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Brown Rat · 29th June 2006, 04:10 PM

Geoff Ryman
Date: June 2006
Interviewed by: Carolyn Hill for the Chronicles Network

Part Two of Four: Mundane Science Fiction and Rhetorical Techniques

Mundane Science Fiction

CN: Some of the Chronicles Network members prefer fantasy to science fiction because they think of science fiction as 'cold,' driven too much by hard science and too little by character. Your fiction, with its strong emphasis on character and inside point of view, would appeal to them. Some of that emphasis on character comes from your interest in what's known as mundane science fiction. Would you please give us a quick definition of 'mundane science fiction,' tell us its main ideas, and explain its history?

Ryman: My heart sinks. Mundane SF grew out of a Clarion class. One of the more political writers there, Julian Todd, was pointing out that we weren't really facing up to the death of oil and climate change. It rang bells. I was particularly struck by how the ease of Faster Than Light Drive has become an unexamined cornerstone of SF. It not only made stories happen faster (and in one person's lifetime). It also encouraged an attitude of 'Oh well, we'll burn through this planet and go on to the next one.' Oh really? How. There will be no FTL. Simple. Can we go back and start leaving all the tired old SF tropes out so that we can invent some new ones, and begin to look at futures we might actually have.

I wrote a jokey Manifesto, to throw out all the old tropes. It was supposed to work like Dogme, a series of rules that forces filmmakers to avoid studio trickery, special effects and manipulative storytelling. I can tell you, writing to the Mundane Manifesto is tough tough tough. Those old SF magic wands do so much work for you, if you let them. We promise not to.

I don't think anyone except the group supports the manifesto, and most of the group is American. I think it has struck a nerve with most people in SF either pro or con because SF knows perfectly well what science says about FTL. People find it grumpy and unnecessary and just plain silly to say so. How could I be so serious? I think most authors fear to lose their autonomy and so don't like to sign up to any movement. The first Mundane Manifesto had a mocking tone (self-mockery as well) and that seems to have got up some people's noses.

I came up with the idea of calling it Mundane and the basic concept of privileging the likely over the unlikely, but it's gone through many revisions since as smarter people than me have gone through what the movement might mean or do. We need a new manifesto urgently.

CN: In your 2004 interview with Kit Reed http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intgr.htm, you said that mundane science fiction will probably be more conventional and technically conservative in form, in order to emphasize the ideas and characters. Has that happened?

Ryman: Hmm. More conservative than what? More conservative formally than New Worlds magazine in the 60s, but practically all commercial SF is very conservative formally. There's a reason for this. Just like in SF art, you have to be very very clear what is actual in your world and what is a metaphor.

There was a trend in the early 60s to use abstract expressionism for SF book covers. It was artsy, but not SF. SF is photorealist. Its aim is to make that new world as convincingly present visually as a photograph of it would be. So does SF prose. One of the things Clarion does is knock muddy prose out of you and clear, simple prose in. That means it can also knock experimental prose out.

My nightmare is that SF, pioneering as it did with first Milford then Clarion the workshop/peer critique pedagogy, is one of the sources of literature lite. Literature lite is mainstream fiction so clear that it needs no interpretation. There is no subtext or symbolism to be unpacked, no deep layers, and the language is utterly conventional. I mean things like The English Patient and other books that are literature aimed at Reading Groups. My nightmare is that a.) WE taught the world how to write literature lite and that b.) literature lite is costing the mainstream its ability to read between the lines. You have to be able to read between the lines to read SF at all. If your heroine's food comes in bamboo packaging you are meant to think: ah, metal has become rare; if it's that rare can they use steam engines for transport? Mainstream readers can't do that, won't do that, and they'll never learn how if they just read Sebastian Faulks or Michael Ondjatee. In other words, we are losing more of the general readership every year.

Who knows what Mundane will do? It could be the meeting ground for hard SF (since it privileges the likely technology) and humanist SF (since it privileges every day life). That could get interesting. If it has more room for a character-driven story, maybe it has more room for stream of consciousness, etc.

