INTERVIEW: Me, Wok and Tony Interviewed about Bruce

Russell McGilton from RMIT interviews all three of us about Bruce (as well as asking me about Beef too!) in late 2017, uploaded earlier this year.  Thanks for the interest Russell!

HEAR (AND, IN TONY'S CASE, SEE) THE MAGIC FOR YOURSELVES RIGHT HERE!

INTERVIEW: Me on the ABC, talking Beef and Bruce and Wealthy Benefactors

The trouble with talking on the radio is they ask questions that I have no answers for ("So, what's your career plan?"), and I, being the socially-wrong terrifyingly-honest person that I am, have to answer them on the fly ("I have no plans - I'm just hoping to one day meet a wealthy benefactor and become some kind of creativity-slave.")


INTERVIEWED ON ABC RADIO


Do I appear awkward or strange?  Do I appear Aspergery or amusing?  Do I appear boring or irrelevant?  DO I APPEAR AT ALL?

You be the judge.  Eep!

Nice Review of 'Beef" by K.L. Allendoerfer

You've gotta love it when someone describes your book with phrases like "I don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite like this before, and I doubt I will again" and "the best of what science fiction and eco fiction have to offer".   At least, I gotta love it.  Woohoo!

Read the full review HERE:

'BEEF' REVIEWED BY K.L. ALLENDOERFER 

NEWS: 'Beef' scores Number One on Vegan Reading List!

Now, I'm not assuming here that the numerical value of my position is necessarily some kind of value judgment - it could just as easily be "the first thing on the list" as it could be "the very very finest wordular arrangement I've ever seen".  No assumptions are made here about the qualitative nature of this numerical listing, is what I'm saying.  It could be that I was merely lucky, or that the ordering was alphabetical (except then I would've been positioned at third place... but people do make mistakes).  It could be completely and utterly arbitrary.

But - regardless of the presence or absence of any sort of judgment-based ordering practices - 'Beef' is NUMBER ONE on this new and exciting list of "11 Best Vegan Books To Read This Summer"!  Woohoo!  Much awesomeness!

The complete list is over here:

11 Best Vegan Books To Read This Summer (Or Any Other Season, Let's Be Honest)



   

ESSAY: Over the Wall: The Power of Fictional Activism

A short piece about the oft-overlooked power of fighting the establishment, not with angry placards and cold facts, but with engaging characters and immersive storylines.  Published by the very lovely Quo online zine.

"More people have heard, and really listened to, and can sing along with “Imagine” than have ever been to one of our protests.  And it works precisely because it’s fictional – like a sci-fi novel, it merely asks the audience to “imagine” a world without countries or possessions or religion, rather than trying to make an argument using facts or figures.  It’s not presented as a fight, but an invitation"

READ IT HERE.

INTERVIEW: LV Book Design ask me about Writing

We talk about heart-warming rejections, the vortex of the research/writing cycle, the pain of editing, and the slippery moments of inspiration.

"As far as I'm concerned, I'm a very normal person. It's just everyone else that's quirky and undecipherable and irrational and were told the rules of the game and when to start playing."

LV MEETS MAT BLACKWELL

INTERVIEW: Martin C Wilsey interviews me about Beef

Sci-fi writer Martin C Wilsey interviews me for his Fast Friday Interviews segment, and we discuss Beef, writing, the internet, and being a curmudgeonly loner misanthrope.  Yay!

Revel in my scorn right here.

INTERVIEW: Geetanjali Mukherjee interviews me about Beef

An interview about Beef, in which I basically break down and writhe about on the floor complaining petulantly about the gruelling horrors of marketing (and also talk about writing, creativity, and persistence).

Read it in all its self-indulgent whingey glory here:

Interview with Geetanjali Mukherjee

NEWS: Xtian dedicates entire post to Beef!

