Meet James McNaughton, author of ''STAR SAILORS,'' an international cli-fi novel
weighs in at 0.62 kg !
And just to whet your appetite for what's in the book, here's an interview link to his publisher's website:
Many of the people in New Zealand and overseas online who were at the launch for ''Star Sailors'' were from the disaster management, resilience and risk avoidence community, keen to see a dramatization of local risks around climate change.
The novel actually got to #4 on the NZ fiction bestseller list on the back of the launch, according to the publisher. Here's hoping for an international readership , too.
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| James McNaughton (Grant Maiden Photography) |
FIRST QUESTION: Your new novel, ''
Star Sailors,''
is set in a version of Wellington in the near future where climate change has
severely changed people’s lives. Your first novel, ''New Hokkaido,'' was also set in a reimagined Wellington in
the 1980s, one in which imagines the Japanese occupied New Zealand in WWII – can
you talk about the attraction of turning Wellington on a fantastical slant like
you’ve done in two books now? What is it about speculative fiction that
motivates you as a writer?
JAMES: With New Hokkaido I wanted to try something I
hadn’t done before: a page-turner. My previous attempts at long fiction were
reflexive, digressive and plotless, so this was a big departure for me. It was
fun to go forth and tell a love/detective story, but I felt the genre
conventions a little restricting. What I like about speculative fiction is that
it offers dramatic possibilities and ways into issues that straight literary
fiction isn’t allowed.
One of the
problems with climate change as a future global catastrophe is that it’s all
rather dry and abstract. For a lot of people in first-world countries climate
change and inequality have become bothersome background noise that only sharpen
into a sense of guilt and hopelessness when attention is paid to them. To travel
into the near future transforms vague forecasts of catastrophe into something
concrete. Risk becomes reality. Star
Sailors shows the disastrous possible effects of climate change and
inequality on a day-to-day basis. But the prerequisite for any novel to
effectively tackle issues is that it be entertaining. Star Sailors is character-driven. It’s
humorous. It’s cinematic. It has momentum. It was written in the golden era of
the TV mini-series.
Star
Sailors is not a dystopia. I’ve attempted to create
a plausible geo-political 2045 in which emission reductions have not occurred.
Given the current political climate in the US, for example, this is plausible.
To imagine NZ as a haven for international elites doesn’t feel like speculation
but highly likely. (Since I started writing the novel, which imagines an elite
gated community in the Wairarapa, rich Americans have bought land there.) The
future I’ve depicted in which ‘business as usual’ prevails is distressing, but
power is never given up willingly and the science is clear that if we keep doing
what we’re doing now in terms of emissions and deforestation we are bound for
global disaster within decades.
There is a
perception that climate change is just about drought and waves beating at the
doorstep. My view is that rising sea levels, worsening weather shocks and the
spread of pests and of disease will greatly exacerbate existing problems around
fresh water, food security, migration and inequality, resulting in unprecedented
social unrest. A wheat crop failure in North America due to climate change, for
example, can affect the price of bread in Eastern Europe. Everything is linked.
There are a
couple of fantastical elements in the novel. One is the arrival of a
brain-damaged alien humanoid to New Hokitika (Hokitika has been moved to higher
ground and become a rain holiday destination for Australians). The helpless
humanoid becomes the property of the news arm of a transnational and a puppet
for their commercial interests.
Another element
is the idea of the super-elderly class. Out-of-control-unsustainable technology
has been described as the Frankenstein child of science, with technology’s grand
prize the end of illness and death altogether. But is vastly increased life-span
really the boon it’s made out to be? With the elite class of super-elderly in Star Sailors I’ve showed what extended
age might mean to society in terms of entrenched ideology and power. And how
creepy ancient baby-boomers might be.
QUESTION: You’ve described Star
Sailors as ''cli-fi'' (aka climate change fiction). In writing it did you research
predictions of climate change disaster or was it fairly easy to come up with
your own?
