(goto:"What Dreams May Come")
(either:"Hi, Sandra.","Hi, Sandra. Welcome to your *Vector* interview.","Hi Sandra. Thanks for taking a moment to talk to the British Science Fiction Association.","Hi Sandra. Is the time travel format OK for you? Great.","Hello, Sandra.","Thanks so much. I've just got a few questions.","Sandra Newman, thank you so much.","Hi there. Shall we get started?","Okay, I think that's recording.","I always live in fear that it won't record. The red light is on. The red light is on.","So kind of you to let us do this.","So feel free to answer in relation to *The Heavens*, or really go anywhere with it.","It's a really great honour, thank you Sandra!","I'm so happy you could make it.","Let's dive right in.","I hope these are all actually questions.","Thanks so much for taking the time with us.","Thanks so much for taking the time. And in fact, time is what we're here today to talk about ...","Hi Sandra.","First of all, love the book.","Love the book. Love it.","*The Heavens*. Very hot title. I'm here with its author, Sandra Newman. Sandra.")
(display:"First Two Questions")
(display:"Early Questions")
(display:"Middle Questions")
(display:"Final Questions")
Thanks so much, Sandra!
(either:"*That went well.*","*These are supposed to be questions?*","*Some of those 'questions' ... yeesh.*","*Is that all he's got?*","*And these are his questions?*","*And these are their questions?*","*You got out of bed for this?*","*Nope, still the darkest timeline.*","*What?*","*They're still doing interviews in this timeline?*","*This must be the interviewer's first time.*","*Are they even paying you for this?*","*Who set this up again?*","*Really? You write a whole book and that's all they want to know?*","Really? You write a book and this is your thanks?*","Etch-a-sketch time, right?*","*Why the third degree?*","*Then there is the queston of the questions themselves.*","*Must you answer?*","*What are questions anyway?*","*Has this guy even read the book?*") *But maybe if you [[go to sleep->What Dreams May Come]], the interviewer will come with clearer questions.*Perhaps the next time you wake up, the questions will be more about (link:"writing")[(set:$focus to "Writing")(goto:"Hub")], or (link:"dreaming")[(set:$focus to "Dreaming")(goto:"Hub")], or (link:"time")[(set:$focus to "Time")(goto:"Hub")], or (link:"the world")[(set:$focus to "World")(goto:"Hub")], or (link:"everything")[(set:$focus to "everything")(goto:"Hub")].{(set:$raredependency to (random:1,12))
}1. (if:$raredependecy is 1)[I think while I was reading it, I thought the title came from Caliban in *The Tempest*. ‘The heavens methought would open and show riches / Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak’d, /I cried to dream again.’ But that’s not actually the line. The heavens are hidden behind clouds. Or I was remembering a timeline that no longer exists. Books are meant to mess with our sense of reality. Do you think *The Heavens* does so in special ways?](else:)[(Either:
"What do you think of parties in novels (and not in novels)? E.g. who writes well about parties? Are there aspects of party experience that are difficult or impossible to evoke?",
"What do you think of parties in novels (and not in novels)? E.g. who writes well about parties? Are there aspects of party experience that are difficult or impossible to evoke?",
"How did you come up with the character William Shakespeare? Is he based on a real poet, or is he entirely your own invention?",
"How did you come up with the character William Shakespeare? Is he based on a real poet, or is he entirely your own invention?",
"Why the title? The word ‘Heavens’ appears all over Shakespeare and I’m hung up on wondering if it’s an allusion to one Heavens in particular.",
"Did the book ever have other titles?",
"What’s the relationship between fiction and gaslighting?",
"Tell us about 'willingness to see the evil in the world and just use it like any other tool to eradicate some of the evil in the world.'",
"Is it cold on the moon?",
"If my mother be in hell, would it be better to be good and go to heaven, or to sin to be beside my mother?",
"Tell us about your new book, *The Heavens*.",
"How long have you been working on *The Heavens*?")]
