Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon, interviewed.

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Captain Morgan and his Cyberpunk Organ

Richard Morgan has just written the first great cyberpunk novel of the 21st century, Altered Carbon.

The noir gloom-soaked streets of the Altered Carbon universe are so dark, you need a chainsword to slice through the atmosphere.

Stephen Hunt slips into the inquisitor's chair and finds out why this new author is going to be stunningly, nay amazingly, big.

SH. Do you write full time yet, or are you still fitting in the day-job?

RM. At this stage, full time writing isn’t really an option, but even if it were I’m not sure I’d be able to quit entirely. I’ve been a teacher/trainer for nearly a decade and a half and the post I have now is the best I’ve ever worked in.

Hard to give something like that up, and anyway I’m not convinced ivory towers are all that good for writers, personally or professionally. In an ideal world, I’d probably teach part time (with some extremely long holidays!)

SH. When and why did you begin writing?

RM. I think originally I had the same motivation as Asimov – I wrote because I liked reading and I wanted to create my own stories for my own consumption. That’s something that stretches back to childhood. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t scribbling away at something.

In my late teens I started writing a lengthy fantasy epic which owed a lot to Tolkein, meandered along for years and never approached anything resembling a conclusion. At university I dumped the whole thing in favour of harder edged SF short fiction, though none of it ever attained the polish necessary for successful publication.

I date myself as a serious writer from the year I graduated (‘ 87), when I produced an extremely bloody, drug soaked futuristic cop-bastard-sees-the-error-of-his-ways novel, which, perhaps fortunately, never saw the light of publication either.

SH. How does working in a university compare with being an author?

RM. Writing, for all the massive head rush and other benefits, is a lonely business. Most of the time it’s just you and the Mac. The university environment provides a level of social and professional interaction that I would otherwise be hard put to come by.

And, for an EFL teacher, lecturing in a university gives you access to facilities and a level of professional support that are unheard of in the commercial sector. Of course, in the end, a job is still a job, no matter how good it is, whereas writing is (at least for me) a lifetime dream come true. On that level, there IS no comparison.

SH. How has becoming a published science fiction author impacted your lifestyle?

RM. So far, not that much. I’ve been able to take a couple of slightly more expensive holidays in central America than would otherwise have been possible, and publication has made the process of buying a flat pretty painless.

But I’d say these have been shifts of emphasis rather than lifestyle changes. If Altered Carbon hadn’t been picked up, I’d still have bought a flat, and I’d still have gone to central America. It just would have been harder to pay for, and consequently a bit more stressful.

SH. How do you see the future of science fiction literature in the 21st century?

RM. Bright, very bright. I think there’s always been a lot snobbery in the literary establishment regarding the merit of the SF genre, but that’s breaking down now. It has to. As the rate of technological development speeds up, the gap between science fiction and what we’re living now is getting narrower all the time.

Look at cloning – how long have we got before all those imagined nightmare clone scenarios are living breathing reality? This closing of the gap is going to force (probably is already forcing) a re-assessment.

Established and respected non-genre writers like Paul Theroux, Margaret Atwood and Fay Weldon have already produced books that HAVE to be classified as SF, even if the critics don’t like it. Meanwhile, leading SF writers like William Gibson are now no longer published purely as SF – Gibson’s last two novels came out in Penguin fiction, the SF label quietly removed. (That galls me a bit, to be honest – after all, we found him first, didn’t we! But you have to rise above it and see the benefits).

And perhaps most importantly of all, you’ve got writers like Iain Banks who straddle the genre gap on a completely comfortable day to day basis. So basically, we’ve got the critical establishment in a half nelson.

No doubt about it, it’s a good time to be writing SF.

SH. Do you tend to read the work of many other SF/F authors?

RM. Yes, I’m a voracious reader, in and out of genre, and SF/F is the only type of fiction I’ve come across that consistently stretches my perceptions of the universe, which I like. Favourites in the genre are Iain M Banks, William Gibson and M John Harrison – I’ve read practically everything they’ve written.

SH. What's your favourite SF/F movies and TV?

RM. I have to confess I watch almost no TV of any sort, but I am a fanatical movie fan. As far SF movies are concerned, There Can Be Only One. Bladerunner - the movie that fundamentally redefined our relationship with and perception of the future.

Aside from that of course, it also had superb characterisation, gripping narrative and stunning set pieces. It was a film that changed me at an emotional and an intellectual level when I saw for the first time. Better yet, I saw it again about a year ago and it hasn’t aged a day!

There aren’t many others to stack up against that standard, but my next favourite is probably Strange Days, which offered a similar simultaneous kick to the adrenal glands and frontal lobes, as well as some superbly flawed characters. The Matrix was also great, of course, though a little two dimensional and derivative. Then again, with those FX and set pieces, hard to get too upset about minor failings like that.

