Seeing Sullivan
01/12/2003 . Source: Ben Sharpe 

Author Tricia Sullivan interviewed about her stunning new work of future-fiction, Maul, and why some may fine her imagined world extremely disturbing.

Was there any one event or thought that sparked the novel?

TS: The girlz-in-the-mall strand of the story just came out of nowhere; I wrote the first passage back in 1995 as a lark and surprised myself: I mean, what kind of girl masturbates with a gun?

So I kept telling myself the story to find out what would happen next. But the problem was that there was no SF crunch to this thing, and I just couldn't get interested in doing it as a 'straight' novel. Around this time I was also thinking, wouldn't it be fun to do some sort of twisted response to Sheri S. Tepper's THE GATE TO WOMEN'S COUNTRY, which contained the fascinating idea of an apparently male-dominated culture that was, in truth, anything but.

I had a short story from back in 1993 called 'Pink', about a chemist in prison (because it has been predicted he'll invent a chemical formula that will revolutionize the world) and his jailor, Starry Eyes. I sent it to Analog but they wrote back that it was too dark, and I knew it hadn't quite gelled, anyway. I still had feelings for these two guys, though, so I decided to make them both prisoners in a female-dominated future - you know, the old, 'men wiped out by deadly virus' scenario.

I liked the way the two tests rubbed against each other, but the real work then came in figuring out why they needed to be juxtaposed.

Did you have particular themes in mind before you began writing, or did they evolve with the story?

TS: I had the image of Meniscus being painted blue right from the get-go, but I didn't know what that was about. I started reading about evolutionary biology, and I was reading some microbiology for DREAMING IN SMOKE (I actually stole all the Picasso's Blues stuff that appears in DREAMING IN SMOKE from MAUL because I need something nifty to use in DREAMING), and I started thinking about co-evolution and the relationship between multicellulars (us) and single-celled organisms (the bugs) and how that relationship has shaped human development.

It's the idea that the organism doesn't have to be sentient in any way we would recognize in order to produce behavior that is sentient. It's a bit like those optical illusions where you don't know if you're looking at a black vase on a white background, or two white faces kissing against a black background.

You can look at human behavior from the point of view of this intricate chemical dance among micro-organisms. I guess I am always interested in the mind/body problem and in the idea of psychophysical transformation, so that naturally came to the fore as I was going along. I was doing a lot of martial arts training while the early drafts were forming, and my then-teacher, now-partner, Steve Morris, had told me about the importance of visual impressions in determining physical response. 

He could also control his pulse and body temperature and stuff like that - sans mysticism - and he introduced me to a whole body of information on neurochemistry and its effect on behavior - especially combative, aggressive behavior. I put that together with the sentient bugs and I was on my way.

The scenes in the near-future mall, and the girls' behaviour is extremely convincing - are your own mall-hanging memories an influence here? And is there maybe a tiny bit of wish fulfilment in the carnage that ensues?!

TS: I didn't mall-hang all that much, and my friends and I were most determinedly non-cool. If there is wish-fulfillment going on here, it lies in the characters of Sun and her friends, who are a whole lot more plugged-in than I ever was (or will be!). Carnage-wise, I guess I still carry a lot of frustration from my adolescence and - OK, what the hell, it WAS cathartic to write those scenes!

The far-future story is, at times, extremely disturbing and raises questions about the longevity of the human race - do you think we are a doomed species?

TS: I never saw doom in the future of the Meniscus story. I saw a far-future (if it is a future, which is not necessarily the case if you read the book) in which people might acquire the ability to connect their ideas with their physical form. Become like comic-book heroes. Have special powers. Do wild, imaginative things.

You could say that's just a metaphor for what's already happening, from body pierces to tattoos to plastic surgery to genetic engineering and so on and on. Or you could say it's something innate in us.  We can transform our environment; why wouldn't we want to transform ourselves? And since our central nervous system already does that for us - in infancy, in adolescence, in pregnancy, in ageing - why not get the master keys to the inner kingdom?

Of course, lots of SF has dealt with the transformation of the species. Nanotech is all over the place these days. But I wanted to get into the crack between what we set out to do and what actually happens. As a species, we might be scientists, but we are also animals, and we're moved by drives and desires we don't understand.

In the Meniscus strand of this story, humanity has been shaped by the very organisms it's trying to design. I try to subvert the cliché of 'killer virus runs amok' and look instead at the diolog between subject and object.

I try to look at the dilog between parasite and host, which is, incidentally, very much the same dialog as that between the conscious and unconscious mind. I found myself playing with all of these dichotomies. But it isn't really about the future, remember! It's about now.

And, on a rather lighter note: if you could buy anything from the mall in your novel, what would it be? (I've heard pink ammo-belts are the must-have just now...)

TS: As the mother of a 19-month old boy, I could really use a pair of Energy boots from Miles Mocassins. And maybe a Patience belt or something.

What are you reading at the moment?

TS: Nothing. I'm writing.

Who do you regard as the ones to watch in SF?

TS: Justina Robson and John Courtenay Grimwood. Everybody's already watching folks like Mike Harrison and China Mieville, not to mention scads of others - SF in Britain is superb these days. 

What can fans look forward to from you after Maul?

TS: I'm doing this thing called Cookie Starfishing. It's set partly in 1980's New Jersey and partly on another planet. I said this at a reading recently and somebody in the audience guffawed. 'Isn't that the same thing?' he said. Wise guy.

Thanks to Orbit Books (and Ben Sharpe) for permission to post this interview. For more details of their SFF authors and books, visit Orbit at www.orbitbooks.co.uk