Alex Irvine, who also writes as Alexander C. Irvine, was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and now lives, writes, and teaches in Maine. Noted for the expert color and thematic depth of his work, as well as his mastery of a wide variety of literary forms, he has written five highly regarded novels–A Scattering of Jades (2002), One King, One Soldier (2004), The Narrows (2005), The Life of Riley (2005), and Buyout (2009), as well as a number of comics and TV tie-ins. He is a dedicated and innovative practitioner of short fiction too, and his collections, Rossetti Song (2002, a chapbook), Unintended Consequences (2003), and Pictures from an Expedition (2006), are among the finest of the current decade. A recent chapbook novella is Mystery Hill (2009).

I interviewed Alex by e-mail in June 2009.

GEVERS: Anyone reading a cross-section of your work must be struck by your unusual versatility–your ability to switch between genres and subgenres, between different styles, different kinds of subject matter. Your Subterranean Press short novel of a few years ago, The Life of Riley, was remarkable for its variety of first-person voices… How did you acquire this protean facility?

IRVINE: I’ve always been interested in all kinds of stories. When I started writing, I had so many models of writers I admired, and so many things I admired about them, that I wanted to try everything. This is still true, so as I’ve learned a bit more about the craft I’ve started to have a process of thinking about a potential story both in terms of what it’s about and what kind of story it should be. Usually I can’t really get started on something until I decide both. I can think of quite a few writers who have a single mode and find ways to talk about everything they want to talk about within that mode. I kind of admire this, but I’ve never been able to do it. I keep seeing new things I want to try.

GEVERS: Your first three full-length novels were all secret-historical fantasies set in the nineteenth century or first half of the twentieth century; your latest book, though, Buyout, has the 2040s as its milieu. Why this transition? And what, in your experience, are the particular challenges and rewards of writing near-future SF?

IRVINE: The thing that I decided to accept before I started writing near-future SF was that it is destined to be wrong. I don’t try to argue that a particular future is coming, or is even likely to come. The future is a literary space onto which a writer projects his or her thoughts, anxieties, and ambitions about the present. The rewards of near-future SF as opposed to historical narratives include being more at home with the point of departure, which is the now. In a historical narrative, you’re trying to recreate a time about which much is known, so there’s a responsibility to make it right. If you decide to write about the future, nothing is known so everything is on the table, and the future is understood by virtue of its relation to the present. The problem of anachronism disappears, and anachronism’s a very tricky complication in some historical fiction. With future settings, you begin with how things are now, which gives a solid footing, and go from there. Historical fiction has to be built from the ground up–and that ground is not present reality, but historical and previous fictional narratives.

Part of the reason I decided to write a near-future SF novel is that some of my favorite books are those kinds of novels, and I wanted to see what it was like to write one. I’d done The Life of Riley, but the presence of aliens in that book was a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. With Buyout, I wanted to be especially rigorous in not imagining wild flights of transformation that–if the history of humanity is any guide–just aren’t going to happen in the next thirty years. I don’t believe in the Singularity. I believe that the America of 2040 is going to look much like what exists now, and that the important differences are going to be subsumed within the eternal human activities of life, love, and work. In a century, or three centuries, more radical transformations might be in store, but if they’re truly radical there’s no way to imagine them from the cultural epistemology of the present.

GEVERS: Still, for all your disavowal of prophetic function and assertion of basic human continuity, your portrait of 2040s America is fairly candid about certain definite and transformative dangers looming on the country’s horizon–global warming, capitalism on the rampage, the loss of privacy as the Internet effloresces into something ultimately resembling a panopticon. Since finishing the novel, do you find your specific fictional vision confirmed or overtaken–what with Barack Obama’s election, the Great Recession, the burgeoning use of Twitter, etcetera?