JAMES: I’ve volunteered
for the Red Cross Cred Crescent as an editor at various times, including 2004–06
when my wife-to-be was a Red Cross delegate in South Asia and we were based in
Delhi. Weather-based disasters were on the increase in the region and her job
was to advocate for those at risk. When I accompanied her on a mission to the
Maldives, I saw the vulnerabilities of low-lying communities to climate change.
The Red Cross reports I edited clearly described climate change as the major
ongoing risk in the Maldives and in the other areas in South Asia prone to
flooding and storms. Climate Change wasn’t a bourgeoisie playground or
opportunity for trolls, it was real and happening. In 2008, I volunteered for
the Red Cross in Bogota, Columbia and edited Spanish to English translations for
the South American centre for climate change, which collated and published
reports from across the continent. I’ve followed developments ever since.
I took my
predictions for 2045 to a few experts and asked them a lot of questions. Those
talks were very helpful.
Q. Is
there something in writing about the disasters of climate change that helps you
mitigate your fears about climate change?
A. No, not at all.
The more I learned about climate change while researching the novel, the worse
the situation looked. Discussing the subject with experts was especially grim.
When I started writing in 2014, climate change denial was not uncommon in
government. I thought the Paris Accord would make denial untenable for those in
power, if nothing else, but depressingly that hasn’t happened. The process of
writing hasn’t made me feel any less fearful, but a little less impotent. I’ve
tried.
Q. There have been a few
stories in the wake of the recent US elections calling for artists to write
about our current troubles. Do you feel you have a responsibility as an artist
to write about environmental and political concerns?
A. Narrative is how
we make sense of time and the world. Stories have power, and symbol, analogy and
metaphor are powerful communicators. I felt that the best contribution I could
make to raising awareness of climate change was to take the content out of
unread reports and knowledge-sharing documents into a wider discourse through
fiction about people facing the effects of climate change. The decision to write
about these issues wasn’t born out of a sense responsibility exactly, more out
of anger and exasperation if anything.
I can understand
readers avoiding social problem fiction. One of the most attractive things about
art is its exemption from having to be practically useful. You’ve got a few free
hours and don’t want to be lectured—particularly on a good cause. But at the
same time, writing which ignores the pressing concerns of the day runs the risk
of being irrelevant. It’s a balancing act for a writer. Great social problem
novels don’t preach abstract issues, they’re about people facing those issues,
like Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of
Wrath, and the work of Charles Dickens and Dostoyevsky. Social science
fiction classics, such as Gulliver’s
Travels, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are less
character-based, but work on an important level as entertainment. There’s no
point preaching to the choir or preaching to the sleeping.
VS Naipaul said
novels should be an investigation onto society, which for me describes what the
great nineteenth-century writers did best. It’s probably fair to say that the
novel has since moved to more individual concerns. It could well be time for
some writers to change focus.
Q. Climate change can be hard
to talk about and get your head around. Is it hard to write about?
A. Climate change
is difficult to talk about, partly because it’s hard to visualise and then
depressing if you persist. The inertia, denial and politicisation around it is
wearying. To research and write a novel in which things have only changed for
the worse thirty years from now was sometimes hard. But this horrible
possibility inspired me to find a story.
We need to be
worried. Emissions could quite likely continue to increase in response to
population growth and growing energy demands. War or social unrest will move
climate change to the background. Tipping points may come sooner than predicted.
The earth is a balanced system, and feedbacks (such as the effect of
disappearing ice reducing solar reflection and increasing warming) are difficult
to predict accurately.
Problems are the
beating heart of fiction, so from a writer’s point of view there’s plenty to
work with around our slide into catastrophe. Star Sailors is a Comedy plot, in the
way that War and Peace is a Comedy
plot. It’s about people finding each other in a time of trouble—it’s about love.
Climate change and inequality are Star
Sailor’s Napoleon—its one hundred Napoleons tearing up the fabric of
civilisation.
Star Sailors is available for purchase now at
the best bookshops and through online bookstore. p/b,
$35.
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