2. (if:$raredependecy is 2)[So there’s this crux in the *Hamlet* textual scholarship. Hamlet says he will put on an ‘anticke disposition,’ which you’d probably modernize as ‘antic disposition,’ meaning kind of mad, bizarre, ludicrous, all over the show, extra. But a few interpreters think what’s meant is ‘antique disposition,’ i.e. something antiquated or old school, which plays into the stuff about time being out of joint. That doubleness of *antic* and *antique* seems really suggestive for Emilia.](else:)[(Either:"What are you watching / listening to / reading / eating at the moment?",
"I remember reading that you were thinking of a sequel to *The Country of Ice Cream Star*. Is that still on the cards?",
"*The Country of Ice Cream Star* was very open to a sequel. Whereas *The Heavens* doesn’t feel like it is teasing a sequel. Or could there be one? You could call it *To Betsy*.",
"Okay I have this brilliant observation that *The Country of Ice Cream Star* and *The Heavens* are quite different books. What do you think they have in common?",
"I think in my message to you I said something like, *The Heavens* is a brutally beautiful book? It’s like, by the end, the beauty is arriving filled with defiant knowledge of its cost.",
"Tell us about Grove Atlantic and/or Granta.",
"So, you know Sapir–Whorf, linguistic relativity, and all that? The whole thing about – Samuel Delany does good stuff with it in`` *Babel-17*`` – how the language that is available to us shapes who we are, our world, our temporalities, what we experience, what we can and do know, how we can and do act, how we can and do feel, and so on? Can you tell us a little bit about the experience of writing a novel (*The Country of Ice Cream Star*) mostly in an invented language?",
"In *The Country of Ice Cream Star*, can you tell us a little bit about the crossroads of AAVE, ‘S’AE, and French? And other influences I might have missed?",
"You said in another interview that AAVE is probably objectively the best English going. Say more?")]{(set:$random1 to 0)
(set:$random2 to 0)
(if:$focus is "everything")[(set:$random1 to (random: 1,8))(set:$random2 to (random: 1,8))]
}3. (if:$random1 is 1)[(display:"Time Question A")]{
}(if:$random1 is 2)[(display:"Time Question B")]{
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}(if:$focus is "Writing")[(display:"Writing Question A")]{
}(if:$focus is "World")[(display:"World Question A")]{
}(if:$focus is "Dreaming")[(display:"Dream Question A")]
4. (if:$random2 is 1)[(display:"Time Question C")]{
}(if:$random2 is 2)[(display:"Time Question D")]{
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}(if:$random2 is 6)[(display:"World Question D")]{
}(if:$random2 is 7)[(display:"Dream Question C")]{
}(if:$random2 is 8)[(display:"Dream Question D")]{
}(if:$focus is "Time")[(display:"Time Question B")]{
}(if:$focus is "Writing")[(display:"Writing Question B")]{
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}(if:$focus is "Dreaming")[(display:"Dream Question B")]5. (if:$random1 is 8)[(display:"Time Question A")]{
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6. (if:$random2 is 8)[(display:"Time Question C")]{
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}(if:$focus is "Dreaming")[(display:"Dream Question D")]7. (either:"Tell us about the theme of children in *The Heavens*.",
"Tell us a bit about the theme of apocalypse in *The Heavens*.",
"Could you tell us about the theme of climate change in *The Heavens*.",
"Tell us about the theme of cyclicality in *The Heavens*.",
"Tell us about the theme of posterity in *The Heavens*.",
"Tell us about the theme of mental health in *The Heavens*.",
"Tell us about the theme of political activism in *The Heavens*.",
"Tell us about the theme of ego in *The Heavens*.",
"What was it like writing distance and disagreement and disintegration between Ben and Kate? Are there other writers you think write well about relationships when they get difficult, or get doomed? What were you hoping for in *The Heavens*? Did the characters surprise you in any ways?",
"Tell us about rich people in *The Heavens*.",
"Can you tell us a bit about the arguments and quarrels in *The Heavens*?",
"Can you tell us a bit about being rich and poor in *The Heavens*?",
"Was there any part of *The Heavens* that was particularly hard to write? Why do you think? And how did you figure it out?",
"Are you always able to read?",
"It's interesting how the language of literary appreciaton and criticism asks us to adopt a persona with certain cognitive and emotional competencies. You kind of have to say, 'Sandra, I loved your book! I couldn't put it down!' It doesn't have room for a different baseline. It sounds weird if you say, 'Sandra, I was able to read ten pages at a time before the words began to swim or fragment. There were some bits were I think I almost felt something,' even though that could really be a kind of heartfelt praise. Depending. Who do you feel you're writing for?",
"Aspects of this book are a bit pessimistic. Yet on Twitter, you are an inspiring advocate of things like Westerners not appropriating Easter. Gotcha!",
"It seems to me, or it definitely used to, that you and Howard would often be tweeting AT THE SAME TIME. Is that just my imagination? Do you ascend to side-by-side Tweet thrones like Jaeger mech co-pilots? Are you competing over RTs and favs. Remember this interview is completely confidential.",
"Tell us about the relationship between *The Heavens* and *Cake*.",
"Tell us more about the relationship between *The Heavens* and *The Country of Ice Cream Star*.",
"Tell us more about the relationship between *The Heavens* and *Changeling*.",
"Tell us about *The Western Lit Survival Kit: How To Read The Classics Without Fear*.",
"Tell us about *The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done*, and how it relates to your other books.",
"Will you tell us about your article, ‘What kind of person makes false rape accusations?’",
"Do you abandon projects?",
"So you like M. John Harrison’s stuff huh?",
"When were you at the University of East Anglia? Was Denise Riley there while you were there? I feel like there’s some resonance between your work.")