IRVINE: Like I said, the future in any SF novel is a thought experiment about the anxieties of the present. Imagined details about a future may or may not turn out to be right, but if they do it’s not because the writer has a crystal ball. The aspects of our near future that are relevant to Buyout are extensions of phenomena already visible, as you said. When I finished the book, Obama looked to be in good shape but nothing was certain. I went ahead and threw in a note from Walt Dangerfield about his election because I was making a guess about the future. I turned out to be right. I made other guesses about the future, too, including the construction of a viable subway system in Los Angeles. Who knows whether any of them will be right? I do think that certain effects of climate change–disruptive rainfall patterns, large refugee flows from flooded parts of low-lying countries in Asia–are inevitable. And I do think that the recent financial system implosion is indicative of other problems that have to do with unrestrained corporatism, and I do think that something like a surveillance state is more or less inevitable. Buyout is in part a product of all of those anxieties and my efforts to think through some possible consequences of these current circumstances. If it gets people thinking about these issues who weren’t thinking about them before, or if it generates some conversations that weren’t happening before, then it doesn’t matter in the end if any of the details of the book’s imagined future are correct.

GEVERS: And so to the primary conceptual gambit of Buyout: the notion that, in order to avoid squandering large amounts of money incarcerating serious offenders for life, a system could be devised whereby said convicts would receive a (smaller) payout in exchange for being executed right away. This money to be distributed to people or causes of their choice. How did you come up with this idea? Did it flow entirely naturally from trends in American politics and economics, or is it more of a satirical exaggeration?

IRVINE: The idea germinated back in 2000, when I was reading articles about companies that would pay out AIDS patients’ life insurance policies while they were still alive. I’m not sure why, but this practice connected itself in my head with the enormous growth in privatized prisons and the fundamental conceit of Buyout appeared. It’s certainly an exaggeration of current trends in American corporatization, but I’m not sure it’s satirical as a whole. (Although if it comes across that way, I won’t be upset.)

The privatization of American criminal justice has exaggerated a number of trends already present in the way we treat prisoners and conceive of prison. The housing of prisoners has become a big business with big growth; even before the explosion of privatized prisons in the 90s, there was a huge industry in supplying prisons and prison guards. Now that’s multiplied as corporations build and maintain their own prisons. The prisoner becomes a pure commodity in these situations. Nobody’s concerned about rehabilitating him or making sure he doesn’t get so maladjusted that he can’t stay out of prison. Private, for-profit prisons are using prisoners to make money for themselves. That’s what private companies do, and that’s fine. My question is: What happens when you create a situation in which a human being is the commodity–or, more accurately, in which the time a human being spends in a prison cell is the commodity? The idea of the life-term buyout developed out of that question.

GEVERS: Your central character, Martin Kindred, bears a name that suggests the spirit of Philip K. Dick is lurking behind Buyout. (And that’s not the only clue.) To what extent is this true? Are Martin Kindred and Charlie Rhodes is any way reflections of Dick’s typical protagonists?

IRVINE: I feel as if I’ve been enormously influenced by Dick’s strategy of looking at possible futures not through the people who run the world in that future, but through the regular working people who would in fact be the ones who make that future go. Martin’s surname is an acknowledgment of that influence for sure. Dick’s basic vision, that kindness and empathy make us human and are easily lost in various human hierarchies–technological, cultural, workplace–has had a big influence on me too. Martin Kindred is a Phildickian protagonist in that way. He’s faced with choices between empathy and advancement, between ideals and reality. Dick did that to his characters in all of his great books. He’s one of America’s great writers about work and the workplace, and about the relationships among work and self and identity. I was trying to tap into a bit of his method without, one hopes, being influenced by Dick’s flaws, although I set myself up to fall into the same traps he did by having Martin’s marriage in mortal trouble right from the get-go.

GEVERS: The fascinating monologues by “Walt Dangerfield” in between chapters of Buyout add a powerful analytical voice to the mix. What decided you to insert his jaundiced commentary?

IRVINE: I got dissatisfied with the narrative voice of Buyout at some point and decided to see if there might be another way to tell the story. For a little while I had the book entirely torn down and was rebuilding it using Walt–or a voice much like Walt’s–to tell the whole story. Then I changed my mind again, but I’d written all of this stuff in what became Walt’s voice and I thought it was worth keeping in some way. So I recreated him as a gadfly podcaster and because I love the technique (which Phil Dick used once in a while) of using interchapter moments to add commentary, that’s what Walt became. He’s also a way of getting a broader perspective on the book’s imagined future, which I thought was important to the SF parts of the story but which I didn’t want to just info-dump into the main narrative. I love Walt. He turned into a much more important character than I thought he would when I was first sketching him out. He’s also another kind of nod to Phil Dick, in that like his namesake he looks down on his culture and…you get the picture.

