Interview w/ Edward Willett
Edward Willett is the author of Terra Insegura (see my review here) and Marseguro (see my review here), among other novels. Special thanks to Mr. Willett for doing this interview. Here goes: Can you talk a little about Terra Insegura for those that have yet to read it? Terra Insegura takes up immediately where Marseguro left off. The people of Marseguro have reason to believe that a genetically modified super-plague has made its way to Earth and have decided, even though the Body Purified, the religious dictatorship on Earth, just tried to “purify” their planet, they have to at least attempt to help by sending a vaccine. Good impulse, but things go awry when it turns out the Body Purified is not entirely destroyed yet, nor are the Selkies of Marseguro, genetically modified to be amphibian, the only new race of humans spawned by Victor Hansen, the genius geneticist who both created them and had a nasty habit of leaving clones of himself around for other people to trip over. Terra Insegura is about the battle to decide the shape of the new society about to arise on the depopulated Earth. One of the things I loved about Marseguro, and which continues in Terra Insegura, is your approach to human/Other relationships, with the Other being the Selkies (a genetically augmented human/fish race). What about science fiction makes it “easier” to address humanity’s less appealing qualities (discrimination, segregation, and even violent extermination of “the Other”)? (In your opinion, of course) One of the strengths of science fiction in general is that it allows you to strip out aspects of present-day life that in the real world are wrapped in too many layers of other stuff to be seen clearly. A story about, say, the progressives of the early 20th century who saw forced sterilization or forbidding marriage to certain types of individuals as a good way to improve society, has to deal with so much historical baggage concerning the real people and events of the time, not to mention the politics of the reader (who may not like to be told that some historical figure they revere–Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, George Bernard Shaw, etc.–had this unsavory side to them), that it can be hard to examine the central issue of eugenics clearly. Science fiction gives us a way of finding, baring and illuminating these kinds of big-picture problems so that we can look at them in a different light and perhaps gain a better understanding of the issues involved. Terra Insegura follows Marseguro, a particularly dark dystopian future/space opera, yet it takes your already established darkness to new heights. Is there some really scary part of you that just loves to put your characters through hell? Do you mentally torture little voodoo dolls? Or is all this darkness simply you way of making a darn good science fiction story? It’s funny, because while I was reading a recent thread on the SF Canada listserver about dark and dystopian fiction (prompted, I think, by the latest book by Margaret “I Don’t Write Science Fiction Because There Aren’t Any Talking Cabbages from Planet X” Atwood), I kept thinking, gee, you people are depressing. I’m glad all my fiction is upbeat! At which point a little inner voice cleared its throat and said, “Have you actually read your own last couple of books?” Really, the darkness in these two books was entirely a function of the story situation I set up. As I think I explained in the last interview, Marseguro grew out of a writing class exercise, the whole thing springing from a couple of opening sentences, one of which contained the line “the water in her gills smelled of blood.” The darkness was built into that first sentence, and the story that grew out of it just seemed to demand the level of unpleasantness I heaped on my poor characters. I’m actually a very cheerful guy. Really! As a sequel, you run the risk of falling short of the preceding novel, of letting your fans down. Terra Insegura never disappoints, and in some ways it is a superior novel to its predecessor. Was Terra Insegura planned from the start, or was it something you put together later on? How did you go about approaching the idea of a sequel and were you at all concerned about “sequelitis?” Terra Insegura was not planned from the start, and Marseguro was complete before I knew for certain I would be writing a sequel, though obviously I had hopes, since I crafted an ending on which to hang one. Outlining the sequel was really the same process as outlining the original book. Marseguro started from just a couple of sentences, as I mentioned, and I just began asking myself questions about those sentences as a way of getting to the story they implied. Terra Insegura was the same process, except I was asking myself questions about things I had mentioned in Marseguro, so I had a lot more to work with. There are always loose ends in a novel, alleyways you could have explored but didn’t, little bits of throw-away scene decoration or dialogue that you put in really as a kind of stage trick, to imply that there is more to the world than is in the foreground of the story. When I started thinking of a sequel, I looked for those bits and pieces that hinted at something more…and then developed that something more. For instance: in Marseguro, early on, there is a scene at a religious service of the Body where a genetically modified female attacks the priest and is shot down. I described her as being feline. That was a throw-away bit, really, just something to dramatize how moddies were being treated on Earth by the Body Purified. Didn’t give that poor dead moddie another thought…until I started plotting Terra Insegura. And then I remembered her and thought, wait. If there’s one feline moddie, there must be others…maybe a whole race