8. (either:"It’s just such a beautiful book. Thank you.",
"Please tell us more about Oksana. She is kind of incredible but we never really get inside her head, do we?",
"Please tell us more about Oksana.",
"Do we ever fully learn Oksana’s importance?",
"Can you tell us about all the different versions of Oksana?",
"Please tell us more about how you wrote Oksana.",
"Tell us more about one of the slightly more minor characters. Let’s say Martin.",
"Tell us more about one of the slightly more minor characters. Let’s say Sabine.",
"Tell us more about one of the slightly more minor characters. Let’s say Mary.",
"Tell us more about one of the slightly more minor characters. Let’s say Alicia.",
"Tell us more about one of bit parts in *The Heavens*. Let’s say Southampton.",
"Tell us more about one of bit parts in *The Heavens*. Let’s say Gabor.",
"Tell us more about one of bit parts in *The Heavens*. Let’s say Mistress Bewley.",
"Tell us more about one of bit parts in *The Heavens*. Let’s say the Percy girls.",
"Tell us more about one of bit parts in *The Heavens*. Let’s say Danvers.",
"Tell us more about one of bit parts in *The Heavens*. Let’s say Ian.",
"Tell us more about one of the slightly more minor characters. Let’s say José.",
"Tell us more about the slightly more minor characters. Kate’s parents, for example.",
"Tell us more about the slightly more minor characters. Kate’s parents, for example.",
"They kind of break up via Terminator 2, don’t they? Ben and Kate. Is that a thing – how a movie or something can kind of coincidentally have a conversation for you?",
"Tell us about that moment when Oksana wants to honour her birthday by charging any man who wants sex with her a thousand dollars.",
"What was Ben’s poem about – the one he recited to Kate’s parents?",
"Anything else you’d like to say about the book?",
"Do you have ideas about your next project?",
"Can you tell us about the scene with Oksana ice-skating?",
"Can you tell us about writing Ben and Kate getting together at the beginning?",
"How do you make books funny?",
"This is a bit meta, but how is this whole resettable timeline interview thing treating you? Is it spooky? I can’t promise I won’t upload patches, by the way. If I think of more questions. Which will reset the counter. I’m kind of worried that it might permutationally generate some kind of sequence of questions that is horrifically insulting or something. But also I guess the unpredictability is partly the point.")(either:"So, time travel is impossible, and writing about time travel is actually *more* impossible. Did you ever go crazy thinking about the paradoxes? And/or did the paradoxes help or play into the writing in some other way?",
"How do time travel and parallel universes relate to the writing process, to drafting and redrafting? Are there still more timelines that exist in drafts, for example?",
"The time travel mechanism you invent in *The Heavens* is a really interesting one for fiction, maybe partly because it preserves (actually increases) the weightiness of actions. With many time travel narratives there’s a sense that the characters can always go back and undo what they did.",
"The time travel mechanism you invent is a really interesting one for fiction, maybe partly because it preserves (actually increases) the weightiness of actions. With many time travel narratives there’s a sense that the characters can always go back and undo what they did. But here it’s do, do, do.",
"Eventually it dawns on me, okay, *The Heavens* *isn’t* going back and forth between two things, it’s going back and forth between one thing and potentially *anything*. Every time Kate wakes up, it’s a different world, where she has a different past that she doesn’t have access to. Everything that happened in the chapter before last now maybe didn’t happen. We do still get Ben and Oksana and Sabine and the whole crowd, but we always might not. Every awakening is desperately fragile.",
"*The Heavens* *isn’t* going back and forth between two things, it’s going back and forth between one thing and potentially *anything*. The only other book I can think of that’s structured like that is Italo Calvino’s *If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller.* The way the book keeps resetting, I guess it might give you a sense that everything exists somewhere, that every ‘false start’ actually keeps arcing on invisibly beyond some horizon?")(either:"Is there a relationship with Ursula le Guin’s *Lathe of Heaven*? Or Octavia Butler’s *Kindred*? I haven’t actually read them, sorry if I kind of zone out.
Okay I should read them.",
"Time travel by mechanical means was famously popularised by H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, but before that, time travel was all fairies, ghosts, angels, and falling asleep. Rip van Winkle, the Legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, and so on. Was that in your head? Was it important that what is happening should be rooted in Emilia’s time as much as our own?",
"I can’t think of any time travel narratives from Emilia’s time. Do you know if there were any?",
"Do you have any favourite time travel fiction?",
"Do you think Emilia and Kate experience time in different ways?",
"Do you think Emilia and Kate experience time in different ways? I guess I’m partly thinking of like wristwatches and brunch and things like that.")(either:"Do you *like* time?",
"Are you pro-time or not? Sandra.",
"Revisionism can be a way of changing the past, which can also change the present and the future. And we know how malleable memory is. In that sense, is time travel real?",
"*The Heavens* is also partly a novel about a woman whom nobody believes. How they manage to not believe her, how she manages to deal with never being believed.",
"Gaslighting can be a way of changing the past. ‘That didn’t happen.’ Do you want to talk about that in relation to the novel at all? And do we ever change the past in ways that aren’t abusive and manipulative?",
"When I was young it was a seriously fruitful fantasy of mine to kind of glide back in time and occupy my earlier self, and do things differently. I guess it was a kind of pleasurably sublimated anxious regret, a way of obsessing over past actions except . It started to glitch a bit when I was like, ‘Oh so you’d lose all your writing,’ but I got around that by allowing myself a kind of temporal Dropbox (this is way before Dropbox). But even though there is still plenty that is appealing about second chances and a bit of supernatural foresight, the fantasy is broken for me now. I don’t enjoy thinking about it like I used to.",
"So the fantastic is often thought to be a space where we work out social anxieties and obsessions. And the same fantastic tropes actually get reworked again and again according to how those anxieties and obsessions shift. What do you think it is about time travel that speaks to the present moment? Or, do you think the time travel trope of the past was doing something different? If today’s time travel trope could travel in time to meet the time travel tropes of the past, what would they say to each other?",
