1. The two book deal you’ve recently signed will see the reissue of your novel The Holy Machine. Will the second book also be a reissue or something new?

The second book is still up for discussion and I’m not sure at this point. Could be either a new book or a reworking of an existing book.

2. Do you feel more comfortable writing in the short format or at novel length?

I honestly don’t think I have a preference. There are pros and cons of each. Shorts have a satisfying tightness, but novels allow one to linger and expand and unfold things.

3. When you set out to write a new story, what are you trying to achieve?

Difficult to say but these are my immediate thoughts:

To solve something in my own mind, to solve an aesthetic problem (for example I might have several disparate elements in my mind which I find myself wanting to combine into a single piece of work), to turn a piece of raw experience into a satisfying shape, to take an idea or an observation about the world and make it into something that isn’t just abstract but has a life of its own and is inhabited.

4. Could you ever see yourself writing mainstream fiction?

In principle yes, but in practice I’m not sure I even will because I find that conventions of SF allow me to make my stories more vivid and fun. For example: why write a mainstream story in which a character struggles with his inner demons in his head when you could write an SF stories where the same characters struggles with those demons outside of his head, on the well-lit stage of the story itself (see my story ‘Monsters’, for instance, which pretty much does just that).

5. Do you believe written science fiction is as accessible to new readers today as it ever was, or has something changed?

No, I don’t think it is as accessible. I started reading SF in the 60s and 70s and back then science fiction was something that many habitual readers of fiction would dip into at some point, without necessarily feeling they had crossed some boundary into a separate genre, or turned themselves into SF fans. My mother, for example, is not in any way an SF fan, but she would have read Wyndham, maybe Ballard. I can actually remember her recommending Aldiss’s Greybeard to me.

Actually it’s still the case that many non-SF readers read SF by writers such as PD James (who wrote a book with a remarkably similar basic premise to Greybeard, written thirty years earlier!!) Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro and many others, but it is marketed in such a way that they don’t see it as being SF at all. Sadly, I think there is more resistance than there formerly was to exploring SF identified as such. That’s my impression anyway.

I don’t know why this is but it is probably in part down to publishers trying to brand books and pitch them at specific demographics?

Or maybe it is partly down to SF sometimes struggling to find new angles and repeating the same tropes too often for most readers? Once upon a time galactic empires traversed by huge FTL spaceships was a new and exciting idea, but perhaps now you have to be a bit of a diehard to want to read yet more books with that same basic premise? (It doesn’t grab me much anymore I have to admit, though I am prepared to be persuaded otherwise in respect of particular books.)

This is not to say there is anything wrong at all with just not being able to get enough of a certain kind of book. That’s absolutely fine. The heart wants what it wants. I’m just saying that it is perhaps inevitable that after a while the market is going to dwindle and become more specialised.

(The same is true of books about humans, dwarves and elves going on quests. I loved the Lord of the Rings, but I have no desire at all to read any more trilogies with the same premise, and my guess is that a lot of people would agree with me, though a glance at the fantasy section of a bookshop shows that a diehard minority still wants more books with that same basic idea.)

6. If time, finance, work and all other pressures were removed, what would Chris Beckett be writing next?

Short stories come when they come. I’ve never been able to force one into existence out of nothing. So if I had more time, and no other pressures, I would be playing around with various ideas for novels until eventually I found one that I could run with. And then I would put all my energies into unfolding that. I know that is annoyingly vague, but it’s the best I can do at this exact moment!

Chris, many thanks.