On The Spot at BSC – John Meaney interview

There’s a new Master of the Dark Fantasy genre, and his name is John Meaney, the author of the Nulapeiron novels, compared favorably to Frank Herbert’s Dune books and made up of the trilogy Paradox, Context, and Resolution, as well as the novel To Hold Infinity. The novels I’ve personally read and will focus most of this interview with Mr. John Meaney on are Bone Song and Black Blood (released in England as Dark Blood).  The first two of three novels of a series are set mainly in the necropolis of Tristopoils on an alternate Earth where it rains down liquid mercury and where bones provide the city’s electric power, fueling the reactors by supernatural means. 
 
Bone Song and Black Blood are strange but highly engaging and brilliant blends of the Dark Fantasy, Horror, and Crime genres forming intellectual Molotov cocktails that will explode (in a good way) in your brain, causing visions of zombies to dance in your head.  This is sort of like the outcome of my last experiment, but I used cocktails genetically altered with Barbary Ape DNA, and the result was trash-talking flying monkeys that were deadly accurate at throwing their own feces at their human targets.  I’ve heard they’ll be used in Iraq, once all of the bugs are worked out, but that’s a different story.
 
I want to thank to Meaney for granting yours truly this interview!  Without further ado, it’s on to the questions!
 
Professor Crazy - They say you can’t always judge a book by its cover, but, at their best, fantastic artwork on the covers of books help attract readers and add some eye candy appeal to fans.  I’ve got to say that I really loved the cover art of both Bone Song and Black Blood. 
 
Do you have the final say on what art appears on the covers of your novels, or is that left up to your publishers?
 
John Meaney - My contribution for Bone Song and Black Blood was limited to exclamations of: “My God, guys, those covers are gorgeous!”

And you’re right… If you’re walking into a bookstore and considering books by authors new to you, what catches your eye first? While you don’t judge a book by its cover, you might wonder whether terrific art means the publisher thought it worthwhile to pay extra for talented work.

The previous four books featured art by Jim Burns (the UK’s answer to Michael Whelan), and we swapped phone calls on each project, because Jim likes to be accurate. I loved them enough to buy two of the originals!

Professor Crazy - Bone Song features Lieutenant Donal Riordan (as does Black Blood), and he is charged with the task of protecting a famous opera singer from being murdered.  Other celebrities have met this fate, killed right in front of their adoring fans, without anyone knowing what happened.  We learn that the fans have been ensorcelled to do the dirty work of a group of people called the Black Circle.
 
For anyone reading this not familiar with Bone Song, who are the Black Circle, and why would they want to murder talented celebrities?

 
John Meaney - They’re not the Black Circle! Not really…

Of course, that’s how they’re known in the books, but it’s the cops’ nickname, not their own. If you suspect a widespread conspiracy whose members are highly placed in society – and in many countries – you have to come up with some catchy label.

Both books feature mages whose abilities include manifesting quantum superposition in the macroscopic world (although the word ‘quantum’ never appears). In Tristopolis, necroflux reactors, necromagnetic locks and elevators powered by imprisoned wraiths are commonplace technology – so mages’ powers of ensorcelment come from a gritty, robust and technical body of knowledge. Those who belong to the Black Circle play centuries-old games of politics and corruption.

The city’s power comes from the reactor piles, each containing the bones of a thousand dead, where necroflux standing waves bounce back and forth inside resonance cavities, building up energy. Those waves act on tiny patterns laid down in the bones during life, replaying an awful chaos of fragmented thoughts and feelings.

Consummate artists, during life, cause minute interference patterns of exquisite beauty to occur in their bones. After death, their bones are kept separate – not used as fuel – providing a means for sensitive people to lose themselves in a wonderful trance, lost in the dead artist’s dreams.

Some of the Black Circle (and some of their rich associates) long to enjoy such dreams. But if the object of their affection is still alive, how much more convenient if the artist were to die at a moment of one’s choosing, and in a way that allows you ownership of their bones…

Professor Crazy –  A cool touch in Bone Song is when Riordan finds that he can hear bones talking to him; revealing their secrets to him, singing to him, in italicized words that play through his mind, as he does things like run through the catacombs of Tristopolis.
 
