erhaps contemporary British SF's most subtle and stylish writer, Ian R. MacLeod excels at strong, sensitive characterization, elegant evocation of mood and finely nuanced description. Although he is justly renowned for his renderings of quintessentially English landscapes and states of mind, he can also portray exotic alien worlds and altered histories with flair and deep insight. His major alternate-world fantasy novels, The Light Ages (2003) and The House of Storms (2005), are fast building his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic; the first is a richly imagined coming-of-age tale full of Dickensian energy and grotesquerie, the second—a distant sequel—a pastoral love story the collapse of which symbolically and directly summarizes the sundering of England itself. In these books, the magical substance known as "aether" has enchanted and subverted all of human civilization.
But long before the "aether" novels, MacLeod was well known for his often brilliant short fiction, which has been collected in Voyages by Starlight (Arkham House, 1996), Breathmoss and Other Exhalations (Golden Gryphon Press, 2004), and the forthcoming Past Magic (PS Publishing). An earlier, and very powerful, novel is The Great Wheel (1997), dealing with a conscience-stricken priest oscillating between a ravaged, refugee-crowded North Africa and a utopian, post-historic Europe; another novel, written in the '90s but only appearing in full this year from Aio Books, is The Summer Isles, a deeply felt alternate history of a 1930s fascist England, as seen through the eyes of a (secretly) homosexual historian.
Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Ian R. MacLeod by e-mail in December 2004 and early January 2005. Go to to SCI Fiction to read MacLeod's "New Light on the Drake Equation."
In the first part of your writing career, you were best known for your short fiction—you were a regular in Asimov's, Interzone and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction through the '90s and beyond. Now, however, you're exclusively writing novels, and long ones at that. Why this radical change of pace?
MacLeod: I always wanted to produce novels, but actually getting them done to my satisfaction and then sold took quite a few years. Meanwhile, my short fiction was selling. Despite having produced and sold The Great Wheel, and having written a long-unpublished (and probably unpublishable) novel in my 20s, I did seem to find the focus of novel-writing hard to maintain, and I decided in about 2000 that short fiction was possibly a distraction. One thing which got me thinking that way was reading a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who definitely sacrificed his novel-writing for the short-term gain of short fiction. So, and much though I'd like to be Fitzgerald in many respects, I decided that this wasn't one of them. No more short fiction became the rule, and I've stuck to it. And the novels have come, and got done, and sold.
Otherwise, and this was another aspect of the reason I dropped writing short fiction, I was always conscious that a lot of my short stories are actually rather long. In fact, a lot of them contained the seeds of what might otherwise have been novels, or at least parts of novels. I wanted to see what would happen if I held back and tried to let them evolve in that way.
Now that I've stopped writing short fiction for so long, I'm rather worried that I've lost the facility. I'd certainly like to return to the area and prove that I can do it, but in a different way. I'd like to write stories which more properly adhere to the unities of place, theme and function which the form should, ideally, represent. A new simplicity. Whether I ever get there is, of course, another matter. But I'm beginning to have the glimmers of what might be ideas.
Your two related novels, The Light Ages and The House of Storms, are set in an alternate England where "aether," a substance discovered in the 17th century, acts as a magical power source, giving rise to an extended, but flawed, Industrial Revolution. If magic works, science and engineering can afford to be lazy, imperfect, lacking in rigor; medieval social structures like guilds can persist, meaning no democracy. ... To what extent is this a commentary on the history of our own world?
MacLeod: The logical, SF-writer part of me, the part which rejoices in the certainties of science and logic, dislikes the concept of magic. But then the other half—the right brain or whatever—is entranced by the idea that the world is capable of being more than it seems. These two novels are, amongst other things, explorations of this conflict.
