This is Part 3. If you missed them, here is Part 1 and here is Part 2.

TD: So, given that you can have multiple pronunciations of a word, and presumably multiple meanings of a word, is the continued existence of dictionaries – whether paper or digital – threatened by internet enterprises like Wiktionary or even the Urban Dictionary?

CS: Dictionaries basically are becoming an online thing. The Oxford English Dictionary is an online entity; it does of course also exist in physical form, but in terms of the updates that happen to it, and the way that most people work with it and use it, it’s an online thing. Now the ones you mentioned are crowd-sourced. If they’re not the sort of sites that scrape dictionary content and then present it, a lot of them are crowd sourced. I think that contemporary dictionary producers are interested in crowd sourcing, but that there’s a value to expert editorial input to weigh things and to make sure that there’s a balance, and people aren’t creating things the way they wish they were, rather than the way things actually are.

TD: That makes sense. Again, this is from the linguist, so do forgive me. Can dictionaries ever be subversive?

CS: I’d say lexicographers can certainly be subversive, yeah! There’s not a lot of scope for subversion in the pronunciation part of a dictionary entry, although probably not none; the decision for instance to include the northern ‘A’ (bath, glass) [rhyming with ass, not arse] forms subverted the norm of giving only the close RP versions.

In parts of the dictionary that aren’t my specialism I’m wary of speaking for my colleagues too much, but say you have a dictionary entry. As well as the pronunciation, part of speech, definition, and the etymology, you’d have some quotations or example sentences.

CS: Those are drawn from massive corpora of real data –we don’t make them up, they just exist in the world and an editor picks a few to illustrate exactly how the word might be used. Now if you’re picking three from a hundred, in exercising that choice you might subvert people’s expectations. For instance if it were a word that was particularly associated with one sort of thing you might – and you’d do it partly for lexicographical reasons because you want to demonstrate the range – pick one that would surprise or upset expectations.
I invited my colleague Fiona McPherson to weigh in on this, she says:

The main purpose in selecting the quotation evidence is, course, to reflect the way the term you are defining is used. I’m looking for apt, clear examples which help the reader to understand, rather than baffle them – otherwise I’m not doing my job. In saying that, it is the one area where we can get a little creative. All other things being equal, I do get a kick out of choosing an example from one of my favourite books, or perhaps one that shows my football team in a good light. I do also enjoy choosing a publication that is more unusual – maybe something that is less canonical than those which spring to mind when you think of the OED. Working as I do with new words, you often get that opportunity as those publications tend to be where that type of vocabulary is found. But that is only possible if the quotation is one which aids understanding. That always has to be the main objective.

TD: How would you explain the concept of a dictionary to an alien?

CS: Well, what’s the alien’s language? Does the alien have language in the way we understand it?

TD: Yes, let’s assume that there is some way to actually communicate with the alien.

CS: Okay. I’m going to restrict myself to talking about the pronunciation bits of the dictionary.

TD: Fair enough.

CS: Assuming the alien had some language, and that their language was produced physiologically by some part of their alien anatomy, I would say: these symbols here, the transcription symbols, are just a sequential indication of which bit of your anatomy – which bit of alien anatomy – interacts with which other bit of alien anatomy, to produce the sound which combines to make the language.

TD: That’s an excellent description!

[CS laughs]

TD: And probably helpful to non-aliens as well to be honest [laughs]. If you could bring any obsolete item of lexis back into popular use, what would it be?

CS: Oooh. One of the nice things about OED is that nothing gets removed. There are a lot of entries in OED which are obsolete, but they won’t be expunged or deleted. I come across words a lot, actually, as I’m working through, and I think ‘oh that’s ripe for coming back’.

TD: Linguistics questions aside, a couple of quick ones to end with. You mentioned you have a doctorate in sociophonetics, and obviously you have various academic interests. What role do you think academics can or should play in the production or consumption of geek culture?

CS: I was thinking about this recently, because I was looking at the term aca-fan. Often people are very keen to draw distinctions, you know, ‘it’s not the same as being someone who is simultaneously a fan of something and an academic’. I don’t think there should be an artificial distinction; I don’t think that academics fundamentally think about things in a different way. We might give ourselves more space to pick things apart, or we might bring particular frameworks of thinking about something to bear on whatever our particular fandom might be, but I see it as organically belonging together. And I think really anybody can analyse, if you listen to people geeking out – so, I enjoy tabletop games, I enjoy comics books, I enjoy Buffy and various…

TD: Anyone who doesn’t enjoy Buffy I don’t trust [she says, tongue in cheek].