How does Donal gain this ability?

 
John Meaney – Donal meets the director of one of the subterranean reactor complexes, a man called Malfax Cortindo, who tricks Donal into holding a dead artist’s knucklebones. In the complex, stray necroflux is strong in the air. At first it appears that the bones and the place are the only causes of the change in Donal.

However, Donal later realizes that Cortindo is an enemy. Donal’s ability to hear the bones goes side by side with the mage using him as a focus for ensorceling others, and to track him when he flees with the Diva who’s under threat.

So it wasn’t just touching the bones that altered Donal – there was additional ensorcelment, plus something else that’s not explicit: Donal’s driven personality, a result of his tough orphanage upbringing, was a necessary factor.

Professor Crazy – There are several examples of supernatural characters you have in both Bone Song and Black Blood.  For instance, there are various types of wraiths used by humans to run mechanical devices like cars and elevators.  Also, another example are zombies; but, they’re not your typical, brain-eating, garden-variety type.  They’re dead people who have enhanced strength, agility, and other special attributes, as long as they maintain their bodies and don’t let their muscles begin to atrophy too badly.
 
The most important zombie to the plot of Bone Song is Commander Laura Steele, who becomes Donal’s team leader as they go after the Black Circle and try to prevent the deaths of yet more celebrities.  She’s important because if her black zombie’s heart hadn’t been transplanted into Donal, showing her ultimate love for him, Riordan would have died and there wouldn’t have been a sequel to Bone Song.

Could you please tell our readers under what bizarre circumstances the two first met each other?

 
John Meaney - Well, after Donal fails to save the Diva, he quite naturally steals a car, dumps her corpse into the trunk, and drives into the mysterious Ironwood Forest to an isolated cottage he inherited. There, he lays out her corpse on a table, and prepares to flense her flesh from her bones…

At some point during this, the reader (hopefully) comes to realize that Donal isn’t quite himself. He has locked himself away in a cottage surrounded by lifewards, so no living being can get in to prevent what has to happen.

Before he can get to work on the flensing, the windows implode and a SWAT team crashes in, led by Commander Laura Steele. The stunned Donal croaks something about the lifewards, and stares at the troopers. “They’re alive,” says Laura. “It’s me you didn’t count on.”

Just your typical boy-meets-zombie-girl, love-at-first-sight meeting…

Professor Crazy - When the mayor and police chief are assassinated at an awards ceremony for Riordan, despite the efforts of Donal and police stationed all around the building to prevent such an occurrence from happening, zombies who had been members of the kitchen staff are blamed and zombies all over the town become the Unity Party’s scapegoats for whatever societal ills they want to blame them for.  The Unity Party wants to strip them of their rights, even to own property, and, of course, this does not sit well with Riordan.
 
Did you set out right from the beginning to include a strong anti-discrimination message in Black Blood?  The treatment of them by the Unity Party sort of reminded me of how the Nazis made the Jews scapegoats and how they justified their persecution of the Jewish people.

 
John Meaney – I’ve visited Germany several times – I like the country – and I speak German. If you walk around Munich you experience a gingerbread town that looks just as it did in the 1930s before the Beer Hall Putsch and Hitler’s rise to power. But in one sense it’s a Disney reproduction, rebuilt after the war’s destruction.

Berlin is different, if you look closely. Outside the U-bahn subway station on the Ku-Damm, the main shopping street, is an electronic sign that displays the names of all the concentration camps. Meanwhile, in residential streets, you come across small disks set in the sidewalks outside some houses. The disks bear the names of the families dragged from their homes and taken away.

But look, here’s a less extreme example of discrimination that’s still bad enough. Both my parents were Irish, and settled in London after WWII finished. (My Dad served in the Royal Air Force.) Famously, old documentaries still show what was common in boarding houses: notices in the windows that read: No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.

So yes, I’m sensitized to discrimination and the way it escalates, and it was a natural facet for me to add to the story. The zombies are the cool undead, in some ways superior, but also easy to single out as different. And you’re right, there’s a particular resonance with the Nazis because of this: Jewish people were considered to monopolize banking and intellectual jobs, and were simultaneously considered inferior. Huh?

