(Mon.20.Feb.95; Painted Table/Alexis Hotel: Seattle, WA)

Feathers

Oh, I don't know why feathers. Just came into my head. I wish I had a great story to tell you about the feathers, but I don't. When I first started writing it, I knew I wanted to do something about virtual reality being ingested in some way, becoming part of the body. I went thru the usual things with pills, syringes, and all that, but my mind wasn't really working properly. And I suddenly realized, "It's not going to be like this." I was thinking about birds, and getting high, and flying ... and it just came to me, feathers -- you put them in your mouth, and you tickle the back of your throat with 'em. Don't ask me where I got that from -- you don't want to know! Just one of those marvelous moments.

People have really picked up on them as an image and a symbol. Someone sent me an American Indian "dreamcatcher" -- which is feathers and a web which is supposed to catch your dreams at night -- and I didn't know anything about this. And that was nice, discovering something else happening beyond vurt, that also has to do with dreams and feathers. You wouldn't really connect those things together in your mind, that a dream could be captured in a feather, but I'm not the first person to think it up.

Pregnant author, editor-midwife

The way the book was written came out of the way I was asked to write it. By a friend I'd known for about ten years, Steve Powell, who'd decided to start his own publishing company. He asked me to write him a novel. I'd been writing plays for eight years or so, and he liked the plays, so I went over turned the computer on, and wrote. The first sentence came out, the same sentence in the book, and he said something -- "Is it vurt, you on?" -- I can't remember what he said, but he said something like that. And I wrote the first chapter, handed it to Steve, and he liked it, but didn't have a clue what I was going on about -- he didn't know anything about science fiction at all. But that's how it went: I'd write a chapter or two at a time, give them to Steve, and he'd come back to me with his ideas, and so on. We worked very close together, not like the usual writer-editor relationship at all. Much closer.

Ballard days, Gibson nights

I'm not like a science fiction maniac, myself. I don't read it all the time, because I read a lot of books, any subject -- everything interests me, I've got that kind of mind. I read SF in the usual stage of adolescence, when science

fiction seems to connect with your sexuality for some strange reason that no one's looked at, I don't think. Which is the same thing that happens with surrealist art, Salvador Dali, you know... You suddenly get interested in these things the same time you start getting interested in sex, and they're all tied up together, I'm sure. So, I did that stint. And every so often if something interests me, I go back to it.

Then I discovered JG Ballard. Totally by accident. That was another "moment" for me, because it was the first heavy science fiction I'd read that wasn't about space ships, but was actually talking about the society we live in, in a very specific way. He was writing quite difficult books at the time, like The Atrocity Exhibition and such. I loved it, just took to it completely. And I've read everything Ballard's done, so that was a big influence.

Reading Gibson for the first time made me realize that SF's really changing. It's becoming more literary, it's becoming more exciting to actually write. Because all those old guys -- Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and so on -when you read their books, you don't get a sense of language from them. By the time Gibson was here, the language was as important as the ideas. That was when I realized, "Oh, maybe I should try this, because this is something I could do."

So, I move in and out of reading SF. I'm very interested in popular science, fractals, chaos theory, and all that kind of stuff. And just a lot of straight fiction as well. Since I've been a kid, I never stopped reading.

Wordsmithery

The thing about the language in Vurt is that people compare it to Clockwork Orange and I don't see that at all. Because Burgess, in that book, took language all the way, and I'm much too interested in telling a story -- that ol' boring thing, you know -- to let the language strangle it. I want to excite people, that's my main purpose on earth, I'm sure. And to excite people with the language and the story at the same time is the perfect thing, really. It doesn't always work like that, but that's what you're aiming for: those moments where the story and the words that describe it come together.

I love playing with words. In Pollen, I made words up that have nothing at all to do with SF, and in Vurt there is one word that is made up, rivered. It says something like "His brow was rivered with sweat." Now, I just wrote that and thought, "This is a normal word, rivered." But somebody said to me, "No, no -- there's no such word as 'rivered."' You look it up in the dictionary, and it's not there. But to me, it just sounds perfectly natural. And in Pollen there's a lot more words like that.

Because the way I write is very free, I get all these mad ideas and put them into the story. And Steve says some of them are too over the top, and I get rid of them. But a lot he lets through, so they're almost like embarrassing, some of them, I find. I write a sentence, and I'm almost embarrassed by it -"That's too wacky!" Or, I'm being too clever. And some of those you get rid of, but others you think, well, they're fun -- it' embarrassing. I don't think embarrassment is something to be ashamed of in art, but it is, to a lot of people. When that point in your mind is reached, as a writer, that means that you're actually on the edge of something exciting -- and that's why your mind says, "Step back! You can't got this far, you can't say that."

