- Jeanette, welcome to Waterstones first of all. - Thank you.
I've been asking authors for the last few years about the the novels that inspire them and the one
book that has come up more than any other is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and
I wondered if I could ask you first of all, what is it about that book that inspires
authors so much and in particular that sort of inspired you to write Frankissstein.
It's a book that becomes more and more prescient, it's as
though she sent out a flare to the future or it was a message in a bottle
and it was thrown overboard and now as it comes to us, oh it seems to
be absolutely about the times that we're living in. We are about to create a new
kind of life form, you know, not out of the assembled parts of decayed corpses
but out of the zeros and ones of code. And she also understood the political
situation whereby most people were left behind in society, you know, she was at
the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, she could see the vast
fortunes that were being made by some and the abject misery that was being
experienced by many. Her husband Percy Shelley writing in his poem The
Masque of Anarchy has the line that everybody quotes at the moment 'We are
many, they are few.' That you could rise up as they did at Peterloo. Of course you
can't now because everything has changed. It doesn't matter how many we
are because the elites have the power in a way that Mary Shelley was terrified of.
This was just after the French Revolution, there's a real feeling that
society could become more egalitarian, that there might be liberty, fraternity,
and equality - not for women of course because they still didn't count -
Mary Shelley's own mother Mary Wollstonecraft had written her own
diatribe about this - A Vindication of the Rights of Women - so it was in this
cauldron of women's rights, of equal rights, the idea that human beings
actually had rights. This is where it starts. And in Frankenstein itself of
course the monster is entirely disenfranchised, he has no rights. It
doesn't really exist because he's been made by Victor Frankenstein
but also Victor Franklin doesn't bother to educate his monster. This is one of
the things that's very sad in the book. And we see the position of women in
society who were not educated, you know Mary Shelley really put her own position
her own situation, the situation of women really into the situation of the monster.
Somebody who is outside of society, is overlooked, ostracised, not educated,
above all not educated in any feeling. What Mary Shelley really understood
was that intellect on its own, unconnected to or disconnected from a
feeling tone is baleful and malign and causes far more trouble than perhaps
just the sort of bumbling inefficiencies of ignorant people.
So she really talks about that and I think our society now feels like that. We
do feel atomised, remote, excluded, baffled by much of what is going on around us in
the way that the monster feels baffled by what is going on around him. He looks
and he can't understand. We look and we can't understand. We are in the hands of
an elite whose interests are not ours.
You raise, as Mary Shelley did in her
book, you raise so many interesting topics in this novel. There's a
question that one of your characters asks and I'm actually going to put this
question to you to see what your answer to that question would be.
Your character Victor asks Ry, 'If you were certain that by disrupting
everything you take for granted about the mind, about the body, about biology,
about death, about life; if you were certain that such disruption would bring
about a personal, social, global utopia, would you risk it?' - Would you risk it?
Yes!
Certainly. Not that I'm going to have any choice because the thing about the
future is that it happens anyway and you can't stand against it. You can
only hope to learn from the lessons of the past. And I think we are at a
unique moment in history now, this is the time that we live in, where we are going
to soon share the planet with non biological life-forms; whether as
robotics in their benign, cuddly, cutesy form or in their useful, workaday
form, or perhaps in a form which is less tolerable.
We've got sexbots already, you can buy one, you know, cheapest is $3,000 or as
expensive as $25,000. You know, it's happening, it's here.
So, yes, there will be that level of disruption but there will also be, when
it's created, pure artificial intelligence. Which will mean that we're
not the smartest thing on the planet anymore.
And as the book discusses you know would that really be such a bad thing because
we haven't been great at being Masters of the Universe.
You know it's astonishing that we've reached this point in history and most
of the planet is just still busy killing other bits of the planet or ruining it.
So I don't know which will happen first. Part of me thinks that the planet is now
so tilted and so polluted and so compromised that we will never actually
reach this tantalizingly close moment where we have the chance and it is a
chance to become a different kind of species. Because we're going to be
relating to a species which is smarter than us and we will have created it.
We're going to create our own God. Or will the planet tilt so much that in fact
we're about to be engulfed in a minute; in food and water panics, in epidemics.
And also then in the relentless rise of the right which we'll see, at the
moment there is an international emergency the right will take over and
everything will be suspended, all the things that we take for granted.
That could happen, that's very near, it's all very near. And we're all sitting here now,
it must have been like this probably before the first world war perhaps more
than the second world war where people are just going about their business
thinking, you know, it's all fine, it's a few skirmishes but it's fine. It's really not fine.
In this book with the story of Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord
Byron and then you're having a lot of fun by sort of updating those characters
with the modern day story - you seem to be having a lot of fun creatively.
Yes, I mean what's the point of being alive if you can't have fun. I'm very fortunate
and you know I'm doing work that I love. I'm in a minority on this planet:
I'm able to do something I enjoy and it gives me great pleasure. I've never
understood the business that writers are meant to be miserable or that they are
miserable. I just think well go and do something else then that'll
cheer you up a bit. For me no it's about exploring imaginative and
creative spaces and teaching myself as I do it. I mean that's the great thing, that
you learn from your books, you're forced to expand your own thinking all the time,
your own understanding as I've had to do you know with this. It's not that I
have a point of view I wanted to peddle. I wanted to show a situation and that
situation was showing it to myself as much as to the reader. So obviously
there's a lot of research in that, I've had to learn. But even in the writing of
it, it's not that you change your mind about things you just realize that there
are multiple positions. At the moment you're getting back
into a very black-and-white situation; this is right, that's wrong, you know, and
what human beings need is complexity and to be able to hold conflicting opinions
really in some sort of balance rather than just jumping for a solution because
often there isn't a solution.
There's lots to digest but primarily lots to
enjoy in this book Jeanette, so thank you so much for writing it and also for
telling us a bit more about it.
Thank you very much.