"I'm interested in that bit where Sabine says, 'Kate, we do this all the time.' So they have to explain to her about Shakespeare again and again? How does that work?",
"Can you talk about the relationship between time travel and justice? Maybe reparations specifically? Or just justice.",
"If today’s time travel trope could travel in time to meet the time travel tropes of the past, what would they say to each other?",
"I have a problem with Ray Bradbury’s ‘A Sound of Thunder’ which I think means I *should* have a problem with *The Heavens*, only I don’t because I guess I am mad with love. The problem is something to do with covariance. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions means that a small change in the past can create large and unpredictable changes in the present. I don’t think we can predict them, but because some things depend on other things, we can say things like ‘If a is different, b will also be different,’ or ‘x can’t be different unless y is different.’ Like in this interview, how this question never appears unless Caliban is mentioned first. Or like the idea that Caliban might have spoken my version in an alternative universe – I know he doesn’t, because it disrupts prosodic dependencies, there are too many syllables. But in ‘A Sound of Thunder,’ the counterfactual that Bradbury retags as actual is incoherent, the pattern of change and fixity is implausible. The crucial event ripples through time for sixty million years. But when the time traveller returns, the desk is in the same place, the man behind it is the same man, just a bit uncanny. Humans evolved, English evolved, but the English language is different: SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST. Yet the same two people ran for president in yesterday’s election. Only a different one won. This is a long question. Sixty million years. Where will it end? I guess … for some reason, that covariance stuff really didn’t seem to matter in *The Heavens* in quite the same way?")(either:"Does it feel like it’s too late? Is that why we like to think of time travel?",
"Was this story a time travel story from the start?",
"Is memory a kind of time travel? In *The Heavens* everybody thinks Emilia has pathologically bad memory, which she does in a way. What’s the relationship between memory and time travel?",
"Time travel, in this book, turns out to be not the superpower it cracked up to be. Would you situate *The Heavens* within the tradition of stories about superpowers not being what they’re cracked up to be?",
"Can you talk about the relationship between time travel and forgiveness?")(either:"Tell us a bit more about the historical research. Especially Emilia Bassano Lanier.",
"Tell us a bit more about the historical research. Especially Emilia Bassano Lanier.",
"As a reader, I feel like novels with two interleaved viewpoints have to work a little harder … simply because however much I like or don’t like the book, I inevitably like one of characters better. So the basic rhythm becomes, ‘Okay, *now* we’re talking! Oh great, *this* guy. Okay, *now* we’re talking! Oh great, *this* guy.’ Of course *The Heavens* is kind of unusual and intricate, in the way that the central character, Kate, appears in every chapter but always as Kate-via-Ben or Kate-as-Emilia. But can you tell us a bit about the experience of working with that structure, and with two-ish protagonist?",
"By casting this kind of intertextual net through Shakespeare’s life and writing, you also tangle with all the nets others have cast. So there’s this intertextual relationship with, like, *Rosencrantz and Guildenstern* are dead, and *Shakespeare in Love*, and all those. How do you feel about that? And *West Side Story*, and *The Lion King*, and *Ten Things I Hate About You*. How did it fit into the way the novel took shape?",
"What was it like, to write *The Heavens*?",
"What did it feel like, to write *The Heavens*?",
"How do you feel about stories which depict imaginary events in authors’ lives, with the implication that they shaped the beloved? How much of that is going on in *The Heavens*? There are the ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets. How important were they? Are there other things like that going on?",
"Is there something a bit Twitter feminism about that as well? Like almost, ‘That’s cool Shakespeare, I’m sure you’re a great guy, but I’m still going to mute you.’",
"Tell us about how you approached writing the historical fiction aspects of *The Heavens*.",
"How did you approach writing Early Modern English? I feel like you may have gone a bit deeper than many authors of historical fiction into archaic vocabulary and syntax, but that it’s still kind of a synthesis of then and now? What kind of issues or surprises did you encounter?")(Either:"Why should everybody read *The Heavens*?",
"Faulkner’s *The Sound and the Fury*, Huxley’s *Brave New World*, Foster Wallace’s *Infinite Jest*, Steinbeck’s *The Moon is Down*, Nabokov’s *Pale Fire* (and Proust’s *Remembrance of Things Past*, in a way). Books like these, which have in common titles from Shakespeare … do they have anything else in common? Do they have anything in common with *The Heavens*? And/or, what is the significance of taking a title from Shakespeare? *The Heavens* is too short to *definitely* be from Shakespeare, but it feels from Shakespearey.",
"What do you feel are your biggest challenges as a writer?",
"You revealed a novelist’s secrets *How Not To Write a Novel*, co-authored with Howard Mittelmark. But when will you reveal a writing coach’s secrets in *How Not To Write How Not To Write a Novel*?",
"One of the things that differentiates *How Not To Write a Novel* is that it makes pedagogic use of pointed humour. Sure, a lot of writing guides are sort of jolly, but *How Not To Write A Novel* verges on mocking the reader. Like, it mocks you supportively, but there is an edge there. I don’t think that humiliation should ever be used in education or anything. But I don’t know, there’s something it’s doing that is refreshing and useful. What do you think?",
"One of the things that differentiates *How Not To Write a Novel* is that it makes pedagogic use of pointed humour. I think humour is cognitive, it’s a form of knowledge. I think Deleuze says somewhere that evaluating any text comes down to evaluating its humour. Do you have any thoughts about humour in the process of writing and criticism? And maybe not just in the process of comic writing, if that makes sense?",
"Is the Emilia of *The Heavens* a sort of historical fiction Emilia, i.e. based on what we know of her life, with the missing spaces filled in by guesswork and imagination? Or does the time travel stuff mean that she’s a slightly different version of Emilia?")(Either:"What do you think advice actually IS? Any advice, not just writing advice.",
