Welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview, part of 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 Australian author T.R. Napper about his debut short story collection Neon Leviathan, which is out now from Grimdark Magazine. Over the course of the interview we cover topics including the challenges and joys of short stories, being under surveillance in Southeast Asia, the impact of memory on science fiction (and in particular Cyberpunk), and the differences that Australian and Southeast Asian influences bring to Napper’s stories. If you’re at all interested in Cyberpunk and a fantastic new collection of short stories, check this out and then make sure you pick up a copy of Neon Leviathan.
Without further ado, over to the Doctor of Cyberpunk…
Track of Words: What’s the elevator pitch summary for Neon Leviathan?
T.R. Napper: The blurb (which I’ve included below) is a good place to start. But let me try something for Track of Words. There’s this thing, in the industry, when you’re pitching a book, where you compare it to two other popular books or films or whatever. For example, “Hey Mister Agent, my 1000-page urban romance is Frozen meets The Fast and the Furious, I am convinced it will sell a million copies.”
So this collection (remembering it’s 12 stories) is Blade Runner meets Apocalypse Now meets Total Recall meets a three-quarter dose of LSD. In that elevator, I’d also be quick to add: “You know Richard Morgan? the guy who wrote Altered Carbon? He did a cover quote, calling it ‘achingly beautiful.”
Here’s the blurb:
“A collection of stories about the outsiders – the criminals, the soldiers, the addicts, the mathematicians, the gamblers and the cage fighters, the refugees and the rebels. From the battlefield, to alternate realities, to the mean streets of the dark city, we walk in the shoes of those who struggle to survive in a neon-saturated, tech-noir future.
Twelve hard-edged stories from the dark, often violent, sometimes strange heart of cyberpunk, these stories – as with all the best science fiction – are an exploration of who were are now. In the tradition of Dashiell Hammett, Philip K Dick, and David Mitchell, Neon Leviathan is a remarkable debut collection from a breakout new author.”
ToW: Without spoiling anything, what can you tell us about the setting that these stories all take place within?
TRN: It’s near future. The year 2090 would be about the average for all the settings. I try to realistically extrapolate from the present. As Ursula Le Guin said: “Science fiction is not predictive, it is descriptive”. That is, you take the DNA strands of the future that exist already today’s world, and build on them. We live in a cyberpunk present, it seems to me, and the future will be ever more so.
The world of Neon Leviathan is one where the US has collapsed and China is the sole superpower. Dizzying new technologies stand beside staggering inequality. Methods of surveillance and control are pervasive, as is human resistance. The settings are almost always Australia and Southeast Asia.
Napper’s short story Opium For Ezra was previously published in Interzone #274.
ToW: Why short stories? What prompted you to tell these stories in this fashion, as opposed to a longer format?
TRN: When I began writing, about 8 years ago, I dove straight into a novel. I’m a novelist, I thought to myself. A few weeks later I thought: what the fuck am I doing? I was trying to write a science fiction novel, without having done any world building beforehand. More importantly, I was trying to be a writer with no clue as to how to write well. Briefly (the long version is here), short stories are a fast-track way to improve your writing skills.
In terms of world building, short stories allowed me to construct little pieces at a time, brick by brick: the tech, the politics, the social order, all that. So now, when I am writing a novel (or short story) the world seems ‘lived-in’. The reader comes to it and feels there’s layer after layer of this accreted detail, and therefore (I hope), finds the story more immersive.
ToW: Did you specifically set out to write a set of stories spanning a range of time periods in order to tackle the subjects you wanted to write about, or did it grow in the telling?
TRN: Grow in the telling. As I said above, I was fleshing out ideas at the start. Then it moved from being an instrumental activity (these stories will help me become a better writer), to a thing-in-itself: a fascination with this near future world and a desire to explore it more. I should add that I developed a love of the short form.
ToW: I always think there’s a real art to choosing the order of stories in an anthology. How did you go about deciding the order in which these should be presented?
TRN: With great difficulty.
The collection starts with Flame Trees, for example. It’s an award-winning story, and it first appeared in the venerable Asimov’s Magazine. So we can assume it’s pretty good. But it’s dark, man, maybe the darkest. So the question that gnawed at me was: will that turn readers off the remainder of the collection?
The first five stories as such are quite different from each other. I tried to give the readers everything, ranging from the grim dark, to the paranoid, the lyrical, hyperkinetic, to the straight up weird.