Fantasy movies are another matter. Until about a month ago, I would have been willing to say that no-one had made a really good one. Then I saw Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings; the Fellowship and, well, game over. Jackson has done for Fantasy what Ridley Scott did for SF with Alien and Bladerunner – he’s upped the ante for the whole genre. Fantastic movie – let’s hope it’s the start of a trend.

SH. Do you use the services of an agent?

RM. Yes. Carolyn Whitaker at London Independent Books.

SH. How long did you spend in rejection letter hell before you were first published?

RM. Longer than I like to think about now. Once I had an agent, it was very easy. Before that, a nightmare. I spent the best part of two years hawking Altered Carbon around UK and US publishers (and agents) before Carolyn picked me up.

After that, everything went like a dream. From LIB accepting me to getting my contract with Orion was less than six months. The moral of the tale is GET AN AGENT! Kill if you have to, but get one.

SH. Did you always want to be a writer?

RM. Yep.

SH. Where, when, and how do you write?

RM. Given a word processor, wherever, whenever and for however long I can. I’m quite anti-social, which helps. Basically, while I was writing Altered Carbon I came home from work every day, ate with and grunted at my girlfriend for about an hour and then sat at my desk in the bedroom and wrote until I had to go to bed. Weekends too. You gotta suffer for your art (and so does your partner, unfortunately).

SH. What are you reading now?

RM. I’m currently re-reading The Two Towers – I can’t wait as long as December.

SH. Is this the first book/story you ever wrote, or are there a few earlier unpublished works hanging around?

RM. There’s that bloody, drug soaked futuristic cop-bastard-sees-the-error-of-his-ways novel, which I wrote just after graduation. It was called Ethics on the Precipice – maybe I’ll go back one day and revise it, but it certainly shouldn’t see print in its current state.

Then, back in the mid-nineties I wrote an SF screenplay called Market Forces which never came to anything because (producer quote) "the central character was too morally ambivalent for Van Damme or Stallone to pick up". There are also a few short pieces featuring Takeshi Kovacs pre-Altered Carbon, and some short fantasy/horror that I wrote more for my own personal edification than anything else.

SH. Did you come up through the writing short-stories route, or did you get published in novel-form first?

RM. No, my short stories were all rejected by the magazines I sent them to. Altered Carbon is the first piece of fiction I’ve had published.

SH. If Altered Carbon was going to be made into a film, who would be your dream producers/actors for the role?

RM. I suppose James Cameron or Ridley Scott would be obvious directorial choices. They both know their technology, whatever era it belongs to, they’re both comfortable with FX, and they both know how to put an audience through the emotional wringer.

Another, less obvious choice would be Michael Mann – he doesn’t do sci-fi as far as I’m aware, but anyone who can turn in Last of the Mohicans and Heat with the same power and grace ought to be able to sustain the jump forward another few hundred years.

Casting Kovacs? Well, he’s one man wrapped up in another man’s flesh, so you’re looking at some substantial acting talent here. He’s also, in Ryker’s flesh, older than your average action hero. In an ideal world, De Niro. Failing that Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel or Tom Sizemore – they could all carry the stature, and the damage.

Ortega would be a tough one because your studio’s natural inclination is going to be to bring in some standard Hispanic beauty like Jennifer Lopez or Penelope Cruz. Ortega isn’t beautiful, she’s hammered hard handsome. There’s a little known Spanish actress called Ana Fernandez who’d be perfect for it, but out of the Hollywood crowd I’d say only Linda Fiorentino or Famke Janssen have the right profile.

Maybe at a pinch Madeleine Stowe for her sheer acting power, though I have this perverse desire to cast her as one of the female villains – sort of like Sergio Leone casting Henry Fonda as the bad guy in Once Upon a Time in the West. Shock, horror!

SH. Do you ever attend SF-cons, and what has your experience with them been?

RM. Never been. I’m going to Eastercon this year – looking forward to it.

SH. Would you ever consider writing in a different genre, or are you content with SF/F?

RM. I tend not to think in terms of genre WHILE I’m writing. I just have this story to tell, and so far all the stories I’ve wanted to tell have come out of the wash as Science Fiction or Fantasy/Horror. That’s fine by me – SF was always my first love in literary terms.

There’s a sense of freedom and imagination to it that’s hard to imagine attaining in other genres. On the other hand, who knows? I quite like the idea of writing a contemporary crime novel at some point, but that depends on having a suitable story to tell.

SH. What are your hobbies?

RM. Travel, any kind of travel, the more exotic the better, is probably my biggest passion outside of writing, though working for a living tends to put limits on how much travelling you can do at any one time.