There was more editing on Pollen just because we worked on it longer. Steve will just say "lines 12-25, let's get rid of them." And the way that I work is to go along with it. Because what I do is give power over to one other person, and let them be the overseer. A lot of it comes from working so much in the theatre, where you're not in charge of anything -- a play doesn't belong to a writer, it belongs to a company, which can be a hundred people or more. So you very quickly learn to lose the control of the text in theatre. If you don't lose it, all you're going to do is argue with actors and directors all day long, and it's just not worth it! So you kind of give up the text as it is, and let them get on with it. And I do that now with my novels -- "here it is, do what you want with it."

So when we were working on Pollen, during the last moments, the entire last chapter went, and was replaced by a different last chapter -- that was just Steve saying, "these five pages don't mean anything at all." And me admitting it, you know? And we came up with a much better ending because of that moment, so it works!

The secret of it is, nobody realizes that you've taken any of the lines out of the novel. When you're writing a novel, you think, "God, people are gonna realize this."' But all you're doing is removing lines -- they don't know, they just carry on reading!

I'm reading Martin Amis' new novel in proof, and what's incredible is that there's so many mistakes in it. And this obviously an early draft, and I don't know how Amis works at all, but there's not only spelling mistakes, but bits repeated at different parts of the novel -- entire paragraphs repeated. Not for effect, but him thinking, "Oh, this bit should maybe go there." And then, not taking it out. I've never read an uncorrected proof like it, really.

(How does ten years of writing plays relate to writing novels?)

Play writing is a kind of dead art, you know? It's an exciting one if you get it right, because there's nothing more exciting than a live audience's response. But to get it right is so difficult, not only in terms of the medium itself but also in terms of the writing money -- there's no money in it, and there's no money to put plays on. You're constantly struggling. So, it was good to get out of it in that sense. But I've always had a great love of dialog, which I can use in the novels.

And it taught me about structure, really. Which is quite useful to someone like me who's got a weird mind, and just writes. Every so often I think, "Well, where should I be up to now?" That came from drama.

But the main thing about how Vurt came to be, is that when Steve asked me to write a novel, I'd actually started to write a play called "The Torture Garden."' And The Torture Garden is a novel written in 1899 by a guy called Octave Murble. He was a kind of anti-authoritarian, anarchist kind of figure -- a bit like de Sade, but not as mad. Basically, he wanted to bring down the authorities, and he did this through satire. The Torture Garden is a garden in the middle of a prison, where every Tuesday, the bourgeoisie can go along and watch the prisoners being tortured. The garden is described incredibly well. It's beautiful. And the actual tortures are written about in a very lovely way -- reminded me a lot of Ballard when I read it. And I'd wanted to do this as a play ever since I read the book, but I couldn't work out how to do it. And then, I was reading a textbook on virtual reality, and the introduction was by William Gibson. It was only about a one-page piece, but in it, he just throws away this line, which says that some of the characters where playing a game called "the Torture Garden." And then it suddenly clicked to me that the Torture Garden is in virtual reality -- the rich people could visit virtual reality to experience this torture. And that's when I started to think this is what I could do to make this a play, and also make a play about virtual reality, which no one had done at the time. So I put this idea to a director I knew, and he was into it, so I started to write the play. About half way through it, Steve turns to me in the bookshop where we were working, and says, "Write me a novel."' So, I started to write this novel, and forgot about the play. But it kind of grew out of the play, the novel did. I didn't realize it at the time, but when I finally finished the novel and went back to the play, there was so much in the play that went into the book.

So that was the way that my drama led into my writing novels.

(What is "vurt"?)

Well, vurt grows. The more that you read, and the more that I write about it, vurt grows. So it exists in real time, in a sense, because I don't know what it is. That's why it excites me so much to write about it, because I keep getting ideas all the time. None of the characters in the novels know what it is, although some of them think they do -- you know, the Game Cat, for instance, thinks

he's some kind of high-up-the-ladder, spiritual-wisdom, guru type figure. But I suspect he's not, I suspect he's just on the first rungs of the ladder. There's lots of hints in the book, and it's actually described in Vurt in different ways. Like at one point you see Icarus Wing actually putting dreams into the

feathers, and you think, "Oh, it's something quite practical, then." He's got smoke and he's got cameras, and you think it's got something to do with that. But again, that's just a red herring, really. That's one way in which you can make vurt, but it's not the best way, and it doesn't lead to the most powerful visions. In Pollen, it goes into it much further. What's happening there is that the vurt is fighting back. So, the vurt, once you get to the highest level, seems to have a life of its own. It could almost be a planet, the planet Vurt, from which these creatures are visiting our minds. See what I mean? It could be anything. So, when you read the book, you say, "Yeah, vurt -- it's a drug."' You say, "Like a video game or something." Some people seem to be using it like a psychological tool, or it becomes a way of knowledge, or it's a religion. Or it could be this planet. But in Pollen, it actually is -- the people in the vurt world are sick and tired of being told what to do, of being dreamt about, they want to be real! It's an exciting adventure for me. I've got four books, and that's all I want to write on it. It'd be a terrible thing to say that at the age of 85, "Yes, the 37th vurt novel..."

