Fantastic Metropolis

Paul Witcover: Metaplanetary is the first book in a series. When is the next volume scheduled for publication, and how many books will there be all together?

Tony Daniel: Metaplanetary is one of two books. I am almost finished with the second, which will be called Superluminal, I believe. Then that’ll be it.

Paul Witcover: I like that title a lot. Come to think of it, your stories almost always have good titles. Do they come to you easily? Do you have a method?

Tony Daniel: Sometimes easy. Sometimes not. I started out as a poet in the long-ago before time. That is, before anybody paid me to write.

Paul Witcover: What are some of the sources that influenced you in the writing of this book, both in and out of the SF field? The breadth of the novel is quite impressive; it’s as if you’ve found the perfect vehicle for all your interests and obsessions!

Tony Daniel: Life, man! It’s hard to say. My favorite living writer is Cormac McCarthy. The style of Blood Meridian had a lot to do with the prologue to Metaplanetary, “Grist.” I’ve always liked good speeches (I coached Lincoln-Douglas debate for a while), and writing the debates between the cloudships was fun in that regard. And I love to read popular science, although I’m put off by the pomposity of scientists and science writers when they get to philosophizing—so writing those fake science essays was fun both as a satire and as an homage. The idea was to create a future world that felt like a world, with all the viewpoints and weirdnesses you find here in reality. I wanted to use all manner of prose styles, and all manner of characters, while keeping one goal in mind: to create verisimilitude.

Paul Witcover: Of course, there’s verisimilitude and then there’s verisimilitude. I don’t think that anyone would argue that Blood Meridian was a realistic depiction of the Old West, but it certainly was a mythically authentic portrayal—which I think you can say about a lot of McCarthy’s work, although I was quite disappointed by his last novel. Suttree was the first McCarthy novel I read, and that was it for me. I remember reading something by William Gibson talking about the revelatory effect of encountering McCarthy’s language in that book.

Tony Daniel: Who the hell knows what the Old West was like? For that matter, who the hell knows what anybody else’s subjective experience is like? I’ll bet Blood Meridian will be one of the prime ways the Old West is remembered down the centuries. And I can’t drive through Knoxville without thinking about all those caves under the river in Suttree.

Paul Witcover: Your epigraph is from the notoriously difficult (and controversial) existential philosopher Martin Heidegger. Why Heidegger?

Tony Daniel: Heidegger was a political idiot. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, whom I greatly admire, came to believe he was not evil, merely a naïf. She was both a Jew and Heidegger’s mistress when she was young. Go figure. He was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. I am an existentialist. Heidegger wrote a big book called Being and Time that pretty much blew my mind when I read it. It is all about the relationship of consciousness to Being. This is the fundamental, basic human condition. Everything else—including science, the arts, all pain and pleasure in life—everything human—springs from this relationship. This is what philosophy is all about for me. It is what I am concerned with communicating in my writing.

Paul Witcover: Can you expand a bit on this relationship? I mean, they seem pretty interdependent; at least, it’s hard to imagine consciousness without being, although not at all difficult to imagine the opposite.

Tony Daniel: What does it mean to be? How is it to be? The answer is as varied as the minds of the individuals asking it. Or the characters in a fictional work. Heidegger wants us each to ask this question and find the answer for ourselves—beyond the science, the logic, the religions—even beyond the words themselves. That’s what philosophy is for. It isn’t to provide answers, but to ask the real questions. Our consciousness, in the very act of existing, is constantly asking this question. It’s up to us to listen to the response from whatever it is out there, and inside us. Heidegger calls it Being. When you are listening and responding to Being, then you’re living an authentic life. There is nothing anti-rational about this and it’s absolutely not anti-science. It’s empiricism—the scientific method—taken to heart. William James says the same thing in less dramatic form.