Historically, I'd say the Middle Ages were hindered by a lack of true understanding of the way the world worked, and by a compensating emphasis on religion and magic. So, if one of the tenets of the so-called science in my crude alternate history was that magic of a kind actually existed and anything, at the end of the day, could be made to happen irrespective of genuine logic, I think that science as it developed would inevitably have been hobbled, and that the maturity of society would have been impeded as a result.
I don't really think in terms of a commentary, however. What concerns me as I work these things through is that, firstly, I can obtain the feelings, settings, events and effects I want to achieve as a writer, for essentially aesthetic and emotional reasons, and, secondly, that these things can be made to seem plausible in the context of what I believe, feel or know about society and human nature. If I can get that going, I'm happy. The commentary is incidental.
More generally, alternate history seems a favored medium of yours. What do you see as the particular creative advantages of this variety of SF and fantasy?
MacLeod: The light which it can cast upon the world—and when I say "the world" I suppose I mean the world of ideas and nature and society, rather than in the geographical or historical sense. Alternate history also allows you to write about aspects of the past without having to slavishly reproduce it, which, even in the most well-researched historical novels, is bound to be inaccurate in any case. The past is, of its essence, unknowable. What matters is here and now, and the ways we can explore it.
One of the main reasons I write SF, or whatever you care to call the bits of the genre I inhabit, is that I soon grow bored with simply attempting to render reality. I like the point where the real and the unreal meet, and the twists and odd angles which it can create. A couple of my favorite works, the novel Pavane (1966) and the short story "Weinachtsabend" (1972), both by Keith Roberts, are alternative histories. I read them when I was in my teens, and have re-read them many times since, and they've always stayed with me. For that reason alone, it was probably inevitable that I'd try to write alternate history.
I had a correspondence with my agents about this whole aspect of the genre recently. It was pointed out to me that alternate history is seen as box-office poison on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite my liking for this aspect of the field, the discussion did make me realize that the scope for creating interesting and resonant alternate history is actually very limited. Yes, it's a fascinating area in which to set your dramas, but the areas you can actually cover aren't that great. It's no use writing about a twist in a time or place in history which your readers don't care, or know nothing, about. That's why you get so many versions of World War II, and the American Civil War. So I can't see alternate history ever becoming big in the sense that, say, horror fiction or, indeed, historical fiction can be. There's a limit to the number of times you want to encounter Hitler working as a house painter. Still, I'm always open to re-meeting the old chap with his dowdy mustache and paint-splattered overalls.
The Light Ages and The House of Storms appear consciously to echo Victorian novels in style and structure. Why this specific influence? And have any later authors—D.H. Lawrence, for example—acted as further inspiration?
MacLeod: Not sure if conscious is quite the term, but I know what you mean. To a considerable degree, this Victorianism was dictated by the type of society I wanted to portray. If you're writing about certain attitudes and behavior, a choice of a language and storytelling technique in conflict with that approach would appear strange. Not that you can't do it, as John Fowles did in The French Lieutenant's Woman, but then the stylistic approach itself tends to take the spotlight, which was exactly what Fowles intended.
I went for a slightly more modern style in The House of Storms. The book's not a huge leap forward, but the multiple viewpoint involved is more in tune with early 20th-century fiction, and some parts, such as the childhood of Klade, who's brought up by changelings, are written in a style which approaches stream-of-consciousness. Similarly, the couple of short chapters which are written essentially from the viewpoint of the house came about after reading what Virginia Woolf did with this approach in To the Lighthouse. Lawrence is a definite presence in House's early chapters. ...
Both "aether" novels depict human beings transformed by aether into what might as well be fairy folk—otherworldly, magically talented beings, an object of fear and fascination for ordinary people. In what ways do The Light Ages and The House of Storms embody, and retell, traditional fairy tales?