I wonder if in fact we need something more like New Worlds, more concerned with blowing apart all the lies embedded in traditional story structures.

CN: Would you please name authors and books that seem particularly good examples of mundane science fiction? (Are there noncontemporary authors you would include on that list?)

Ryman: I don't think it's fair to claim as mundane authors who didn't sign up and can't now because they are dead, or who simply haven't been able to take part. Air has a bit of something like magic in it, but it's near as dammit Mundane SF. We've had a couple of mundane writers, for example Bob Angell, in Asimov's. There is stuff in Bruce Sterling's Distraction that I would sign up to immediately.

For me the great writer who most embodies mundane sensibilities is Kim Stanley Robinson, but he has refused to be in any way identified with the movement. Another writer I keep thinking of who I find writes following SF's better rules is Greg Bear. And then there is the great John Brunner, who is one of the few SF writers to make predictions that came true.

CN: Have your views toward mundane science fiction changed in the past year? What's its status now in your writing, thinking, and reading?

Ryman: I'm bored by it. I've said the same thing more or less since at least 2002-2003 and I think people just want to see the stories now. It's rumoured that Anil Menon is about to unleash the first properly Mundane SF novel about India and published in India. He's both a mundane AND a post-colonialist. Since he can write with equal facility about science and grieving for a dead wife and has done actual cutting edge research on evolutionary computing, I fear that most of us old fogies will be out to grass soon. I can't imagine anything more necessary than beautifully written, non-Western science fiction based on real science that plays tennis with the net up.

Rhetorical Techniques

CN: Your novels and novellas have clear messages; each conveys attitudes or a philosophy about the world and how people should or shouldn't act toward one another. How conscious of your audience and intent are you as you write?

Ryman: I'm very conscious of writing for someone, often a real person, or maybe a group. I don't think anyone thinks about a philosophy when they write a story. Too much of a story consists of specifics, objects, time of day, distance between places, how things look and feel, the outer signs of people's emotions or choices in life.

Then there's emotion, which drives how your characters behave. Ideally you are feeling what they are feeling. None of this has very much to do with philosophy or moralising. I'm just not that aware of it when I write, though I guess I may do when I revise and I'm using the editing part of my brain.

CN: Your prose throughout most of the books is what I think of as clean: straightforward, relatively uncluttered sentence structures. Is this your natural prose style, or a conscious choice on your part?

Ryman: I write to be as clear as possible, particularly in SF which consists of sprung metaphors. You have to be crystal clear about what the characters are actually seeing, what is actually present. There're no rules. I also read my stuff aloud a lot when revising, and that privileges simplicity and clarity.

Sometimes I notice doing that overemphasizes clarity. My mom doesn't like my writing; she says it's boring, I work too hard to make clear who is speaking.

CN: Your works have a literary flair. In Was, you use rhetorical techniques to reflect characters' points of view, as when you use alliteration and sentence fragments and short sentences to reflect Millie: 'Millie's shoes clicked on the concrete as she walked to the trailers. Cold this hour of the morning. Her gum clicked too. Millie liked the sound of punctuation and progress. She liked things to move, for herself and other people. Why she was good at her job. Lots of people around who could do makeup. But there was more to the job than that' (Was 108). And in Air, there are tiny unmarked parallels between description in the early part of the novel and Mae's stomach-pregnancy later in the book, which in turn mirrors Mae giving birth to a village that can survive the change to Air.

I assume that you use these techniques consciously, but are they in full flower in your initial drafts, or do they appear during later stages of your process?

Ryman: I have no idea. Making the third person prose sound like the words that the point-of-view character would use themselves is a relatively useful way of conveying who your character is and how they see the world. It avoids explaining their emotions in the narrator's tone of voice, which can be horribly distanced, pompous and patronising. But you have to be careful using this echoing technique. As an editor, I've caught myself getting exasperated with how rough and informal the prose is being and only then realised that the style is echoing the PoV character.

As for subtext, a linking of imagery and metaphor into another consistent layer underneath the plot level... well that's the difference between literature and literature-lite. It's literature-lite that sells. It sounds like it's going to be literature, but it's all on its incredibly worthy surface.

