Interview: Paul McAuley

Interview with the award winning sci fi writer and new Who author.

How did you come to write this novella?

I've known David Howe for a while, but we got serious about my doing something for Telos after he published my friend Kim Newman's wonderful Doctor Who novella Time and Relative.One of David's great charms is that he is pretty open-minded and very encouraging about welcoming people to the Doctor Who franchise, but is also very serious about the quality and originality of what he publishes.

He asked me to write an Eighth Doctor novella, but apart from that (and some excellent editing) I was pretty much given my head, and the wonderful thing about the Doctor Who franchise is that it is a very open format that can accomodate all kinds of stories.

Like many science fiction writers of a certain age, Doctor Who had a big influence on my childhood. I can't remember if I saw the first airing of the very first Doctor Who episode, or if I saw the repeat the week after, but I do remember hearing the news of Kennedy's assassination, which is *why* that first episode had to be repeated.

I do remember being scared behind the sofa by William Hartnell's minatory Doctor (a lot scarier and more convincingly authoritarian than the Daleks), but that didn't stop me becoming hooked. I caught just about every episode until I went to University when I stopped watching all TV for about five years.

As a writer used to establishing your own universes, how did you approach the constraints of the Whoniverse?

The great thing about Doctor Who is that it is a terrific story-generating machine - the only real constraints are what's happened in the Doctor's long and intricate back story, and his refusal to use violence as an easy solution - which is a very useful constraint, as it stops you from taking the lazy way out when the Doctor confronts a problem. As far as I'm concerned, the most interesting thing about the Doctor is the way he uses his intellect to find a way out of the problems he falls into. He's also a very strong moral force - he has a clear sense of right and wrong (we're lucky he likes humans a lot), and sticks to it, which is why he got into so much trouble with the Time Lords in the first place.

In terms of time, place and theme, the franchise hands the writer all of human history and the whole galaxy to play with, and it gave me the opportunity to play with and update the conventions of a good old-fashioned space adventure.

Do you find writing to this length a constraint or a challenge?

Like most science fiction authors I've written quite a few novellas (by coincidence, a kind of ghost story, A Child of the Stones should be posted on the scifi.com site at about the same time as publication of the Telos novella). Someone or other once said that at between 20,000 and 40,000 words, the novella was the ideal length for science fiction, as it allows the author to explore a single idea without too much digression or subplot, and at 60,000 words many classic science fiction novels from the 1950's and '60's aren't much longer than the longest novellas.The major constraint of the form is that of sticking with the main idea, and trying not to get distracted by other ideas that pop up along the way. My idea was to tell the story from the point of view of one of the Doctor's temporary associates; to show why he came aboard the TARDIS, and give a convincing reason why he would want to leave.

The challenge was to keep up the momentum that I remember from the best Doctor Who stories without adding so much baggage that the story could not be neatly resolved. I don't know how well I succeeded, but I had a lot of fun trying.

What would you say is the trick of writing a good spin-off story?

First, being able to accurately reproduce the voice of the character, and second, to find the right angle of attack - a way of finding a way of introducing the character to the story.In this case, it was the idea that the relationship between the Doctor and his companions often resembles that of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, and to show how this could develop during an adventure.

The theme of people being changed crops up a lot in your work. What's the fascination with it?

It's one of the Big Themes of science fiction: a sort of variation on the Horatio Alger myth at the heart of the American Dream, that we can transcend our origins, and we all have a shot at becoming President of the World, the magic kid who is the secret master of the Solar System, or immortal gods, or whatever.The latest word for it is 'transhumanism', and it is bursting with science fictional story ideas. What happens if you get your heart's desire and discover that it wasn't what you wanted after all? What happens if you are the magic kid but don't know or realise it (the theme of my Confluence trilogy)? What happens if things don't always get better? It's the secret throb of science fiction, and it's inexhaustible.

What were the reasons behind the Indian Raj setting of the novella's opening?

Well, I wanted to write about someone turning into a tiger, so I thought it had better start off in India. And in the late Raj it was possible (not exactly likely, but possible) that a colonial officer and a native policeman would go off to investigate a man-eating tiger. In earlier periods, the local Nawab or prince and at least several high-ranking army officers would have become involved in a big social hunt, along with a crowd of society chums, servants, and native shikaris.Also the decay of the colonial society in the late Raj is a mirror of the decay of society aboard the spaceship; I'm very interested, or at least, I keep writing stories about, societies that are beginning to fall apart, that are coming apart at the seams but still retain their shape. Something to do with my childhood in 1960's Britain, perhaps. Aside from that, I think I was tapping into vague memories of stirring tales of colonial adventure that I read when I was a kid, the kind of pulp stories that still seem wonderful, as long as you never go back to them.

What are your worst habits as a writer?

The first and perhaps worst is the very common sin of prevarication - spending too much time doing anything else other than sitting down in front of the pad of paper/typewriter/computer and getting on with it.The second is a variant on the prevarication theme: the temptation to keep rewriting. After a while, rewriting really isn't going to make things better but is probably going to make things get worse - that's when you have to bite the bullet and let go.

What do you think the role of the small presses like Telos is in British sci-fi today?

I think they're essential for helping to preserve science fiction's diversity. Science fiction is a unique genre in that a high percentage of its writers start out as short story writers. Small presses like Telos, and small press magazines like Interzone, are cauldrons where the soup of genre is stirred and refreshed.

Are you planning to do any more Who, if you get the chance?

I buried a very small hook for a sequel at the end - the black hole, the Eye of the Tyger, is a kind of time machine, and I'm interested in finding out what happens when the people Fyne is charged with looking after escape it, at the end of the Universe.What happens if they challenge the Time Lords for control of time and space? And what happens to the Doctor then?

What else should we look out for from you at the moment?

There's the novella [A Child of the Stones] on scifi.com, a collection of short stories, Little Machines, due out from PS Publishing in 2004, and a novel, White Devils, in February 2004.And [theres] the novel I'm working on right now, but I can't talk about that because I do not know as much about it as I should.

• Paul McAuley
  

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.