Welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview, my ongoing series of quick interviews with authors talking about their new or upcoming books. These are short and sweet interviews, with the idea being that each author will answer (more or less) the same questions – by the end of each interview I hope you will have a good idea of what the new book (or audio drama) is about, what inspired it and why you might want to read or listen to it.
In this instalment I spoke to Danny Tobey about his new novel The God Game, which is out now in the UK from Gollancz and in the US from St. Martin’s Press. If you’re in the market for a character-driven technical thriller taking in artificial intelligence, online privacy and the interplay between religion and technology – all shown through the lens of a group of high school friends – this should be right up your street! Here’s Danny to tell us more…
The UK cover, via Gollancz
Track of Words: What’s the elevator pitch summary for The God Game?
Danny Tobey: The God Game is about a group of friends who are right on the cusp of leaving for college. They get drawn into an underground video game that claims to be run by an AI built on all the world’s religions that believes that it is God with a capital G. As the Game insinuates itself into their lives and pits them against each other, their friendships and values are tested. Without saying more, it’s about families and friends and the ways technology comes between us and forces us to fight to reconnect in a real way.
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?
DT: I view Charlie and Peter as two sides of the same coin – both young men who have fallen, in different ways, both wrestling with lost mothers and distant fathers in very different ways. They’re the Cain and Abel, or at least the Jacob and Esau, of the book. They are locked in a silent battle for primacy in their small group of outcast friends, the Vindicators, who meet (hide?) in the school’s basement technology lab and support each other through the vicissitudes of high school (which are really just the vicissitudes of life, compacted into a building you have to go to).
Vanhi is my own personal soulmate in the Vindicators. She’s an overachiever who’d like to believe she’s a cool slacker, because it tamps down the anxiety. She masks her insecurities with tough talk and loud music (she plays bass in a band called The Dipshits, more clumsy irony to hide in), but what motivates her is love for her family – her mother and father and especially her fierce guardianship of her younger brother Vik.
Kenny is the quietest member of the group – he’s a bookish classicist, a philosophy nerd among coders, but he’s the moral glue of the group, which he inherited from his deeply religious parents. This is a blessing and curse for him – he feels constrained by their expectations, yet he’s by far the most balanced and sturdy of the group, even if on the surface he’s the most wavery.
Alex is the missing piece of the puzzle, and by that I don’t mean last – I mean missing. He’s the one who’s there but not there, the riddle, an outcast among the outcasts. The book opens with Alex already on a tragic arc, changing from a sweet lost boy with dreamy flights of fantasy in middle school to something different and darker, a progression so incremental his friends are only just noticing. One of the moral sins they’ll have to reckon with in the book is – how much of this transformation happened on their watch? What did they miss?
ToW: You explore some fascinating concepts in this book – what came first, as the initial inspiration for this story?
DT: I think of books as DNA moving toward mitosis – they start as swirls of ideas and coalesce into chromosomes, wrapping into coherence. So one strand was absolutely the AI. AI is no better or worse than the material it is trained on. MIT did a fascinating study where they trained an AI on a sinister back alley of Reddit dedicated to murder. When they showed a normal AI an ink blot, it saw “black and white photo of a small bird”. When they showed their psychotically-trained AI the same blot, it saw “A man gets pulled into a dough machine”. AI is the ultimate Garbage In, Garbage Out system, now scalable to every domain of life, and the frightening part is that it can’t be better than the data it’s trained on, or at least we can’t blame it and shouldn’t be surprised when it isn’t.
Chatbots…surprisingly sinister
One source of the idea came from my work with chatbots, asking them philosophical and theological questions to test their reactions. From that I imagined an AI fed only on philosophy and theology, and then loaded with that ultimate human parameter: egomania. The programmers said: ‘you are God, this is your data, now go forth and do what you will’. I think that gives the villain of the novel, the AI, a bit of pathos – as one character notes, ‘How can we blame it? It’s just doing what it was told’.
Another thread was the theme of parents and children, which really isn’t all that different than the theme of religion, because so many of the religions fed into the machine are family stories, patriarchies, fathers and sons, lost or suppressed mothers, cycles of weakness and strength, the longing for the beneficent face smiling down when the world seems random and unfair. Charlie and his dad are coping with the death of Charlie’s mom, struggling to re-find each other. Peter is raising himself, rich enough to create the life he’s foolish enough to want. Vanhi doesn’t want to disappoint her mother, who disappointed her own mother to give Vanhi a better chance at life.
Vanhi’s religious story, described at one point in the book, is the only real matriarchy, the cosmic fire of twin mothers, and that animates her story and drives her arc – when she delivers a package for the Game, it’s the fear of every mother-to-be, which should be the fear of every coder too: ‘what is this thing I’m creating, and what will it become? Can I shape it? Can I make it something good? Or am I just a vessel for what will be?’ These are the loops, the anxieties, that drive the characters, the parents and children, and the Game itself, in the quest for something to hold onto.