CS: Well thinking about Buffy as an example, I’ve watched Buffy for many years and talked about Buffy with many people, friends who are academics and not, including people who were academically working on Buffy and not, and I don’t see a fundamental difference. You can pull it apart on gender lines, you can see things on a subsequent watching you hadn’t seen before, and that might be informed by your academic work or your readings or but those aren’t things that are locked up in the ivory tower especially, or they shouldn’t be.

TD: That’s a great answer. One of the things we do on the site quite a lot is talk about tropes. Do you have a favourite trope?

CS: Tropes are one of the things that feed a lot of the potential new additions to the dictionary in the areas I look at. Often they’re fairly niche and specific, and so they might not make it over the hurdle to get included. Something like 'Mary Sue' for instance as a trope, or 'Sexy Lamp Test' is certainly something that we’re looking at. I was trying to pin down a definition of Strong Female Character recently – the thing with tropes is that they’re really slippery. You know exactly what you mean by them, but they can be hard to nail down. I don’t think I have a favourite one; I’m very interested in them, and it’s fun to spot them, but I don’t think there’s a particular one that’s my favourite one of all.

TD: Are there any that you would like to stop seeing?

CS: Oh plenty! I’m trying to think of things I’ve watched recently.

TD: I know as soon as one puts that hat on then it’s just easy to get ragey about all the many things that they should really stop doing…

CS: When I think about tropes that really annoy me, it often boils down to limitations placed on female characters, of one sort of another.

TD: Agreed. Finally, do you have any recommendations for our readers: films to watch, TV series you’ve loved, books to read, or other recommendations?

CS: Oooh. I’ll pick ones that do interesting things with language…

TD: That would be great.

CS: Ok, a comic book – I’m sure many of your readers will already be familiar with it, but Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga series does really interesting things with language. It uses an existing invented language for one of its languages – Esperanto – and I’m very interested how languages get used in graphic novels in different ways. So yeah, Saga would be one.

I wouldn’t say I’d wholeheartedly recommend it for various reasons, but there’s lot of interesting language stuff in Game of Thrones, and I do enjoy watching it, and problematising it as we academics love to.

I enjoy the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general, and there are some cool language things that go on for instance in Captain America: Civil War. I mentioned Scarlet Witch already, but also Zemo, Bucky and of course Black Panther with the Xhosa. I spoke about some of that at Nine Worlds this year. Agents of SHIELD has some nice language and translation bits too.

I’m trying to think if there are any board games with really good pronunciation dimensions to them but not among the ones I love, really. Although the word ‘meeple’ – which is a little character figure from a board game – is finding its way into the dictionary.

TD: Oh that’s cool.

CS: Well we’re seeing what we can do.

TD: Thank you very much for a really interesting chat!

CS: Thank you!

NB. This interview has been edited for clarity.

This is the third in a series of interviews with authors, developers, critics, journalists, and academics. If you'd like to make a suggestion, or be interviewed, do get in touch.

In case you missed it, you can find Part 1 here.

TD: I have some questions from the linguist, so I’ll do my best to pronounce all the words.

CS: [Laughs], okay!

TD: When selecting voices for your audio pronunciations for the dictionary, is there dialectical variation, or when you have British English, is it always in RP?

CS: The short answer is ‘no’, and the long answer is coming.

TD: [Laughs], good.

CS: First of all, it depends what you mean by RP. The definition of RP that we work on is the one that was developed for an earlier Oxford publication by Professor Clive Upton, and his definition of RP is pretty broad. There’s a sort of conservative RP which is that quite 'the cet set on the met' sort of ‘Queen’s English’ except even the Queen doesn’t do it anymore, and then there’s a sort of broad RP. Clive Upton… a long time ago used to teach me, and he would say that I speak – the way I’m speaking to you now – he would call it RP.

(Editor’s note: the parts in square brackets below are my editorializing, and the rhyming is in accordance with my Aussie accent. I encourage you all to imitate it out loud to get the full effect.)