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure here, let me just firstly say that Xtian and I have known each other for many years, and continue to make strange art together (see here, here, and here for examples), both in physical forms and in an ongoing digital Exquisite-Corpse-style mysterious-swapsies-type-art-piece/game/distraction known as the Infinite Collage (or "With Uninhibited Fingers for the Unfathomable", to give it its proper title), which is perhaps the longest piece of art in the known universe, and is viewable here.  So, point is, he's no stranger - in fact, we like each other quite a lot.  So you can take that as meaning that this review of his is meaningless or whatever, but I don't see it that way at all: after all, I never asked him for a review, and even if I did (which I didn't) he didn't have to do it, and even if he did do it (which he did), it didn't have to go into as much detail as it does, nor did it have to be so wonderfully positive and/or expressive about the coolness of my novel.  

TLDR: it's still unbiased, and still totally awesome, and I'm very very stoked about it.

Read the full excellence right here!  And then buy all of his artworks and books and so on to help him save up for his moon-home, he'd really appreciate it.

Left to right: Tim Harris, Xtian, Mat Blackwell, and Dan Kelly, at our four-way collage exhibition a few years ago: "The Wrong Head: 4 Men, 100 Collages".

NEWS: Tanya Loos writes amazing in-depth review of Beef!

I can't believe it's taken me so long to mention this!  Clearly, I am a bit lame when it comes to promotional stuff.  Eep!  

In August, the wonderful naturalist and nature-writer and all-round Aussie treasure Tanya Loos dedicated an entire post to writing about Beef, delving deeply into the story itself, but also discussing the power of literature as activism.   It's great for me to see just what people get out of it, which particular aspects of the book touch people and what they think I'm saying, and what resonates and what doesn't.   And I really think Tanya gets it.  

Regarding the activism at the novel's core, she mentions that "our modern civilisation’s dirty secret is the true cost of cheap meat", and goes on to say "[b]ut Beef explores an alternate reality, the sort of world where the treatment of animals in this way is morally repugnant, and it reflects on the past in a very light-hearted and easy to read way. Without lecturing!"  Exactly what I was after! 

Her review includes lovely little summations like this:

"Royston is going through the motions of life in his eccentric family, and happy with his wife Lena and his daughter River. Until BAM! Gene enters his life. Royston falls head over heels for this luscious embodiment of womanhood and the two strike up a very close friendship that oozes with sexual tension and causes a fuckload of consternation for Royston. I say fuckload because if you don’t like swearing you are in for a challenging read."

(I do love a good swear.  In fact, I have an in-depth piece about swearing on this very blog.) 

"I think it works equally well as a love story or as science fiction, or speculative fiction, indeed Beef reminds me very much of one of my favourite authors, Margaret Atwood, just with more swearing!"

High praise indeed! :)

Thanks Tanya!  The entire review can be read on Tanya's website, here.

FICTION: Another Excerpt of 'Beef'!

In exciting news, 'Beef' was accepted into the Green Reads collection, a website dedicated to ecological- and/or environmentally-themed books!  To do so, I had to submit an excerpt - which means you get to read another excerpt of the novel before you buy it (if, for some inexplicable reason, you were still dillydallying).  Woohoo!

Read the excerpt here - and GO EARTHLINGS GO!

A Really Quite Lengthy Excerpt Focusing on Both Character and Vat-Meat

INTERVIEW: The Vegan Anarchists of the "Which Side" Podcast Talk to me about Truth, Life, Kindness, and "Beef"

Jordan Halliday and Jeremy Parkin, two chaps far more interesting than I (like, "actually going to gaol for illicit mink-rescuing" levels of interesting) decided to Skype-chat with me for their podcast.  We ended up jabbering away about veganism, the lies society wants us to tell to our children, being compassionate to Normals, anarchy in nature, parenthood, and even a little bit about my novel "Beef".  I think I came across as a total waffling loon, so at least it was accurate.

"Which Side" Podcast Interview Thingie

FAQ: Beef (Less-Spoilery Edition)

Here, I try to answer a series of questions about the novel “Beef” without totally ruining the book for people who haven’t read it yet.  For another series of questions that do end up spoiling major plot points, see here.  For the novel itself, see here for the futuristic virtual eBook, and here for the physical printed version.

What were your reasons for writing the book?

