Max Barry is a Melbourne-based author who left his work in marketing in order to write books. It’s safe to say this was a very wise choice, as he has written six novels, one of which has been made in to a film. He also created the online political game, NationStates. His latest book, Providence, is a sci-fi thriller which puts four people on a spaceship in the middle of deep space, surrounded by hostile forces. Max was kind enough to sit down and answer some of our questions!
As a writer, are you a gardener or architect (or planner/pantser, if you prefer)? Would you mind running through your writing habits/schedule?
I used to be 100% gardener, but I’m learning to plan more. Previously, I don’t think I knew how to plan without destroying the book—I wound up pushing characters around to meet predefined plot points, which killed the most important parts of the story. So instead I followed my characters wherever they went, then went back and tried to fix all the terrible plot holes later.
More recently, I’ve felt able to plan while leaving room for a natural, organic discovery. Which is much more fun. And I don’t immediately need to throw away half a book once I finish a first draft. So that’s good.
I read in your note at the end that Providence had an initial point of inspiration in a story you wrote when you were in high school, but I also got a bit of an Ender’s Game vibe from it; I actually think one of the characters asks whether this is all a game at one point. If that’s correct, could you speak a bit to what about Ender’s Game inspired you and how you played with those ideas?
War and gaming overlap so much. Ender’s Game is a terrific novel about that, and there are many others, plus a film I was obsessed with as a kid, “The Last Starfighter.” I read the novelization of that film a hundred times. I think as modern warfare increasingly resembles a video game, you naturally start to think about what happens if you can’t reliably tell one from the other.
What got me thinking, though, was hearing about soldiers deployed overseas who don’t see fighting and pass the time playing video game shooters. I’m sure they’re very happy not to be getting shot at, but I bet at least some of them want a chance to do what they’ve trained for—and fulfil the role that people back home imagine they’re doing. That was a starting point for Providence: the frustration born out that gap between reality and simulation.
A lot of stories focus on AI at the moment, with many of them coming down pretty firmly against AI, yet Providence seems to ultimately suggest that the AI is able to do things humans simply can’t; it’s almost reassuring, in a way.
Computers are clearly better than people at lots of things. Like aiming. I can’t believe we’re still making sci-fi where humans have to manually aim the guns. That’s barely happening in real life any more. Nobody in 2200 will rely on a stupid fallible human to aim a gun.
The AI in Providence is mysterious and I don’t want to spoil what it turns out to be. Or whether it’s fundamentally good or not. But the most important thing is that it’s different. Even in the book, characters keep mistakenly ascribing human emotions and motivations to it, because that’s what we do: We’re story-tellers, and we need a narrative for everything. We want everything to have a “why” and a moral. But the universe is just cold physics that doesn’t care at all. We’ve built our cozy stories on top of that.
The salamanders are a really scary creature because we don’t really get into their heads. Even when we understand a little more behind their motivations, they’re very much bogeymen-esque creatures due to the fact that they are so very, well…alien. What was your reasoning behind creating such an impenetrable enemy?
It lets us know the characters by what they think of the aliens. They can’t tell for sure what the aliens are thinking or feeling, so their guesses and assumptions are revealing. It’s a similar situation with the ship. The book is just four people in a room, for quite a long time, so it’s really about making them as interesting as possible.
Also it allows for moral quandry: If the salamanders were unequivocably evil, everyone’s moral position is very clear. There’s no room for debate or nuance. If they’re more like a force of nature, we can get into more interesting questions.
Another thing is an important part of the book: the idea that you can’t really understand what an alien creature is thinking, or an AI, or even, maybe, other people. We can’t help ourselves, because we’re serial anthropormphizers and story-tellers, but a lot of that is delusion. The characters project themselves onto practically everything.
It would be remiss of me not to ask about Lexicon, because I loved it so much. It’s such an unusual conceit, the idea of persuasion – what was its genesis? Also, I felt that idea shone through particularly in Beanfield’s character – is this a particular interest for you?
I’ve been writing about persuasion for a long time—my first novel, Syrup, was about marketing, and that’s my own professional background. I was literally taught how to manipulate people’s perceptions and coerce decisions. I’ve always found those two ideas fascinating: that you can’t really rely on what you think is real, and that you may not have as much free will as you think. So obviously I’m a big fan of Philip K Dick.
Spending two years with basically nobody other than three other people in a relatively confined environment…that’s a pretty intense prospect. Are there three people who you could do that with?
Hey, I’m doing that already. I work from home. My commute is literally a walk up the stairs. I do force myself to leave the house from time to time, to walk among the other humans, but I can go a long time without speaking to anyone.
So I’m like Gilly in that regard: I’m pretty content by myself, just building things.
I would like an internet connection, though. In Providence, they only get to sync occasionally. That wouldn’t be great.
Providence seems to be a strong critique against war and those who have a financial (or I suppose ideological in the case of the military) stake in war, yet it also paints the war as a necessary evil, how do those messages interact, to you?
That’s correct: I view war as a necessary evil that is also always terrible, corrupt, and unjust. I’ve been listening to a lot of Dan Carlin’s history podcasts lately and I’m always amazed by stories of some cultured, advanced civilization running up against a bunch of bloodthirsty militants and getting annihilated. You somehow think the nicest or most ethical civilization will prevail. But of course it often doesn’t, and sometimes it’s the opposite, where the winner is whoever was willing to commit the worst atrocities. Then losers get wiped out, and nobody cares about their advanced judicial system or whatever because they couldn’t survive.
Finally, tell us what you’re reading right now!
I just finished 11/22/63, which is probably the twentieth Stephen King novel I’ve read, but the first for years. That was really good and made me go back and read Cujo, too, which was also great. I can’t get over the confidence with which King writes. It’s really something. And I discovered Ed McBain recently, who wrote incredibly sexist but very funny potboilers in the 50s and 60s. Next up I have Recursion by Blake Crouch, because I keep hearing good things about it. Don’t let me down, Crouch.
You can find Max on Facebook, Twitter and at his website.
