Abstracting Utopia: Chase Griffins Interviews Jeff Noon
Jeff Noon is an award-winning British novelist, short story writer, and playwright. He won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Vurt, the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer, a Tinniswood Award for innovation in radio drama, and the Mobil prize for playwriting. He was trained in the visual arts, and was musically active on the punk scene before starting to write plays for the theatre. His newest novel, a collaboration with Steve Beard, is called Gogmagog: The First Chronicle of Ludwich, which came out earlier this year on Angry Robot.
Chase
Most days I feel like we are sitting through something like those medieval waning days of Catholic control, when not only did the people not understand Latin but even much of the priesthood didn’t know how to read or speak the code and spoke gibberish at their congregations. Should all of us learn the new Latin, computer coding, to combat the feedback loops of control? How do we break free from all recuperation all the time?
Jeff
Well, I’m a born optimist, and a realist (perhaps the two go together?). Life now is not that different from other periods. I read a lot of novels from past days, and very often they have the same concerns as we have now, and the same joys. New forms of technology might change the way we talk to, and view, each other; but so did the invention of the alphabet, and the printing press, and oil paints, etc., etc. As soon as you turn away from the internet, then life resets in a single day. If you see the internet as boring (which I do, increasingly), and you have other activities in place that aren’t boring, that are in fact incredibly exciting, and you then move towards those activities, and keep moving towards them every day, more and more… well, everything changes. You see life in a different way, you talk to people in a different way. The internet has turned into a giant self-confirmation machine. We self-confirm our beliefs in two ways: by seeking out people to agree with, and seeking people to oppose us. Both have one purpose: to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. It’s all a bit pointless. But there are other ways of learning about life, and they have existed for a very long time, and they have continuing value. I speak, in the main, of Art. Despite what the current fashion might state, there are one or two universal truths that we all share, as a human race. There are ways of focussing on those things, rather than the things that divide us. These days, I find, I want more and more to celebrate life. We all have ways of doing that. Mine is through words, through story. To seek, to seek, to seek! There is one easy and complete answer: dismantle the internet for good. View it as an interesting but failed experiment. The world would then reset, and people would act as they used to act, living in pockets of localised interest. It’s never going to happen, but it would be so exciting if it did! What an act of collective courage that would be. The shadowy bulk of the internet is hiding a much better technology, that is moving further and further away from us, down a pathway not taken.
Chase
If you could resurrect Borges, in a way that wouldn’t bring about all kinds of unintended Pet Cemeteryesque consequences, and he was down to collaborate on a novel with you, would you do it, and what would the book be about?
Jeff
I love this question. Borges is very important to me, a source of early inspiration. Literally, in the sense that, in my youth, I tried to write stories in his style. Terrible stories, I should add. The first thing to say is that Borges never wrote a novel, only short stories, poems, and essays. He invented novels, and then wrote short stories describing the novels. A fantastic way of doing things. So I could write a novel, and he could write the story describing that novel. But my novel would be a very long description of his short story. We would keep this a secret, keep it ambiguous. Only by reading both works in a certain way would the truth be revealed: a third book exists, created by the interlacing of the novel and the story. This third work exists only in a limbo land, that most exquisite of all limbo lands: the reader’s mind.
Chase
If humanity can make it over this hyperobject hump, and we make it, what do you think the world will look like in a hundred years? What do you think something-kinda-close-to-utopia looks like?
Jeff
Using cultural and historical records—diaries, novels, films, paintings, photos, news reports, etc.—we can look at how people behaved and thought in 1024, 1124, 1224, 1324, 1524, 1624, 1724, 1824, and 1924. Are we really any different, in any of those eras? No. The surface changes, a little. So, in 2124, I’m certain we will be acting the same way we always have. We will face difficulties, we will make mistakes, we will invent amazing things, and so on. We will wage war; we will fight for peace. People always like to imagine they are living in the end times; it gives them the feeling of being important, of being at the end of a glorious story. New technologies will change some things, yes, absolutely, but not by a huge degree. Even something incredible like extending life beyond the flesh, as an upload, will become part and parcel of normal life, and we will continue to love and hate, as we see fit, as we choose. As a writer, I have no interest at all in dystopias or utopias: society is messy, never perfect, never ruined. The job of the novelist is to examine that messiness, and make a story from it.
Chase
Do you have any advice for weirdo writers just beginning their careers?
Jeff
I was looking at a number of YouTube videos with titles like: “Write the first draft of your novel in twenty minutes using ChatGPT. I show you how.” Most of the comments were in favour of this. One said something like, “I’ve been trying to write a novel for years now, and failing miserably. Your video is going to help me so much!” That made me smile. It’s the mechanisation of the creative process. It allows a person to put their name to a book on Amazon. It’s similar to a teenager daubing their name on a wall: I am here, I have value! Now, I won’t use AI to write, for a simple reason: I love the physical process of writing. I just love it! I love to have an idea pop into my head. I love to expand that idea, to create a series of events and a set of characters, to bring the story to life chapter by chapter. I love to write the first draft, the second draft, the third draft. I love to receive editing notes, and put them into practice. I love to sprinkle on the final magic dust. Everything. Not one part of it bores me. Every part of it gives pleasure. It is my life. Using AI would remove a lot, if not most, of that physical pleasure. So, quite simply, it’s not good enough, it doesn’t reach the pleasure level that I require. I totally understand that a great novel might be created or part-created by AI one day, but for me, personally, the physical act is all-important, it’s fundamental.
I’m in my 60s now. I do think novels still have value. They are unlike any other art form: they give the reader a very particular feeling. They are very, very good at capturing the inner life, the hidden personality, especially the way the inner life copes with the outer world, and vice versa. Reading older books, classics, I’ve noticed that a lot of emotions have vanished from the present-day novel; that fictional characters express fewer emotions now, and that these remaining emotions are much simpler in nature. (I’m speaking of both popular novels and literary novels, equally.) Where did those emotions go? That’s interesting to me. Post-modernist flatness used to be exciting; now it’s boring. I want more.
Advice? Be brave, be courageous, create a unique voice for yourself, something unsaid in the entire history of the universe. Let the machines follow you, not you follow them. Throw away all fashions. Love language as much as a painter loves oil paint: it has beauty both in and of itself, as well as a being a medium for stories. Invent your own creative method, keep it a secret (I did this for forty years, before I started talking about it, and sharing it with friends). There is a borderland between shared ideas, and unique ideas. All the great art exists on that borderline. Aim to live there.