Fantastic Metropolis

Paul Witcover: The epigraph from Heidegger—“Things that really matter, although they are not defined for all eternity, even when they come very late still come at the right time.”—suggests the working of some kind of predestination, which can be seen as informational time travel. And indeed, Metaplanetary features a variety of transhuman, time-warping entities, such as the insane LAPs known as Time Towers and the emotionally damaged but godlike Thaddeus Kaye. There’s a lot of time travel in your fiction, and it seems to me that there’s a quasi-religious quality in the way you use it, almost as though the manipulation of time is a kind of sacrament through which your characters are offered a final chance to touch something numinous in the universe and in themselves. What are your thoughts about the role of time travel in your work? Do you think of yourself as a religious writer in any sense?

Tony Daniel: The epigraph is about the lack of predestination, actually. Hell, I’m either an atheist or a Christian—I can’t decide which. In either case, I don’t believe God has any plan beyond what’s in plain sight—the moon, the stars, the ground. Time travel tales, for me, are about how things are irrevocably lost. Anyone who touches the noumena touches a little bit of death. My time travel stories are always sad.

Paul Witcover: How can something come at the “right” time if there’s not an already-established order to things?

Tony Daniel: “Right” means authentic. Authentic, to me, means to act with a competence that leads to survival. All my heroes in real life are extremely competent men and women. Most of my fictional ones are too. So the “right time” is the time when authentic actions are most needed for survival. The epigraph is meant to be a sort of Western version of a Zen koan. Maybe it’s nonsense. In any case, I can’t really explain it. The book is my best explanation of it. We wish that the world were teleological (that is, that it is moving toward a purpose), but it is not. As I have some character say, the universe is only teleological locally. Any existentialist will tell you that he or she has no idea what it all means, that the only thing that he or she can know is what it means to him or her, and how it affects the lay of the land roundabout him or her. My idea of time travel is that it will be a lot less wondrous and/or harmful than we might imagine. It won’t solve the essential human dilemma—death—because time is subservient (is an epiphenomenon of) Being. And Being decrees that consciousness flows into and flows out of existence. There will always be death, even if we gain technological control of the past and the future. That’s the built-in logic of being human—that is, of thinking. So, when I write about time travel, it’s usually about disappointment, huge disappointment, rather than wish fulfillment.

Paul Witcover: In addition to writing SF, you’re a prolific playwright, both for radio (and audio) and for the stage. You worked extensively with the late, lamented Seeing Ear Theatre at scifi.com. First, are there any plans to revive the Seeing Ear project? And second, is your own dramatic work also SF?

Tony Daniel: SET is dead, I’m afraid—although the plays are still available for listening at the SCIFI.COM web site. These are radio plays, in case that isn’t clear. The directors, the sound designer, and the actors put a lot of care and hard work into these productions, and the quality is fantastic. The technology has come a long way since the old days of radio drama. We’re all turning into cyborgs!

Paul Witcover: Why isn’t more SF written for the stage? Or, rather, why aren’t more SF plays produced, because I assume they are being written? One would think that the popularity of SF on television and in movies would incline producers to back theatrical SF. Why hasn’t the commercial and critical success of plays like Copenhagen and Proof, both of which contain speculative elements, translated into more dynamic, visible SF theater?

Tony Daniel: A lot of my drama is kind of surrealistic and on the edge of being SF. Some of it isn’t even close. It’s very hard to do SF for the stage. The reasons for this are plain enough—the spectacle isn’t up to it without spending vast amounts of money. But when you have the money, you can do it. The Lion King is, by my definition, science fiction, and it is fantastically successful. But often surreality has to substitute for the sci-fi McGuffin. I don’t lament this. There are plenty of other dramatic forms suited to science fiction—the movies, for instance.