Locus Award Nominated Writer Hal Duncan

The Author Of Escape From Hell! Talks Inventions And Politics

Jul 5, 2009

World Fantasy Award nominated writer Hal Duncan talks world politics and ruminates on skybikes and hoverboards as inventions he'd like to see realised in his lifetime.

Suite101: What's the one invention/political policy you'd like to see realised in your lifetime?

Hal Duncan: I want to say skybikes or hoverboards, but if truth be told, I never learned to ride a motorbike or to skateboard, and it would be a bit too mid-life-crisis for me to start now, so I don't know that I'd actually be all that wowed, in practice, if either of them became real.

I'm not actually that much of a technophile at all when it comes down to it. Gadgets don't excite me that much. Bit of a piss-poor excuse for a science fiction writer, I suppose. And even in terms of truly off-the-wall, blue-sky imaginings - inventions that would change the world completely - well, even if time travel was invented, or FTL, or AI robots, or nanotech (like, honest-to-god, rebuild-reality-around-you nanotech), I can't seriously see the future turning out as the sort of playground of adventure you get in the stories.

For all that this or that doohickey or whatchamaflip might be really fricking cool to play around with, I can't think of any one invention that I want to see simply exist for the sake of it. Would *I* get to travel back in time and **** with the past to see if it created a paradox? Could I afford the Apple iRobot? Hell, anything that's interesting enough, anything that's more than just a neat gadget, is probably an invention with completely unpredictable potentials, the sort of thing that could plunge us into dystopian hell as easily as it could make the world a better place.

Unless maybe it was some sort of free power, renewable energy thingumy, something that would free us from the economics (and environmental problems and world politics) of oil. Even there though, the cynic in me kicks in and thinks that we'd need a radical overhaul of the Way Things Are in order to get that out into the world.

So if it's pipe-dreams we're talking - some one thing that would *in and of itself* make me feel like I was leaving the world in a fundamentally better state than I entered it - I'm drawn to the political policy option. But again, I don't know. I'm an internationalist, so I'd want it to be a policy that applied across the board, not just in some nice liberal democracy like the UK or the US.

The sort of human rights legislation that would probably mean the most to me personally - protection from persecution on the grounds of sexuality - is just not that meaningful if it just amounts to a piece of paper expressing ideals that aren't enforced. It doesn't mean shit if gays can be refused the right to marry in this US state or that, or stoned to death for sodomy elsewhere.

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