The saying goes that art imitates life. Except when it’s the other way around. Max Barry’s latest book, The 22 Murders of Madison May, follows journalist Felicity who becomes dragged into the pursuit of a man hunting the same woman (Madison May) across multiple realities. While I am not a serial killer—I promise!—I doggedly chased an in-person interview with him as a follow up to the Q&A we exchanged last year for the release of his previous book, Providence, in a way that feels oddly appropriate to Barry’s newest release. Lexicon is one of the books I immediately nominate when people request a sci-fi recommendation, and Providence was one of my favourite reads last year, so I was more than keen to have the opportunity to speak with him.
Fortunately, I rein in any and all serial killer energy (I hope) when we meet via Zoom on a sunny morning in early Winter. Most of his author pictures are of a who stares at the camera with an intensity that appears almost self-conscious, even when smiling. Yet from the get-go, he’s warm, thoughtful, and smiles with a frequency emphasised by the laugh-lines across his face. He speaks with a reflective humbleness, that is balanced against the confidence that comes with an established and successful career in his chosen field.
And Barry’s career is indeed an impressive one. His first novel, Syrup, was published in 1999 and adapted into a 2013 film of the same name. To promote his second book, Jennifer Government (2003), he created NationStates, an online national simulation game, that by all definitions, is successful in its own right. His subsequent five books have achieved varying levels of commercial and critical acclaim, with the screen rights for several of them being acquired—most recently among them, the television rights for Madison May.
While he speaks in a deep, clear voice, he is generous with his answers, and enthusiasm for what he does suffuses his demeanour. Above all, he comes across, both online and in person, as a reflective person whose interest in the world around him is concentrated into the stories he produces.
That reflection can be seen in his blog posts (“I’m pretty old school in that I still enjoy writing long form more than tweets”); he’s unafraid to consider himself and his own work. He wrote about Jennifer Government that he most appreciates “it’s crazy, oblivious energy. It’s not always great from a technical perspective […] But it has a wild abandon that works because it doesn’t much care about its missteps.” I quote the blogpost back to him and he smiles: “When you’re young, and you’re just entering this field, you don’t know what’s right and wrong, according to the established custom. And so you just sort of do stuff. And everything that we do as artists is this gravity defying process where you have to try to walk out from the cliff and not fall. And you’re suspending yourself just from sheer hubris or your own conviction that what you’re doing makes sense. When you’re younger, I think it’s easy to do that, to have that kind of diluted sense of, ‘this is fantastic what I’m doing, of course, this makes sense.’ And now that I’m 48, it’s probably harder for me to avoid being more reasonable or sensible, and so you are more critical.”
Barry describes his pathway to publication as “bumbling around rather than any clever strategy.” Because he was querying in the nineties, “it was really just writing letters,” until one of the New York agents he contacted “liked the letter enough to see some sample chapters. And then that guy did an amazing job of representing my book.”
I think a lot of established authors often forget how special it is to get a publishing contract at all, let alone the rush that accompanies your first book going into the world. Despite the intervening years and success, his voice takes on a softer quality as he recalls the start of his career. “It was really exciting,” he says. “It’s that that time where you’re a new author with a hot book. I will never experience that again, no matter what, because you’re this unknown quantity.” He smiles at the memory. “I was living in Perth at the time, having these midnight phone calls with people. It was really wonderful.”
It’s interesting to speak with someone whose career is so established. Most authors will tell you that their process changes from book to book—sometimes subtly, sometimes significantly. But a 22-year career means Barry has a good length of time to review and consider how he’s developed and changed as an author. “I used to avoid planning at all,” he admits, going to note, “I feel confident enough [now] that I can do a bit of planning without completely destroying the things that make the story feel real, and the characters feel real […] There is a constant push and pull between what the characters want to do to be real people and what you want to do as the author to make the plot interesting. And it’s a really delicate balance.”
That balance is something he worked hard to achieve in Madison May, the premise of which he had “kicked around for years, like five years, ten years, and could never quite find a way into.” The reflectiveness re-emerges as he looks at the intersection of his interest in the premise of parallel lives and worlds with his personal life:
“I’m at the point now, where I feel like, my life is kind of set, like, I’ve made all my choices about what kind of career I’m going to have, what kind of family I’m going to have […] So I start thinking about how it got here. And how much of that was due to my choices and how much was fate or things out of my control.” He tells me that as he played with the premise, he arrived at the idea of a man trapping a woman in a house (which is the first chapter of the book), which “immediately that solved a whole bunch of problems for me, and also exposed the type of story that I really liked, the type of science fiction I like, which is where there’s a science fiction concept, but you can’t see it.”
