Tricia Sullivan gets Double Vision
01/08/2005 . Source: Orbit Books Team 

Science fiction author Tricia Sullivan discusses her latest novel, Double Vision, why she envies authors who talk of their characters 'surprising' them by their actions, and why she's not a big fan of formal thought as the road to enlightenment.

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There are two plot strands. One follows the life of shy, borderline-personality Cookie, who has a little problem with watching television. Instead of seeing what everyone else sees, she sees distant realities and what seem to be future events. To complicate matters, she can't prove that what she sees is real. And she's been diagnosed as schizophrenic.

But the technology company that she works for sees her problem as a talent. Cookie is assigned to act as a sort of remote spy-plane reporting on events in an otherworldly location called 'The Grid' as part of a colonization effort. The Grid is a place where the relationship between matter and ideas is far more plastic than in our world. In this story, a band of soldiers is attempting to rescue one of their comrades lost in a sort of energy-jungle that is inhabited by 'golems', which are generated by the Grid out of the remains of dead soldiers.

That's the basic set-up. As the book goes on, the two stories inevitably begin to converge.

One half of Double Vision is set in 1984 in New Jersey; apart from the obvious link with your formative years, was there a reason for this setting?

I wanted to get away from writing about the future. Some SF writers use a lot of extrapolation to arrive at plausible possible 'futures' in which to write, but my futures have always been pretty slapdash ways of lazily giving myself a world in which stuff could happen that couldn't happen here and now. I have never taken my fictional futures very seriously, and I think this is a weakness. Sometimes the whole setting of the book (I'm thinking specifically of Dreaming in Smoke) came about because I liked the possible window-dressings that the imagined 'future' made available to me. In that sense, I'm more of a fantasy writer, because I'm not all that interested in the science in the way somebody like, for example, Kim Stanley Robinson is. I'm interested in the concepts that science opens up, especially the crazy, counter-intuitive ways that it can make a mockery of what we think we know; but in my heart I'm no reductionist and I only ever want as much science as gives me room to play with some ideas.

So this time, I thought it would be more sincere if I didn't write in the future. And I realized that I couldn't think of much SF that had been written about the recent past, even though some classics of SF like 2001: A Space Odyssey are set in times that are now in the past. I remembered reading 1984 in 1984, in my sophomore year high school English class. And I already had this idea about someone watching TV-that-isn't-TV, which was in some sense like Big Brother with a little cocktail twist. At first I thought it would be too cute if I set the book in 1984, so I had it in 1983 at first, but then I thought, 'ah, what the hell.' Also I found out that 1984 was a big year for string theory, which hovers in the conceptual framework of the follow-up to Double Vision.

I don't know if I'm supposed to say this, but in my view, for those who care about such distinctions (I don't) Double Vision is fantasy. It contains many recognizable SF tropes, but they tend to be turned on their edge in such a way that they are no longer SF in the stricter sense.

This is the second time (after Maul) that you've used a dual narrative structure in your novels; do you think the technique particularly lends itself to SF?

I don't know why, but I seem to instinctively arrive at this type of structure when I set about starting a book. I don't do it deliberately, but I think what happens is that I take one viewpoint on a question and then I find myself wanting to come at it from another angle, so I adopt a radically different perspective, and the next thing I know, I've got a parallel plot going on. I don't know if it's a structure significant to SF, but I suspect that it's coming up for me because I'm interested in dualities as a general principle: mind/body; self/other; concrete/abstract.

Are there any particular favourite authors who have influenced your work?

I'm sure there are, but I would have read them so long ago that I can't detect their influence anymore. Sadly, I haven't done any recreational reading in many years, except for a few James Lee Burke novels that my partner has left lying around (In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead is great, btw). I know I've read a lot of good stuff in my life, but right now there's nothing that's springing to mind as seminal to my own work. I used to like Paul Bowles a lot. Peter Mathiessen. Some of Thomas Pynchon. Michael Baldwin. But that was a long time ago and I'm having trouble even remembering these guys' names. Alice Walker. I'm embarrassed that I'm not thinking of any women here. I'm parched, actually. I read somewhere that your IQ drops after having kids and I believe it..

How extensively do you plot your novels before you start writing them? Do you plot the entire book before you start writing or do you prefer to let the story roam where it will?

I always try to plot but I'm like a little kid; I just don't have the discipline. I want to play. So I'll start writing the passages of the book that seem most vivid to me, and I'll make notes, and I might take a stab at guessing what it is I'm doing, but it's always very incomplete. At a certain point, I end up with some convictions about what I'm doing. Implied within that handful of convictions that constitute 'what it's about' I'll have at least one or two big contradictions. Or maybe a great big jellylike unknown, which I always envision chasing me around like the Blob (or that thing in the new Marmite commercial).