To let off some of the ensuing steam, I’ve got this big mud spattered mountain bike that I like to get even muddier whenever the opportunity presents itself. I’m also just getting into indoor climbing (the outdoor variety, in Scotland, is far too wet and cold for any but real dyed in the wool fans). It’s a sport that absorbs you totally, mind and body, which is a rare pleasure.

I used to do an obscure type of karate called Kyoshindo that had the same effect, but it’s hard to find clubs that practise that particular style, and I’ve had some unfortunate experiences with other types. There’s a lot of macho rubbish tied up with the image of martial arts, and finding a dojo with an atmosphere that you really like can be quite hard.

On the physically idle side, I’m a voracious reader and a fanatically enthusiastic movie fan. I’m also taking some tentative steps into gaming – nothing too advanced so far, PS One and a handful of basic male violence games, but it’s dangerously addictive stuff… To try and redeem myself from all this self-indulgence I’m also trying to upgrade my Spanish, which has decayed badly since I left Madrid three years ago.

SH. What advice would you give to budding SF writers?

RM. I’d recommend trying to write primarily about people and events rather than scientific ideas. Good characters and narrative will carry ideas whether they are stunning and original or well worn and derivative. But even the brightest idea won’t carry a dull story and wooden characters – the readers will get bored once the novelty of the idea wears off and they’ll stop reading.

And of course, the hoary old writer’s chestnut – stick with it! It can take years or even decades to get published, but if you’re writing anything reasonable numbers of people will want to read, you will get picked up one day.

And besides, if the passion to write is in you, what else are you going to do with your free time that will even vaguely satisfy that passion? Don’t give up!

SH. Are you from the 'writing tightly against a full outline school' or the 'make it up as you go along' school?

RM. The second of these, definitely. Obviously you start with an idea, and you have to have some idea where you’re going with it, but the only true white heat of creativity I’ve ever felt has been while I’m actually typing.

Storylines start spontaneously extending themselves both back and forward in time, characters begin to speak and act for themselves, stuff you never even dreamed of comes bubbling up through the cracks.

When you’re really on track, you can feel the rightness of the new stuff – it fits into what you’ve already written because, well, given X, Y just makes sense, doesn’t it. Of course you have to go back and cull this stuff from time to time, to make sure it does all fit, so the actual writing is a longer process than it probably would be if I could think it all out beforehand Agatha Christie style.

On the other hand, I don’t have the control to just hold off and think it all through perfectly. It’s like sex – ten minutes into thinking about it, my hands are itching for the keyboard and I just have to get some of this stuff down.

SH. Do you consider yourself and your work quintessentially Scottish?

RM. No. For one thing, I’m not. I can lay a vague claim to Scottish blood through my mother’s family about three generations back, but I’m not from here. And unless you’re writing specifically about Scotland or the Scots, I don’t see how there can be a Scottish flavour to a novel. The first time I read Iain M Banks, I’d no idea where he was from. This stuff is international.

SH. How much do you base your characters against people you actually know?

RM. Not much. My social circle is short on psychologically damaged assassins and power hungry corporate vampires (not that I’m complaining about the fact). Some political figures, seen from afar, have provided a certain amount of input on the bad guys and the occasional phrase gets lifted from the conversation of friends if it seems to fit. The rest is pure sick imagination.

SH. When it comes to your drafts, how much do you tend to re-write?

RM. A lot. Creating on the run tends to leave a messy trail, and you have to go back and tidy up extensively. Like Ray Bradbury said – throw up into your typewriter in the mornings and in the evenings go clean it up. Or was that the other way around? Certainly would be for me with the hours I keep.

SH. What other books do you have planned?

RM. I’m currently mid-way through a sequel to Altered Carbon which sees Takeshi Kovacs pitched into the middle of a planetary war and an inconvenient archaeological treasure hunt.

We finally get to see first hand how he behaves in a military context, as well as finding out a bit more about the civilisation the Martians left behind for us.

After that, I want to set a third novel back on Harlan’s World where we’ll get to see some of the cultural and personal influences that have made Kovacs what he is.

SH. How would you summarise Altered Carbon for readers who haven't experienced the novel?

RM. In a single sentence, it’s a high-impact ultra-violent tragedy about the nature of power and how future technology will affect it. You’d like a little more detail? Takeshi Kovacs is a convicted criminal and an ex-Envoy, an enforcer for the UN Protectorate, which spans about three dozen colonised worlds as well as the earth, and isn’t what you’d call a liberal political structure.