CS: Now, there are aspects of my own accent which are not conservative RP: I say ‘glass’ with /a/ [rhyming with ‘ass’] not ‘glass’ /ɑː/ [rhyming with ‘arse’], I say ‘poor/pour’ with / ɔː/ [like an Aussie would say it] not /ʊə/ ‘poo-r’ – either for somebody who doesn’t have a lot of money, or for moving liquid from one thing to another. Another one is called yod coalescence which is when rather than saying tune [tyoon] and dune [dyoon] you say tune [choon] and dune [joon]. And so those are things that in a narrow definition of RP would be outside it, but in the broad definition of RP would be inside it.

Which brings me around to the answer. If you call RP broad, then yes, the pronunciations that we offer for British English reflect broad RP. However, in the OED for instance, all the bath/glass/grass [all pronounced to rhyme with ass] words, have both pronunciations bath and bath [bath and barth/bahth] given, and we similarly include that yod coalescence, which is quite widespread now. So it’s a sort of broad and modern RP for British English. We don’t reflect… this is a bit difficult to explain without reference to some technical stuff, so I’ll tell you a bit and you can use it or not.

TD: Deal, that sounds reasonable. (Editor's note: We decided to leave it in. Obviously.)

CS: When you make a phonemic transcription of something, the symbol you choose can encompass more than one possibility. For instance if I’m doing a transcription in IPA for the word ‘bus’, then the symbol I use for the vowel in the symbol of that word is like an upside down v (ʌ). Now, there is another symbol which you could use if you wanted to use a kind of Yorkshire ‘boos’ type vowel, but you can argue that if you’re doing broad phonemic transcription like that, that the use of a symbol can include a range of different phonetic possibilities for something. Similarly, a speaker whose accent is influenced by Irish English would probably have more of a dental ‘t’, and someone from the south of England would probably have more of a ‘t’ that’s alveolar, further back in the mouth (well still at the front, but not as far forward as your teeth). But in a broad phonemic transcription, you would still use the symbol ‘t’. In a close phonetic transcription you have diacritics – extra symbols that say very specifically ‘the closure for this is here, and the kind of release is like this’ – but that’s not the kind of transcription you use in a dictionary. That belongs in, for example, a transcription for the purpose of speech therapy, or for a very close analysis of a regional accent. In my past I’d have done that kind of transcription, but for dictionaries it’s broad.

Example of phonemic transcription (Source: http://www.azlifa.com/pp-lecture-8/)

But your question was about the voices we choose to read those transcriptions aloud, and then you’re picking a person, so all of that useful abstraction that you get with a phonemic transcription is lost. In picking people, other things are more important than accent. We need people with a clear voice, good microphone manner; I know that sounds odd, but some people get in the booth behind a microphone and they speak in a very robotic way, or some people get mic fright and if they can’t get over it then it’s not the job for them! It’s not even a problem particularly if people have a stutter… the way we record, they’ll go into a booth with a list, and they’ll go through. They have to be very careful not to use a very list-like intonation, because we don’t want the words to be [makes up and down noises, much like Australians are famous for].

TD: Yeah [laughs]

CS: Because once you chop them up, that sounds very strange. They have to… it’s a fairly artificial way of speaking. We try to get a bit of apparent gender balance as well: I don’t want the voice of the dictionary to be male necessarily. And there is difference in things, some of which are corollaries of apparent gender, like pitch. I probably wouldn’t use somebody who had a very obvious, very localised non-RP regional accent for the British English recordings, because we’re trying to give something that’s fairly general and in line with at least a fairly broad RP.

Before I had the job I did, I myself was at one point several years ago one of the many freelancers who did some recording for the dictionary. So if you go to oxforddictionaries.com and you listen to the pronunciations, a very small proportion of them are me! [Laughs]

TD: That’s very cool! So you’re permeating all levels of the dictionary!

CS: Yeah! And when we did the regional ones, most of the regional stuff was spoken by members of the dictionary team, because we have members from lots of different countries. Not all of them; I did have to find some external freelancers to come in for varieties of English that we didn’t have covered, but it’s quite nice, you know, being the voice of the OED is pretty cool.

TD: Yeah, I’d be writing that one on my forehead, or at least on my CV.

[CS chuckles]

TD: Or you know, it would be a nice one in the Twitter bio, ‘voice of the OED’

Institut de France, home of the Academie Francaise

TD: So apart from the fact that the voices you’ve chosen are more limited in their range, you’ve talked about the fact that there are lots of possibilities for pronunciation in terms of how they’re phonetically written, and I took it from your Nine Worlds talk as well that the point of Oxford Dictionaries is to reflect usage rather than prescribe it. What are your thoughts on institutions such as – and please excuse my bastardising of the French language [TD prepares herself to pronounce French with an Aussie accent] – the Academie Francaise, which attempt to control the evolution of language?

