Scriptorium Writing Competition 2015 Interview:
Alwyn asks Copperknickers II about Thus Spoke the Shark Men
Thus Spoke the Shark-Men won the Gold Medallion in the 2015 Scriptorium Writing Competition. If you would like to read the story before the interview, just click on the content box below. Underneath that, you will find the interview.
Thus Spoke the Shark-Men |
Congratulations on winning the Gold Medallion in the 2015 Summer Writing Competition! The theme was science-fiction. Would you like to mention some of your favourite science-fiction authors or books? Have any of your favourites influenced your writing – if so, would you like to say something about those influences?
I like science-fiction and always have done. In school, we used to study all the standard works of English literature: Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, etc. If I'm honest, I didn't usually find that kind of thing very interesting. So when we occasionally studied authors like George Orwell or John Wyndham, it felt like a break from the usual fare, and I enjoyed it. 1984 and Wyndham's 'the Chrysalids' were some of the first sci-fi classics I read, both texts on the school curriculum. I then read Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, as well as 'a Clockwork Orange'.
More recently I've read some lesser known sci-fi books, such as 'Under the Skin' by Michel Faber (a book about aliens landing in the highlands of Scotland, recently made into a very successful art-house film starring Scarlett Johansson. It brought the entire city of Glasgow to a halt when we heard that an A-list celebrity was coming to film here for 2 days. In fact Glasgow has been making various appearances in sci-fi films recently, Brad Pitt came here to film some scenes in World War Z. I applied to play a zombie in the latter since they were looking for local extras, but I couldn't make the filming day... anyway I digress: on the whole, I wouldn't call sci-fi my 'favourite' genre, I tend to prefer fantasy, adventure/travel stories, and especially anything with a supernatural theme.
But nevertheless, I have a big affinity for sci-fi, for two reasons: I come from a scientific family background, so I've always had a strong interest in science, technology etc. And also, as it happens, I am distantly related to Aldous Huxley, my great-grandmother was his second cousin and met him a couple of times. So I suppose I have to choose Brave New World as my 'favourite' sci-fi work out of loyalty, although I've never actually read any of his other works. :S I threw some references to Brave New World into Shark-Men, but oddly, I think one of the influences, at least for the setting in the first part of the story, was actually Futurama, which is my favourite sci-fi TV show. It's quite good for distilling a lot of the sci-fi tropes from Star Trek, Star Wars, Red Dwarf etc into an easily digestible cartoon form, as well as being incredibly cleverly written.
Right from the start, you present a clear image of your main characters, the brothers Mads and Kamy. How did you go about creating these characters – did you write more of their background than you included in this story?
To explain that, I have to give a brief explanation of how I came to write Shark-Men in the first place. The germ of the idea for the story goes back a long time, to a schoolday in my childhood. I had been watching David Attenborough's 'Blue Planet' documentary, specifically the second episode which deals with marine life in the deepest parts of the ocean where there is no sunlight. It's literally an alien world: there are ecosystems on the seafloor that are fed by underwater volcanic activity and don't even depend on the sun's energy like the rest of life on this planet. We could have WW3 on the surface with a thousand year nuclear Winter and it would hardly touch them. Plus there are some real monsters down there: the fearsome looking anglerfish and viperfish, but also leviathans like the giant squid and six-gilled shark. The documentary had a big effect on me and I remember sitting in school the morning after seeing it, and imagining myself as an astronaut exploring the oceans of an alien planet full of such nightmarish creatures. Ever since then I wanted to create a story about such a journey and I thought last year that it was about time I tried my best at doing it justice.
That covers part 2 of Shark-Men: part 1 was working backwards, and thinking up a conceit which could bring some foolhardy explorers of deep-space to such a dangerous place in a way that gave the characters some kind of depth. It wasn't too hard to come up with the idea of explorers as part-scientist, part-celebrity: iirc at the time I was writing Shark-Men, Commander Chris Hadfield was just coming to the end of his period in the ISS (that guy who recorded himself singing a David Bowie song in zero gravity, and generally being the first 'social media spaceman'). I don't know exactly where I got the idea of Mads and Kamy as two brothers: probably I subconsciously plagiarised it from something else I had been watching or reading at the time. I might have only had one character, but it's difficult to write even a short story about one character and noone else, especially one which is already so outside of any normal human context. To be honest I also have a bit of a phobia of writing dialogue and capturing complex relationships between several characters is not one of my strengths (although I've been practicing it more lately) so two characters was the optimum number. As for the characterisation of Mads and Kamy specifically: the story started out with various elements of dark comedy, which I mostly took out, partly because I didn't find them funny enough and partly because of the word limit. Unfortunately this also removed some of the context of the brothers' lives.
The original idea was that they were in their younger days the half-scientist, half-natural resource prospector stars of a reality TV show which involved them flying on long journeys through space and documenting their very boring lives, á la 'Keeping up with the Kardashians', and that they were the only ones willing to take on a mission which would possibly result in their deaths and definitely involve years of mind-numbing interstellar travel (I don't know about you, but I can barely cope with long-haul plane journeys so imagine if they lasted for many years). Once the basic idea occured of two somewhat jaded celebrities volunteering essentially for a suicide mission as one final attempt to cement themselves as something more than a historical footnote, various stereotypes and tropes opened themselves up (several recent films including Harrison Ford spring to mind here for some reason...) and there you have it: two wealthy, sleazy has-beens who have lost their purpose in life, who don't have a great relationship with each other, hoping to redeem themselves in the eyes of the world. If I could rewrite the story, I would put a lot more emphasis on the relationship between Mads and Kamy: I put in a couple of hints but I could have made it clearer that they really don't get on well in the slightest, to put it mildly.