He gets bailed out of prison on a colony world (really storage – his mind has been stored as coded digital data and his body sold off to the highest bidder) and into a new body on earth. The reason for this stroke of luck is that a guy called Bancroft, one of a hyper-rich elite Earth overclass, has been murdered and wants to know by whom.

For the super-rich, death isn’t much of a problem in these times because they all have stored copies of their personality that can be decanted into cloned copies of their body on demand. The problem isn’t that Bancroft’s dead – it’s that he can’t remember any of the events leading up to this death, and he wants Kovacs to fill in the blanks.

Which proves an unpopular pastime in the eyes of a whole host of shadowy characters and interests within the Earth underworld. Luckily Kovacs is a pretty tough character himself, and so widespread mayhem ensues…Read on!

SH. What kind of manuscript changes had to be made to Altered Carbon?

RM. Very few, mainly because I’d clawed the thing apart and re-written it the year before it finally got picked up. My editors just pointed out some ugly facial hair I hadn’t noticed and a few technological matters that needed tighter clarification. That kind of critique is invaluable – you can never see these things yourself because you’re standing too close.

SH. Of the feedback you have heard people say about Altered Carbon, what are your favorites?

RM. Probably David Langford’s warning on the Amazon site: not for the faint hearted! I got a real kick out of that. Ken Macleod was also very kind – he said the backstory left him wanting a sequel like another fix, which I think means I did my creative continuity job properly.

And John Berlyne from SFREVU told me the book had left him thinking quite deeply and extensively about the implications of sleeving, sort of worrying at it in his mind. I was made up about that. I think I write primarily to arouse feelings in my readers, but if I can get them to think as well, that’s a huge bonus.

SH. What research did you do for Altered Carbon?

RM. Research? Uh, not a lot, really. I tend to read a lot, and that can be anything from Quantum mechanics to Spanish political history, but it’s incidental, or at least tangential, to my writing. I don’t often go looking for specifics – I tend to create out of thin air and then fling in handfuls of whatever I have to hand.

SH. Is the term cyberpunk just a label or is this a "genre?"

RM. I think it WAS a genre, or at least a sub-genre back in the late seventies/early eighties when it first broke cover. But that was because it really was radically different from what other SF there was around at the time.

Now, I think the elements of cyberpunk have dissolved into the whole SF genre, so it’s hard to find anyone writing who doesn’t owe serious debts to Gibson and his crew. So yeah, it’s become a label, over time. I wouldn’t label Altered Carbon cyberpunk (although others have), but one thing is certain. Without the cyberpunk writers, I would never have been inspired to write it.

SH. As an English lecturer, do you find the hard science parts of Altered Carbon easy to write, or were you scouring copies of Nature and New Scientist for cutting edge developments you could weave into the book?

RM. I think it’s important to realise that from the point of view of Kovacs and my other characters, there’s very little science in Altered Carbon that IS cutting edge. Most of it is the currency of everyday life for them. They don’t necessarily know exactly how it works, but they don’t need to.

I don’t know exactly how my CD player works, but it doesn’t stop me using it. What WAS hard work was taking ideas centuries away in technological terms and making them seem commonplace. Having a background in popular science helps here, but only in an editorial sense.

You have to apply some kind of basic censorship to your ideas, in order to make them ring true. But the ideas themselves didn’t require research – I just made them up.

SH. How long did it take to write the novel?

RM. Hard to estimate because it was an off and on thing in the early stages, and then with the re-write…. I started in early 94 and finished the final draft in late 98. So three and a half years real time, of which, say about two years was actual writing time.

SH. What gave you the original idea?

RM. I got into this huge and not entirely sober argument with a Buddhist one night about the injustice of a system of reincarnation where you end up with a karmic debt (or credit) for a previous life you can’t remember and therefore, as far as the current you is concerned, a life you haven’t lived. That got me thinking about where the exact parameters of self are, and how technology is inevitably going to re-set them.

SH. Any more works in the Altered Carbon universe planned?

RM. I’d like to tell a story from the point of view of Ryker, the cop whose body Kovacs is using. He gets a bit of a raw deal in Altered Carbon – we only ever hear about him from characters who disapprove of him. Be nice to let him speak for himself, and maybe get another look at the workings of the Bay City police department. And then there’s Trepp, who I’ve got a REAL soft spot for. Ah well, we’ll see…..

SH. Do you have any recommended reading for fans of Altered Carbon?

RM. Haruki Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World – best novel I’ve ever read. It’s half science fiction, half fantasy and the critical establishment would sooner curl up and die than let it go by either label.

Aside from that, M John Harrison’s Centauri Device, for the most beautiful piece of SF writing I’ve ever come across, and for any crime fiction addicts who might wander in at this point Laurence Block’s When the Sacred Ginmill Closes – nothing better in the cri/fi genre.

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