There were a bunch of reasons for writing the book.  I mean, I’ve always been writing, pretty much as long as I’ve been able to hold a crayon (although these days I do use the crayon much less than I used to), so I had to write something.  But why “Beef” in particular?  The initial idea was, I was really interested in exploring this idea of whether or not an affair had to be physical, or whether or not there could be such a thing as a “platonic affair”.  In the end, I didn’t quite write that story – there’s no way that what goes on between Royston and Gene could be termed “platonic” – so I may still have more to explore with that particular concept.  But yeah, I thought that would be an interesting idea to explore, this idea that an affair is begun well before the skins thwack together – that’s it’s not actually the physical stuff that matters, it’s the hearts and minds.  Because I think we put a lot of weight on the actual sex when it comes to affairs – did they or didn’t they? – when it’s actually the emotional and psychological bizzo that hurts the most.

So that was the main driving force, but I also had all these other ideas for this future world that was just over the horizon, a world where we grow meat in stainless-steel labs and can’t go outside during the day because there’s no ozone layer and where all art is really just an extension of advertising and so on: this world that is ostensibly a vision of the future, but really is just a commentary on the world right now, just extended logically a teensy bit.  So these two things – this personal story of non-physical infidelity, and this world of the incredibly-near future – just got slapped together.  And “Beef” was born.

Was the book fully planned out beforehand, or was it just pulled, like a series of a magician’s joined-up handkerchiefs, straight out of your arse?

You have such a delightful turn of phrase.  I might steal that and use it in a book one day, if you don’t mind. 

Just answer the question please.

Fine, be like that.  Well, like I said, there were a bunch of ideas for this not-very-futuristic future world, and this tale of not-very-physical infidelity, and the two were just sorta crammed together into the same story and let loose.  To be honest, I write best when I don’t plan it too much, when things just get to flow on their own and take me where they seem to logically go.  I did know what the climax was going to be, and I knew that Royston and Gene were going to get closer and closer to physicality, but other than that, I really had no idea where it was going to go.  There was this moment quite early on when I realised that meat-without-killing-actual-animals was almost the perfect metaphor for infidelity-without-actual-sex, so once that had dawned on me, the book became filled with food metaphors: Royston’s friend Luka tells him the old line that “just because you’re on a diet doesn’t mean you can’t look at the menu” (for those of you unfamiliar with the term, it’s a phrase meaning “just because you’re in a monogomous relationship doesn’t mean you can’t check other people out”); the idea of the attraction of Forbidden Fruit makes a few appearances; Gene is described with all sorts of foodie-type adjectives; and so on.  None of that was intended, it all just happened once I’d started writing.  The way I tend to write is to have a few nice ideas, a few set-ups, and then just see where things go.  Then, once I’ve discovered what happens, the second (and subsequent) drafts are just about chopping away all the stuff that didn’t work, and refining the stuff that did.  So, to answer your question, there were some bits that were planned beforehand, but a hell of a lot of arsekerchiefs.

 

What was your writing process? Did you have a specific strategy for writing it?  What time of day best suits your writing process? What were you wearing?

I’ve honestly never understood these kinds of questions.  What possible difference could it make to you if I wrote in a beret at twilight or in a fez at the stroke of the witching hour?  I mean, I’ll answer you, because I don’t like confrontation, but it doesn’t seem particularly relevant.  I would get up in the morning, make a coffee, have some breakfast, descend the trapdoor to my shadowy dungeon, and write.  Then I’d come up for some lunch, another coffee, maybe a smoke, and then descend once again, and write.  Then I’d eventually rise again and try to spend some time with my family.  Now and then, when particularly inspired, I’d write again after my daughter was in bed, and keep at it until the wee hours. 

My strategy was just “keep writing”, basically.  First drafts are great that way: you can just keep writing stuff, and it really doesn’t matter if it’s good or not, because if it’s shit, you can either just delete it or fix it later on, and if it’s awesome, then it’s already awesome and it’s done baby, done. 

No specific times of day are better or worse, I just need to be inspired (and, luckily, for pretty much all of “Beef”, I was feeling inspired). 