I could get bored with clarity any moment and suddenly begin to write floridly. Who knows?

CN: At the end of most of your novels, ecstatic catalogs of memories and events mirror your message about the coexistence and commingling of past, present, and future. In 253 and The Child Garden, commingling is elevated to a structural principle: 253 is comprised of the character descriptions of 253 passengers on a single train, and The Child Garden's chapters and sections are comprised of flashforwards and flashbackwards in Milena's past, present, and future as she is read by the Consensus. In one passage in The Child Garden, you offer many details about people who aren't characters in the novel as you attempt to describe the moment of 'now,' then you state explicitly that such description isn't possible, 'so we tell stories, histories, instead' (345). What's going on here?

Ryman: All of this comes from a distrust of storytelling. First, most stories or myths get social support because they enforce desired attitudes or behaviour. They are a control mechanism. Second, stories make us sick. Neuroses and psychoses are just stories we tell ourselves and believe. Third, traditional storytelling in chronological order privileges consequences, or karma.

It's almost impossible to stop stories about consequences turning into moralising. You did this thing and so you reaped what you sowed. So I distrust story. Life doesn't really happen in stories; it just is, right now. Any story, even one that sticks to the facts totally, is made up, constructed and a bit false.

So I keep trying to break stories up in ways that don't confuse people. The chapters from different historical eras in Was, the turning of people into identified spaces in 253, and the moments in which people act or feel or think all at once in concert in Air and The Child Garden.

Life is time bound and we are bound to one little arrow shooting through it--ourselves. One of the reasons we read is to get out of ourselves, hitch a ride on someone else's arrow. As soon as you start to work in any art with a narrative or even just a progress, you have to deal with issues of time. Movies have to decide how much they can cut out of the character's real lives. In prose you are forever skimming over slow bits and slowing down to really look at the exciting bits. Things really do happen all over the world, all at once. That really gets me outside of time and the self, and that feels liberating.

