When I found Chris Beckett’s site, there was a note to non-SF readers on his website, asking them why they don’t read SF books, and discussing the coventions of it that might make them avoid it. It’s bold, I thought and wanted to learn more about him. He was kind enough to answer my questions for me below.
Growing up, what was your introduction to sci-fi and your reaction the first time you were introduced to it?
My dad was a voracious reader of various genres. I never got into his whodunits, or his Regency romances, or even his Hornblower books, but as soon as I noticed his shelf of SF, I worked my way through the lot: Ballard, Aldiss, Van Vogt, Heinlein, Wyndham, Pohl & Kornbluth…
To some extent I moved on from that in my student days when I got into literary fiction (I had a friend who was doing a degree in English, and I read all of his set books from Milton to Lawrence), but I never forgot it. The strangeness of it, the eeriness, but also the endless potential, the vast potential for thought experiments which it represented.
Has that reaction changed as you’ve grown older? How?
I’ve grown to be a much more critical reader as I’ve grown older, and sadly my capacity to be enchanted is harder to awaken than it once was. To be frank, I’m bored by a lot of contemporary SF. It doesn’t seem to have the same charm as the SF of my youth, and there’s really not all that much of it that I like. But then this is true of music, films, beer… and, well, a lot of other stuff, including a good deal of ‘literary’ fiction too.
(Curiously enough, while I’m much more easily bored by things in that sense, I’m much less prone to boredom itself. In middle age, I hardly ever experience that acute boredom that used to beset me in my teens.)
What prompted your message to non-SF readers on your site?
Because I don’t see myself as an ‘SF writer’. I see myself as a writer who happens to write SF. I believe the things I like to write about are likely to be as much of interest to non-SF readers as to SF ones, and it irritates me that a lot of people who would like my stuff won’t ever encounter it because of their preconceptions about SF. I don’t just think that, I know as a fact that a lot of people who don’t think they like SF, do like my stuff when they read it, including the judges of the Edge Hill Short Fiction Award, who admitted they ‘hadn’t known they were SF fans’ when they gave me the award for The Turing Test.
(There are of course people who don’t like my stuff at all, but they also include both SF and non-SF people in their numbers. The genre isn’t really the issue, in other words. It’s just the means of expression. The issue is what is inside my head!)
Do you think there are conventions in SF writing that need to change to appeal to a wider audience? Which ones?
A lot of SF seems to feed on itself. The vast space opera sub-genre, for instance, recycles a set of conventions developed in previous space operas, embellishing, inverting or subverting them in various ways. My guess is that all this is pretty dull for an outsider (not unlike those literary novels in which authors write about other authors, which I imagine are also fairly dull for those not inside that little world). I’m not saying it’s wrong for SF writers to reach out for old tropes – I do so shamelessly – but you need to reach out for them because they serve some purpose now, and connect with something you want to say about life and the world. Otherwise it all becomes a bit airless for most readers’ tastes, including mine.
In Dan Simmons’ novel Hyperion, a group of people undertake a journey, first in a giant tree-shaped starship, then in a riverboat pulled by live dolphins, then in a kind of yacht that sails across a plain of grass on a single giant wheel. These things aren’t necessary to the plot, they don’t make the invented world more plausible, and they don’t (unless I’ve missed something, which is entirely possible!) serve any thematic purpose, by which I mean they don’t connect in any way with some underlying view of the world that the book is trying to put over (unlike, say, the two-way screens in 1984, which clearly tell us something about the world of the story, or the electric animals in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep which are thematically integral to the whole book, with its precarious and shifting boundaries between what is alive and real and what is dead and fake). Hyperion was a very successful novel, and clearly a lot of people do find these sort of flourishes to be fun in their own right, but my hunch is that most readers outside the circle of committed SF fans would simply ask: what are they for, what am I supposed to take from them, why should I care?
Are you a researcher or a planner? And, if you are (or if you’re not), do you think your chosen way of writing holds you back in any way?
I’m not really a researcher. I think I may have a problem with my concentration span. I just can’t imagine how someone like Hilary Mantel can gather together and hold in her head everything she needs to know to write two novels about Thomas Cromwell, or how Francis Spufford (who doesn’t even read Russian) would build up a convincing account of what it was like to live and work within the command economy of the 1960s Soviet Union in his wonderful book Red Plenty.
I am sort of engaged in continuous unfocussed research, in that I like to look up and read about about all manner of 
things, which often proves useful in my writing, but I haven’t to date researched books or stories in any detail. The nearest I came to it was The Holy Machine, where I read several books about the history of the Balkans, and bought myself a guidebook to Albania. Hardly up there with Mantel, though.
I’m not really a planner either. I have a rough idea in my mind, obviously, when I begin to write, but I have to feel my way into a book or story. This means I often get stuck, and the whole process is very slow. So yes, you could say my not being a planner does hold me back. Perhaps I should work harder at it.