GEVERS: Having a noir atmosphere, Buyout has been marketed as a “science fiction thriller”. Is that a fair description? There’s been considerable discussion in recent years of the thriller and SF genres being inherently opposed–the thriller being about the protection of the status quo against threats, SF being more concerned with adaptation to change, the inevitability of radical novelty…

IRVINE: The first thing I would say is, for the love of humanity, can we please stop setting up these reductive oppositions between genres? (Not that I think you’re doing this; it’s a general comment inspired by one too many conversations about the difference between This and That.) Plenty of SF is concerned with maintaining a status quo in the face of technological change; plenty of SF about the inevitability of radical novelty (nice coinage) is constructed using the tropes and skeleton of the thriller. One of the worst disservices SF does to itself is its continual insistence that it is not only different than other kinds of literature, but somehow inherently beneficial. This meme in the SF community that reading SF makes you a better person drives me nuts. SF can be great and broadening; it can also be close-minded, artistically bankrupt, reactionary crap. It’s no better or worse than any other kind of literature.

Having said that, I think that there are elements of both SF and the thriller in Buyout. Perhaps, if those two modes are inherently opposed, the book is in some way an exploration of that opposition in the same way that it’s an exploration of the tension between intellectual ideals and emotional reactions. The thriller/noir plot, with its lone protagonist opposed to the institutions of state and corporation, can be a way to explore the effects of radical change, and at least in Buyout, there is no return to a status quo. The threat in that book is that a status quo will be established that is contrary to basic human values. It begins during a period of disruption, after Pandora’s box is already open, and the ongoing question of the book is not whether the status quo will be restored but what kind of new equilibrium will emerge. At least that’s my reading of it. Now that the book is out in the world, it’s not mine anymore.

GEVERS: Changing gears: your above-mentioned literary versatility is particularly evident in your short fiction, as witness your collections, Pictures From an Expedition and Unintended Consequences. Regarding your recent and immediately upcoming outings at shorter lengths: PS has published your novella, Mystery Hill, of course; you have two stories in inventory at Postscripts; and you have several pieces in the current issue of Subterranean Online. Can you say something about these works? Do they reflect any definite trend in your creative output?

IRVINE: Hm. In addition to those, there are two in inventory at Fantasy & Science Fiction. I think that’s everything. Like the rest of my output, those stories are all over the map, from near-future satire to vaguely surrealist weirdness. Some of them are very young, conceived and written in a matter of weeks (in the case of “100 Sentences About the City of the Future,” about 36 hours); others rattled around in my head for years before I figured out how to write them. When I look at the dozens and dozens of incomplete stories and scraps floating around in my notebooks and hard drives, it’s the same. I can’t settle down in any particular mode. The truth is, it would be easier career-wise, but I can’t make myself do it. I would feel like I was missing something.

If there’s a trend in what I’m doing, it might be in the direction of seeing just how far you can push a literary story in the direction of genre before it becomes a genre story, and vice versa. There’s a very interesting space there that I’m trying to get at in stories like “The Dream Curator,” “The Truth About Ninjas,” and “Remotest Mansions of the Blood.” I’ve always done that, I think, but I’m approaching it in a different way now. I want to write genre stories with literary preoccupations and literary stories animated by the tropes and narrative energy of genre fiction. Sometimes those are the same stories. And always I’m trying to write the kind of story that I would like to read.

GEVERS: Do you have a new story collection on the horizon?

IRVINE: I have enough stories for another collection and would like to do one. Let the signal go out!

GEVERS: An especially impressive new novella of yours is The Price of Forgetting (title tentative), forthcoming from PS. You seem here to sum up all the material of heroic fantasy, giving that subgenre a potent altered spin. Is this story indeed your major critical statement about fantasy, as well as being (in my view, certainly) a masterpiece of fantastic storytelling?

