John Hawkes-Reed is a Unix hacker by day. By night, too, if it's been one of those sorts of weeks. His origin story involves finding the big yellow Gollancz hardbacks in Winchcome public library, the 'Making a transistor radio' Ladybird book and the John Peel programme. The 2006 Viable Paradise writer's workshop was something of a life-changing experience, and he has been quietly emitting stories of varying length since then. Some of those stories can be found in the anthologies 'Airship shape and Bristol fashion', 'Colinthology','Dark Spires' and 'Future Bristol'. He is fascinated by cold-war architecture, islands and stationary engines. John owns too many books, not enough tractors and is trivially Googleable.
John wrote Miss Butler and the Industrial Automation Group for the anthology and has dropped in to talk about ideas, amongst other things...
Summer 1983. Peelie plays the first release from Red
Guitars, a band
from Hull. 'Good Technology' becomes an indie hit,
features in that
year's Festive Fifty and is part of The Tube's guide to
the Hull music
scene. It seems obvious that it is only a matter of time
before they're
playing packed gigs at the Town & Country in Kentish
Town. The song
itself is a minimal piece. A mildly ironic list of
post-spaceflight
technological wonders. It is stripped back and carefully
avoids any
rockist cliche, as was the orthodoxy of the time.
In 1983 I'd fallen into work as a bench technician,
repairing what we
were then pleased to call 'personal computers' -
Superbrain, Altos,
AppleII, LoMac, Anadex, Qume, Televideo - all names
completely
meaningless to the people around me. It felt like I had
my hands on some
of the future that one would only see once a week on
Tomorrow's World,
and which otherwise was cheerfully avoiding rural
Gloucestershire.
For that reason, and because it's a damn fine song, 'Good
Technology'
turned into something of a personal theme. I played it to
death via
mixtapes ruined by a variety of nasty car cassette
players, and the
lyrics - We've got computers that can find us friends/We
know roughly
when the world will end - stayed in the back of my head
for the next
thirty years.
Winter 2015. Because I drive a car from the late 90s, if
I want to
listen to something other than the whistle of a
turbocharger I have to
go and find the pile of blank CDs that are gathering dust
next to the
selection of boot floppies and create an 'audio project'.
I can almost
hear the young people laughing into their Tumblergrams as
I do it. One
of the tracks is 'Good Technology'. I'm driving out of
Kelston towards
Bath when the carefully-digitised surface noise from an
old 7" leads
into a large helping of backwards guitar. Because I'm
older and/or
paying more attention to the road and/or just have a
different brain,
the lyrics first describe a quaint sort of retro-future
where everyone
will have smoked while worrying about impending nuclear
war, then mutate
into something quite different - We've got cigarettes
that can tell us
who we are/We've got missiles that reproduce a work of
art - and each
new mutation suggests a complete and functioning world
brimming with odd
stories.
People very rarely ask me where my ideas come from.
Usually they say
something like 'I have no idea what you just said, but it
sounds
amazing.' And then they change the subject.
The thing is that lone ideas are pretty weak sorts of
thing. You
couldn't in all good conscience stretch one idea out into
a story. You'd
get about half way and then there's be this nasty snap as
some part
broke off under the strain, which would leave you with
nothing but a cut
where the sharp bits sliced through the back of your
hand. However, if
you just quietly let the things arrive and fall into
place like some
wonky kind of Tetris, then you find that through a
combination of
piling, twisting and frantic jabbing, odd selections of
ideas fall
together with satisfiying 'bloink' noises. Or you could
think of it as
accelerating ideas to close to the speed of light, bashing them
together and then carefully recording the subatomic
story-particles that
come spalling off the impact zone.
That is to say that creativity is a lot like playing
Tetris in a
particle accelerator.
Another thing that people rarely say around me is 'Art or
engineering?'
because as a hacker who writes SF, the only sensible
answer is 'Yes'.
Autumn 2006. I'm in the Island Inn on Martha's Vinyard,
working my way
through a case of expensive 'imported' beer (so Heineken,
probably. Or
Wifebeater.) while listening to Uncle Jim and TNH tell
stories of fixing
the dialogue in a story over ICQ. For reasons of dramatic
wossname, but
more likely because of the beer, everything went a bit
wibbly and I was
back in 1989 and reading about some Amiga demoscene crew
who'd managed
to crack the protection on some game or other by reading
hex dumps over
the phone to each other.
"You were debugging that story, live," I
squeaked.
Everybody seemed quite pleased with that statement,
although perhaps a
bit 'Well, yes. Obviously…'. However I had to bag a fresh
bottle and
wander out onto the lawn so I could listen to the
crickets and the surf
and think about what had just clattered into place.
Hacking on code was this thing I'd fallen into by
accident - I'd happily
assumed my future would be some sort of electronic
engineering because
this programming malarkey seemed to involve more maths
than I could cope
with, proper university and faffing about with coding
sheets and
flowcharts. Battering away at a keyboard in Turbo Pascal
was just
mucking about and would never lead to any sort of proper
work, because I
couldn't see how the type of complete impostor like me
could ever
actually manage to create the huge sorts of programs that
actually did
things and had input boxes, save-as icons and printer
drivers. However,
it was curiously satisfying work for which I had a
pleasing aptitude.
I was lurching around the grounds of the Island Inn
because I'd written
a story over a period of many months and many, many
cross-functional,
cross-Atlantic team meetings (sit at the back and keep
very still, the
videoconferencing kit will assume you're furniture and
ignore you) and
sent it off to Viable Paradise more or less to find out what
would
happen next. I still couldn't see how anyone could hold
the structure of
a complete novel in their head. As far as I could tell it
all went - (i)
I can typing! (ii) Writery things! (iii) Profit!
And in a dimly recursive burst of self-awareness, I had
realised that
the bits of brain that lit up when I was writing code -
the code that I
originally couldn't see how to cobble together into
useful programs that
did things - were the same bits of brain that lit up when
I was fumbling
about with this other code. The code that you could run
on human brains.
At this point I should tie this all up by pulling the
obvious
comparisons together for an emotionally satisfying
conclusion. And,
given that it's me writing this, there should probably be
a
self-deprecating geeky in-joke.
Alternatively I could just stop.
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