A Conversation with Chris Beckett

I first met Chris Beckett over email when our Literary Agent, John Jarrold, offered me representation. While waiting for news from other interested parties I asked John if I could chat to any of his existing clients, and he put me in touch with Chris. We had a lovely and insightful exchange, and I thought that would be that, unless we ran into each other at a convention or two. 

Then, a few months ago, I was listed alongside Chris as the Sci-Fi offering for Season 4 of The Alternative Stories and Fake Realities podcast. This provided an excellent excuse to get back in touch, and obviously I used the opportunity to ask some questions.

 ***

So, Chris, your book, Two Tribes, has recently been released in paperback format and you adapted sections of it for audio-drama. How was that process?  

Well, it was difficult because after all I wrote an 80,000 word novel for a reason, and it isn’t easy to capture it in a short extract. But it was interesting thinking about how my story might be told in this different form, and about the pros and cons of prose and drama as ways of telling stories.

How did you select which parts to adapt? I’m mostly asking for me here, I was asked to provide a few extracts from my book and I had no idea where to start!  

I can’t remember if it was myself or Chris Gregory (Producer) that came up with the idea, but we ended up focussing in on one scene in the middle of the book, which feels fairly pivotal, and which touches on most of the themes of the book. Chris G introduced material from other parts of the book in order to make this scene comprehensible on its own. I tweaked the changes he made.

You’ve been writing short stories since 1990, and your first book, The Holy Machine, was published in 2004. The world of writing and publishing has (probably) changed a lot since then, but what change has surprised you the most?  

My first two novels, and my first short story collection were published by small presses with tiny print runs. It’s only since 2010, when The Holy Machine was re-published by Corvus (my current publisher), that I’ve been with a commercial publisher, so it’s difficult to compare how things are with how things were in the 90s. When I started out, I wrote stories for Interzone, then under the editorship of David Pringle. 

Okay, so David Pringle was editor of Foundation in the 80s, and became sole publisher and editor of Interzone in ‘88, which won the Hugo Award for best semiprozine in 1995.

That’s right. One thing that was great about that: at the time they didn’t just send rejection slips, but a fairly detailed explanation of why they were rejecting a story. It was almost like a correspondence course, albeit a correspondence course in slow motion, since they could take months to get back to me.

So maybe speed of communication and feedback is the biggest change since then?

Yes, perhaps!

In some ways we’re already living in a sci-fi world. If you could choose one imagined invention or reality from your books to bring into the real world, what would it be?

My planet, Eden, has no sun, and all the light and warmth comes from ‘trees’ that are powered by geothermal energy. I wouldn’t mind walking through the forests of Eden, surrounded by the softy luminous flowers that hang from the branches, and listening to the steady hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph, as they pump their sap down into the hot rocks far below, and pump it up again to warm the world.

That image is so powerful in those books. Although I think I’d want to avoid the leopards. The way you described them singing to their prey still haunts me. I’m easily mesmerised so I’d die very quickly!

Okay *shudders* new question! How far off do you think a cyberpunk reality is?

Hmmm. Aspects of cyberpunk already exist don’t they? But the future when it happens is never quite as glamorous as it seemed when it was just SF! 

True! Two Tribes is set in a future where climate change has seriously impacted on our infrastructure, and our cities have been flooded. Climate change is a serious issue right now. Do you think technology can save us? 

Oh undoubtedly. The technology already exists with which we could build a carbon neutral world, and if we invested in it even more than we do, that technology would rapidly get better and better in the way that cars, planes, TVs, computers etc etc, all got rapidly better. Indeed we’ve already seen that happening with windpower, solar power and battery storage which have become both cheaper and more efficient at an impressive rate. The question is, do we have the will to make the transition in the time available?

That’s the big question. Your upcoming novel, America City, is also driven by issues related to climate change. Do you think climate change will be a continuous driving force behind your books going forward? 

I’d rather not write or think about climate change at all! But I feel an obligation to keep coming back to it, particularly in books which are set in the future. I suppose we would all prefer not to think about it, rather as a sick person would rather not have to think about their disease, but, like the sick person, we’ve got to think about it if we don’t want to experience it getting even worse.

Do you ever see yourself writing something pandemic-related?

I don’t know. Odd though it is to say it, it hasn’t really captured my imagination. My mother was a doctor and was prone to medialise everything. This has made me rather resistant to medical matters in general as a subject. I wrote a book during the pandemic. During the first lockdown in fact. It’s called Tomorrow, but as far as I know it isn’t directly related to the pandemic.

I love how, as a writer, you can never really know how your work relates to current issues until, sometimes, years later. It’s like retrospective self discovery.

Well maybe some pandemic-related hints are in there. Time will tell.

You’ve said before that your award-winning trilogy, Dark Eden, Mother of Eden and Daughter of Eden, explore the stories people tell to give themselves purpose and their lives meaning. Do you mean myths and legends? Or are you drawing more from specifically religious texts? 

I don’t just mean myths and legends, because we equate those with the distant past and with religions and magic and in fact we’re still telling ourselves stories all the time. In Two Tribes, for instance, I look at the stories that people told themselves about Brexit – Brexit was all about competing stories. Stories are to a culture a bit like what dreams are to an individual. Myths and legends are part of that, though, and some of them still have a lot of force.

Presumably you looked at a lot of these stories in the creation of the trilogy, what was your favourite?

For me the story of the expulsion from Eden (in the book of Genesis), remains a deeply powerful story, full of layers of meaning, which is why I drew on it for my three Eden books, even though I am certainly not a religious person. Eden comes into several of my short stories too, and even puts in an appearance in my next novel, Tomorrow. (And it’s not just me that it resonates with. I think, for instance, of the lovely Joni Mitchell song ‘Woodstock’ with the lines ‘We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’).

I love Joni Mitchell. I very much hope she will be as eternal as Eden! Now the serious business - what’s your favourite movie and why? 

Impossible question, obviously. Spirited Away. Or maybe Apocalypse Now? No scratch that, Solaris (the one by Tarkovsky, or maybe one of his other films, like Stalker?). Then again, there’s The Life of Brian. It’s impossible! How can you compare such different films and arrive at a “best”? Impossible. But I’m going back to Spirited Away. Just for the train ride through the flooded fields.

That scene is total magic. For me My Neighbour Totoro beats Spirited Away by a whisker, so I’m on that beautiful train-ride with you.

Alright, and finally, because I truly believe this question gets to the soul of a person, what is your favourite biscuit? 

Ah well, you have saved the best to last. I like pretty much all biscuits, except (obviously) for Jammy Dodgers which are clearly disgusting, and those horrible pink wafers which are not really biscuits at all but a kind of cardboard. Shortbread, chocolate biscuits, orange thins, Shrewsbury biscuits, Maryland cookies… I love them all. But then you’re not asking me about the biscuits I like to dally and flirt with. You want me to tell you my soul biscuit, and that of course has to be the plain digestive biscuit: solid, satisfying, ordinary in the best possible sense.

Well I think that’s a strong note to end on! Thank you Chris!

If you’ve not got hold of a copy of Two Tribes, get yours now here and on Amazon.

And you can listen to the audio-drama here.