How does your field of study tie in with a literary science fiction novel?
One of my main concerns as a scholar of early to modern British literature is satire. There’s one kind of satire that’s really come to the forefront recently called Menippean satire. I was getting ready to write a scholarly study on the subject, but a really good critic at the University of Wisconsin at Madison named Howard Weinbrat wrote a brilliant study on Menippean satire and sort of pulled the rug out from underneath my project, so I thought, I’ll just write a novel.
So what is Menippean satire?
It really attacks what might be considered the dangerous orthodoxy of the day, the status quo. For example, in 1948 when Orwell wrote 1984, he was concerned with Stalinistic communism. He was a member of the communist party, a devoted Marxist, but he saw it going horribly wrong with Russia. Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid’s Tale, is looking at religion and patriarchy run amuck. My book is really looking at the dangerous orthodoxy of our times, and I see that as a combination of corporatism and militarism. Politically, the book examines what it would be like if Europe and America had to square off over ideologies of legitimate culture and problems of the environment. We are two locations that are situated to survive global warming fairly well. So I prognosticate what would happen if the only way to secure oil and water and other resources we need would be just to take them. If you’re not afraid to use overwhelming pre-emptive military might, I think this sort of scenario is plausible.
2084 features some pretty scary technologies. How did you come up with these ideas?
The only thing I really made up is the concept of hacking into TexArc’s Web system. All the other devices– the nanotechnology, the weaponry, and everything else–are all either in existence or just about to be placed into existence, so that is very scary stuff. The book mentions the elevator to outer space–that’s something that is actually on the drawing board. It’s been contemplated. It was really fun to zoom around the Internet and find all these amazing technologies and gadgets that are coming down the road really soon–if they’re not already here–and to construct a world based on some of these things really being used and misused.
Many people knock science fiction for not being high literature. But you don’t buy it. Why?
Science fiction often is not given its due for being the important literary form it is. Literary science fiction points out how human technology runs ahead of human intellect, human morality, and the human ability to deal with technology. Technology tends to run headlong out there, and we sort of follow up, picking up the pieces, trying to deal. It goes back to the very first science fiction novel, which was Frankenstein, in which a scientist creates this thing, and then thinks, ‘Oh God, what have I done?’