I wrote the majority of the book stark-bollock naked.  And I didn’t always use my fingers to type.  Eh?  Eh?

You’re gross. 

Well, ask a silly question etc.  I mean, sheesh: “What was your reading strategy?”  “Where did you read it?”  “Did you read it more in the mornings or at night?”  You don’t see me asking you things like that, do you?

Well, this is your FAQ, not mine.

Okay, fair enough.  Sorry, I’ll take this more seriously.  Please, carry on.

What is it about infidelity that interests you so?  Was the whole thing just a weakly-disguised voyeuristic affair-by-proxy?

I’m not sure what you’re insinuating here.  I mean, I think infidelity is an interesting thing to most people because relationships are basically the core of our experiences.  Relationships of all sorts are what we spend the majority of our energies on, as social creatures: our family relationships, our friendships, our parents, our children, our partners, our lack of partners, trying to get partners, trying to deal with ex-partners, trying to test the waters with this or that friendship to see if it will ever become a partner-type relationship, being with one partner while kinda wishing we were with some other partner, experimenting with non-monogamy, having threesomes, dealing with rejection, accidentally sleeping with our own mothers, etc.  Every story is really a story of relationships, and the old-school monogamous relationship is rife for stories to emerge.  I mean, the idea that you’ve found “the one”, when there’s seven billion people on the planet, well, statistically-speaking it’s pretty unlikely, isn’t it.  And yet here we are, with loads of us tying ourselves to just one partner for as long as we can possibly stand it.  The trad. monog. relat. just begs to be interrogated, really.  I mean, I actually love it lots, it’s the perfect kind of romantic relationship for me, especially with someone as incredibly inspiring and wonderful and hilarious and smokin’ hot as my long-term partner-of-choice Nalin, but as far as the rest of you are concerned, well, good luck.

Where do you get your ideas?

Drugs.  And wikipedia.

No, seriously.

Sheesh.  I just kinda think about stuff.  I mean, it’s a weird question.  I’ll be washing the dishes or just about to fall asleep, when I’ll get this sudden realisation, or understand the consequence of something, or just have this question pop into my head, which I don’t know the answer to, but feel like it would be fun to explore.  Like, what if there are spirit guides who help people to achieve their goals, but only because these spirit guide creatures feed on feelings of success, ie, as far as the spirit guide beings are concerned, it’s a totally selfish act driven by hunger, not an altruistic act driven by wanting to help us?  Or, what if someone was making fake child pornography in photoshop and putting it online, in an attempt to stop real children being exploited – would they be doing a good thing, or a bad thing?  Or, what if seeing a black cat really is bad luck, how does that feel for the cat?  That kinda thing.  I don’t know, really, I don’t.  It may simply be a symptom of the yet-to-be-formalised Blackwell Syndrome, who knows.  I may just have something wrong with my brain.

Are you Royston?

No.  He’s much thinner than I am.

Are you a fatter version of Royston?

No.  Not really, anyway.  I mean, I do share his bumbling sociophobic awkward party-hating qualities, sure, and I am probably just as far along the Aspergers spectrum as he is, fine, and I do have a tendency to overuse technicalities, and I do feel occasionally overwhelmed by my rudderless lack of agency in a meaningless universe, okay, okay.  But I think if Royston ever met me, he’d actually think I was more like Luka (scruffy, pettily anti-mainstream, dodgily drug-addled, hopelessly hipstery, etc) or Syd (harshly critical, overly political, uncompromisingly contrary, conspicuously desconstructionist, etc).  That is to say, I think all the characters in the book are small parts of me, cranked up to ten and made slightly more interesting.  Except maybe Lena: she’s small parts of Nalin, cranked up to ten and made slightly less interesting, with a bit of me stuck on the top.

What’s next?

I think a book of short stories.  And then I plan to revisit the world that “Beef” is set in, but this time focusing on the hyper-political mega-critical Syd, as she interrogates notions of “femininity” and “feminism” in the context of her falling pregnant (to this horrible sexist flaky hipster guy who I still haven’t named).  The whole book will be an exploration of gender and genderlessness and motherhood and pregnancy and all the kinds of questions that arise with such a traditionally-“gendered” act.  Plus loads of weirdos and subcultures and mutants and politico-anarchic clubs and societies and poverty-stricken artists.  At this stage it’s called “The Post-Cultural Pregnancy of Sydenham Jones”.  Stay tuned!

