Fantastic Metropolis

Tony Daniel is the meta-talented author of three science fiction novels. His most recent, Metaplanetary, is published by HarperCollins. He’s also written numerous short stories, including “Life on the Moon,” a 1996 Hugo finalist. Daniel’s fiction is noteworthy for its combination of fierce intelligence, high literary quality, and a cool-idea quotient that’s in the Sterling/Stephenson class. Daniel also writes and directs drama—most recently he worked as the senior story editor at SCIFI.COM’s Seeing Ear Theatre. His radio plays can be heard on the NPR radio show “The Next Big Thing.” Originally from the southern U.S., Daniel now lives in Brooklyn.

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Paul Witcover: I understand that, like many New Yorkers, you watched the collapse of the Twin Towers from your rooftop. Now that some months have passed, how do you think you’re assimilating this experience as a writer? Have you noticed any effect on your writing, either in terms of your ability to sit down and work or your choice of subject matter?

Tony Daniel: I did indeed watch the whole thing with binoculars from my rooftop (including the falling bodies). It had a galvanizing effect on me. One thing it did was to remind me that, for better or worse, I believe in the idea of America. I’m convinced that democracy, as rag-tag a scheme as it is, is the only political system that will ever keep humans from destroying each other. I found the various excuses for the act, given here and abroad, to be ludicrous nonsense. It made me want to subvert and convert the children of the perpetrators by insidiously telling the truth when I write.

Paul Witcover: Your new novel, Metaplanetary, is nothing if not ambitious. The action is set in a dazzlingly complex future where, among other things, artificial intelligence exists in embodied and bodiless forms, and people can shed their bodies entirely, choose new ones (not necessarily human or, for that matter, organic), or diffuse their consciousness among numerous cloned bodies connected in a kind of continual gestalt despite the vast distances often separating them. Some individuals are even products of the intermixing of human (and animal) genes with computer coding! In describing this aspect of your book to friends, I’ve been surprised by the aversion it’s evoked. Some have even expressed sympathy with the aims of your character Amés, a dictator bent on “defending” the purity of the human species (somewhat hypocritically, since he himself is a LAP, or Large Array of Personalities). Do such reactions disturb or surprise you?

Tony Daniel: Of course I’m not surprised. Many people are terrified of anything that disturbs the status quo. I don’t blame them. It is terrifying. Unfortunately, there’s absolutely nothing any of us can do about it. We never could. Culture is what makes us human. Consciousness is our adaptation—and technology is the extension of consciousness into the non-conscious world. That’s what culture is. Have you noticed that we are all naked when we take off our clothes? We’d all be living at the equator if we had to give up that technology. And what about cars? Seems to me that’s pretty much the perfect example of a human-machine hybrid. Every time you take your kid to music lessons—you become a cyborg! See what I mean? This is the way the future “trans-humans” will view their being and their lives. Amés, my bad guy, is doomed not because he’s evil, but because he’s blind to reality. He’s a rationalist, not an empiricist.

Paul Witcover: Assuming we don’t destroy ourselves first, do you believe a trans- or metahuman future is the logical end-point of current research in such areas as genetics and nanotech?

Tony Daniel: I think it’s inevitable. Unless, that is, we create some sort of eternal cultural stasis for ourselves and plunge into it, closing the door behind us. Hard to imagine how we might do this, since the universe around us seems bent upon our change and adaptation. Maybe jump into a black hole. I’ll bet that wouldn’t work, either.

Paul Witcover: Well, some religious and cultural systems do seek to create an eternal cultural stasis. I mean, it seems to me that’s one difference, and a pretty major one, between “us” and “them” in our current conflict.

Tony Daniel: But it won’t last. I don’t think reactionary Islam wants stasis—it wants a return to the 13th century, then onward from there. Of course, none of the mullahs I’ve seen want to give up their eyeglasses and wristwatches.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Paul Witcover: Well, you asked for it: what is your definition of science fiction?

Tony Daniel: Any story where the plot turns on a fantasy element. Fake science is fantasy. You can gussy it up to seem plausible. This application of makeup, false teeth, and moustache is what we mean when we say we are “writing science fiction.”

Paul Witcover: You mentioned that Cormac McCarthy is your favorite living writer. Who else has been meaningful for you? Can you name a few contemporary writers that people interested in SF should be reading but probably aren’t?

Tony Daniel: I like Jack Kerouac, Herman Melville, and Walker Percy a great deal. I like V.S. Naipaul’s honesty and sourness. I like Kierkegard, Heidegger, and William James for philosophers. I just read Mario Vargas Llosa’s first novel, The Time of the Hero, which he wrote back in the early 1960s. It’s kind of The Lord of the Flies set in a Peruvian military academy. Very rough and touching book. Before that, I finally worked my way through Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. In science fiction, I think Kathleen Goonan is doing amazing work. Lucius Shepard is, of course. I discovered Charles Harness last year—a wonderful writer. Don’t know how I missed him before, except sheer ignorance.

Paul Witcover: Thanks, Tony. I’ll be looking forward to Superluminal. Best of luck!