CS: I’m glad to be working in the English language where that isn’t seen as the way to go. English’s role in the world is rather different – English’s position as a global language is special – and there’s so much diversity in English, within the British Isles and around the world. I’m glad that there’s a general recognition that description rather than prescription is the way to go, and that’s certainly something that underpins what we (and not just in the pronunciation but in definition and in all aspects of a dictionary entry), my colleagues and I would be guided by. ‘How is this word actually used? ‘What do people mean by it when they say it?’ Which is not to say ‘throw away the etymology! Throw away the historical!’; the OED especially is a historical dictionary, so as a word’s meaning evolves, all of those definitions would be recorded in order in the entry.

Think about the pedant’s favourites, a word like ‘decimate’, where people will say ‘no, you have to mean you’ll kill one in ten!’ Yes it can mean that, and it can mean other things as well, and so recording both of those is really important, and is part of the job of what dictionary writing is. Lexicography is very different from language control. Organisations like the Academie Franscaise seem to operate in a different sphere, their role seems to be to rule and to prescribe, and not necessarily to embrace language change in all its forms, as it happens.

CS: One thing I should’ve said earlier, actually, is that we do of course give more than one pronunciation for things, and that’s a good example of actually when something changes. You might have a loan word for instance for a piece of food or something, that comes in from another language and when it comes in there’s a very foreign-like pronunciation that some people use, and then a very spelling-like pronunciation, so something like ‘chorizo’ or ‘bruschetta’: all these ones that people feel they get tripped up by. In that kind of situation we would probably record both: we’d have the pronunciation that would possibly be used by the foodie expert for whom authenticity is really important…

[TD laughs]

…possibly with knowledge of the original language, and then a generally acceptable spelling-based pronunciation that maybe becomes the majority usage. Now there’d be arguments for dropping either one of those: people might say ‘oh you know, nobody actually says this anymore, so we shouldn’t even give it’, or ‘this is truly correct, and so we shouldn’t drop it just because 7/10 people say ‘chorizo’’. It’s nice that we can accommodate them both, which is quite different from the prescriptive vision.

And so ends Part 2. Our discussion concludes in Part 3.

This is the third in a series of interviews with authors, developers, critics, journalists, and academics. If you'd like to make a suggestion, or be interviewed, do get in touch.

TD: Hi Catherine! Firstly, tell me in a couple of sentences what your job involves as Head of Pronunciation.

CS: My job involves researching and advising on the way words ought to be pronounced. When one of our dictionaries is going to have pronunciations – either in the transcription form or audio – I would be the person who would ultimately show editors how to do that, teach editors how to do the transcription, and check them before they get published. And when it comes to audio (which is a relatively new thing for the Oxford English Dictionary) I also oversee the procedure of getting all the recordings made and put online. I can come on to it later, but something we’ve done quite recently in Oxford English Dictionary is, as well as British and American English, we’ve made recordings for other varieties of English, so that’s been a recent focus for me.

TD: Very cool. Yes, I definitely have some questions about the types of English and the types of accents that get used, which we will get to shortly (Editor's note: in part 2!). But first, what is your favourite recent addition to Oxford Dictionaries?

CS: Oxford English Dictionary is the big dictionary – the most dominant large dictionary that I work on – but the other dictionary that I do a lot of work on is the one that gets presented when you look at OxfordDictionaries.com, the free online one. It is an amalgam of two print dictionaries: the Oxford Dictionary of English and the New Oxford American Dictionary. That gets regular updates in a certain way, and the OED has quarterly updates – new stuff gets added every quarter – and my work often focuses on the quarterly updates for OED. I think in the public mind, OED and Oxford Dictionaries are…

TD: Synonymous.

CS: Hopefully they don’t actually contradict each other too much! [TD laughs] But they’re two different beasts.

TD: I see! Well, you should feel free to answer any of my questions then in relation to either, or to both.