FAQ: Beef (Spoiler Edition)

This FAQ post absolutely contains massive spoilers, and it is highly recommended that you read the story it refers to before reading this. These questions are about the novel “Beef”.  For the actual novel itself, please go here for the eBook, or here for the print-on-demand physical version.

*CONTAINS SPOILERS!*

Why the tired old patriarchal power structures? I mean, this is a fictional story about the future, you could’ve made the power structures anything.  Why just more tired white male bullshit? Seriously man, I thought you were cool.

That’s a damn good question, sorry to disappoint you.  It’s not like I didn’t think long and hard about this stuff when I was writing it, I tend to labour over exactly this kind of stuff all the time.  I guess there are several answers here, the first of which is, I feel like I have to tread carefully when I write, to make sure I’m telling a story that is my story to tell: am I really qualified to tell the story of a Hispanic lesbian’s struggle with heroin, when I’m not any of those things?  In the same way as I kinda feel like black roles should be played by black actors (instead of white folk in blackface) or gay characters should be played by gay actors (instead of straight folk in gayface), I sorta kinda feel like writers should tell stories that they are qualified to tell.  (This is all wishy washy kind of philosophical stuff, and at the same time as I feel quite strongly about all this, I also feel quite strongly about the opposite: that the whole point of being an actor is to be someone you’re not, and the whole point of being a fiction writer is to tell stories that aren’t true.  So I’m really quite ambivalent about this topic, actually (the word “ambivalent” used in the old sense of “having strong feelings both ways”, rather than the new sense of “feeling kinda neutral”).  So, with “Beef”, I guess I erred on the side of telling the story from the point of view of a white male sociophobe, three things I quite clearly am.)

Another reason why I went for the white male patriarchy is that, in my country (Australia), demographically-speaking, most of the power is currently held by white males.  Like it or not (and I don’t like it one bit), it does seem to be undeniably the case.  So, when creating this world where no-one eats animals, I felt like that was already the one Big Departure From Reality, and that too many more would maybe make the reader harder to convince.  I mean, sheesh, I already have psychics and teleportation and unlikely cults and giant murderous bovines, to be honest I’m already stretching reality a little too thin for most people, I was wary of making the whole thing seem like a “these are all the things Mat disagrees with” political fantasy.  I felt like, by creating a world with no animal exploitation, and by making the woman Royston has this emotional affair with non-skinny, I was already kinda dealing with a couple of Big Issues, and too many more would’ve tipped the book into something maybe too alienating for a lot of people.  I really don’t know.  I did think about all this lots, though, if that makes any difference.

And, like it or not, I feel like the powerful white males are unlikely to give up their power any time soon.  This may be a poor reason, but it’s a true one.  Similarly, demographically-speaking, Australia is mostly populated by whites, so, statistically, it’s likely that my readers are going to be People of No Colour.  This also may be a dodgy reason, but it is, I think, an accurate one.

Again, sorry to disappoint.  I really did hope you’d think I was cool.

Sorry, I vagued out during all that.  But whatever the answer was, I doubt it was good enough.

I suspect you’re right.

Why did you feel the need to make fun of people with Aspergers Syndrome?

I didn’t.  The reason that was part of the book was because I’m a lazy writer, and I just used my real life instead of coming up with something creative.  My otherwise-lovely partner Nalin does believe that I’m Aspergery, and she calls me all the very clever burger-themed nicknames that Luka calls Royston.  So really, it wasn’t me making fun of Aspies, it was her: honestly, when it comes to that shit, I just copied and pasted my real life straight into the novel.  If you’ve got any complaints, take them up with Nalin.

The book is set two generations into the future, right? So how come the nightcows evolved so drastically in so little time? Seems unlikely to me.