There’s a novella towards the end. I think the standard for collections (caveat: I’m no expert – this is my first time) is the long work tends to go there. However, the very last story in the collection is called Dark on a Darkling Earth, which is set a hundred years later than any of the other stories. I wanted it there as a way of showing where the world had ended up.
The final paragraph – particularly the last line of that story (which I won’t repeat here) in a way is a summation of everything that went before. Not internationally. Not by design. Dark on a Darkling Earth is one of my earlier stories. But for me that last paragraph is the perfect coda.
ToW: There’s an overarching theme of memory across these stories, and how it can be adjusted, manipulated and controlled to affect history and identity. Where does that come from, your interest in tackling that particular theme?
TRN: I didn’t set out to write about memory. It just happened, as a particular fascination of mine. After a time I began to reflect on just why I kept coming back to it, and I think it is this: memory is identity, the sum total of our being. As I write in one of the stories: “everything is memory, save for the thin edge of the present”
Memory is a recurring theme of cyberpunk and its predecessors, noir film and hardboiled fiction. Memory is crucial because without it, are we even human? Memory is a means to ask the question: what is human? Which is one of the perennial questions of science fiction.
Recall Blade Runner, where Replicants are desperate to develop memories, hoarding photographs as a symbol of their humanity. Or that Rachel was given a lifetime of memories, and does not even realise she is a Replicant.
Recall the anime, Ghost in the Shell, where the Major does not own her own memories (they are the property of the government), and that she can’t trust whether her memories are real or implanted.
And we can go back earlier, to some of old noir films, where a character has amnesia. Hit on the head, shellshock, etc. Who are they really? (Usually they are a nice guy or love interest who turns out to be a cruel murderer in this former (unremembered) life).
In Neon Leviathan, the way technology is used by powerful interests (corporate or government) to control memory, is a way of discussing the dehumanising effects of technological progress. Especially when technology (in itself neither good nor bad) has its purpose twisted to suit the interests of the powerful. Memory is perhaps the most powerful metaphor for control, going all the way back to Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Big Brother uses the full weight of its power to control individual and collective memory.
Probably my favourite version of the Nineteen Eighty-Four cover.
I’ve taken too long on this answer already (because it’s a good question, and also fucking hard to answer well), but I’ll end with this. Memory isn’t just interesting as a metaphor, but also as a fragile, precious thing that can be altered. Powerful regimes can rewrite history, and the science of memory shows that an individual’s memory can absolutely be twisted and shaped.
ToW: A lot of science fiction tends to come from America or the UK, but you’re drawing influences from Australia and Southeast Asia. What do you think that these influences bring, that readers might not get from elsewhere?
TRN: Yeah, that’s hard to figure, to some extent, because I’m immersed in these cultures. An American friend said to me, after reading one of my stories, that he was learning about two cultures: Australia and Vietnam. The latter I get, although the former is sometimes easy to overlook.
What do these influences bring? A different atmosphere, setting, cultural practices, ways of speaking, and ways of thinking. Everything you get, I suppose, when you go to a new country. I don’t try to be obscure, I should add. I try to make these stories accessible in this regard (or at the very least, don’t aim for the impenetrable). I’m used to travelling between the worlds so I’m used to explaining them. What I strive for, I suppose (and been told by the occasional reader) is this: that the world feels lived in, vivid, and new. It feels new, both because of the future I am projecting and because of the location of the stories. I want the reader to feel that they are in a safe pair of hands as they encounter these worlds, and my having lived in these different places is a means to do that.
One of the things I’ve always loved about science fiction is the chance you’ll have your mind blown. That you’ll see the world in a different way. This is what Philip K Dick did for me, for example, when I was young. So, in a way, these influences help me to do the same. I fail mostly, I’m sure, but this is my goal.
That, and a fuckload of swearing. I mean: I am Australian.
ToW: When I ask about drawing upon real life to help plan or write stories, sci-fi/fantasy authors often joke about not having personally battled monsters and conquered planets (which is fair enough). In your case, however, it sounds like you really have been able to tap into real-world life experience, as a diplomat and an aid worker, to inform your stories and your characters – how much of what you saw and heard during those experiences has made it into these stories?
TRN: A lot. Not in direct ways. I don’t directly replay the worst I’ve seen or experienced, because, well, I suppose I’m not comfortable with that. Maybe I’m not ready to; maybe it feels like it would cheapen these experiences, if I turned it into fodder for my stories.