The key to that is, when you open a science fiction novel, and the first chapter is ten pages of telling you what's happened up till then, and you think, "Well, I'm not reading a stand-alone novel here, am I?" They have to stand alone. There's none of the same characters in Pollen as there is in Vurt. So, in Pollen there's the actual vurt itself, what that means, where it comes from, where it's going, who started it, and who Miss Hobart is.

It's very English, that. Goes back to the whole Victorian thing. That was

a whole strand -- the English fantasy, the fable, the mystical land, the dream

world -- lots of writers have touched on it: Conan Doyle, Lord Dunsany,

people like that. That whole idea that there is this other world that exists at

the same time as ours, is a tradition. Vurt and Pollen * kind of plays with this

on purpose. Like, a lot of the critics have picked up on the Orpheus theme in

Vurt. Now, I didn't write it with Orpheus in mind, but about three-quarters

the way through, it suddenly came to me, "Oh, this is a bit like Orpheus, isn't

it? He's got to visit the Underworld to rescue his Love." So, at that point I got

a book of myths and looked it up, and the details were incredible! In the

actual myth, his wife Eurydice is bitten on the ankle by a snake. And that's

how she dies. Now, I'd had Scribble being bitten on the ankle by a snake, and

this is one of the reasons he's got the vurt in him, that he can visit these

places. Now that just came, and I didn't have a clue. It's quite scary! I'd never

even heard of this before -- I didn't like snakes... I like worms. And I like the

old atavistic thing of being able to take on an animal's traits.

So, having written this book that was supposedly based on Orpheus, one the things I had to think about when I was writing Pollen is how I'm gonna handle this. There's nothing more dangerous for a writer than saying, "Right. Which myth shall I have next?" So, instead of running away from it, I actually decided -- foolhardy or not -- to tackle it head-on, and say that the vurt is actually this realm of stories. The stories, the dreams, the myths have been released from the human scope, and are now out there, and growing.

Using SF tropes to comment on our times... One of the anomalies of all this is this word "robot." Which is such a clichˇd word, that I'm not quite sure about the Robos -- the third book is gonna tackle that. The second one, Pollen is about Shadows and Dogs, there's not a lot of Vurt, there's not a lot of feathers in it. But this Robo thing, it fascinates me, because it's almost like a node in my mental map, it's like a black spot, you know? For some reason, I was lazy, and it's like on the first page -- there's a Robo-crusty. Usually, I would just throw that out straight-away, but I didn't. Don't know why, I just didn't. So, I want to look at it again, see what these Robo things are. I don't think they are "robots" as we know it, where the word comes from -- they're something else.

I'm very interested in the idea that once you've got a quality within you, it can be passed on in the genes. So this Robo-thing, it's passed on. Barney, the Robo chef, he's got kids which've got this Robo-things in them, so it's being passed on.

There's a scene that could almost be an allusion to the "Terminator" movies, in Vurt... Yeah, well, what I want to do is set that up, and then cut it all away, later: it's got nothing to do with "Terminator", they're not robots ... it's something weird. But I don't what it is, yet.

But I'll get there!

The four books I've got in mind lead naturally to the end of it all, an end of writing about Vurt. It will be daft of me to go beyond that, really. Most of the short stories I write touch upon it, somehow.

The third book has all to do with that slash -- robo /shadow/ vurt/ dog -- but not in the past, in the future. Not the reason for the crossbreeding, but what the crossbreeding will lead to one day. It's gonna get a lot worse, the world's getting more and more fluid all the time in these books. That's the main problem people have got: "how on earth can I live? There's no control any more." You don't know what you are. Zero Clegg goes around in cop car, thinking, "What the fuck is that? What the devil's wrong with the world these days? Look at the state of that thing! What is it? You've got ten different things in there!" And this is a guy with dog in him.

So they're worried about this, the authorities, because it also seems like for some reason in Manchester the walls between the Vurt and the real are getting very wobbly. There's like holes appearing, and through one of these holes comes the Pollen.

I'm interested in characters who have to accept things rather than fight them -Scribble starts off thinking he's Pure, ends up realizing he's going to have to accept that he's not. It's the people who accept it that become the heroes, the ones that survive.

re: "Pure is Poor'

"Pure is Poor" is the exact opposite of what the Nazis were up to -- they wanted purity of race.

The people who have this slogan are mixed up, anyway, but what they mean is being Pure is a

poor idea. To be crossbred is how society should be.

