I chatted with author Tobias Buckell on his rousing new novel Sly Mongoose.
MC: For people unfamiliar with the universe that you've created in your novels, can you set the stage a bit?
TB: The three books so far are each books that illuminate a bit more about a series of worlds all connected via wormholes. In Crystal Rain I explored one world, Nanagada, settled by people from the Caribbean. In Ragamuffin I opened things up by showing that there were 48 worlds all connected by wormholes, all ruled by the Satrapy: Satraps being large, trilobyte-like aliens with strong colonialist ethics. Humanity is one a handful of alien races that the Satraps consider themselves Patrons to, and in Ragamuffin the book is about how humanity deals with their place in the universe. In Sly Mongoose I've shown some of the consequences to what people chose to do about the Satraps, and also focused on exploring a world and people who are caught up in the middle of all that.
MC: The buzz on this book has been pretty big. What's that been like for you?
TB: The buzz has been strong online and with early readers, yes, I still haven't made that leap into regular media buzz that an author so cherishes. So far people who encounter the book seem to really dig it, so I'm hoping word of mouth continues to spread.
MC: The setting in Sly Mongoose is fantastic. You have a world where the atmosphere and the surface are deadly to humans so they live in floating cities in the clouds. How did you come up first with Chilo and second the amazing floating cities that populate the planet?
TB: I have Geoff Landis, NASA scientist and science fiction author to thank. He gave a speech about Venus that basically inspired me to create Chilo. Geoff had figured out that Venus, at 100,000 feet, is somewhat more habitable for people if you build a floating city, thanks to air being more of a lifting gas on Venus than here on Earth.
MC: I really enjoyed the unique take on the human cultures populating Chilo, How does your background, being born in Grenada, influence that aspect of your novels if at all?
TB: Well, for one thing, I enjoy books that have lots of different cultures in them, showing the diversity and vibrancy that the future can have. Growing up in the Caribbean where you have a lot of world travelers and varying island backgrounds encouraged me to try and represent this in my books.
MC: You literally begin this book with a bang. All around ass kicker Pepper is blazing through the atmosphere in a space suit and a man made heat shield. That's a hell of a way to start the book. What can you tell people about your lead character Pepper?
TB: Pepper is as much an archetype as a character. I usually use Pepper to herald the immense change that's about to come and kick a society's ass, or upset people's lives. He's something of a harbinger, from a literary standpoint. He's also a hell of a lot of fun to write, and I get a lot of fan mail about him.
MC: You also quickly introduce two other interesting leads. Let's start with Timas. He's a young man with literally the weight of the city on his shoulders. Can you talk a bit about Timas and the role he plays in the story?
TB: I've been thinking a lot about how children bear the weight of their parent's mistakes and decisions. In this novel, Timas's ancestors made choices about technology without even thinking about it, and the result is that Timas has to get into a pressure suit and be lowered to the ground of Chilo to work the mining machine down there, or the city suffers. And since only children like him can do this, it forces him to grow up early.
MC: Next is Kat, an avatar from the technologically advanced Aeolian society. What role do avatars play and what kind of society are the Aeolians?
TB: The Aeolian society is a bit of a techno-democracy. They believe government should not be embodied by professional politicians, but be the result of decisions by the community as a whole in real time. As a result, the idea of an ambassador doesn't fly with them. They pick someone at random who then has to 'represent' the nation by acting as an avatar to the will of the nation's citizenry. The end result is pretty odd, but the civil society it works for is interesting.
MC: You have honest to goodness zombies in Sly Mongoose. How much fun did you have in mashing the two genres together? And talk a bit about what the Swarm actually is...
TB: The Swarm comes about in part from an old Arthur C. Clarke piece about distributed swarm intelligences and with a nod to Bruce Sterling's Swarm in his Schismatrix series. But mainly it came about because Peter Watts created a hard SF justification for vampires in Blindsight, and I wanted to do the same for zombies before the idea occurred to him. The Swarm is passed on by biting, and it harnesses the brain power of its individual units like individual processors of a Beowulf Cluster. And the larger the Swarm gets, the more intelligent the Swarm becomes. That's the ticking clock. Unlike zombies, when the Swarm goes critical, it will start messing around with you by having individual units pretend to be okay, or by sending out messages saying 'everything's all good here, no worries.'
MC: I got a definite steampunk vibe from this book similar in some respects to Crystal Rain. Is that a genre that you think you might ever fully set one of your future novels in?
TB: I have a fondness for steampunk, so the aesthetic is fully creeping back into my work, particularly with Sly Mongoose. The excuse for blimps and floating cities makes it hard not too. The floating Straandbeest creatures powered by wind and gears, and using analog operating systems out of gears to emulate minds are the result of a full on steampunk ethos I can't shake. But the novel is essentially also science fiction. Jamming steampunk and space opera together seemed like a lot of fun. In Ragamuffin, the previous book, I also had a space ship powered by human beings doing hand computations in a steampunk way as well, though that book is all spaceships and space opera.
MC: Aside from Sly Mongoose being a rousing action/adventure story it also touches on some pretty serious issues. The price of duty and responsibility, the divide between rich and poor, eating disorders, slavery...how important is it for you to address issues like that in your writing?
TB: The action and adventure comes first, I have this terrible fear of boring people, that comes from my own short attention span. I try to pack a lot of fun into each page. But usually underneath that is this layer of issues I fold into the book. Every once in a while I get a reviewer or reader who mentions reading my books twice, once for the sheer dash and fun, and the second time paying closer attention to this stuff under the surface, and being pleasantly surprised at all the things I'm touching on because they were distracted by all the fun.
MC: Pepper is a character who you have featured in short stories as well as him being a secondary character in your other novels. This time Pepper takes center stage. What is it about Pepper that keeps you coming back to him and what's coming up for him?
TB: As I mentioned above I use Pepper to humanize the changes that are coming. He works as a harbinger. As a character, he's very much modeled after the 'man with no name' from the Clint Eastwood movies and the Japanese Samurai movies those are based on.
MC: What's next for you Tobias?
TB: I'm wrapping up a HALO novel for Bungie/Microsoft and my publisher Tor. It should be a lot of fun, showing off some corners of the HALO universe that haven't been explored. The big action and big ideas of my first three books got the folks at Bungie psyched about my brand of adventure, and I'm psyched to be working with them.