MacLeod: This again isn't a conscious thing. You do become aware that you're dealing with Jungian archetypes after a while, but the initial idea has to seem fresh for it to interest me, rather than a deliberate attempt to mirror an existing tale. But nothing's new when it comes to telling stories, and that fact is something you come to terms with as a writer. I certainly became aware, for example, that Alice in The House of Storms was very much like the Wicked Queen in "Snow White." But there are also elements of Dorian Gray with her. Creativity doesn't distinguish between folk myth, the book you read last week, and the news on the TV. Ideally, they should all be up for grabs, and part of the synthesis you need to create something which seems new.
More broadly, I guess, and to return to a point I made earlier about the development of science and logic in Europe since the Middle Ages, both books were in part an attempt to describe a less mature, more "childlike" world. I wanted the dark woods and psychological uncertainties which adults attempt to deny or ignore to be more clearly and indisputably visible. A bit of wish fulfillment on my part, too; I really would like ghosts and magic and all those other things to exist.
The Light Ages contains magnificent, often quite grotesque, evocations of industrial England. To what extent did your personal experience shape these descriptions?
MacLeod: To be honest, I don't have that much direct experience of the sort of industrial desolation which the book plays upon. I'm a product of the polite outer suburbs, where industry is mostly neat, and zoned a bus or a car ride away from the housing estates. But I do live in a part of the world, the English Midlands, which, as much as anywhere, created the Industrial Revolution. The steam engine, mass production and the kind of modern man who could make a fortune from nothing out of science and money (Bolton and Watt, Abraham Derby, Josiah Wedgwood and so forth) all made their mark here.
I don't know why all of this has such a strong appeal for me. Dickens, the idea of what he writes about as much as the books themselves, certainly played a part. So did Lawrence. But it was always there in me, waiting to respond and get out. I seem to obtain at least as much inspiration, if not more, from walking along streets lined with walls and houses as I do when I'm out in the countryside. And I love redbrick, the smell of soot, the rattle of litter on the wind, the closed-in surprises of alleys ...
A striking feature of The Light Ages is how both the political idealism and romantic passion of the narrator, Robert Borrows, remain essentially unrequited. Genuine revolution is elusive, the beautiful Anna Winters is never quite within his grasp. Why did you choose to make his story so much one of disappointment and disillusion?
MacLeod: What was floating uppermost in my mind was a particular film. Once Upon a Time In America starts off as a rites-of-passage rags-to-riches gangster movie, but ends up as a meditation on the betrayal of friendships, the loss of impossible loves, and the emptying of dreams. I was after something like the same effect.
This film, and I'd like to think my novel, are part of the tradition of melancholy in art. When Robert De Niro stares up through the gauze of his defeated hopes at the end of Once Upon a Time ... , I'm tearful, but I'm also exhilarated. It's the same way I feel when I listen to Richard Strauss' Death and Transfiguration, or when the red-coated figure turns around to confront Donald Sutherland at the end of Don't Look Now.
I just love that kind of thing. Over the years, I've come to realize that a lot of my favorite novels, music and movies are, by many people's standards, essentially sad—morbid, even. But those standards aren't mine. Until someone points out to me that, say, the songs of Richard Thompson are supposedly "gloomy," it doesn't really occur to me. I'm just struck by their beauty.
Mere sadness, pain, disappointment and disillusion are, to me, everyday emotions you feel when you're doing a job you dislike or having a bad time at the dentist. Maybe it's a sort of emotional autism to want your art to offer high tragedy and deep grief, but I guess that, as the examples I've given show, I'm not unique in feeling like this. I guess the effect is cathartic.
London and Bristol in the "aether" novels: with your alternate timeline diverging from ours in 1678 or so, you've had splendid opportunities to alter the architecture and atmosphere of the great English cities in imaginative ways. How have you set about this, and do you think you've accomplished genuine urban improvement?
MacLeod: The nice thing about novels is that you don't have to worry about the budget. It doesn't take much effort, either, as you can suggest a lot in words through use of detail. After that, I generally just let the sentences lead me. You just keep thinking—how can I make this more interesting? With Bristol, though, there was a definite influence. I'd been to Barcelona when I started work on the book, and Gaudi was too good an influence to avoid. The problem which occurs then, when you have a more specific aim stylistically, however, is that you soon become conscious that you're falling short of it.
