Fantastic Metropolis

Paul Witcover: Hmm. I’m not sure I agree. I’m thinking of the work of Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, for example. It’s non-fiction, but it’s more powerful than any fictional account of the Holocaust I’ve read. Or even Anne Frank, for that matter. On the other hand, in a thousand years, it may be through something like Schindler’s List, the 3-D anime drama, that the Holocaust is preserved in cultural memory.

Tony Daniel: We shall see. Well, not personally, I suppose. In any case, it won’t be forgotten. It’s too terrifying a story. In fact, it’s something like a new human collective archetype.

Paul Witcover: Metaplanetary features a number of ideas that both parody and outdo classic hard SF gee-whiz construction projects like space elevators, Dyson Spheres, and other Big Dumb Objects. The most original of these (in my reading experience) is the Met: a vast network of ultra-thin, almost infinitely flexible cables linking the inner planets. How did you get the idea for the Met, and what are some of the purposes it serves as artifact and metaphor?

Tony Daniel: I was running in Riverside Park on the Upper West Side of New York City one day, and I got tired and sat down. I gazed up at the clouds and saw space ships. Then I looked at a spiderweb on a shrub and imagined it stretching across all the planets in the solar system and moving with them. And then I had a year of fun figuring out how such things might be made plausible to a reader. My big idea for holding the Met together using a modified version of the Strong Force also came while running, this time in Spain. I was out on this dirt road in the hills outside of Barcelona and I was wondering how I could answer any argument about torque and breaking and such in the Met. I’d just read about SQUIDS, devices that use a quantum trick to mimic atomic behavior on a macro level. And there I was surrounded by all this matter—the hills, the dirt—held together by nuclear forces. And I said to myself: “the space cables are like long, strung-out planets. Nobody’s worried about the Earth flying apart from all that rotation. The same force can hold the cables together.

Paul Witcover: Do you check these ideas out with scientists or pretty much rely on your own knowledge of what’s possible?

Tony Daniel: Depends. This I read about in Science News. I get a lot of ideas from Science News.

Paul Witcover: I’m a runner myself, so it’s interesting to hear that you also get a lot of ideas while running.

Tony Daniel: It’s the only time in the day when I absolutely can’t occupy myself with any task. When I’m running, I either think, or don’t, but I can’t do anything but keep pounding along. It’s weirdly productive to have a time when you aren’t trying to produce.

Paul Witcover: One of the things I enjoy most about writing SF is making up religions. You seem to get a kick out of it as well. Tell us a little bit about the Greentree Way and its priesthood. Is there an echo of the Catholic philosopher Tielhard de Chardin there? Any religion that includes a Cardinal Filmbuff is okay by me!

Tony Daniel: It’s my idea of an existentialist religion. Sort of Zen crossed with liberal Christianity. Of course, Quakers already are sort of that, but this is even more skewed to the East, and to animist religions. It’s a kind of mysticism with techno-shamans as the priests. Religions, I think, are reflections (perhaps the highest reflections) of the activities of a culture. Christianity is very much about agriculture, for instance. Judaism is about the joys and trials of being a nomadic shepherd. If you have a culture based on quantum mechanic weirdness and simultaneous, instantaneous communication then I don’t see how you can avoid a bit of mysticism—that is, personal, inexpressible revelation—in your belief system, since you’ll get it all the time in your everyday life. I think such a world would simultaneously throw us back to the extreme personalization of the universe in a hunter-gatherer mentality, and pull us forward to a larger sense of the individual in everything, ala Buddhism. I’d say it has more to do with Soren Kierkegard than with Tielhard de Chardin. It’s kind of Protestant.

Paul Witcover: Will the Greentree Way play a more central role in Superluminal?

Tony Daniel: Yes, they—especially my priest, Andre Sud (and good old Cardinal Filmbuff!)—will have a lot to do with brokering the peace at the end of the civil war.