CS: Okay. I’m thinking favourite recent addition still. There were some nice ones on the shortlist for word of the year – woke, and hygge, and Latinx, for instance. When I come to Nine Worlds I’m collecting examples of usage and it gets fed in, and there have been a few that are some way through the pipeline. One of the ones I collected back in 2014 is actually just about to be published in OED, which is extra exciting for me – it’s “Mary Sue” – I’m so happy that she’s going in to our dictionary at last.

TD: You’ve given talks at Nine Worlds for the last couple of years. What motivates you to get involved in something like that?

CS: Well, although the focus of my work is on how words are pronounced, everybody at the dictionary is encouraged to think about the entire process. I have colleagues who specialise in new words – in drafting new words, and researching what words we ought to add – but they’re always interested in input from different people, and that aligns with people’s different interests and specialisms. And so it happens in different ways. One of my colleagues in New Words recently was putting together a lot of words around parenting; there’s a lot of new vocabulary around things like cloth nappies, baby-led weaning, baby-wearing with slings, and so forth. It’s quite a generative area for vocabulary. And so she would look at that area, and I had some thoughts of my own there, and similarly just with Nine Worlds: the area of things like gaming and the political side of what goes on at Nine Worlds in terms of gender politics, sexual identity and gender identity – that’s another fertile area for new words, and new usages for old words as well. Because that’s something I’m into anyway – popular culture and geekery – it seemed like a good place to say ‘Come and tell me about what words you use all the time but you don’t see in dictionaries; let us catch up!’.

TD: Before you were at Oxford Dictionaries – and I will come back to that, because I’ve got quite a lot of questions about dictionaries – you were part of the BBC Pronunciation Unit.

CS: That’s right. My chequered past involved doing a doctorate in sociophonetics (a branch of linguistics). I specialised in accents and dialects, and looked particularly at accommodation, which is how, when you speak to someone with a different accent, your own accent changes. Or somebody’s regional accent changes over their life with moving around, with contact, or with wanting to present a different persona. So my research was sociolinguistics with a particular focus on pronunciation. And then after I finished that I went to work in the Pronunciation Unit, which is where I was for several years, then had a little baby-having interlude, and now I’m at Oxford Dictionaries.

The Pronunciation Unit’s job is to help broadcasters pronounce anything they need to know how to pronounce. They might be people’s names, place names, phrases – all kinds of things really. Unlike my current work which focuses on English, that was any language that they needed.

TD: Cool.

CS: Not all of the BBC is in English, of course – there’s the World Service and so forth – but even if they were broadcasting in English the words and phrases often weren’t. Radio 3 might say ‘We need this Old Church Slavonic for the mass that we’re playing’, or maybe a Polish football team, or Icelandic volcano; all kinds of things! There was a very small team of linguists – phoneticians – and we used published sources (reference books etc.) but you’d also do interviews.

I’m still in touch with them, it’s quite useful for us to check in with each other sometimes. Most recently I had a call about the news story about the woman who was head of UKIP for about a week…

TD: Ah yes, for a sneeze.

CS: The story was that when she signed up to be the leader she’d written vi coactus, the Latin tag, indicating that the signature was given under duress. And I was the Latinist, they don’t have a Latinist at the moment, so I had a phone call at about half past five saying ‘We need this for the six o’clock news! Help!’. That doesn’t happen very often anymore. One of the big differences between the Pronunciation Unit and dictionaries is the different time pressures, different time scales.

TD: I suppose so! You’ve just mentioned there that people’s regional accents change: people change their accents depending on who they’re with, or what kind of characteristics they’re wanting to portray. We see that quite a lot in fiction, and I wonder if you have any thoughts on what accents can be used to denote in fiction. It seems that sometimes its class, sometimes its personality. Are the kinds of patterns that you see like the kinds of patterns you see in the real world?

CS: Thinking back to my research – which is obviously several years ago now – I would imagine that in fiction, as in the real world, people will tap into certain associations. Let’s restrict ourselves to talking about urban regional accents of the British Isles. My own work was about Liverpool English, and I’ve got family background in Liverpool, and all of my subjects were Liverpudlians: all young people either living in Liverpool or recently moved from Liverpool. I wanted to track how they did or didn’t lose their accent. Now Liverpool is a city that people have a lot of opinions about, lots of stereotypes cluster around it, and the same is true of Newcastle, Glasgow, Birmingham, and indeed, London. And however much you might want to challenge or problematize the reality of the stereotypes that cluster around those cities, you can still see people using a character who speaks with a Scouse accent as a shorthand for somebody who matches those stereotypical values.