"Some intertextual interventions into Shakespeare do clap back in various ways – Margaret Atwood’s ‘Gertrude Talks Back,’ maybe? – but I feel like whatever their critiques, and despite their supposed mischief, they all gravitate toward some kind of reverence or mysticism, they all feel like they are basically on the side of Shakespeare or something like him, and that they want to participate in some kind of greatness that Shakespeare embodies or symbolises. But *The Heavens* avoids that. How?",
"*The Heavens* makes the case that Shakespeare *has made the world a much worse place.* It’s not like criticisms of various kinds of *status quo* are that unusual, but Shakespeare is one kind of *status quo* that usually gets away with it. How did you approach the challenge?",
"*The Heavens* makes the case that Shakespeare *has made the world a much worse place.* This is refreshing and unusual and I’d love to hear more about that.",
"*The Heavens* is different from works like Stoppard’s *Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead*, in that it manages to resist a kind of deferent relationship with Shakespeare – a relationship, perhaps of patronage? Was this deliberate? How difficult was it? How does it manage to do so?",
"Are there any writing advice books, or writing advice adjacent books, that you would recommend apart from your own?",
"What do you make of Emilia’s poetry? Are there any poems that jump out for you?",
"When I started teaching a bit of Creative Writing, suddenly a lot of the adages made a lot more sense to me. You know, things like the admonition to show, rather than telling. Or the celebration of conflict as the engine of narrative. I had always thought, this stuff is just terribly inaccurate, when you consider it as a set of generalisations about decent or amazing literature! It doesn’t describe what’s going on in books! And I still believe that. But the revalation was, it does describe the inverse of what’s going on in drafts, especially drafts by inexperienced writers. For some reason – and this is kind of the conceit of *How NOT To Write a Novel* – there are these quite noticeable patterns in such writing, enough to serve as the basis for a taxonomy of. Why do you think so much? Why isn’t it all bad in its own special way?")(either:"Can writing advice be useful outside of writing?",
"*How NOT To Write A Novel* is a title that also makes me feel nervous. I mean, I get it and everything, but it makes me nervous whenever I do thing it says, that afterwards there will NOT be a novel.",
"What do you think about cutting? This Twitter account called The Darling Axe keeps following and refollowing me. Students of writing are often encouraged to compress, to get into a scene at the latest possible moment and out of it at the earliest possible moment, to turn adverb-modified verbs into single verbs that imply the adverb, and so on. They’re encouraged to be ‘ruthless’ and ‘merciless.’ Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t kind of driven out of a desire not for improvement, but complete annihilation. Or it’s a way of saying, ‘To be honest I would just never read this if I wasn’t in your crit group and I’m kind of angry at you.’ So what do you think about cutting? In your own work, and/or in the advice writers and beta readers and so on give to each other?",
"How much, and in what ways, can we blame bad writing on the reader? E.g. I sometimes think that literary critics just don’t know how to read the popular books that they slate. They don’t know that you’re supposed to skim a bit in really long predictable epic fantasy, or whatever.",
"How did you write *How NOT To Write a Novel*? Like, what were the practicalities of the collaboration?",
"What about a sequel called *How Not to WRITE a Novel*? What would that be about?",
"‘Show, don’t tell’ is maybe a weird example of writing advice, because it has that kind of accommodating vagueness of horoscopes. I think it’s actually grounded in several different, er, pathologies. For example, characters who just constantly express their inner lives without any subtext. But also writing which lacks concrete detail, or feels like a recollection or an anecdote, without any immediacy. But equivocation or vagueness doesn't necessarily make for bad writing advice, does it?",
"What do you think of immersion, and/or estrangement, in relation to the novel?",
"I mean, would you like to talk about *The Heavens* from a kind of craft or poetics perspective at all? What was easy or difficult? What might you take with you? Did you change as a writer in the course of writing it?",
"One thing I admired in my more squinting, objectifying moments was how (as well as jumping back and forth through time) you adjust the pace of the linear progression of time. But usually even in the swifter flows, there is a lot of clarity and precision and concreteness. Almost like stepping stones, and then an island, and then stepping stones, and another island. Does that sound right? If so, is it something you feel you’ve always been able to do?",
"*The Country of Ice Cream Star* was long, and *The Heavens* is short. How come?")(Either:"Dreams are things that actually happen. Sure, they only happen to you. Sure, the consequences aren’t what you think they’re going to be if you don’t realise you’re dreaming. But they do really happen. Maybe we don’t talk enough about dreams. We talk about thoughts, and feelings, and ideas, and ‘dreams’ in the sense of plans and aspirations and hopes. But dreams themselves?",
"What can we accomplish in dreams?",
"In *The Heavens*, dreams also feel like they’re standing in for all kinds of inwardness and solitude and difference. The dreamer as someone who hasn’t heard the news. Who somehow missed the thing everybody knows about, that is making everybody feel a certain way. Do you have any thoughts on that?",
"Can you tell us a bit about dreaming?",
"My dreams have changed over the years, I think not just the content, but formally as well. Is that something you relate to at all?",
"In dreams, a person can be themselves and yet not themselves. I guess there are many ways of thinking about that, but I sort of imagine that all the people you know stand in their own particular space in your life. And in a dream, a different person can stand there, but all the connections, the incomings and the outgoings and the filters, and the affordances and the baggage, all that stuff is the same. Do you think that’s at all relevant to the synthesis of Kate and Emilia?",
"Can you tell us anything about the threshold of dreaming? Whether that’s falling asleep, or waking up, or those moments of sleep where you rise to the surface?")(Either:"Do you think dreams have genres?",