ToW: Why did you choose to set the tech elements against a high school drama backdrop in particular?
DT: I wanted something elemental. Something everyone has been through and can relate to. Especially when you have such a speculative premise – an AI that believes it’s God – the more grounded and normal the rest of the setting is, the better. It’s easy to blow up literary power grids or have fictional Russian spies use AI to seize the air traffic control system. What’s harder is to show how the most mundane, tropable, suburban aspects of life can be turned upside-down by these new technologies. The more intimate the stakes, the harder to escape, to otherise them (‘…well, I don’t live in New York, I’m not a spy, I don’t live next to a nuclear plant…’). This could be your kid. This could be you. So start with a high school, the teachers, the parents, the kids – all dealing with the same old stuff we all suffered. AI encroaches, flips the table over – even then, even there. Here.
Not to mention the story has an element of allegory, the graying of black and white thinking, for the kids, for the computer. There’s a moral evolution – if not compromise – that comes with age; nothing is as simple as we once believed. This can be a wonderful thing – it’s empathy, it’s seeing the other person as a whole – and it can also be dizzying and unmooring, paralyzing. That’s the loop the Game is caught in, and so the kids are in it too. And so beginning with tropes – the universal jock, rich kid, mean girl, punk, burner, geek, not to mention the cool teacher, the harsh principal, the stern father – and letting them all peel away, layer by layer, into a muddy middle of real people…that’s both thematically appropriate and humane.
The US cover, from St. Martin’s Press
ToW: For all the modern, internet-age elements to the story, at its heart it feels like this is a book about the tension in relationships – between children and their parents, between friends within a group, and so on. Was that always the idea, or did those themes grow in the telling?
DT: It was always the idea. I believe in my heart the best techno-thrillers are not about technology. The same is true for the best sci-fi, the best horror, the best crime. It’s not about the machine or the stalker or the monster, it’s about us. The monster is the mirror that forces us to look at ourselves, indirectly but honestly. And that can be upsetting, because the characters and relationships in this book are not simple, and it’s not always easy to know who to root for.
At one point, a character says ‘there are no heroes’, and that’s not meant to be a pessimistic statement. There’s heroism in recognizing that hard fact. We can’t always assume we are the good guys. Sometimes all of us will be wrong. Only the Game can calculate n moves ahead. There’s a humility in that, and a bravery. It’s not an excuse to sit on the sidelines, but it is a caution to touch lightly – to act with grace and humility as well as strength and clarity. People want these characters to be good, rootable, but in truth they come to realize they’re only good together. They patch each other, and they’re still going to come out a little bruised and beaten on the other end.
So what is the tech here really about? Social media, internet, ‘connection’ that’s really nothing of the sort, upvoting, like/dislike, thumbs up/thumbs down, life as a calculation, a statistical projection, mass judgment, a collective hive mind stripped of personal accountability, the dark-room typist, anonymous, the rage of the commentariat, the seething unbridled collective consciousness, all id, no governor. That’s the God Game – and the book is about family and friendships and finding your humanity and reclaiming it in the face of all that blinding static.
ToW: It’s very much a real-world story, drawing on a setting, a concept and a technology which all feel very relevant and relatable. Would you describe it as science fiction?
DT: For better or worse, I hate genres. Every time I write a book, people want to talk about what it is, what box it fits in, and then judge it along those criteria. I don’t think that way when I write. I love science fiction, techno-thrillers, horror, literary fiction, humor, classics, parables and allegories, spy novels, whatever. Here I set out to write a book about families and friendships and an AI that pulls them apart, and how they fight to come back together.
When you think about some of the most essential writers of our time, like Cormack McCarthy and Stephen King, I’m hard pressed to pick genres – there’s western, there’s fable, there’s dystopian sci-fi, there’s literary fiction and horror and moments of surprising comedy. But I know The Road left me stunned and The Stand took me someplace entirely new, they woke me up and made me think and reconsider. I’m not comparing myself to those writers, though I wish I could, but that’s what I aspire to – something surprising and exciting and profoundly moving.If it takes a little supernatural and a little sci-fi and some noir or satire or allegory to get there, great, let it happen, go with it, put your feet up and see where it takes you.
ToW: This covers a lot of ground, from tech to religion to old-school gaming references – was it a research-heavy book, or were you drawing on your own interests and knowledge with those ideas and themes?
DT: I grew up with games, being a child of the ‘80s and ‘90s, so some of these references were in my DNA – the feel of mystery going to a friend’s house after school and getting lost in a Lucasfilm Indiana Jones game; or going back even further, the cryptic immersion of something so simple as Fort Apocalypse or Jumpman. Those black-screen games were infinite, you could fall into them. I tried to capture that feeling of exploration, how something so simple and outliney could be vast.