He goes on to note that while the science-fiction concept and mechanic exists, a great deal of the content bears remarkable similarity to real life – a man obsessively hunting down a woman and inflicting violence onto her—but “made them even bigger because of the concept.” It’s a demonstration that Barry has a deliberate and conscious understanding of his craft, not just from a story structure sense, but from a perspective of the genre’s conventions.
In my review of Madison May, I made the observation that, while there are very few new ideas, something about the way Barry constructs his concepts, premises, and narratives has a unique feel. He himself articulates what it is in particular about his latest book that takes the concept of moving through parallel worlds and gives it a fresh feel: “I really like that it was a ‘what if’ story that was forward looking, because all of my previous iterations of this idea tended to naturally look backwards; be someone who was looking at a different version of their life or trying to fix something that went wrong or, and I didn’t want to write that sort of story.” I comment that the premise of alternative universes in Madison May felt really tightly constructed. He gives a little laugh:
“It appears that way; it took a lot of drafts to convey that impression.” He tells me he produced “pages of notes” to ensure he had a clear and specific understanding of how the mechanics of his concept work “logically and consistently”, so the story can flourish within the framework of the concept. It’s the kind of writing I really like, and that I do to a lesser extent in my own fantasy writing, so it makes inherent sense to me. But this is next level. Partly, it’s the difference in our genres, but partly (and obviously), it’s the difference of that many years honing your craft to tease out a concentrated, tight story. “When it’s a good concept, then there are really interesting implications from that idea,” he explains. “You don’t keep adding complications, but rather you keep exploring the implications of the core idea. That’s what makes a good idea for me, when it’s something that it’s a simple idea. You can articulate it pretty cleanly. But the deeper you go into it, the more interesting doors it opens.”
Yet while there is clearly a lot of thinking, research, and reflection that goes into the construction of the story’s premise, unlike much sci fi which can focus almost exclusively on the premise at the expense of significant character development, Barry, as he himself said earlier, works to create characters that are ‘real people,’ even if they aren’t always completely likeable. “I quite like stories where there is a really cold, unfeeling framework that people have to find their humanity inside,” he admits. Constructing a story like that allows for really interesting character growth. I comment that I found Madison May’s protagonist, Felicity, a bit unlikeable at the beginning of the story, and his interest sharpens. After a moment of consideration, he comments that he particularly enjoys constructing a narrative in which a potentially unlikeable character is “getting hammered by more powerful forces, [because they suddenly become] so likeable and sympathetic.”
How people respond to more powerful forces—especially forces that are cold and unfeeling and distinctly non-human, is something Barry himself admits he finds “endlessly fascinating” and which has “stuck with me my whole career”.
“We all tend to have this idea that we’re perceiving reality and that’s an objective thing. […] And the reality is, everything is way more subjective than we think. Our own memories and our own thoughts are being cranked through this very fallible machine that gets all kinds of stuff wrong all the time,” he explains. I ask about AI and its intersection with this, as AI was a core component of the story in Providence. He shifts in his chair, as though settling to really dive in to the subject, and he admits, “it hits upon a few of my favourite things about human perception and capitalism and how people work in groups.” This is clearly something about which he’s thought a great deal. “It’s like a bomb where we don’t really understand what will happen when it goes off. It plays on […] this wrong idea of our own infallibility, where we feel like we can perceive the risks properly, but humans are terrible at perceiving risk properly,” he says, going on to add, “it’s going to hit upon our biases of expecting non-human things to think and feel like humans.”
He must see my expression of horror, because he reassures me, “we’re a long way away from getting any of that right,” but given we’ve just been talking about humans’ inclination to delude themselves about the scope and immediacy of risk, I wonder if the reassurance is a collective delusion between the two of us.
When I ask what he’s currently working on, he’s polite, but firm: “I won’t be talking about it until it’s done.” Given he’s admitted his experience is that “I find the first draft to be the one where I can get stuck for long periods of time,” because “I never know how far down the road I am with an idea until, you know, suddenly it starts working,” it’s a fair comment. However, he also notes that we talking about a work in progress, “the second it comes out of your mouth, I feel like half the magic flies away.” The only clue as to what it might be about is from an earlier part of our conversation when he let slip, “AI, I’m always interested in writing about it. And the book I’m working on at the moment may be returning to sort of that idea.”
“I’m also at the point now, where I really enjoy the process of writing just for myself now.
I could, you know, much more happily now write a book and get to the end and feel like that was a great book and put it in a drawer never to be seen again,” he adds.
At the end of the day, we all write for ourselves, really. But it’s easy to lose that as writing becomes not only a career, but a successful one. To hold on to what excites you, what interests you, and what you love about your craft is something special, and I think that translates across to Barry’s books. Certainly it’s what came across in our conversation, and one of the reasons it was such a treat to sit down with him.