IRVINE: Well, first of all, thanks. That novella has a long and tortuous (also, for me, sometimes torturous) history. It started out as a very short story that I read at the Corpus Christi World Fantasy Convention in 1999, and which was partially inspired by the lyrics of a Widespread Panic song: “Jack was really a jester…he kept his one good eye on the queen.” That line hung around in my head for a long time after I first heard the song. Eventually it became a story about a jester whose brother was turned into a dog. Then, in parallel, I was thinking about magical systems and wanting to test out a way in which there could be a market for magic. So that was layered into the jester story. Then the whole thing lay fallow for six or seven years, I think, until I came up with the narrative throughline of Paulus and the apprentice that became “Wizard’s Six,” which incorporated the original jester story. I kept thinking about Paulus and for the first time in my life as a writer wrote a second piece using the same character and setting. That was “Dragon’s Teeth,” which is coming from F&SF. After those two novelettes, I was thinking hard about how to write a heroic fantasy that would satisfy the desires I bring to anything I read. I wanted to write a story that was about the real matter of the human heart–my two eternal touchstones, family and obligation–but do it within the heroic fantasy mode. So I went back to those two stories, tinkered with them a little, and expanded them into the novella.

As far as a critical statement? Maybe. Heroic fantasy taken as a whole (there are plenty of individual exceptions) tends to suffer from an odd combination of narrative bloat, deliberate naivete, and near-pornographic relish of violence. You could certainly argue that my novella has none of those qualities. It also ends with a beginning. There’s no prophecy fulfilled, no hero achieving his destiny, no Dark Lord who must be stopped at all costs. I wanted to write a heroic fantasy for adults, by which I mean not that it deals with adult themes but that it deals with its themes in an adult way rather than the deliberately reified way typical to the subgenre. It’s a heroic fantasy with neither heroes nor villains. What it has is people doing either what they think is right or what they think they can get away with. In my experience, people are usually doing one of those two things. But at the same time I wanted all of the trappings of heroic fantasy: the quest, the magic, a dragon. So, typically for me, I overcomplicated things because I wanted to do everything. This time, in this story, I think it worked pretty well.

GEVERS: A look at your titles on amazon.com indicates that you are active in quite a few other areas too–comics, comics tie-ins, and companion books to TV series. How did you first get involved in these shared-universe and media projects, and are more in prospect for you?

IRVINE: Well, speaking of heroic fantasy, I just agreed to write a novel for Wizards of the Coast. I’m also working on a Star Wars novel and a couple of comic-book projects. I started to get offers for tie-ins as soon as A Scattering of Jades came out, and some of them are potentially too much fun to turn down. I started talking with people at Marvel Comics around the time The Narrows came out, and the first couple of series I’ve done there–Hellstorm: Son of Satan and Daredevil Noir–have been kind of a dream come true for a guy who read as many comics in his youth as I did. I take opportunities as they come along and as I find them interesting. For a while I worried that doing tie-ins would result in people not taking my original work seriously, but I can’t get too worked up about that anymore. Either my original work stands up or it doesn’t; whether I write a Batman novel or a Star Wars novel or a book about Supernatural shouldn’t make any difference. I do think I’m probably one of not very many people to publish with both Marvel Comics and Cambridge University Press.

GEVERS: Yes indeed–another of your many hats is that of professor of English. Do you have much opportunity to teach SF and fantasy books to your students? If so, which authors do you select for the classes, and why?

IRVINE: I teach quite a few different classes at the University of Maine, which means I have a chance to bring in all kinds of different stuff. A couple of years ago I taught a grad seminar in SF, and when I do a survey course or an upper-level topics course I spot in genre stuff as needed to give an understanding of what was or is happening across the literary spectrum. This past spring I taught a seminar in contemporary American literature and used Neal Stephenson and Cormac McCarthy–as well as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is not SF but associational, I suppose. In a course last year on the American novel, I used Philip K. Dick. I hear about people who encounter problems using genre material in their courses, but that’s never been an issue for me at Maine. I don’t go out of my way to force SF into a course where it isn’t called for, though. That kind of evangelism is pointless.

GEVERS: Finally: do you have another full-length novel in gestation?

IRVINE: Always. Right now I’m tinkering with two ideas. One is a time-travel story about refugees from a 2070 nuclear war between India and Pakistan who decide to go back in time and kill H.G. Wells because they blame him for the nuclear age. The other is a picaresque/fantastical historical novel taking off from the life of the great 18th-century hoaxer George Psalmanazar. I’ll write both of them, but right now I’m not sure which comes first.