You know, I consider Bone Song and Black Blood reasonably light reading, but you can have fun with your brain switched on!

Professor Crazy - Here’s a relatively brief question, for a change – brevity is the soul of virtue, after all – hmmm…. so, what does that make me, I wonder?  Anyway, I mentioned earlier the Indigo colored phones. 
 
What purpose do they serve in the Unity Party’s plans to “Reach out, reach out and touch someone,” and to take over Tristopolis?

 
John Meaney –   Forget brevity… I like your questions! They’re thoughtful and spring from your reading of the books, so thank you, Professor.

So the indigo phones come from a new supplier, the new kid on the block of phone companies. It just happens that their subscribers become happy people who smile a lot, and their health has improved. Oh, and their minds are now subject to commands delivered down the phone line.

There’s a hypnotist called Derren Brown, famous on British TV, who reproduces all sorts of strange phenomena, with the strict proviso that everything is based on psychological techniques, no mysticism. One of his series featured, in every episode, a ringing public phone, which sooner or later a passer-by would answer… and immediately slump into trance. Brown’s expertise is terrific, while his shows can be (deliberately) disturbing.

An even more famous TV hypnotist is a gentleman called Paul McKenna, who long ago switched from light entertainment to using his powers for good, in the self-help arena. (As a writer of self-help books, he’s the UK’s no. 1 non-fiction author.) As it happens, I’ve trained with Paul, and even assist on some of his live training events.

Which is another way of saying that I know hypnosis over the phone is possible, because I’ve done it.

So, Professor, just look into my eyes, only the eyes, that’s right…

Professor Crazy - What was the first novel you wrote, what was it about, and when was it published?
 
John Meaney – To Hold Infinity was the first of my novels to appear in the UK (in 1998), but the fourth to appear in the States. It just worked out that way.

It’s set in the Pilots future history, which is also the backdrop for the Nulapeiron trilogy. The Pilots are the only ones who can traverse mu-space – I go beyond using ‘hyperspace’ as a plot shortcut, and consider an ur-continuum with fractal dimensions underlying all the other universes.

In the first novel, Pilots make only occasional onstage appearances. They are cool dudes.

The story takes place on the world of Fulgor, where the elite Luculenti have brains extended by processors called plexcores. One of their number is Rafael de la Vega, a rogue psychopath who dispatches his victims via electronic telepathy and grows ever less human. His nemeses are an Earthborn immigrant, Tetsuo, and Tetsuo’s widowed mother Yoshiko (the real heroine of the story) who comes to Fulgor following her bereavement, looking to mend bridges with her estranged son. Instead she finds Tetsuo missing, the subject of a homicide investigation.

She tries to navigate through a strange, fast-moving, ultra-rich society, while Tetsuo finds himself among near-outlaws in the non-terraformed hypozones. Other conspiracies come to a head alongside de la Vega’s showdown with Yoshiko.

Yoshiko’s a retired biologist with a martial arts background. Rafael de la Vega is a hugely talented bad guy. The backdrop was described as ‘post-cyberpunk’ – a rich society with tawdry aspects, as opposed to only mean streets. Since I have a long background in software engineering, I dropped in fragments of program code in an invented language.

Each of the 36 chapters begins with a haiku. Although it’s never mentioned in the book, if you join the haikus together (where there are common words) they form a hypercube, which has a thematic resonance with the story.

I can be such a geek…

Professor Crazy - I noticed that you’re a Roger Zelazny fan.  I, also, really like his novels, especially the Nine Princes in Amber series. 
 
What other authors and novels have been major influences for you?
 
John Meaney – Ah, Nine Princes in Amber… also my favorite!

I loved Dune (which is why I nearly wept with terrified joy when several critics compared Paradox and its sequels to Frank Herbert’s masterpiece).

When I was very young, the juveniles of both Heinlein and Andre Norton totally gripped me. Nowadays they’d probably be called Young Adult, but I was seven or eight when I discovered them. RAH’S Tunnel in the Sky stands out for me, and Norton’s Beastmaster and the two Ift books.