"Do you think your dreams have had fads and fashions over the years? Cultural influence within one person, so that they draw not only on your waking life but on what you’ve created in previous dreams?",
"When you close your eyes, there’s actually a lot of visual data there. And when you move your eyes under your eyelids, the data changes. Do you think that plays a part in the construction of dreams?",
"Can you tell us a dream?",
"Do you ever get recurring dreams?",
"Are we too passive about our dreams? Should we have aspirations about how we want to dream? Should we follow our dream dreams?",
"What do you think about the ways we study dreams scientifically? Are we asking the right questions?",
"What would a society be like built around the principle that everyone should have awesome dreams all the time?",
"I think for me one big difference between being awake and being asleep has to do with short term recollection. Sometimes I'll be thinking in bed, then I'll drop off for a few moments and wake up again, and just have no memory of where my thoughts went, of what crazy thing I was thinking a second earlier. It's like they were starting to turn into dreams. And it's like I have phased myself out, like I'm not listening to myself. I am usually pretty sure there *were* thoughts, but there are variations where actually I think there might have just been silence ... but also a silence that wasn't being properly listened to. Is any of that like that for you?",
"My theory is that dreams are physically present in the canthuses. There are a fixed number of them. They are released one at a time, just like ovaries release eggs. They are maybe made out a substance a bit like hagfish slime, but more algorithmic and pigmented.")(Either:"Have you come across that thing about how dreams in the 1950s were in black and white? Or at least, people used to remember them as being black and white. And obviously this was when black and white media were flourishing. What do you think of that? What do you think about the reliability of our memory of our dreams?",
"One of the novel’s themes is unexpected consequences. One thing about dreams, maybe, is the way they disruptively drift through any kind of utilitarianism. Dreams subvert and resist calculation, or they have their own calculations or equivalent of calculation.",
"Dreams have a funny relationship to utopia as well. On the one hand, they’re often seen as harbouring utopia, as a refuge for the utopian impulse against . But on the other … what if you did somehow come up with this perfect society, but everybody just had nightmares all the time? Would that be, like, an acceptable price?",
"Do faces work in any special or unusual ways for you in dreams?",
"Are sex dreams a special kind of dream?",
"Can you tell us about daydreams?",
"Are you always you in your dreams?",
"Do you ever have dreams that aren’t really from any particular point of view?",
"Are dreams just thoughts exercising self-care?",
"Are dreams just pampered, spoiled, Millenial thoughts?",
"Are dreams thoughts? Is dreaming thinking?",
"Can you tell us about dreams and medication, or other altered states?",
"Do you ever die in your dreams? I do. Sometimes I become another character afterward.",
"Do personal connections work in any special ways for you in dreams? Do you dream about people you know vaguely or used to know? Is that dreaming different from dreaming about people you spend lots of time with?",
"Do you ever have a sense that you’ve got better or worse at doing things in your dreams? That your dreaming faculty has matured, aged, transformed?",
"I am pretty sure I am better at dreaming printed text than I used to be, although it’s still really swimmy. Do you ever have a sense that you’ve got better or worse at doing things in your dreams? That your dreaming faculty has matured, aged, transformed? Do you think you can learn to do things in dreams? Do you think you can forget or get rusty?")(Either:"Sometimes my dreaming has incorporated cognitive acts which I’m pretty sure I’m not really capable of. I’ve done complicated arithmetic, or I’ve rapped really fluently. At other times, the dreaming self actually seems to use ruses on itself to prevent those occasions from arising. Like if there’s someone in my dream who is about to speak in Italian – which I don’t speak, although I could probably spot a gibberish faker – oh whoops how coincidental, a trapdoor opens, or Tony the Tiger bursts in, or something. It’s so weird. It’s like, “Oh no, he’ll spot that that special effect is fake and realise it’s a dream, don’t let that happen!” What do you think that’s all about?",
"Sometimes the dreaming self actually seems to use ruses on itself. Like if there’s someone in my dream who is about to speak in Zulu – which I don’t speak, although I could probably spot a gibberish faker – oh whoops how coincidental, a trapdoor opens, or the Kool-Aid Man bursts in, or something. It’s so weird. It’s like a solo *Truman Show*. What do you think that’s all about? Like what the fuck is that about? Who is the self that knows that there are things that the duped self must not know?",
"Do you find it’s really easy to rationalise things in dreams? Like if the question arises, Why is the pizza talking, the answer can be, Oh because his lawyer had to go hide in the hummus, and so long as it’s structurally positioned as an explanation, it will serve as one?",
"I find that things in dreams want to cohere, like water droplets on glass. Despite this, something about my dreaming self has got extremely lazy about joining A to B. When I was younger, I had a real sense of a kind of iambic beat to my dreams, and the unstressed moments would be filled with all this random ebullient high-energy improvisation. I have noticed that a lot of people in my dreams just literally mutter now. Like it will be keyword, mumble mumble mumble. They are literally not saying anything. I am too damn lazy, even while I am fast asleep, to generate language for them, even though almost any language would do the job. Does this accord with your experience at all?",
"Supposedly there’s nothing more boring than somebody telling you their dream. Do you think that’s true? If not, where does it come from? Or if so, why?",
"It’s not totally impossible that we could sort of share dreams, right? It would take technology and it would be really hard to learn. But we take inputs from the outside world and incorporate them into our dreams. And we give outputs too, whether that’s murmurs or brain waves or whatever. So there’s signal, there’s bandwidth. We just haven’t figured out yet how to link up.",
"I sometimes wonder if the thing each of us calls ‘dreaming’ is quite distinct for each person.",