How has your social work influenced your writing? It was the focus on families, however screwed up
they may be in Dark Eden and Mother of Eden, that made me wonder how social work could have shaped your writing.
I’ve written four novels to date, and the main protagonists of each, as you’ve noticed in the case of two of them, come from seriously screwed up family backgrounds. (There are more specific similarities between them if you look more closely!) I have sometimes attributed all this family stuff to my social work background, which certainly exposed me to a lot of unhappy families, but to be perfectly honest I think it more likely that my writing and my decision to go into social work, are both the products of my own family background, which left me with a kind of gap in my head which I seem to need to keep poking away at, like a hole in a tooth.
The novel of mine that is most obviously influenced by social work (social work as an organised activity, as opposed to by social work as a form of exposure to human unhappiness) was my second novel Marcher, currently available only in a rather shoddy edition, but to be re-released this year in a new and revised form and a smart new cover.
What are the differences for you as a writer between penning a short story and a novel? In terms of characters, especially? I’ve always marvelled at the speed with which short stories create characters and stories within a few short words and pages.
Creating characters is essentially a conjuring trick, in which the reader is persuaded to create an imaginary person for herself from a relatively small number of clues. This is true even in a long novel. It’s somewhat easier to pull off in a short story, because the reader is only required to assemble a short snapshot of a person, rather than build a character who grows and changes over a long period of time. I’m very pleased with some of my short story characters, they seem alive to me, but in many cases I would find it hard to keep them going over the length of a whole book.
That’s the hard part about writing a novel, obviously: holding everything together over a long series of developments and changes. That said, though, I think it’s much easier to write a 120,000 word novel, than to write a similar-lengthed collection of 6,000-word short stories. The novel requires a few core ideas which, once they’ve got going, can be developed slowly across the book. The short story collection requires twenty different sets of ideas, each of which must separately be animated I’ve never completed more than a handful of short stories in a year.
What is the most exciting and frustrating thing about writing in sci-fi?
One exciting thing is the sense of freedom. As I often say, all fiction writers make up characters and situations, but SF writers make up the world. The scope for thought experiments is endless. (What would happen if…? All writers of fiction play this game, but SF is the 3D version with all the expansion packs.)
Another is the scope SF provides for externalising interior things and making them concrete and visible. In one of my stories ‘The Gates of Troy’, I used Troy as a kind of metaphor for the state of mind of a young man who feels hemmed in and trapped by the expectations of his dominating father. You could do that in a realist novel too, perhaps making the young man into a scholar who is obsessed with Homer, and is constantly re-reading the Iliad. But mine was an SF story, so I could have my young man actually travel back to the siege of Troy itself, and be inside this beautiful peaceful porcelain city when his dad kicked down the gates with the Greek army.
And then there’s SF’s scope as a means of estrangement, a means of making familiar things unfamiliar so the reader can see them in a new light. Eden is a strange world, but it’s no stranger than our own. It’s the unfamiliarity of it that (or so I hope) reminds the reader just how strange and scary this universe really is.
As to frustrating things. Well, by and large SF is set in the future, even though usually written in the past tense. This is an odd convention, when you think about it, and can sometimes feel a bit clunky and tiresome. Particularly as we know that it never really is the future.
What is the greatest lesson that sci-fi has taught you?
That it’s possible to stand back from the world without turning away from it.
My wife and I were walking the dogs a while ago next to Newmarket race course. A race started right beside us, and we watched the horses as they headed off round the track. Some way off in the distance, surrounded by grassy space, was a concrete stand, and as the horses drew near, it suddenly came live with baying cries. I felt for a moment as if we were inside an SF story, watching aliens at play.
Do you think you’ll ever venture out into any other genre? Which one and why? (or Why not?)
I submitted a story to Asimov’s SF and they said they’d take it, ‘even though we don’t normally take horror’. I guess this means I’ve ventured into horror, though it wasn’t particularly my intention. (The story was ‘Day 29’).
More generally, I’d quite like to write a book or two that couldn’t be categorised neatly into any genre, so the booksellers would have no choice but to put them on the ‘general fiction’ shelves. I’m not proposing to write some realist novel about the meticulously observed intimate relationships of ordinary people in contemporary Britain – that would be going too far – but the ‘general fiction’ shelves do give quite a lot of scope. Kafka’s there, after all, and even Ballard has snuck his way over from the SF corner.
Come to think of it, the first novel I wrote, when I was 19 (obviously it never got published) wasn’t SF. It was about a character who discovered he was a character. He tried to tell the other characters they were too, and that the world they lived in was a made-up one, consisting only of words. They ended up killing him. Not SF but not exactly realist either!
For more on Chris Beckett, check out his site here.