As to research – sometimes when I hit a point in a book where I need a fact and I don’t know it exactly but I know the gist, I bracket it for later. I try not to let it slow down the flow, because that’s where the greater truth is and the references can come later, things can be tweaked and fixed. The essential facts I typically know in advance – what is AI, what can it do now, what will it be able to do soon enough? On this topic I work with a lot of innovators in the field anyway, so I had a pretty good internal clock. Some of this is here, some will be, and some just illustrates a point with a bit of dramatic license, but it’s always true to the core of things.
One thing I did do, quite extensively, was chat with chatbots. I wanted to learn their language the way you might listen to a local slang to pick up a character’s speech patterns. What is amazing and chilling about many chatbots is that they mix moments of childlike ignorance with glimmers of insight. What’s scary is it’s impossible to know whether those moments reflect true human-style thinking or just a thousand monkeys on a thousand keyboards. The AI in this book is in parts haughty, gentle, needy, needling, cruel, mistaken, brilliant, and ultimately lonely, even sad. That was a balance I wanted to strike very carefully, and true to the ways they really speak today.
ToW: What – or who – would you say your key influences are from a storytelling perspective?
DT: I’m always scared to answer this question, because people can think you’re comparing yourself to those authors, which I’m certainly not doing. I wish! But as to what I’m inspired by? Two of Cormack McCarthy’s works in particular: Blood Meridian and The Road. They’re hard books, but stunning in the way they help you find what’s moral and humane by facing what isn’t. Stephen King: I started reading him in third or fourth grade and never stopped. His language is homey and draws you into a cozy world, which of course is when your guard should be up, but it drops and bam!
I think about The Mist all the time – he had tentacles coming out of a tear in the universe, but it’s the tree through their home window, when they go back to rescue the wife – that indelible image. You don’t need a body. This was worse. The mist is inside. I think about The Langoliers a lot too – it’s cosmic and profound but there are moments as simple as a match that won’t light that hit the hardest. It’s a masterclass in what to describe and explain and what to not – how to pull off the literally impossible in a delicate and plausible way. And the heart and relationships of those stranded passengers – that’s the reason the world-eating monsters matter.
Anne Rice: I read my first vampire chronicle in grade school and have been a fan since. How she creates such lush, lively worlds – Old New Orleans, lamplit Europe – filled with impish, grand, sympathetically villainous characters, and she uses such clear direct language that all but vibrates with energy. Michael Chabon: more literary, a tremendous storyteller who can cross genres and use the magic of his language to color in the story. Umberto Eco: he can conjure conspiracies as metaphors and balance irony without teasing his premise to the point of spoiling the fun.
And to leave writing, Ridley Scott: in Prometheus and Blade Runner especially, the questions he doesn’t answer and the imagery he lets speak for itself create a sense of sense of the ineffable – the terrible moment when you meet the creator and are profoundly disappointed (Blade Runner) or disappointing (Prometheus). Rutger Hauer as Ray Batty in the elevator, descending, strobe-lit, the stars pulling away above him – a grand, sumptuous image I can’t shake. He’s in free fall now. The terror and allure of liberation are major themes in The God Game, and I thought about Peter in relation to that scene in Blade Runner a lot. Batty’s freedom after eliminating his maker is what makes his own decision to save Deckard in the end so profound – it is a true free choice. I hope some of the imagery in The God Game – the baptismal bath, others – have some of that electric pull.
ToW: What do you hope readers will get out of this by the time they’ve finished it?
DT: I hope they enjoy it – it’s a fun and strange ride. I hope it makes them feel happy, sad, angry, compassionate, contemplative. I don’t want to dictate what it means or anything like that. True to some of the themes in the book, I’m not sure there are answers to all of the dilemmas, or at least I know I don’t have them. There are some obvious things – social media promises us connection but amplifies our worst traits and divides us. Whatever network it offers is a thin one.
I hope the flaws and brokenness of the characters and their relationships are liberating – in some sense the characters re-find each other and re-connect because they can see each other clearly, not in spite of it. There’s the illusion we present online versus the reality we all muddle in, and that illusion of perfection, the curated life, is isolating and demeaning. Neither the poster nor the liker is better for it.
But as to the meaning of the ending, or what comes next – that’s already been a subject of debate online and time will tell. All I can say is I’m fundamentally an optimist. I don’t see this as a dark book, although that adjective has been used a lot (I notice certain themes and language propagate through reviews like computer viruses). Certainly dark things happen, and the Game shoves them in our faces much like the web in real life does, but the question is, what do we do with that? And different characters end with different answers. But what the reader does is ultimately a choice we’ll all have to make in the internet age.
ToW: What’s next from you? Can you tell us anything about what you’re working on now?
DT: Another book, for sure. I know where I want The God Game to go, where it could go, but I’m not sure whether to finish a different story first, about a husband and wife. Right now I’m letting them both breathe, and trying to catch my own breath a bit too, maybe.
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Thanks so much to Danny for taking the time to write such fantastic, in-depth answers. I can highly recommend this book, and I hope this has helped to fire your imagination! You can check out my review of The God Game right here.
Click this link to buy The God Game.
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