Clifford Simak’s Time is the Simplest Thing just blew my mind when I was eleven. Maybe three years later, A.E. van Vogt’s books, especially The World of Null-A, totally captivated me. It had a huge effect at the time, and was single-handedly responsible for my interest in symbolic logic, neurolinguistics and applied psychology.

Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (nowadays that would be a single novel – they wrote them thin in those days!) sank into my brain, as did Clarke’s City and the Stars. I enjoyed Poul Anderson’s rollicking adventures. Anne McCaffrey actually created characters that were human – she’s a special case for me, because I met Anne at my first convention, and she’s wonderful: an author who inspired me in person, not just through reading their books.

I would say that in the past ten or twenty years, it’s been non-SF writers who most influenced my writing, whether we’re talking Stephen King, James Lee Burke or John Irving. Of course I still enjoy the heck out of recent SF and fantasy books – it’s just that you asked about major influences.

As a Brit, what helped was not a single writer but the whole SF resurgence led originally by Interzone magazine. So the simultaneous existence of Stephen Baxter, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Peter Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross gives me an enormous collective boost.

Although you’ll notice that my mind was almost totally formed from reading American authors…

Professor Crazy – Your website mentions that you enjoy participating in the martial arts.  How long have you been actively involved with that, and what is your favorite type?

John Meaney – If my choice of influential books hasn’t revealed my age, this surely will… I’ve trained in martial arts since 1972. Outside the dojo, we’re talking platform shoes and flared jeans when I went to my first classes in judo and Chinese boxing.

I’ve spent most of my time with Shotokan karate. My solo training (the vast majority) is a superposition of old-style hard karate with modern MMA (mixed martial arts) techniques – flowing from a stylized form to something more free-format and back. I use the traditional art as a kind of skeleton to hang the rest off.

So here’s an interesting parallel. Just as in recent times, my actual writing has been influenced most by non-SF writers, so everything I’ve learned in martial arts in the last fifteen years has been from MMA or krav maga (the Israeli system), despite most of my dojo time being with karate guys.

Having been an unfit geek until I was fifteen, it’s probably ego that keeps me cracking off hundreds of Hindu squats (wrestling calisthenics) and dropping into splits.

Professor Crazy - This question will wrap up the interview, John.  You’ve mentioned to me in past correspondence that the novel you’re currently working on is not the third book in the Tristopolis/Riordan series. 
 
Do you have a working title for it yet, and when can we expect its release?  Also, do you plan on continuing the Tristopolis novels in the near future?
 
John Meaney – No definite plans for another Tristopolis book, though I’ve created an outline for one, called White Bones. So it’ll happen at some point, I hope.

Well, I thought I’d been ambitious with some of my previous books, but I’m really going for it this time. The book in progress is called Absorption, being book 1 of the Ragnarok trilogy. The trilogy ends a million years after the earliest storyline begins.

All right, for most of the story, the different timelines only span a couple of dozen centuries…

It’s set in the Pilots future history, but totally subsumes the previous four books in that setting, and you can read Absorption with or without knowledge of the other books.

For the usual reasons of keeping up the psychological pressure in my head, I’ll keep it that brief for now. The pressure drives the writing, you see. Along with the coffee.
 
Professor Crazy –   Thanks once again, John, for agreeing to do this interview!  I wish you even greater success in the coming years, and am honored that you have kindly answered these questions.  I believe you are one of SciFi’s and Fantasy’s best authors of this era, and I appreciate the time you’ve taken from your busy schedule to grace our pages.
 
John Meaney – Thank you so much! My honor and my pleasure, Professor!

Absorption by John Meaney TBR 2010

About Professor Crazy

Professor Crazy here! I have obtained degrees from numerous colleges & universities both Major and Minor, with an emphasis on all of the Various & Sundry schools of Thought & Discipline. I majored in Rhetoric at the University of Illinois, obtained a Master's degree in English at Arizona State University In Tempe, AZ., and another Master's in Secondary Education at UALR, in Little Rock, AR. Then, there are the years I spent with the Swedish Bikini Team, touring throughout Europe...fond memories, those...especially that time in Amsterdam....