You think I’m a biologist?  Beats me.  I kinda imagined it like, the cow has been domesticated and inbred for so long, bovine genetics are inherently unstable, and the instant they get to express themselves in different phenotypes, they do – it’s like they’re making up for lost time.  None of this is supported scientifically, it’s total poetic licence.  I just liked the idea of cows becoming scary beasts who fuck up our complacency.  Let me dream, won’t you?

Gene is a one-dimensional Manic Pixie Dream Girl.  You even admit that in the book, when she says something like “I’m not just a one-dimensional Manic Pixie Dream Girl”.  Why didn’t you explore her more, make her more than just a sex object for Royston’s mid-life crisis?  Lame, Blackwell, lame.

These questions all seem really negative.  I didn’t know this would be such an anti-Blackwell diatribe.  But yes, well, fair enough question, I suppose.  I guess the answer is, I wanted the whole book to really be an exploration of Royston’s inner states, not other people’s.  Once other people’s inner worlds are being explored, it feels to me like it loses the claustrophobic neurosis of being trapped in Royston’s head.  There are only two voices in “Beef”: Royston’s, and mine (as narrator).  Every time I tried exploring someone else’s inner world, it felt like the story was being diluted, and I ended up scrapping it (I think there are maybe still one or two moments where we get to experience Lena’s inner world, but that’s about it).  So, to Royston, Gene is this Manic Pixie Dream Girl, that’s exactly who she is in his world.  I wanted to explore these notions of obsession, and, I think, a large part of this kind of obsession is the element of fantasy: once reality intrudes, the fantasy is negated.  In a way, the whole point is that Gene never really becomes more than one-dimensional to Royston, that’s the whole story: because it’s just his ego, it’s his own inner obsession, it’s not actually about her at all.  In the end, this story is about Royston, and to tell his story properly, I knew I couldn’t really tell Gene’s.  Maybe in another book.

Are you a vegan?

That’s not really about “Beef”, is it.

Well, it sort of is.  I mean, “Beef” is a book all about a world without animal exploitation, so it does beg the question “does Blackwell walk his talk?”

Okay, fine, you’re right.  The short answer would be “yes”.  But as you can tell, I don’t like short answers.  The long answer is “no, but I do everything that a vegan does”.  That is, I don’t really consider myself a “vegan”, I just consider myself a normal kind-hearted person who doesn’t want to support cruelty in any area, be it sweat-shop labour or making people homeless or using sexist language or using racist insults or encouraging animal exploitation.  I believe pretty much everything that a vegan believes, but I don’t really call myself a “vegan”, in the same way as I believe pretty much everything that a Buddhist believes, but don’t really call myself a “Buddhist”, and support pretty much everything that the Church of Satan stands for, but don’t really call myself a “Satanist”.

Do you really hate parties?

Hate is a strong word.  I do find them exhausting.

The book seems to glorify drugs.  What’s all that about?

It doesn’t!  I mean, well, okay, I guess it does, sort of.  I can fully see how you got that impression, anyway.  Thing is, I try to make my writing as honest as I possibly can, and, speaking honestly, I’ve had many lovely lovely times on drugs.  The prevailing social attitude that we’re meant to have is “drugs are bad”, but if I’m honest with myself, I’ve rarely had a bad time on drugs, whatever they’ve been.  At the same time, there was a period in my life where I was surrounded by junkies, and they stole heaps of my stuff and pawned it, and I would find fucking used needles and shit around my house, and it was generally a pretty shitty environment to be in.  People died, people got really low, there were definite bad vibes and dangerous people and unsavoury living arrangements and a lot of darkness.  So it’s not like it’s a black and white issue: drugs can definitely fuck up your life, whether it be heroin or alcohol or even marijuana (I’ve known people who’ve lost a good decade getting stoned when they really didn’t want to be – there just didn’t seem to be any other good option, at the time).  But drugs can also be great fun, and, more importantly, therapeutic: LSD or shrooms or MDMA can make you realise what you really think, they’re quite good at tearing away all the bullshit we fill our lives with so we can clearly see what we actually feel about things.  To me, these substances are not “party drugs”, they’re only ever to be used therapeutically: I think of them as “defragging” the brain, and will only ever do them one or two times a year, max (and generally much less frequently).  So is that “glorification”?  Not sure.  Certainly, in “Beef”, Royston has the experience of finally being aware of his own true motives and feelings thanks to the clarity of MDMA, and there are a few scoobies smoked, but I’m not sure if that’s “glorification”, or just “accurate reporting”.  I do think that, as a society, we’ll only ever be able to deal with “the drug problem” if we talk openly and honestly about it, instead of pretending it’s all bad, because let’s face it, people who actually use drugs already know that it’s not all bad.  Honesty is usually the key to any sort of discussion, as far as I’m concerned. That’s why I do these FAQs in the first place.