29th June 2006, 04:10 PM	#2 (permalink)
Brown Rat wandering & wondering Join Date: Apr 2006 Posts: 945	Re: Geoff Ryman Interview, in Four Parts Geoff Ryman Date: June 2006 Interviewed by: Carolyn Hill for the Chronicles Network Part Two of Four: Mundane Science Fiction and Rhetorical Techniques Mundane Science Fiction CN: Some of the Chronicles Network members prefer fantasy to science fiction because they think of science fiction as 'cold,' driven too much by hard science and too little by character. Your fiction, with its strong emphasis on character and inside point of view, would appeal to them. Some of that emphasis on character comes from your interest in what's known as mundane science fiction. Would you please give us a quick definition of 'mundane science fiction,' tell us its main ideas, and explain its history? Ryman: My heart sinks. Mundane SF grew out of a Clarion class. One of the more political writers there, Julian Todd, was pointing out that we weren't really facing up to the death of oil and climate change. It rang bells. I was particularly struck by how the ease of Faster Than Light Drive has become an unexamined cornerstone of SF. It not only made stories happen faster (and in one person's lifetime). It also encouraged an attitude of 'Oh well, we'll burn through this planet and go on to the next one.' Oh really? How. There will be no FTL. Simple. Can we go back and start leaving all the tired old SF tropes out so that we can invent some new ones, and begin to look at futures we might actually have. I wrote a jokey Manifesto, to throw out all the old tropes. It was supposed to work like Dogme, a series of rules that forces filmmakers to avoid studio trickery, special effects and manipulative storytelling. I can tell you, writing to the Mundane Manifesto is tough tough tough. Those old SF magic wands do so much work for you, if you let them. We promise not to. I don't think anyone except the group supports the manifesto, and most of the group is American. I think it has struck a nerve with most people in SF either pro or con because SF knows perfectly well what science says about FTL. People find it grumpy and unnecessary and just plain silly to say so. How could I be so serious? I think most authors fear to lose their autonomy and so don't like to sign up to any movement. The first Mundane Manifesto had a mocking tone (self-mockery as well) and that seems to have got up some people's noses. I came up with the idea of calling it Mundane and the basic concept of privileging the likely over the unlikely, but it's gone through many revisions since as smarter people than me have gone through what the movement might mean or do. We need a new manifesto urgently. CN: In your 2004 interview with Kit Reed http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intgr.htm, you said that mundane science fiction will probably be more conventional and technically conservative in form, in order to emphasize the ideas and characters. Has that happened? Ryman: Hmm. More conservative than what? More conservative formally than New Worlds magazine in the 60s, but practically all commercial SF is very conservative formally. There's a reason for this. Just like in SF art, you have to be very very clear what is actual in your world and what is a metaphor. There was a trend in the early 60s to use abstract expressionism for SF book covers. It was artsy, but not SF. SF is photorealist. Its aim is to make that new world as convincingly present visually as a photograph of it would be. So does SF prose. One of the things Clarion does is knock muddy prose out of you and clear, simple prose in. That means it can also knock experimental prose out. My nightmare is that SF, pioneering as it did with first Milford then Clarion the workshop/peer critique pedagogy, is one of the sources of literature lite. Literature lite is mainstream fiction so clear that it needs no interpretation. There is no subtext or symbolism to be unpacked, no deep layers, and the language is utterly conventional. I mean things like The English Patient and other books that are literature aimed at Reading Groups. My nightmare is that a.) WE taught the world how to write literature lite and that b.) literature lite is costing the mainstream its ability to read between the lines. You have to be able to read between the lines to read SF at all. If your heroine's food comes in bamboo packaging you are meant to think: ah, metal has become rare; if it's that rare can they use steam engines for transport? Mainstream readers can't do that, won't do that, and they'll never learn how if they just read Sebastian Faulks or Michael Ondjatee. In other words, we are losing more of the general readership every year. Who knows what Mundane will do? It could be the meeting ground for hard SF (since it privileges the likely technology) and humanist SF (since it privileges every day life). That could get interesting. If it has more room for a character-driven story, maybe it has more room for stream of consciousness, etc. I wonder if in fact we need something more like New Worlds, more concerned with blowing apart all the lies embedded in traditional story structures. CN: Would you please name authors and books that seem particularly good examples of mundane science fiction? (Are there noncontemporary authors you would include on that list?) Ryman: I don't think it's fair to claim as mundane authors who didn't sign up and can't now because they are dead, or who simply haven't been able to take part. Air has a bit of something like magic in it, but it's near as dammit Mundane SF. We've had a couple of mundane writers, for example Bob Angell, in Asimov's. There is stuff in Bruce Sterling's Distraction that I would sign up to immediately. For me the great writer who most embodies mundane sensibilities is Kim Stanley Robinson, but he has refused to be in any way identified with the movement. Another writer I keep thinking of who I find writes following SF's better rules is Greg Bear. And then there is the great John Brunner, who is one of the few SF writers to make predictions that came true. CN: Have your views toward mundane science fiction changed in the past year? What's its status now in your writing, thinking, and reading? Ryman: I'm bored by it. I've said the same thing more or less since at least 2002-2003 and I think people just want