Scott Westerfeld Interview
01/04/2005 . Source: Orbit Team 

Scott Westerfeld, whose debut novel 'The Risen Empire' is released this month by book publisher Orbit drops in for a chat. He found himself wanting to write an old-fashioned space opera with new-fashioned nanotech, programmable matter and information warfare.

One of the key aspects of any space opera is the world - or, indeed, galaxy - in which the story is set. Can you tell us a little bit about the background setting to THE RISEN EMPIRE?

Some time ago I read an article about the history of science, in which the author contended that the shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism didn't actually happen because scientists changed their minds. With a few signal exceptions, the folks who grew up in the geocentric era clung to that set of beliefs and models tenaciously.

But fortunately, they all died. Turns out that death is the great handmaiden of scientific progress.

Around the same time, I found myself wanting to write an old-fashioned space opera with new-fashioned nanotech, programmable matter, and information warfare. And I certainly didn't want any of this singularity crap making my alarums and excursions virtual or irrelevant. So I came up with the Risen Empire, a place where the invention of biological immortality 1600 years ago has managed to choke off the truly paradigmatic changes of the singularity. Lots of cool toys but saddled with quasi-feudal concentration of power, the internal contradiction of all old-fashioned space opera.

This Risen Empire is surrounded by other states in various stages of post-humanity, so it's falling behind technologically and growing ever more paranoid about and uncomprehending of its neighbours' purposes, aspirations, and organizing principles. Thus, the empire tends to flail about militarily - perhaps not to much purpose, but with the considerable pyrotechnic spectacle I was wanting to write about.Sort of like a certain hyperpower of the present day.

Did you start out with the setting and history of the Eighty Worlds and then compose a narrative to allow you to explore it? Or did the story come first and the background was fleshed out the more you wrote?

Setting and style were definitely first and foremost. The narrative wound itself outward from the political setting, and I even derived some of the universe's physical rules from the aesthetics of the tale. Some readers have complained to me that the physics of the space battles can seem a bit Napoleonic at times, to which I say, "Yeah, cannonballs with AI. And the problem with that is?"

THE RISEN EMPIRE involves vast distances and huge time scales and yet everything is told from the points of view of very human (well, mostly human. . .) characters. How important do you think it is to put this recognisable face on an immense worlds-spanning space opera?

I think that the Greeks had it right: The gods are no fun unless their enterprises impact directly upon human individuals. (And better yet, you should make the gods fallibly human themselves.) So I try to focus on the small events and seemingly powerless characters that wind up entangling history's progress.

How extensively do you plot your novels before you start writing them? Do you ever find yourself deviating drastically from your notes because that's the way the story seems to be taking you?

I follow Duke Ellington on this issue: "Try to make the bits you improvised sound composed, and the bits you composed sound improvised." So, I'll leave it to the readers to guess.

Do you have any favourite authors you admire or who have influenced your work?

Samuel R. Delany. Linda Nagata. Joanna Russ. Iain M. Banks.

Do you see any particular trends in recent SF?

Obviously, there's a lot of space opera out there, much of which seems to combine the puerile pleasures of big explosions with the character and political complexity that befits our very grown-up genre. The New Weird seems to be doing the same thing with Lovecraft. This seems to me to represent an extremely healthy pair of goals: Holding onto our fantastically pulpy roots while getting smarter all the time. Like if Peter Pan got a PhD in Pirate Studies, or something, but without growing up too much or forgetting how to fly.

>Does it ever frustrate you that almost every single one of the top grossing films of all time are SF or SF-related and yet the literature of science fiction is either dismissed or ignored by the mainstream critics?

One of my books, Evolution's Darling, got mysteriously discussed in the Review of Contemporary Fiction. In the first sentence, the reviewer said I was just like Philip K. Dick. Which I'm not at all (like, I wish). Of course, this manoeuvre was simply code for RCF readers, saying, "Don't worry, I'm not going to pollute you with one of those science fiction writers. It's all like a metaphor or something."

But this doesn't really worry me. Why not? See my answer to your first question - every current-day mainstream critic is going to die eventually. And, like heliocentrism, our ideas are better than theirs. Their children and grandchildren will dance to our world view.

Getting back to THE RISEN EMPIRE, the Rix are heavily augmented posthumans with mental and physical abilities that are far beyond what we are currently capable of. Do you really see human beings eventually becoming so advanced? And, if so, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I think we're already posthuman. I mean, I'm answering your questions posed in Britain from Australia. To a medieval serf who could barely conceive of the places a few miles from his village, that's some seriously posthuman shit. And it's clearly a good thing. In fact, the main problem with progress isn't the loss of humanity in some abstract sense, it's all the damn maintenance issues: phone bills, immigration forms, jetlag, heart upgrades, brain backups, and reloading that caffeine gland. So yeah, there's always someone sitting around yearning for an earlier era, but so what? Becoming posthuman is what humans do.

One of the central conceits of THE RISEN EMPIRE is the concept of immortality. Is this actually attainable, do you think, or is it much more fiction than science?

It's attainable, but not desirable. You don't want the rich getting richer ad infinitum. You want big fat inheritance taxes to rip into the first half of every accumulated powerbase, and really stupid heirs to blow the rest. And you can't have either with death. I am very pro-death. And intend to do my descendents the favour of dying.

Finally, do you think galaxy-spanning empires are a realistic goal given the constraints of relativity, or are we more likely to be bound to our home solar system?

Relativity is a bitch, but it's the smaller of the engineering problems. The bigger issue is going anywhere worth being. Remember, 5,000 years ago there were only about three crops worth growing-all fruit tasted like those really small, horribly bitter apples you can only make pies with. It's taken untold ages and astonishing efforts to get the ecological systems on our home planet to be such a pleasure to live inside. (And it's still a royal pain to grow decent coffee.) So I honestly think that the earth will be the only really decent piece of real estate for a long, long time. The rain forests of Brazil alone-with their millions of undiscovered medicines, micro-biosystems, and culinary surprises-are probably worth more than the rest of the galaxy put together. (For us humans, anyway.)

Yes, people will leave the solar system. But they'll wish they hadn't for many, many generations.

Thank you very much, Scott Westerfeld!

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