The House of Storms moves the center of the action of the "aether" series to the west of England, Somerset particularly. Why this regional emphasis, and is there actually any such place as the country manor of Invercombe?
MacLeod: There's no such place as Invercombe; I didn't want the restriction of real geography. But I love the West Country, and I wanted to use somewhere fresher and prettier (at least to my mind) as a basic location for the book. After all, I'd "done" cities in The Light Ages.
Still talking of the West: in The House of Storms, a protracted Civil War erupts between Western England, its capital at Bristol, and the East, its headquarters of course in London. This seems a fairly novel scenario; but are there indeed, historically speaking, deep-rooted differences—schisms even—along the East/West fault line?
MacLeod: There is no strong East/West fault line in England. A more obvious choice would have been North/South. But the divisions I wanted to highlight were not of the sort that are geographically determined. The model I had in mind was the American Civil War, which was about old money against new money, rural against urban, colonial against modern economic trading, and so forth. Then, of course, there's slavery, which Bristol did deal in and prosper from far more than London. In that context, and with the old Whig/Conservative divide (which is still reflected to a degree: the West Country remains a stronghold of the Whigs' successors, the Liberals), the East/West idea seemed to fit pretty well. And I'd already done North/South to a considerable degree in The Light Ages.
In The House of Storms, first a nascent family—that of Ralph Meynell, Marion Price and their son—is torn apart, then the entire country. Is the symbolism of this consciously an opposition of two sorts of energy, both embodied in the aether-charged estate of Invercombe: fusion (romantic love, the conception of a child) and fission (separation, misunderstanding, hostility)?
MacLeod: Yes. I did want to portray a division in a relationship which then became a division in a country. It was one of my early aims, and I tried to stick to it, difficult though it proved. Then, as you develop the characters, and they respond and react, you tend to embellish with things which contrast and fit.
Ralph, Marion, their son Klade, the over-aspiring matriarch Alice Meynell: strong, very vivid characters. Are they primarily analogues of historical figures (Ralph as Charles Darwin, Marion as Florence Nightingale)? Or are they more archetypes of fantasy—Klade the changeling, Alice the wicked witch?
MacLeod: Alice came about when I thought to myself one day: "I don't think I can do an essentially evil character." That thought became a challenge. And from that Alice evolved. The Darwin/Nightingale parallels were certainly there—I suppose I grabbed them as they went past in my thoughts, and because, in their different ways, they both represented an important step towards the modern world which "my" England hasn't yet reached. In their different ways, they, and Alice as well, also embody questions which continue to be relevant about the way we choose to live our lives. What can one person do to change the world? Does life have a purpose? What are good and evil? Is there really anything out there other than random chance and self-interest?
The House of Storms ends more hopefully than The Light Ages, despite general devastation. Is this the end of the "aether" series, the books' timeline pushed back into some synchrony with ours?
MacLeod: I would certainly like to write more books (and, indeed, short fiction) based on this premise. I'm certainly struck by ideas which could be fun to develop. One thing which helped me through The Light Ages in particular, and then allowed me to contemplate doing "another aether book" (as I dislike the multi-volume fantasies which have spewed out in Tolkien's wake) was Thomas Hardy's recurring setting, Wessex. Hardy felt that he could portray all the great emotions and questions of life on the relatively small stage he'd created for himself. If he could do that so brilliantly, I felt that a whole alternate world (and, indeed, universe) should be enough for me to return to occasionally.