"I sometimes wonder if the thing each of us calls ‘dreaming’ is quite distinct for each person. It’s like Wittgenstein’s thing about how it’s impossible to have a private language. We all have a little box we gaze into, and in it is a beetle, and we can’t see anybody else’s beetle. Everyone says they know what a beetle is by looking at their own beetle. But nobody really knows if what’s in their box is at all similar to anybody else’s. I think he’s really talking about pain. And you could say it about dreams as well.")(either: "Do you know any gossip?",
"What is good in life, Sandra?",
"*The Heavens* feels like a very timely book epistemologically. It has to do, presumably, with a more networked world. Suddenly the universe is more enchanted, we do encounter wonders daily. Improbable marvels are mere viral content. Things everybody knows get debunked daily, which also feels miraculous, reality-changing. Cowboys wore bowler hats, dinosaurs feathers. It’s also a world where everybody can suddenly know about something, and weirdly act a bit as if they’ve *always* known it. Your phone was out of juice and you didn’t go on social media for a day, and suddenly you’re living in a new world. And communities of belief are polarized or fragmented. In *The Heavens*, Kate not knowing about George Bush, or about burning fossil fuels, feels like it’s bringing out that quality of experience. Does that connect with your sense of what you're doing?",
"*The Heavens* feels like a very timely book epistemologically. It has to do, presumably, with a more networked society. The nature of expertise, or at least its role in stabilizing reality, has changed. In *The Heavens*, Kate not knowing about George Bush, or about burning fossil fuels, feels like it’s bringing out that quality of experience. Can you talk to us about how *The Heavens* relates to the present moment?",
"There’s the so-called Mandela effect, where people who misremember something – like believing Mandela died in jail – decide, okay, it’s too much of a coincidence that we all believe this. I mean, we all got to this page by Googling ‘Did Mandela die in jail?’ but still, what’s most likely is we just have memories leaking in from an alternative reality. I grew up in South Africa and to me this is fucked up. Like call your stupid effect something else. But anyway. That kind of digital age paranoia feels like it’s part of the texture of *The Heavens*, even though it’s set earlier and much earlier?",
"*The Heavens* feels like a very timely book epistemologically. In a networked society, the world is more unstable and enchanted, we encounter wonders daily. Shapeshifting octopuses just hang out, woven in your feed between an old school friend announcing their newborn’s weight, and some now real technological gizmo directly inspired by retro science fiction. There’s a clip about a fox and a rhino who are best friends, and that gives you an idea to look up if there are any wild boar and geese who are best friends, and it turns out there are. Subcultures can be more fractal and more hothouse, because it’s easier to find like-minded folks, maybe for a very high threshold of like-mindedness, and those communities kind of transcend weird versus normal. And it’s also easier to find folks who share your ideas about reality, which means that epistemological outliers who in the past would have lived on in splendid isolation or been assimilated into some majority view. There’s the Mandela effect, where people who misremember something – like believing Mandela died in jail – instead of admitting they messed up, get together and contemplate that they may all have memories from a parallel universe. Also everybody can suddenly know about something, and you can feel like an imposter or an interloper just because you had your phone switched off for a couple hours. All this feels like it informs Kate’s experience in the novel. In what ways do you think *The Heavens* might be a product of its times?")(either:"Is recuperation a theme of the novel? You know, the way in which capitalism and other adaptive systems can sort of take oppositional energies and repurpose them to make themselves stronger? It feels like something people used to talk about a bit more than they do now. We do talk about cultural appropriation, of course.",
"*The Heavens* explores free will, and the relationship between individual agency and events on a much bigger scale. I guess one of the main ways people in Emilia’s time would have thought about that relationship is via grace. Divine grace involves that theological paradox whereby your will can also be God’s will. Maybe there’s also a secular grace that doesn’t quite conform to our common-sense arithmetic of cause and effect. The historical Emilia starts one of her poems, ‘Farewell (sweet Cooke-ham) where I first obtained / Grace from that grace where perfect grace remained.’ Can you tell us a little bit about the theme of free will?",
"Another bit of Shakespeare which seems to haunt *The Heavens* is ‘purposes mistook / and fall’n on th’inventors’ heads.’ This is kind of a big deal in the book, right?",
"Another bit of Shakespeare which seems to haunt *The Heavens* is ‘purposes mistook / and fall’n on th’inventors’ heads.’ This is a major theme, right?",
"OK, so … *The Heavens* seems to engage in a tension between everyday lived experience and systems theory. Or between everyday lived experience and the huge phenomena – capitalism, patriarchy, racism, history, climate change, hyperobjects – that systems theory inadequately grapples with. Things that might just soak up everything we throw at them, but also might behave in really counterintuitive ways, compared to the usual universe of people and things that we influence and take our bearings from. Although then again, in *The Heavens*, actually those giant phenomena do behave kind of predictably, in the sense that *everything makes things worse*.",
"Another bit of Shakespeare which seems to haunt *The Heavens* is ‘purposes mistook / and fall’n on th’inventors’ heads.’ This is a major theme, right? ‘Moral hazard’ is a horrible misnomer, and gets used in all kind of sleazy and bad faith way by right wingers, but the concept does capture how causation can work in counterintuitive ways on a big scale. It’s that kind of ‘if give a man a fish, destroy all incentive for him to develop a fishing industry, thus killing the man, and if you give him a FISHING ROD boy howdy don’t get me started’ kind of logic.",
"Another bit of Shakespeare which seems to haunt *The Heavens* is ‘purposes mistook / and fall’n on th’inventors’ heads.’ This is a major theme, right? And maybe partly the problem comes from wanting to save the world in the abstract. It can lead to all kinds of fearful and anxious thinking. Like: what if I give my whole life to fighting patriarchy and capitalism and racism and it doesn’t make any difference, and in the meanwhile I’ve missed the opportunity to be a good and loving person to the people closest to me? Like: OK, what if we actually do defeat patriarchy and racism and capitalism, and set up some better system, but it just randomly happens to be the wrong one for whatever the future holds, and so it lasts for like nine days then actually for a million years afterwards we have something that is like patriarchy and racism and capitalism only worse?",
