Fantastic Metropolis

Paul Witcover: The attractions of trans-humanism for an SF writer are plain, but you seem to be celebrating it as an extension of philosophies of democracy and individualism that have shaped so much of Western culture. Aren’t you ignoring the dangers—including dangers to democracy and individualism—inherent in the trans-humanist position?

Tony Daniel: Even though I try very hard not to say so in Metaplanetary, I believe that there are no dangers with democracy that are not ten thousand times greater with any other system of government. The problem is the ever-changing definition of the “minority” within the majority. How do we maintain justice for all? Remember, my good guys form a republic, not a direct democracy. How do we maintain a bill of rights for whatever pops up with sentience? The easy way out is to draw a line somewhere and say, these and no others. That’s essentially what bigotry is—the attempt to exclude others from the right to have rights. I think that whoever is capable of saying he is a person, is a person. Language is the defining characteristic of the individual. So if a fifty-member group mind says “hello, I’m Bob,” well then, that’s Bob. And Bob gets a vote and the basic rights accorded to all by a constitution. And the responsibility to pay his goddamn taxes.

Paul Witcover: Like all good space operas, Metaplanetary features a struggle between good and evil. As you say, the central conflict concerns who is to be regarded as human, and afforded the attendant rights, privileges, and powers of a ruling class, and who is not. The dictator Amés, who controls the inner planets of our solar system, supports the most restrictive definition of humanity imaginable, with all who fall outside this definition deprived of even the most basic rights. He is opposed by a loose confederation of groups making their homes on, around, and beyond the outer planets, all of whom, in different ways, have a more expansive and flexible view of what constitutes humanity. One way of looking at this conflict is to see it in the familiar terms of WWII (or Star Wars), as fascism versus democracy. Put in more contemporary (and equally reassuring) terms, it’s fundamentalism versus tolerance. Yet a more useful (and far less reassuring) analogy lies in the realm of music and the Internet: like the big multinational entertainment conglomerates, Amés favors strict interpretation of copyright law, while his less-organized adversaries are in the position of Napster. To realize that copyright decisions coming down from courts today about songs, books, and code may have unforeseen draconian applications in a future where artificial intelligence, cloning, and other technologies have made the line between original and copy all-but-irrelevant is chilling to say the least. Your thoughts?

Tony Daniel: I like that Napster analogy. This is exactly the problem with an overly-restrictive view on intellectual property rights. One of these days, we’re going to be declaring a sentient being as property, to be bought and sold. We already fought a war in America to end that practice. Do we have to fight another one? We may very well have to. And what if we don’t protect the rights of the inventors and creators? We’ll create a stagnant culture where nobody wants to innovate. The best solution (and the solution that the “good guys” are striving for in my book) is a balanced approach that allows sentient beings to chose their own destinies under the rule of law. I like the idea of a world where creators are not making property, but having children. Those children will want to protect and provide for their parents and siblings due to the same hard facts of nature that keep most families loyal to one another today.

Paul Witcover: I suppose it’s impossible to write about a dictator without inviting comparisons to Hitler. But the parallels seem especially strong in Metaplanetary, not only in the characteristics of Amés himself—a frustrated artist, emotionally stunted, and a sexual sadist, to list some of the most obvious—but also in your portrayal of how his policies against artificial and hybrid intelligences impact the lives of individuals and families. The harrowing account of the artificial intelligence Danis Graytor, forcibly separated from her human husband and hybrid children and imprisoned in what is all-too-literally a concentration camp, where she becomes the subject of gratuitously cruel experiments, is clearly modeled on the experiences of Jews and other concentration camp inmates in the Holocaust. And, coming back to the choice of epigraph, Heidegger’s support (at best, passive) of the Nazis is by now well-documented. I’d like to play devil’s advocate with two questions. First, how are you not stacking the deck as a writer by making parallels with the Holocaust so explicit? And second, how do you use Hitler and the Holocaust in fiction without trivializing the reality of the evil that was done and the suffering of so many victims?

Tony Daniel: I’m trying to make Amés more like Napoleon than like Hitler. He really is a good artist, not a wannabe. He’s a classical musician who loves order and hierarchy. That’s his drug. He wants to orchestrate society, and he wants to be the conductor of the piece everyone is playing. I’m not making parallels to the Holocaust; I’m explicitly evoking it to say that this could very well happen again, and probably will. Fiction is the only way a culture ever remembers history. That may even be what fiction is. Memory. Facts and figures and, sadly, even recollections, are lost over time. Fiction, even bad fiction, is stronger than fact. It is stronger than history. Why? Because fiction is about mapping fact onto the deeply-buried, fundamental structures within our minds. It is how we really remember things, not how we would like to. You may not know a thing about the economic and political reasons the Greeks were fighting the Trojans, but I’ll bet you know that Helen was the most beautiful woman in the world and that Achilles had a vulnerable heel. It certainly won’t be because of me, but we’ll remember the Holocaust a thousand years from now because of a fiction writer. That’s how humans work.