I can hear you
by uzwi
Metaphysics: a brand that has sheltered a billion crazed subjectivities & subjective epistemes, emerging from scarified metaphors, mad culty insights, wonky observations, unbalanced personal alchemies & dogmatically institutionalised intuitions about the shapes of things & how they bolt one to another in the service of human “existence”. I love it all & I especially love the imagery that spills from it in torrents. It’s a whole Woolworths of pick n mix. I love it for all the reasons I love physics, but I don’t mistake the one for the other as a description of how things work; nor am I really interested in a particular metaphysics, or the history of metaphysics as a singular discipline or single object of study. I’m just on the lookout for a glittery concept, a slippery notion, or a deeply debatable cognitive structure I can make fiction with. What I want is to stumble over ideas that have sudden hi-res qualities and instant impact. An idea that has that kind of force, & that immediately charms me by entangling with metaphors I’ve already made, will find itself in a month or so part of the personal pathology of a short story about something else entirely. I’m a user of metaphysics, not even an amateur. I’m a user of physics too. I’ve not been the same person, let alone the same writer, since I discovered that a percentage of white noise injected into the input can, counterintuitively, amplify frequencies previously too faint to hear. Culturally, writers & readers operate in the same kind of noise-rich environment as electric fish. They live in a similar neurobiological arms race. Since Alastair Reynolds explained neurobiological stochastic resonance to me 20 years ago, my definition of a science fiction writer has been: someone who’s acutely aware of a concept like that even as they write something that never even mentions it.
the m john harrison blog 
Or someone who makes the concept a profound structural element of the story, replacing the usual formal structures of fiction, without ever referring to it.
“….but I don’t mistake the one for the other as a description of how things work.”
Mike, would you say your position is not relativist?
You use science, metaphysics, gnosticism, etc in an aesthetic way, but you’re not saying they’re equivalent?
There is a difference between truth and fiction?
One of the exciting and frightening aspects of Sunken Land was the way that you compared conspiracy theories to works of literary fiction. In a self-deprecating joke you almost seem to compare the central conspiracy theory to the book itself. They share similar techniques.
Ive been turning this over in my mind ever since.
I’m interested in how your ideas have developed or changed over your career, because reading your old interviews it’s amazing to me how similar your views were back then.
Has the current climate of fake news and potty conspiracy theories changed your views or confirmed them?
One of the exciting things about Sunken Land was the way that your ideas have collided with our political moment.
Btw, thanks for Sunken Land. It was brilliant and has completely fried my brains.
Hi David. I’m so glad you liked The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again.
I don’t think physics and metaphysics are equivalent, no.
I’ve always had anxieties about “truth”, a word that really only seems useful in law courts (where it’s the opposite of “lies”, & implies that testimony is the most important way information about the world can be gained & processed) and religious tracts, where it’s opposed to the testified beliefs of some other faith, and truth-claims are brands.
You don’t ask a builder if an arch is the “truth” about something: you just want to know if he can build one.
And if you don’t want Donald Trump’s “truth”, you don’t want anyone’s, really, do you? For instance, there must be some other way of gaining knowledge about a pandemic than via campaign rhetoric? It’s a matter of episteme and register. Babel and relativism ensure the death of the “scientific” episteme and the redistribution of its remains into the waters of conspiracy theory. Neither “truth” nor fact is available under Babel: only someone’s story and someone else’s take on the story and someone else’s take on the take.
As such, the fantasy-world (in the sense that it is founded on and trades in fantasy explanations, a form of politics that evolves visibly from internet-driven fiction to LARPing to the real thing) of the populists seems to have produced a very expensive IRL re-enactment of the issues floated in “Egnaro” —or in Jack Womack’s novels—in the early 80s. So, as you point out, my position hasn’t really changed much. I suspect that’s because conditions haven’t changed either, except in degree or intensity. What was just about discernible then turned out to be the leading edge of what we have now.
I think novelists are some of the best-placed writers to think about this and—being daily aware of the interface between the fictional and nonfictional—have something like a duty to provide analysis. I’m aware that the above is a bit un-nuanced in its attempt to express the core of the position. In The Sunken Land, using shifts of tone & register & and the equation of fiction with conspiracy theory, I tried to give a subtler feeling of where we are.