The mixture of scientist and celebrity is an interesting one, this shows that your story is commenting on the evolution of culture (as well as developments in technology), which I see as a sign of well-written science-fiction. It would be strange if technology moved on but culture stood still (unless there was a reason for that).
Science fiction certainly does comment on the evolution of culture, although I find (and it's been noted before) that the visions of the future it provides are often more of a reflection on contemporary culture than a real attempt to look at what the future is likely to bring, at least as regards the main themes, less so the superficial stuff. I think there are four main types of science fiction: dystopia (by far the most common), alien attack (e.g. War of the Worlds), space drama (divided into epic or serial, e.g. Star Trek, Star Wars etc) and parody/humour (e.g. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, futurama, mars attacks, etc). Of these, the last is especially prone to reflection on the present, since the setting allows the author to play with, and push to comic extremes, funny observations about the modern world. Not that I think this is a bad thing: after all you can't exactly parody something that hasn't happened yet so it's natural to parody the present using the future.
And of course any sci-fi story worth its salt tries to depict the differences and changes that have happened since our own time, even when they don't directly relate to the plot: that's half the fun of sci-fi, letting your imagination run wild and dreaming up things that might happen given current trends. Sci-fi without good cultural and technological novelties is like fantasy without magic and dragons: you might as well just write about the real world if you don't have them, right?
You mentioned that you enjoy reading fantasy, adventure/travel stories and anything with supernatural elements. It seems to me that Thus Spoke the Shark-Men has elements of all of those. Do you think that the combination of elements of different genres is one of the things which helped your story to stand out, in the competition?
You're right I suppose, it does have elements of all of those. I would like to say at this point that I greatly enjoyed reading all of the other entries, especially the other medal winning stories, and I found the latter ones strikingly original. There are a lot of things that can make a story original: combinations of different genres, a different take on an old theme, or even a conventional style story in the unique voice of a particular author with his/her own way of describing the unfolding story and bringing the characters alive for the reader. I am happy that some people on this little corner of the internet took to my story and enjoyed reading it, I certainly enjoyed writing it. A great literary critic once said that "all literature is nourished from two sources: lived experience, and other literature",* and Shark-Men was nourished by two particular sources that were perhaps always going to lead to a slightly unexpected kind of sci-fi story. One of them was a lived experienced, namely watching Blue Planet as I said above. The second was a literary source material. Which leads us nicely into your next question:
*one might ask of course, what else it could be nourished from .
My review mentioned that you use imagery from the Bible, but perhaps there is more to this than I realised.
You were quite correct: and not just from the Bible, but specifically the Book of Revelation. This was perhaps the most consistent and conscious inspiration for the story. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the Shark-Man's monologue, when he (I) quote several phrases from it (also the final line of the story). Kamy was of course given a Bible by that Scottish priest when they left Earth, so we must assume that he had been reading it, and was indeed quite familiar with it after such a long journey with nothing much else to do. Revelation is the only book of the Bible I've read all the way through, since it's not really comparable to any of the others. A non-Christian would be tempted to pass it off as a 1st century A.D. acid trip, but in fact it's very carefully constructed from the venerable tradition of Jewish prophecy and fits into the genre of 'apocalyptic literature' that John the Apostle would have been familiar with. John was a prophet relaying a message of doom which he felt needed to be revealed to humanity, and after his encounter with the Shark-Man, Kamy takes on a similar mantle. Albeit the 'revelation' is not divine in nature, but the opposite: a nihilistic, even Nietschean condemnation of the divine, ironically interspersed with Biblical phraseology (and hence of course came the title of the story, after Nietsche's famous work 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra').
This is where my story shows its true colours as regards those four sci-fi categories I mentioned above: it is a kind of parody, or at least it was originally. It actually had many elements of dark comedy in the first draft, although I mostly took these out. Partly because of the word limit, and partly because I didn't find them funny enough. It's a shame though, since it meant a lot of the background of the two brothers and some of the thematic content was not there in the way I originally intended. Nihilism is obviously a theme during the start of the story when it's clear that the brothers have lost their purpose in life, and in the shark-man passage, and the results of it can be glimpsed in part 3. It's a bit of an agenda of mine that I like exploring: not nihilism as such, but the acceptance of atheism and its implications of a godless and hostile universe.
I'm intrigued by the supernatural elements of your story - would you like to say more about them?
That's something I was hoping you'd ask. One part of the story in particular is especially supernatural, according to one interpretation at least. I am referring to the encounter with the shark-man himself. Astute readers will remember that that the cabin of the spacecraft at this time was running low on oxygen and was also damaged. Technologically inclined readers might also have noted that a damaged craft in the deep ocean would pose a serious risk due to the high water pressure at such depths. Medically inclined readers might further note that high pressure in such an environment could conceivably cause nitrogen narcosis, symptoms of which include distorted sense of reality, and hallucinations. Of course something must have caused the damage to the ship in the first place, but was that something necessarily a human-shaped alien with the power to communicate in English, with a message that just happened to borrow heavily from the book that the brothers had been reading for several years? A good supernatural story always keeps things ambiguous of course.
Hopefully I'll get another opportunity to compete on TWC in the future, especially if there were to be a supernatural/horror themed competition, partly so that I get the chance to read some more great stories from other members, and also partly because I may or may not have a couple of finished (or nearly finished) stories of that nature sitting around...
Thanks for reading - and thanks to Copper for explaining the thinking behind this exceptional story. Don't forget to look out for Scriptorium Writing Competitions in future!
vBulletin Message