On the other hand there’s a range of topics I know a lot about from witnessing them first-hand. To name just a few: PTSD, extreme poverty, endemic corruption, political repression, and pervasive surveillance.
If I take just the last example, I was under surveillance for several years while living in a dictatorship overseas. My phone was bugged. My house was probably bugged. I was often followed. There’s this weight, that falls on your shoulders, that you don’t realise is even there. It is the weight of self-censorship. It’s the weight of not even being able to open up and talk to someone you love (in this case my wife) in my own home.
I only knew it was there once I left the country for a holiday, and my partner and I started to discuss a particularly sensitive topic. As we began to speak freely, it felt like an actual load lifting from me. I could breathe again. It was liberating. It was a strange, striking sensation and I’ll never forget it.
The thing is mate, I had it easy. The worst they could have done is kick me out. Okay, fine, I go back to Oz. But citizens end up threatened, or in jail, or disappeared.
But yeah, all these things seep into my stories. And if it feels real, well…
ToW: If someone wasn’t very familiar with cyberpunk as a subgenre of science fiction, could you suggest some interesting stories to try next? Particularly Australian/Southeast Asian authors and settings?
TRN: To be blunt, I’m not reading Australian or East or Southeast Asian works for cyberpunk content (though I will always rush to it when I find it). I read in those settings, first and foremost, because I’m interested in those settings. The Cyberpunk is secondary.
The country I have spent most time with outside of Australia, Vietnam, has almost no science fiction tradition. But it does have a tradition of post-war (post the Vietnam War, which the Vietnamese call the American War) literature that features dark stories, broken veterans, haunted (often literally) by their experiences. There’s some great stuff there.
Some of the best Australian noirs are austere and bleak, and tend to focus on the underclass. It’s pretty hardboiled, in that way.
So what I’d say is: read The Sorrow of War by Vietnamese novelist Bao Ninh. Watch The Rover (set in the near future), by Australian David Michôd. Watch Infernal Affairs, by Hong Kong directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, and read the excellent The Broken Shore, by Peter Temple. These are all good starting places, if you prefer the darkness.
Infernal Affairs – such a fantastic film!
Oh and if you want an intro to cyberpunk specifically, read Gibson’s short story collection, Burning Chrome (1986), and Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2002). Watch Blade Runner (1982), and Ghost in the Shell (1995).
(Note: I did a doctorate in noir, cyberpunk, and Asian modernity. So technically I’m a Doctor of Cyberpunk).
ToW: What do you hope sci-fi and cyberpunk fans will get out of this by the time they’ve finished it?
TRN: Oh look, you want people to be blown away. You want to crack someone’s head open and mess up the goo within. Like I said before, one of the most important things you can achieve as a writer is to change someone’s view of the world. But if I can’t do that, I hope I make them laugh, or feel the visceral thrill of a fight scene, or feel sad when a dark fate befalls a protagonist.
But what you’re maybe asking is: what’s the thematic conclusion a reader will come to? What do I hope them to understand, or realise? I can’t answer that. I can’t answer it because I don’t want to prescribe it. I do have themes and concerns, of course, but in the end it is up to the reader to decide. There’s too much fiction out there that beats readers over the head and yells: this is the message; this is the message!
I’m just not interested in doing that.
ToW: What’s next for you and your writing? Do you think you’ll revisit this world in particular, or tell future stories set elsewhere/elsewhen?
TRN: I’ve been writing in this world. Two novels with a third on the way. The first novel found a legit agent in the UK, and mate was I excited. He was convinced it was going to sell. It didn’t. We had a falling out (I strongly suspect because it didn’t sell) and we went our separate ways. Then the second book was accepted by another Brit, this time the excellent John Jarrold. He’s trying to sell that one.
I’m working on a third, again set in the same universe as Neon Leviathan.
In much the same way as the short stories are loosely-connected, the three novels are connected. You couldn’t call them a trilogy, as they are all stand-alone. But yeah. I’d like to get the three out there in the world at some point, because I know they’re good enough (well, the first two anyway, we’ll see how I do with the third).
After the current one is done, I haven’t a clue what I’ll write next. I am thinking of doing something completely different. My heart has always been in science fiction though, so it’d be hard for me to leave that completely.
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I’d like to say a big thank you to Tim for taking the time to answer these questions in such great, insightful detail! Make sure you check out my review of Neon Leviathan here.
If you don’t already follow him, you can find Napper on Twitter @TheEscherMan, or alternatively you can check out his website at nappertime.com.
Click this link to buy Neon Leviathan.
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