CS: I remember reading an accent study once that looked at different scores for levels of likability: do you trust this person, would you lend this person money, you know. And another about midwives, and people’s favourite accent for their midwife to have. It wasn’t a very rigorous quantitative study but it was, you know, ‘Ah yes, the lovely Welsh midwife is what you want’.

Similarly, I’ve done some talks and research on invented languages in speculative fiction and in sci-fi, and while it’s obviously more difficult – because they’re in a newly created world, and you don’t have those pre-existing stereotypes to draw meaning from – I think there are still ways to create that even with constructed languages.

TD: Thank you – that’s genuinely really interesting.

CS: One of the most fully elaborated sets is in Tolkien, you definitely see there’s a diglossia situation with Elvish languages, with Quenya. I’m on thin ice with Tolkien, but there are different registers, used for different situations, and that’s a classic illustration of diglossia.

TD: It’s interesting that you mention Tolkien, and how accents can be shorthand for things. Sometimes they can be shorthand for positive things, but with High Fantasy, often it’s negative. You’ll see the elves speaking with RP accents, and you’ll see the orcs speaking with Cockney accents,

CS: Or something rustic, some kind of West Country (for the hobbits).

TD: Exactly, and when you decide that one accent is associated with the definitely evil lot then we might have some problems.

CS: You get that with foreign accented English as well.

TD: Yes.

CS: I did a panel at Nine Worlds this year called The use and function of ‘foreign’ languages in genre fiction, where we were looking at the use of language in different ways, including how characters are othered, how well or not they can communicate and so on. Take the trajectory of someone like Scarlet Witch in Age of Ultron: she’s initially an enemy character, and she and her brother have quite thick impenetrable accents. Then in Civil War, she’s much more Americanised. Of course, time has passed, she’s part of the Avengers team; there are lots of in-story reasons for her speech changing, her accent becoming softer and more Americanised. But it also operates thematically to position her character differently.

And so ends Part 1. Our discussion continues in Part 2.

This is the third in a series of interviews with authors, developers, critics, journalists, and academics. If you'd like to make a suggestion, or be interviewed, do get in touch.

Spoilers: some elements of Children of Time, but no major plot spoilers.

The Doctor (TD): One of our interests at the EC is the intersection of different types of media, and I’ve heard rumours that you make use of role-playing games in your writing process?

Adrian Tchaikovsky (AT): I don’t really make use of them in my writing process, but Shadows of the Apt – my first series – is based on a role-playing game I ran in university. I’m trying to think if it goes any further than that – I think having a history of gaming has helped me inordinately as a writer for a number of reasons; and that’s probably closer to the mark.

TD: What reasons would they be? 

AT: The majority of current fantasy writers, certainly that I’ve met, seem to be gamers; and I think one of the reasons that fantasy has gone into the current territory – that is to say, it’s very morally ambiguous, there are no pure good guys or pure bad guys, and there’s a lot more focus on the internal life of the characters – is because of gaming experience. If you look at the way that traditional player characters act, and how they interact with the world, it is very similar to that: they don’t tend to be your crisp Tolkienian heroes. Also I think running games and creating campaign worlds uses a very similar skill-set to world building for a book. It teaches you to pay attention to a lot of little details you mightn’t otherwise look at.

TD: Are you still involved in role-playing games?

AT: When I get the opportunity, yes. One thing I’ve started – just this year – I’ve run a number of little, one-off games at science-fiction conventions, which has worked out very well so far.

TD: Very cool. Speaking about the shift away from Tolkien-esque good and bad, there seems to be quite a lot of focus lately – in fantasy literature especially – on trope subversion, on doing something different to how we’ve done it before. What value do you think tropes possess in the creation of these kinds of texts? Are there any that you like to use, or any that you think we should just get rid of?

AT: It’s a fluid ecology, with tropes. If anything becomes over-used, if you’re saying it over and over again in books, then certainly from my perspective that’s something you want to give a rest to. I think ‘getting rid of’ is probably fairly draconian, because if it’s been out of circulation for a while, then it’s probably about time that it can be brought back and rejuvenated. For example, the most overused tropes – you’ve got the prophecy, and the magical quest McGuffin object – obviously a lot of these come from Tolkien, and Tolkien uses them in his own inimitable way, and then a lot of other people imitate that. And so you get scores and scores of, you know, ‘this young boy is the only person who can defeat the Dark Lord and it is prophesied’, et cetera, et cetera.