I'd like, if possible, to escape the "huge world-changing event" syndrome which both of my "aether" books are victim to, though. It's a common trope in the genre, but to be honest I think it shows a degree of immaturity. Teenagers expect to change the world. Adults learn to ride with the flood. Real life just doesn't offer chances to tip over history (and even when it does, it never falls in the expected way), and most good fiction doesn't either. The Great Gatsby says a huge amount about America (in fact, I'd argue that it is the Great American Novel) without needing to describe any history-changing events. Marcel Proust defined huge areas of life in an even more intimate way. To re-echo Hardy, I'd like to think that one day I'll have the skill to say big things on a smaller canvas. And I'm at least as interested in going backwards in the fake history I've created for myself as I am in going forward.
You have several further books coming up. First out should be The Summer Isles—previously available only in abridged novella form (and a World Fantasy Award winner at that length). This in fact substantially predates your "aether" novels. Why has it taken so long to see print?
MacLeod: The Summer Isles is my favorite of my several novels. But it's an alternate history. I think I've already said most of what can be said about the problems with publishing alternate history, but the other thing which I suspect has held the book back (aside from whether it's any good in the first place) is its fairly upfront portrayal of male homosexuality. This never occurred to me as I wrote the book—I'm not gay, but I felt as strongly about the main character's feelings as I've done in anything else I've written—and it's never been said directly by publishers. I doubt if people were consciously rejecting it for that reason, but prejudice (as The Summer Isles itself sets out to demonstrate) can be all the more pervasive when it's sheened with sublimation and denial. Even now, I'm being told that the book will probably have to succeed as a "gay novel." Of course, if I'd taken on another, less loaded, "difficult to sell" subject, such as, for example, setting a book in Mexico (which I understand is currently a publishing no-no), I might have got a clearer signal. As it is, I'm speculating. But if you think that's all hogwash, try to name a mainstream film which portrays male homosexuality in the same "upbeat," "sexy" way in which Kissing Jessica Stein or Mulholland Drive do lesbianism. All you get is the AIDS Sturm und Drang of Philadelphia and Angels in America. Oliver Stone's recent film Alexander is a brave attempt to break out from this, but, at least as of now, its fortunes seem to support all I've said. We've still got a long way to go.
Your next story collection is Past Magic, following fairly closely on the heels of your (quite brilliant) second such book, Breathmoss and Other Exhalations. Breathmoss consists of long, highly atmospheric, tales; is the same true of Past Magic?
MacLeod: I'd like to think so. It includes some of my favorite works, and covers a large span of my authorly life. A particular favorite remains "Snodgrass"—another alternate world story, but this one's told on a much smaller scale. In fact, Kim Newman pointed out to me that it was a rare example of an alternate-world story in which nothing has changed apart from the life of the protagonist. Unless, that is, you count the career of the Beatles. In a way, I see this collection as a neat way of bookending and rounding off what will then be a sort of trilogy of my best short published work.
You have a new novel in progress, set in the near future. What sort of book is it shaping up to be? Is a title definite yet?
MacLeod: After the broad brush sweeps of The House of Storms and The Light Ages, it's a more conscious attempt to keep things within a tight focus, whilst dealing with bigger issues. In fact, the current events all take place in a single day, although, through flashback, the book also covers an entire lifetime. Every time it tries to get bigger (which is frequently), I try to haul it back to a simpler focus and concision. After the baroque embroideries of my two previous books, I've also gone for a somewhat simpler and more immediate writing style as a result.
This book is an attempt to write serious fiction which is also SF. It's certainly a break from fantasy (if that's what I was previously writing), although the main concerns of the book are more religious and philosophical than to do with technological or social prediction. Still, to write about the years ahead, I've had to look forward into this century, and that's proved a sobering experience. There are so many things which are already going wrong with the world which have to be faced up to and dealt with, and it's hard as you confront them all not to fall into a sort of pessimism which is of a different character and degree to the melancholy of the spirit which I dealt with earlier. Still, I'm convinced that life and humanity will go on.
I still haven't found a proper name which "fits" this book. But I keep trying things out. You have to believe something good will turn up and surprise you. Otherwise, you'd never manage to write in the first place.
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