"Another bit of Shakespeare which seems to haunt *The Heavens* is ‘purposes mistook / and fall’n on th’inventors’ heads.’ I wonder if it’s partly a novel that is questioning the priority we place on changing ourselves. We try to build a better world by speaking, listening, thinking, and seeing better. We exercise self-care. We often think of a good person as something you are, something that’s part of your personality and knowledge. But what if the outcome of all that, at the collective, systemic level, is actually counterproductive? What if being the change you want to see in the world actually makes that world less likely?")(either:"Do you think of Emilia as a kind of feminist, or proto-feminist maybe?",
"Do you think of Emilia as a kind of feminist, or proto-feminist maybe? Is one of the conceits of the novel that she is feminist partly because she’s merged with future ideology, which in turn is indebted to her … so feminism is a kind of self-creating ourboros?",
"OK, so … that question of how far, and in what ways, we can trust our own sense of reality has really shaped the last half century or so of leftist politics. We are duped, for sure. There’s no way things could be this catastrophic if we weren’t a little duped. But it gets tricky, because one of the ways in which we’re duped is by being made to doubt our own minds. *The Heavens* seems to explore this tension between affirming lived experience, and critiquing false consciousness (or ideology, or the social imaginary, or whatever you want to call it)? Is that part of what’s going on in the novel?",
"OK, so … *The Heavens* feels both untimely and timely. It dwells in a tension between different ideas of what counts as politically significant action. There is a kind of vulgar Marxist idea that whatever happens in the cultural superstructure (and maybe even legal and political superstructure) is just a reflection of where the real action lies, in the economic base. So like, there is no point in doing apparently sensible things like trying to get people not to think racist thoughts or hold racist attitudes. Forget it, we just need to get on with redistribution. Nobody really believes the super-crude version. But it’s possible that culture’s power to influence social justice is widely overestimated. Maybe especially among writers? *The Heavens* does feel a bit unusual in the way it attributes so much influence to vast invisible processes, which can work to countermand activity on the visible social and cultural plane. Does any of that make any sense?",
"Do you think 'To Howard' sounds weird because 'Howard' already sounds like a direction, like approaching How?",
"OK, so … *The Heavens* also seems partly to allegorise being a writer, or a cultural creator. Basically it asks, can dreams and the imagination really change things?",
"*The Heavens* seems really interested in self-fashioning, self-care, self-examination. When Emilia dives into her dreams, she is in a realm of special solitude. Her actions are radically private, and yet radically significant. Even after she figures out the kind of temporal chain thing, it still feels like Emilia’s dreaming is soul-searching writ large. It’s an allegory of inwardness, of all the things we think we can do to make the world a better place by making ourselves better people. But what if being the change you want to see in the world actually makes that world *less* likely? Is that something you wanted to explore with the novel? Do you think the novel does explore that?",
"*The Heavens* seems really interested in self-fashioning, self-care, self-examination. When Emilia dives into her dreams, she is in a realm of special solitude. Her actions are radically private, and yet radically significant. Even after she figures out the kind of temporal chain thing, it still feels like Emilia’s dreaming is soul-searching writ large. It’s an allegory of inwardness, of all the things we think we can do to make the world a better place by making ourselves better people. But what if being the change you want to see in the world actually makes that world *less* likely? Is that something you wanted to explore with the novel? Do you think the novel does explore that?")(if:$raredependency is 2)[When I looked up ‘antic/antique’ I found another weird resonance, that it seems to be used a lot to sympathise with caryatids, stuck doing this impossible job: ‘crouching Anticks which seeme in great buildings to labour under the weight they beare’ (Chillingworth). Like Emilia, maybe?](else:)[(either:"You’ve lived in the UK and the US. I’m a little transatlantic, but way more UK than US. So I don’t know if this is just me being enormously parochial, but it often really feels to me that US political discourse lacks a whole lot of useful terms, and instead has these clunky and misleading ones. Like here ‘state’ has all these useful connotations which aren’t there in the closest US equivalent, which is ‘government’ (and ‘deep state’ feels like a real non-starter). And a term like ‘white feminism’ leads to all this misunderstanding that you don’t really get with ‘liberal feminism.’ Like, it is hard enough to talk about class in the UK – with the confusion of sociological and economic class and whatnot – but it seems like it’s really impossible in the US … you have to kind of talk about class via race while also talking about race. And ‘liberal’ is kind of an autoantonym, meaning roughly opposite things in the US and the UK. Also, the US terminology is kind of encroaching (if that’s not, like, alarmist and xenophobic) into UK political discourse. Do I actually have a question?",
"Can you spell it out? – how might the life that Kate ends up living, which really looks like a good life, end up making the world worse?",
"Did you do much kind of worldbuilding?",
"How did you manage that idea of the whole history of the world changing chapter by chapter?",
"Did you draw from Emilia’s own poetry?",
"What’s your advice for advice-givers?",
"What do you think about people talking to each other on the street? It’s something that occurs more in Kate’s original world.",
"Tell us a bit about 9/11 in this novel.",
"9/11 fiction is kind of a genre of its own too, right? Do you see *The Heavens* in relation to that?",
"It feels like the novel is also exploring incommensurate values. Like when Shakespeare gets that sort of faraway look in his eyes and is like, fuck it, fuck the world, I’m going to make great art. You’re partly satirising this big ego. But also, it’s about things like art and dreams that just don’t fit very well into ordinary ethical calculus? Or … is that just something we like to tell ourselves?")]