Then I'll complain a lot, become neurotic, and generally be a pain in the ass for a while. I'll find it very hard to write, and I'll hate myself. Then, eventually, I'll either get an idea that I think bails me out, or I'll carry on anyway and hope for the best. This process usually repeats itself several times and on different scales during the course of a given novel. I'm not someone who (usually) 'sees' the whole story in advance, or who has inspired ideas; but I'm not somebody who methodically plots, either. I seem to set up problems for myself in the writing, and the act of solving those problems brings out the deeper order of the particular story. I'm always looking to arrive at a story out of the materials of a conceptual problem. I'm digging for it, but I don't know what it looks like so there's a lot of guesswork.

In Double Vision the problem was, what happens when you have this person who is very passive and afraid in their life, but then they get a chance to do Something Really Big? And of course, the twist is, the person is never really sure whether that Really Big Thing she might be doing is Really Real. But the difficulty for me lay in the interplay between the 'unreal' interior of Cookie and the 'real' exterior, and the way that they began to transform each other. And after much sweat, the resolution to the problem came. . . but I'm not going to give it here because that might be a spoiler.

Some authors talk of their characters 'surprising' them by their actions; is this something that has happened to you?

I always envy people who talk about this. They make it sound like the characters are real people that you sit down with at your computer every day and hang out with. That sounds like so much fun! And it also sounds like those writers have ideas about where they are going that are clear enough to elicit surprise when somebody on board steers the ship in a different direction. In my experience, the characters are almost impossible to distinguish from the action itself. The book looms in my mind like a living entity, and it isn't always a friendly one.

So, when people say that their characters staged a mutiny, I think, 'You lucky devil!' Because, for me, writing is less like being captain of the ship and more like being keel-hauled.

On a more general note, do you find it frustrating that so much excellent work is currently being produced in SF & Fantasy but that by and large it is still ignored by the literati?

Well, no. In fact, I suspect science fiction probably benefits from being allowed to flourish outside the barbed wire fence of the institution of High Art Literature. The whole notion of having a 'literati' is beside the point as far as I'm concerned, and I can't imagine how anyone seriously interested in doing any creative work would benefit from being rated according to a literary hierarchy, or canonized in any way. I really believe that the stairway to heaven of fame and acclaim - particularly in 'high literary' circles as opposed to simply selling plenty of books to people - is dangerous to artists and, ironically, risks trivializing the actual work they need to do.

Actually, when it comes to criticism as an endeavour, I tend to have my doubts as to its value to readers and writers. Good criticism can inspire and offer insight, but at its root the language of criticism is limiting and encircling, and because it seeks to view and comment on fiction from the outside, from some vantage point of supposed objectivity, I think it often runs the risk of denaturing the very freedom of thought that it seeks to nurture. Criticism replaces the reality of the subject (i.e., novel, painting, whatever) with a theoretical discourse about the subject in a medium that is supposed to be both exterior to it, and neutral. And for all kinds of reasons I won't bore you with here, I don't find that process terribly valid as a reader or a writer--although it's better than nothing.

But then, I'm not a big fan of formal thought as the road to enlightenment; that's just me. And the problem is, there are many people who function as critics and academics who are passionate and thoughtful and creative in their approach to their work, but the system of thought and behaviour in which they have to function is almost as antithetical to what artists really need as these devoted individuals are appreciative of art itself. It's a wiggly can of worms, IMHO.

Besides, I doubt that many of the people you're thinking of when you use the word 'literati' could grok much of the best SF. I haven't read River of Gods yet, for example, but I'm a longtime McDonald fan and I hear it's his best ever. If it's anything like his other stuff I just don't see the gang from the TLS getting their heads round it. Ian McDonald could fly around the room, read minds and swallow swords in a stylistic/narrative sense, but it wouldn't matter because They wouldn't get it. I'm not saying the so-called literati are dumb, but I suspect a lot of SF would blow right by many 'straight' reviewers for one reason or another. I believe the kind of effort it takes to really dig hard SF is somewhat different to the kind of effort it takes to really dig, say, William Gaddis. And a lot of people just don't have the chops for it. I read the new Justina Robson in draft. There's a way to feel dumb. Don't get me wrong: this book was a fascinating and scintillating read, huge fun every page, but it wasn't a walk in the park if you're not up on your M-theory (among other things). And it shouldn't be. Personally I like SF to be Out There. Otherwise, why have it?

This is not to say that books like Cloud Atlas appearing on the Clarke shortlist recently are anything but a good thing. I mean this in a general sense, without saying anything specifically about that list (remember, I haven't read anything in ages) or the other books that might have been on it but weren't, or any of that (and not to even mention the debatable worthiness of some past winners (myself included)). What I mean is, the more plurality in the field, the better. Really all these categorizations are so beside-the-point.

Do you see any particular trends in recent SF?

I'm not in a position to spot trends. The two cute chubby parasites I call kids take up literally all my time, day and night, every day. I only have two hours a day for my work time, and I'm always using it to write. So I could count on one hand the number of SF novels I've managed to read in the last four years.

Finally, a Desert Island Discs question for you: what three essential books would you take with you to the aforementioned desert island?

The Lord of The Rings, so shoot me. My favourite book since I was 8 years old. Ulysses because I've read the first half of it twice and would like to finish it. Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko. I love the bigness of it and the American Indian consciousness really got to me.

Thank you very much, Tricia Sullivan!