You live in Cape Paterson, right?  It sounds like you don’t like the place.

What?  No, I love it here.  When I said it’s “a place old people moved to to die”, I didn’t really mean it as a slur.  There’s nothing wrong with going somewhere peaceful in the final few decades of your life, sounds ideal.  What I meant was, it’s a peaceful quiet place filled with old people.  Because it is.  And not much happens here, that’s also not meant as a slur, it’s just the case.  That bit where I said that the local newspaper had a front-page story about a Canadian guy who ate quite a lot of pies: that was totally true.  To me, that was just the perfect example of how little of note happens here: it was not meant as a put-down, or a negative, or making fun of the place, it was just an example of the kind of place this is.  It’s peaceful.  It’s quiet.  It’s far away from the Big Smoke.  And the stars are beautiful here, and the rocks are gnarled and crocodilian and ancient and amazing, and the cold cold ocean does stretch out to Antarctica, and it fully does not give two shits about anything we do, and I really do love that so so much.  That enormous ocean was here before us, and will be there after we’re all gone, and it will be doing the same thing it was doing before we ever popped up our hairy heads.  We’re absolutely insignificant here, which, if you think about it, is one of Royston’s subconscious issues: his own insignificance.  

And all that shit about fracking, that’s also a genuine concern for the area.  I desperately hope it won’t happen like I described in the book, but it totally could.  Scary scary times, for a beautiful beautiful place.

The ending seemed really sudden.  It’s like, there’s the climax, and then suddenly I’m reading the epilogue.  What happened there?  That felt really rushed and weird.  It made me angry.

Sorry to make you angry.  That wasn’t my intention.  From my point of view, I just keep on seeing movies where it feels like the real story has actually finished, but the film keeps on going because they feel they have to wrap up a whole bunch of narrative loose ends, and so I really wanted to avoid that feeling.  So, for me, as soon as the real story was over, I wanted to end it as quickly as possible.  For me, there are two real threads to the story: the individual story of Royston’s infatuation, and the bigger-scale story of the consciousness of the vat-meat.  Once both of those stories were over, that was it: “Beef” was over.  Instead of labouring over another dozen pages of narrative blah, I thought the neatest and least painful way of tying off those loose ends was to simply tell you what happened, and get the hell out of there.  Sorry that made you angry.  It made me very happy indeed.  

So, you’re some fruitcake who believes in psychic powers, huh.

That’s not even a question.

Okay: are you some fruitcake who believes in psychic powers?

Much better.  Am I?  I’m just not sure.  It’s one of the many many things that I like to keep an open mind about.  After all, it seems like a hard thing to prove either way, and so having a specific position on it seems to be presumptuous.  I do believe that we’re unlikely to know for certain one way or the other without a whole lot more serious study on the phenomena involved, and that, at this stage, we’re unlikely to see a whole lot more serious study on it, because no serious scientist wants to look like some fruitcake who believes in psychic powers.  I don’t believe in “supernatural powers”: I believe that, if psionic powers (etc) do exist, they are just a scientifically-describable phenomenon that we simply don’t have the proper terms and/or tools to describe/measure adequately yet.  But my personal beliefs are pretty much as irrelevant as everyone else’s, when it comes to what actually does or does not exist.  As far as “Beef” is concerned, psychics exist because it’s the only way to detect the “consciousness” of vat-meat.

You really don’t like “yes” or “no” answers, do you.

No.

I see what you did there.