[nesfa-reading-group] Interview: Stephen Baxter on The Medusa Chronicles,

[Rebecca DeVendra]

Hi All,

I came across this interview and thought you would like to see it!

Speaking of the latest book, why don’t you tell us about *The Medusa
Chronicles*. How did the idea for this come about?

It was Alistair’s idea, I suppose, but it was more something that exploded
in the middle of an email conversation. We’ve known each other for
twenty-five years, and we email about this and that. That story, “Meeting
in Medusa,” in particular, grabbed Al at a young age. There was a
serialized version in England with great illustration in a boy’s magazine.
We were talking about this, and Al said to me, “We should do a sequel.” I
think it was just a throwaway joke, but then I thought, “Wow, hang on,
could you do that?”

So, I went to read the story, and I could immediately see how you could
develop enough material for a novel. There’s a hell of a lot in there.
Falcon’s own personal story. There’s Jupiter. There are the hints about the
conflict between man and machine in the future, which itself is a kind of
alternate history because it has a scene from 1971 that computers were
going to be like HAL in *2001*. Kind of mainframes with personalities.
Clarke didn’t really foresee the internet as we have it now, with lots of
dumb machines connected together in a kind of big smart network. So these
machines would have personalities. They would be more like HAL, maybe
embodied somehow. But that’s an alternate history, a different kind of
technological development. Then, in the background of the story as well,
there are Clarke’s general concerns and his themes. He wrote most of his
stories against the background of a world government. This story is set in
2099, and by this time there’s a mature world government in place. Once
we’re no longer fighting wars and spending money on armaments, we can spend
it on expensive space programs and cleaning up the planet and so forth.
You’ve got this very utopian picture, and a near future of how the world
could be made a better place. It’s kind of a vision that’s been lost now.
Again, it was good to go back to. All of this kind of struck me in a
blinding flash really in the first half an hour or so of reading the story.
So, I got back to Al quickly, and we started bouncing the idea backward and
forward.
Full interview: Here
<http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-stephen-baxter/>


-- 

Becky DeVendra

beckydevendra.wordpress.com

@beckydevendra
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