Science Fiction author Tobias Buckell has risen to considerable acclaim in the past few years, through the popularity of his first two novels, Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin. Born in Grenada in 1979, he grew up in Grenada and the American and British Virgin Islands before moving to Ohio, where he still lives, before starting college. His newest novel, Sly Mongoose, is scheduled for release on August 19. Also forthcoming from Buckell is The Cole Protocol, a book set in the universe of the popular Halo video games. I had a chance to get in touch with Mr. Buckell and ask him about his work.
What can you tell us about your new book, Sly Mongoose?
It's a world building adventure. I'd been listening to a lecture by NASA scientist and SF author Geoffrey Landis on Venus. Pointing out that despite the insane heat, sulphuric acid rain, lack of breathable air and bone-crushing pressure, it was actually a very habitable planet – if you lived 100,000 feet up in the air. Because on a Venus-like planet, the dense atmosphere would make breathable air a lifting gas, which meant if you filled an enclosed city with air, it would float. It was that core idea that led me to imagine a world of floating cities, blimps, and the adventures that would develop out of that landscape.
What gave you the idea for the Swarm? They struck me as sort of a mixture of the modern George Romero-style horror movie zombie and the older Vodou concept of the zombie, with a science fictional basis.
Peter Watts recently wrote a marvelous novel called Blindsight, where he posited a scientific rationale for vampires in this science fiction novel. I thought to myself that creating a science-based zombie would be an interesting mind puzzle. Other elements of the Swarm are snagged from collective consciousness entities that have been in SF/F before, I think the actual name I lifted from a very old Arthur C. Clarke story about a collective consciousness that infects lemmings...
How would you describe your writing style to someone who has never read you before?
That's an interesting dilemma for an author! Honestly, I am always working hard to make sure the reader isn't bored and that there's lots of stuff going on in the book that keeps them entertained. Death, mayhem and explosions, while underneath always a meaty current of some topic that I obsess a little over that makes the novel a fun read a second or third time.
Your novels and some of your short stories are set in a common universe. For those who are unfamiliar with it, what can you tell us about that setting?
The Xenowealth is a series of 48 worlds connected by wormholes in orbit that let people travel from one to another in a relatively short amount of time. I've introduced 5 worlds or so in the last 3 books. The basic idea is that an alien race called the Satraps have overlorded humanity and other alien races for a long time, with humanity being lowest on the rung. Crystal Rain introduced us to some of my series heroes. Ragamuffin introduced us to the full 48 worlds and the overthrow of the Satrapy. Sly Mongoose is about what comes next, which is the forming of the Xenowealth in the aftermath.
How developed is the background used in those stories? Do you have lots of notes about things like setting, or do you prefer to come up with those details as you go along?
I developed the idea of the Xenowealth back in early 00's while writing a lot of short fiction as a common framework for a number of disparate stories. But it was still very thinly developed, writing the novels helped me firm the whole idea up a whole lot, particularly my work in Ragamuffin, the second book, helped me background the whole thing and firm up the politics and history of the Xenowealth.
In your novel Crystal Rain, which is set on a single isolated planet, you gave only a few hints at what the larger universe shown in Ragamuffin and Sly Mongoose was like. When you wrote Crystal Rain, how much of that larger universe did you already have in mind?
A bit, thanks to those short stories I'd written, some of them on other worlds all within the Xenowealth. But my ideas were still fairly larval at the time I was writing the first book.
Much of your work portrays people and cultures descended from the Caribbean, as opposed to the American/European basis usually seen in science fiction. How have people responded to that?
There have been a varying number of responses. Mainly people dig on the adventure and high-concept adventure, and the Caribbean flair and background of my characters is just added coolness. A number of people struggle a little bit with the dialect in the first book, which is really strong. And that's fair, it's not for everyone.
Others though, make a leap from struggling with the dialect to denouncing Caribbean dialects in general, or making judgments on it. I've gotten some hate mail that says things like 'non-Westerners like the people you show here on other planets will never get to space, they don't have the mental/industrial/mechanical prowess to do so and never will' and they get very mad about the whole thing.
Most of the negativity around my novels has just been an acknowledged fear by some that because I depict a multi-cultural universe, that the book is going to be a literary/academic sort of thing, instead of the rip-roaring no holds barred explosions type of thing the books actually are. But as I've said before, the idea that all peoples of this planet will inherit the future isn't something to be scared of, or act like it’s a chore to depict, but actually a lot of fun. And a tremendous opportunity for a novelist to explore.
More generally, what are your thoughts on how issues of race and culture are handled in the science fiction field, whether in fandom or in the stories themselves?
Well, just doing a simple demographics look at the number of working writers in the field here in the USA shows that our demographics don't even match up to the USA's demographics. According to the US census 69% of the population is white, which means 31% is everything else. So, in a large group of people, who are not tied to a geographic area, you should see at least some reflection of that.
So between the 1,500 or so SF/F writers selling short fiction who are members of the Science Fiction Writers of America, as well as novelists that ones knows of publishing SF/F, using the census, we mainly see representatives of the 69% section of the population.
If African-Americans represent 12% of the population, one should reasonably expect 180 African-American short fiction or novel writers within SFWA and around the SF/F writing community. With Hispanics being 14% of our population, we should expect to see around 200 Hispanic authors participating in our field.
You can play the same number checking game by just taking the number of original SF/F novels that come out in a year (usually 100-200 titles in a given year) and applying the census filter against them to see if there is any correlation.
Now my saying this always gets me hate mail and huge arguments online. But the fact is, there is a lack of diversity, for *whatever* reason you want to attribute it to, in science fiction and fantasy, and I think it hurts our field. I think there are missing voices.
But as a younger generation gets involved with the field, I have a great deal of hope. Diversity is slowly increasing. The idea I've heard passed around as gospel truth by older SF/F authors that writing a minority main character in your work will cause it not to sell is being whispered less and less, and people are experimenting and doing some neat things. I'm particularly enjoying writers from Britain, Australia, and Canada, who may not be diverse, but are looking to bring diverse voices to their work.
Stay tuned for part 2, where Buckell talks about writing in the Halo universe, the shifting perception of tie-in books, and his own process. Don’t miss it!
John Markley is a newspaper reporter and freelance writer from Illinois, and has been addicted to science fiction since elementary school. His other interests include history, science, video games, and martial arts. He maintains the blog Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic.
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