to see the stories now. It's rumoured that Anil Menon is about to unleash the first properly Mundane SF novel about India and published in India. He's both a mundane AND a post-colonialist. Since he can write with equal facility about science and grieving for a dead wife and has done actual cutting edge research on evolutionary computing, I fear that most of us old fogies will be out to grass soon. I can't imagine anything more necessary than beautifully written, non-Western science fiction based on real science that plays tennis with the net up. Rhetorical Techniques CN: Your novels and novellas have clear messages; each conveys attitudes or a philosophy about the world and how people should or shouldn't act toward one another. How conscious of your audience and intent are you as you write? Ryman: I'm very conscious of writing for someone, often a real person, or maybe a group. I don't think anyone thinks about a philosophy when they write a story. Too much of a story consists of specifics, objects, time of day, distance between places, how things look and feel, the outer signs of people's emotions or choices in life. Then there's emotion, which drives how your characters behave. Ideally you are feeling what they are feeling. None of this has very much to do with philosophy or moralising. I'm just not that aware of it when I write, though I guess I may do when I revise and I'm using the editing part of my brain. CN: Your prose throughout most of the books is what I think of as clean: straightforward, relatively uncluttered sentence structures. Is this your natural prose style, or a conscious choice on your part? Ryman: I write to be as clear as possible, particularly in SF which consists of sprung metaphors. You have to be crystal clear about what the characters are actually seeing, what is actually present. There're no rules. I also read my stuff aloud a lot when revising, and that privileges simplicity and clarity. Sometimes I notice doing that overemphasizes clarity. My mom doesn't like my writing; she says it's boring, I work too hard to make clear who is speaking. CN: Your works have a literary flair. In Was, you use rhetorical techniques to reflect characters' points of view, as when you use alliteration and sentence fragments and short sentences to reflect Millie: 'Millie's shoes clicked on the concrete as she walked to the trailers. Cold this hour of the morning. Her gum clicked too. Millie liked the sound of punctuation and progress. She liked things to move, for herself and other people. Why she was good at her job. Lots of people around who could do makeup. But there was more to the job than that' (Was 108). And in Air, there are tiny unmarked parallels between description in the early part of the novel and Mae's stomach-pregnancy later in the book, which in turn mirrors Mae giving birth to a village that can survive the change to Air. I assume that you use these techniques consciously, but are they in full flower in your initial drafts, or do they appear during later stages of your process? Ryman: I have no idea. Making the third person prose sound like the words that the point-of-view character would use themselves is a relatively useful way of conveying who your character is and how they see the world. It avoids explaining their emotions in the narrator's tone of voice, which can be horribly distanced, pompous and patronising. But you have to be careful using this echoing technique. As an editor, I've caught myself getting exasperated with how rough and informal the prose is being and only then realised that the style is echoing the PoV character. As for subtext, a linking of imagery and metaphor into another consistent layer underneath the plot level... well that's the difference between literature and literature-lite. It's literature-lite that sells. It sounds like it's going to be literature, but it's all on its incredibly worthy surface. I could get bored with clarity any moment and suddenly begin to write floridly. Who knows? CN: At the end of most of your novels, ecstatic catalogs of memories and events mirror your message about the coexistence and commingling of past, present, and future. In 253 and The Child Garden, commingling is elevated to a structural principle: 253 is comprised of the character descriptions of 253 passengers on a single train, and The Child Garden's chapters and sections are comprised of flashforwards and flashbackwards in Milena's past, present, and future as she is read by the Consensus. In one passage in The Child Garden, you offer many details about people who aren't characters in the novel as you attempt to describe the moment of 'now,' then you state explicitly that such description isn't possible, 'so we tell stories, histories, instead' (345). What's going on here? Ryman: All of this comes from a distrust of storytelling. First, most stories or myths get social support because they enforce desired attitudes or behaviour. They are a control mechanism. Second, stories make us sick. Neuroses and psychoses are just stories we tell ourselves and believe. Third, traditional storytelling in chronological order privileges consequences, or karma. It's almost impossible to stop stories about consequences turning into moralising. You did this thing and so you reaped what you sowed. So I distrust story. Life doesn't really happen in stories; it just is, right now. Any story, even one that sticks to the facts totally, is made up, constructed and a bit false. So I keep trying to break stories up in ways that don't confuse people. The chapters from different historical eras in Was, the turning of people into identified spaces in 253, and the moments in which people act or feel or think all at once in concert in Air and The Child Garden. Life is time bound and we are bound to one little arrow shooting through it--ourselves. One of the reasons we read is to get out of ourselves, hitch a ride on someone else's arrow. As soon as you start to work in any art with a narrative or even just a progress, you have to deal with issues of time. Movies have to decide how much they can cut out of the character's real lives. In prose you are forever skimming over slow bits and slowing down to really look at the exciting bits. Things really do happen all over the world, all at once. That really gets me outside of time and the self, and that feels liberating.