires.
So as far as I'm concerned, I think it's wonderfully appropriate, and yes, it's a great cover.

In a general way, is the book, as an object, important for you? I think about the new way people read, with ebooks ...

I can understand all of the people who are reading with ebooks. I am myself very used to reading things on a computer screen, on a laptop screen, because that's how I work. And a lot of the fiction that I read – not published fiction, but I mean a lot of fiction from the Glasgow SF Writers Circle which I'm part of -- that's usually emailed through, and I just read the stories on the computer screen, on my laptop.
So I'm very used to the idea of ebooks, but at the same time, there's something about a book – the tactile physical object -- which is just kind of wonderful in and of itself. There's the smell of a new book, especially the ones you get that still have a plastic wrapper on them. You open them and smell them. Or an old book. I think, obviously, if you read the prologue of Velum, you have this character who's stealing the Book of all Hours, and dealing with this leather-bound tome, this ancient book with the crumbling velum pages.
I think you could probably tell from that that I have an affection for that idea of the book as an artefact, an object of mystery. In fact, part of the whole idea of the Book of All Hours is this idea that the ultimate fantasy object – you know, every fantasy fiction has an object of power, a magic sword, or a magic shield, or a staff, a ring... Well, what's the ultimate object of power? The book! The book, which in fact the reader is holding in his hands at that moment of time, in which that world exists.

For years now, you've been writing regularly on your blog. How do you consider this tool? Is it simply a sort of recreation room?

Yes, pretty much. A blog is a journal online – it's a web-log. It just happens to be that my journal hasn't worked so much as a diary, and is much more just my thoughts on writing. A lot of it is very much kind of literary theory and critique : the entries can be 4000 words, 5000 words – sometimes 10,000 words!
But it's just my way of exploring ideas... and possibly my way of procrastinating and avoiding actually setting down and doing work! (laughs) But yes, I do it, more than anything else, because I enjoy it. I think it's a stimulating fun thing to do, and it clarifies my thoughts on what I'm doing, simply by typing them down.

Do you think you belong to a specific fantasy movement? Do you claim any membership?

I don't really. I know I've been labelled as new weird - it's a label that developed in the UK , as I understand, with writers like Ian John Harrison and China Miéville – I think it's China Miéville who came up with the idea of the term : taking the weird from Lovecraft and saying, no... New weird. You can see a comparison with the label New wave – it's really interesting in this sense.
And many of the writers that have been grouped into that, like Jeff Vandermeer for example – I know he was uncomfortable with the label, and said it didn't really seem appropriate to fit him into that movement. He wasn't, for many years, convinced that that movement was actually a valid grouping, that the writers who'd been lumped together actually belonged together. Or at least he found it problematic; I don't want to put words into his mouth.
I think there is a common group there, but I don't really think that I belong to it. If Tolkien was writing pre-industrial fantasy in an industrial era, those writers are writing industrial fantasy in a post-industrial era. And there are similarities in their fictions, they are focused on the city, there's a Victorian vibe at times – there's even a comparison with the steampunk that you might draw.
But to me, I think my work doesn't tend to fall into that category, I think it's pretty more just New wave, a reconstructed New wave. I think you can see that the core influences are people like Michael Moorcock – or when it becomes different, the cyberpunk, Neil Gaiman, and all the Vertigo comics in general.
So I don't really see myself as being in any particular movement in that sense.

We've been discussing the idea in our forums ; do you think one can talk about an English, American, Australian fantasy... and, in your case, a Scottish one? Does your nationality have some impact on what you write?

