Sometimes as a child I would lie in bed and worry what would happen if, in the morning, I awoke with no memory of lying in bed worrying. Would I still be the same person or would I have changed? If memories make us who we are, what happens when we forget doing or thinking something?
In January, Solaris Books will publish Macaque Attack, the third volume in a trilogy of novels that already includes the BSFA Award-winning Ack-Ack Macaque, and its sequel, Hive Monkey. In all three of these books, I have employed a disparate and motley cast of characters in order to examine what it is that makes us who we are – and what it is that makes us human.
The most obvious case is the title character, Ack-Ack Macaque. He is a monkey raised to sentience by the implantation of artificial neurons. He can walk, curse and even fly a plane, but does that make him a person or an animal?
And what of Victoria Valois, who had half her brain replaced with similar implants following a helicopter crash. She started out human, but now fifty percent of her thinking takes place on artificial components. Is she a person still, or has she become a machine?
Perhaps trickiest of all is the predicament of Victoria’s husband, Paul. I set Ack-Ack Macaque up as a murder mystery, with Paul as the victim. He dies before the book opens, so we never get to see him alive. What we get instead is a recording of his personality run as a simulation. This ‘electronic ghost’ remembers being Paul, and reacts as he would have reacted in any given situation. But is it anything more than a talking photograph? Can it be argued that the simulation is in some ways a human being in its own right?
I’m tackling serious questions, but I’m also trying to entertain you while I do it. As mentioned, I used a murder mystery plot as the delivery mechanism and, because I wanted to set it in the near future (so I could have access to the marvelous implant technology that plays such a vital role in the story) and because I wanted to have giant Zeppelins running on nuclear-electric engines, I decided to set the whole thing in an alternate universe, on a timeline where Britain and France had undergone a political merger at the end of the 1950s.
I like to think I’ve taken a Philip K. Dick sort of approach. I’ve given you a trilogy of fast-paced adventure stories that you can enjoy as such, but I’ve built them around some fairly weighty philosophical questions about the nature of family, grief, loyalty and what it means to be a human being.
I had a blast writing all three of the books. The first was fun in and of itself, but the second and third held the added pleasure of returning to the characters and watching them change and grow as each story progressed. I came to know them very well and, by the end of Macaque Attack, found that I was genuinely sorry to leave them.
I can’t say the books wrote themselves, however. The Anglo-French Union appealed to me as soon as I read about the French Prime Minister’s offer of such a merger in a Guardian article, but I had to do my research, and figure out the political, economic and social ramifications of the premise.
I also had to walk a fine line between drama and comedy. I wanted the books to be fun, but didn’t want them to devolve into cartoonish slapstick. I wanted to present a world in which the readers could immerse themselves, one worthy of the themes being explored, but also fast-moving enough to keep those pages turning.
Macaque Attack was a particular challenge, in so far as I felt pressure to do justice to the preceding books, to the characters, and to the readers who’d stayed with me thus far. In Macaque Attack, we meet an older, wiser macaque. He’s beginning to realise that he can’t be a loner forever, and he’s starting to admit to himself that he cares about the people around him – the dysfunctional ersatz family of characters he’s accumulated over the previous two volumes.
(In addition, Macaque Attack features characters from my earlier space opera, The Recollection – which means that all four of the books I’ve written for Solaris form part of a larger tale, and the trilogy has become a quartet!)
As Macaque Attack forms the last book in the series, I always knew I’d have to make sure it wrapped everything up satisfactorily while simultaneously taking the story to a whole new level. When the book hits the shelves in the New Year, you’ll be able to judge whether or not I’ve succeeded.
If you haven’t read Ack-Ack Macaque or Hive Monkey they’ve both picked up 9/10 reviews on Fantasy-Faction with the conclusion that they are ‘heaps of fun, cleverer than they first appear, and contain a hidden heart that’s really rather sweet’ – ensuring Gareth L. Powell was added to our list of favourite Science-Fiction authors.
The latest novel discussed in this Guest Post, Macaque Attack, is published January 2015 in both paperback and eBook formatt from our good friends Solaris.
Richard Marpole
Jennie Ivins