The 3rd Alice book... I had this idea years ago, reading Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice thinking about it, and the first words that came to my mind were "armor-plated Alice." And then came into my mind, "automated Alice." And that got my mind ticking off, thinking in terms of a film or a comic book. Then it really came together when I realized what Carroll did, he took Alice into a dream-world, and he took her into the world in the mirror, but he never took her through time. And wouldn't it be interesting if in the next book, he took her through time, through a clock, into say, 1998. Now, what would Lewis Carroll make of that? I think he'd be very excited by it -- especially the scientific things, fractals, for instance: he'd love that -- and he'd have a lot of fun with it. So, I had this idea of writing that book, but it's a helluva lot darker. It's great, but it's scary because sometimes I think I am him -- I'm writing it, but it's just what he would write! Then, I kind of lose it, again.

The interesting thing about Automated Alice is that Steve (Ringpull) pointed out the Vurt books -- especially Pollen -- could almost be a childrens' books. I mean, these are just the books I write, I don't sit down and think "I'm gonna write a book that could almost be a childrens' book ... but it's got weird sex in it." There's a naivetˇ about them, almost a kind of clumsiness about them, which appeals to me -- I know it doesn't appeal to everybody, because people like well-worked Art. But, I suppose the music that I've been involved in -- it's quite rough-and-ready, and so on -- is like that, works that have got an edge. And the naive that comes out in my writing, as I said earlier, "Oh my God, can I say that? Eh, why not..." The Alice book will be a way to look at that, directly, although I don't think it'd work for teenagers. It'll be aimed at adults. Because I think that Carroll would talk about things like AIDS, or serial killers, he'd have to think about them.

Putting Alice into that kind of world, she steps out and it's like Manchester, but not the Manchester as we know it -- it's cruel, it's dark, and it's full of people doing bad things to each other. It's not the Victorian world that she grew up in.

Then there's a big, on-going project, a novel looking at Manchester's popular music, from about 1955 to about 2020, following a group of people through that time. It's like a big, Russian "generations" novel. And it'll have all the real groups in it, of course.

Did comics influence the Vurt cycle?

Massively. I mean, I was Spiderman! I don't mind admitting it.

I used to have this friend called Gordon Taylor. We had a strange relationship, because he was like one of the tough guys of the class, and I wasn't, but I used to make him laugh. So, it was that old thing -- the Bully and the Comedian. Those kind of relationships, they go along for a while, then suddenly he's hitting you! And you can't work out what you've done wrong. Then he goes on, and he's laughing again. So, it's a very kind of nebulous relationship, fraught with danger, really. But, in the summer holidays we used to go 'round to my house when Mom and Dad were out working, and we were both heavily into "Spiderman", and "Daredevil" -the whole Marvel thing. We used to read them all. We'd have these battles -- you know, one of us would be Spiderman, and one of us would be (?? villain ??) -- and, I can remember saying to him one day, "Why don't we make own up?" And I can still remember the look on his face, b ecause he'd never in a thousand years think of this. So, we sat down, got sheets of paper, and we drew these characters, and they had loads of arrows pointing to all the gadgets. My best one was called Gadget-man, because he had like a thousand pockets everywhere, with a thousand arrows pointing to them -- something for every occasion!

So, we'd get a Hero and a Villain, and then we'd have battles with these imaginary characters. That was great, though we kind of wrecked the house doing this. Gordon Taylor then went on to join the Navy, which is the kind of thing that those kids did at the time.

There's a kind of weird coda to that story, which has got nothing to do with reality at all... I was writing a play called "Woundings", which is about the Falklands war, and I was doing a lot of reading about it, and I read this true account of one of the sailors on -- what was the British boat that got bombed? -- and he was telling this story about being down in the corridors, and it was on fire, molten metal, and that. And he found a way to get out, but then he heard someone behind him, someone screaming, "Help me! Help me!" And this kid had to make a decision whether to get out, or to try and save this other sailor. And he was massively into "Spiderman", and he thought, "What would Spiderman do?" So, he went back and saved him, and for that he got a medal. But it really made me think about Gordon Taylor, though.

That whole idea of making your own superheroes up, it was like a revelation, "Let's do this!" Now, in Vurt and Pollen the way I write, you can see that, I think -- just having fun, and grasping at ideas, shaking them and not letting go -- writing in broad strokes. Which all, I'm sure comes from remembering pages of "Spiderman" comics, where you turn a page which has like six panels on it, and the next page'll be a massive picture of Spiderman flying through space! And it's a great way to present a story, that.

Which Alan Moore, of course, took to the ultimate: when you read an Alan Moore story, you think, "Now, wait a minute... Am I reading a novel, or am I seeing a film?" I think he actually invented a new medium. There's also a very theatrical thing he was doing, with the caption at the bottom carrying on the dialog from the previous picture would also have an ironic meaning for the picture it was now under. What other medium can you do that in? I can't think of any.