I'm not sure you can talk about a particularly Scottish science-fiction. Of the Scottish writers I know, all are working in quite radically different idioms. You know, Charlie Stross (but well, he's not Scottish by birth, he's based in Scotland) is writing singularity fiction, at least it's what he became known for. Ken MacLeod : a lot of space-opera. Ian Banks : space-opera. Myself : completely different.
A lot of the writers I know who're up and coming are from the Glasgow SF Writers Circle, or they're Edinburgh-based, like Hannu Rajaniemi – a Finnish writer who's recently got a big deal for his first novel, and who I think is gonna be one of the next big things. Writers like Neil Williamson, or Phil Raines. They're writing so many different styles, they're very very different.
I would say, however, that the environment had a big impact on what I write, personnally. A huge part of Scotland, and Glasgow in particular, has gone into Velum and Ink. There's a lot of scenes set in the Rookery – which is kind of a steampunk version of the area which I live in, the west end of Glasgow, the university, the Bohemian area - and even some scenes are set in parts of Glaswegian history : the Red Clyde, which was a socialist movement in the early twentieth century; soldiers just coming back from the First World War, working in the shipyards; John Maclean. Even actually works like Alasdair Gray's Lanark which is an incredible piece of Scottish litterature : that had a big influence on Velum and Ink.
But whether there is any cohesive Scottish SF... I'm not sure, I don't see it myself. I think the Scots tend to look very outward, at an internationalist view point. They tend to be informed by their country but also looking beyond.

What's your feeling about the imaginary literature situation in general these days?

I think it's very positive! In imaginary literature... what I tend to refer to is strange fiction -- fiction which is strange, fiction which uses the strange. I tend not to use labels like science-fiction or fantasy, genre labels, marketing labels – because they are marketing categories a lot of the time!
And I think we're now kind of entering in an era where over the last, maybe fifty years or so, there was a backlash against a kind of modernist experimental fiction. A lot of people thought it was elitist, wasn't speaking to the common man. Often it was weird, experimental and inventive, like James Joyce with Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. And there was a reaction against that. I think that over maybe fifty years, it seemed like to be taken seriously fiction had to be completely realist.
But I think we're certainly coming out of that. I think that in the imaginary literature we are split in two strands : on one hand you've got the ivory towers of the academia, with post-modernism – being playful and being inventive, but all this with an arch ironic distance, saying : We're not sincere. In another direction, in the ghettos, there are the same inventive imaginary things, taken seriously but made safe because we say, We're trash!
Again, neither of those were really taken seriously as part of the mainstream, part of the core of fiction, but I think we're now reaching a point were people are coming down from their ivory towers, through magic realism. People on the literary side are starting to take the fantastic seriously again while genre people are moving into the mainstream, with writers like Michael Chabon or Jonathan Lethem bridging that gap. The walls between imaginary literature and literature in general are coming down, and I think we're actually coming to a point where forces are coming together, and the common reader is quite happy to look at these things and take them all on the same level and not disregard a work because it's got a label on it, a genre.

Can you tell us a bit about Jack Scallywag, and your next novel?

Jack Scallywag is part of an experiment I've been trying, with online distribution. The first story was called Scruffians stamp. Basically, I have a bunch of stories with a similar basic idea, kind of a shared world concept. When the idea came, I started writing and had two stories written very quickly, three stories written soon after that, then four, then another three or four ideas coming at the same speed.
And I thought that what I would do is to try releasing them – take one and offer it by Paypal donation. So, for anyone who donated by Paypal, they would get a PDF of the story, and if the donations reached a certain target – like two thirds of the amount that the story would earn by professional rates by SFWA standards - then I'd release it free on my blog on the web, for anybody to download it whatsoever.
Then, from the two thirds target, if people kept donating, people who had not donated before, but just downloaded it for free and thought : Oh, well, I enjoyed this, I will donate. - if that happens then, if it reaches the full professional rates then I would do the same again for the next story.
And so far, actually just here I checked my emails earlier this morning, and Jack Scallywag just reached the point where I've agreed to do the next story! So, once I get back from Utopiales, I will have to get the next story set up online for people to send donations and receive the PDF.

Thanks a lot!

Thank you.

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1. L'interview en français
2. L'interview en anglais