I prefer stories about heroes who actually earn and achieve their success, and who could theoretically have been anyone; rather than ‘everything devolves on this one person’. But obviously these are very popular things, so maybe I’m the minority with that. For me it seems to be reinforcing that ‘Divine Right of Kings’ sort of narrative which we’ve inherited from the Middle Ages, where it is only kings and princes that can achieve anything in the world, and everyone else is just an onlooker to the story of these – it’s the Great Men of History sort of thing isn’t it? Everything comes down to ‘if you’re this person, then you are allowed to do things’, and that person is almost always, of course, a man, and often of a certain social class. There are some fantasy stories where 75% of your group of heroes are all princes.

TD: Yes.

AT: [Laughs]. And that goes back to – you have the old Romance stories where everyone is a prince or a king, or at least a very high-ranking noble, and no one else is remotely important to the story.

TD: [Laughs] Which, you know, is very sad for all of us who want to be heroes of our own stories, and sadly aren’t princes.

AT: Well exactly.

It's a fluid ecology, with tropes.

TD: You mentioned prophecy there – how does prophecy feature in Spiderlight?

AT: Well Spiderlight is, and very very explicitly, a trope inversion in that sense. You have your traditional adventuring party and your traditional prophecy and as becomes apparent about midway through the book, the interpretation of the prophecy that the heroes have fixed on – that they need a giant spider to show them the way to defeat the Dark Lord – is by no means the only interpretation of the prophecy. They run into other religious sects who have a completely different view on what it actually means and, well, hilarity ensues.

I don’t want to spoil the book, so I won’t go into how all that comes out, but the nature of the prophecy as a way of driving the quest is given a fairly thorough and not particularly positive looking at.

TD: Excellent. You’ve mentioned spiders, there are also – and I don’t want to spoil anything about any of your books – but there are also some spiders in Children of Time. Why so many spiders?

AT: I used to have this very intelligent-sounding spiel about how insects and spiders were often used in literature as a mirror to the human condition, and so you’ve got Pelevin’s Life of Insects and you’ve got Metamorphosis and Capek’s Insect Play, and… it’s terribly impressive sounding, but it’s mostly bunk, because for reasons I can’t go back far enough to trace, I’ve always had a fascination with spiders and insects and things like that. I don’t have that instinctive loathing and revulsion that a lot of people seem to have. There’s – I don’t know if you know Penny Dreadful, the TV show?

TD: Yes!

AT: It’s one of the finest TV series I’ve ever seen, and it has this introductory sequence in the credits which is full of scorpions and spiders and things like that. It’s obviously intended to instil a sense of dread, and to me it’s entirely the opposite, I find it all really terribly pleasant.

It’s not really a spoiler that there are spiders in Children of Time, especially for anyone who knows me and knows my work, but it is kind of an open secret now from various reviews. One of the nice things about that is – for example, one of my closest friends is quite arachnophobic, and he’s read Children of Time and was very much able to associate with the spider characters – a lot of people who don’t like spiders have said to me that it has helped them a little to see them as something other than objects of fear. Which is nice!

TD: That was certainly my experience, I mean, I must admit, I got a bit teary at the end of Children of Time,

[Adrian laughs]

TD: Which is a bit ridiculous, but you painted them as creatures of great empathy, which was a bit of a head-spin for me. Especially coming from Australia, where most of them will kill you.

AT: [Laughs heartily] Well yes, I’m used to being in the UK, where that’s…

TD: Less of an issue.

[Adrian continues laughing at TD, quite rightly]

TD: So on the spider front… now obviously I’m a philosopher, so some of the next questions are based on philosophically interesting points, and I’m interested in how they came about. So speaking of the spiders: early on in the book, on page 21, you first introduce Portia, and you say:

‘Portia has no thoughts. Her sixty thousand neurons barely form a brain…’

And then you go on to describe her using verbs we would usually associate with thought, things like recognising her enemy, playing with the edge of the web, working out and planning her approach, and I think the thing that’s most interesting for me: that she knows her enemy’s spit would prove fatal.

Do you think there’s a tension between those two ideas?

AT: There is, and effectively it’s a real world tension: it is perplexing to zoologists (in this particular case). Spiders have very little grey matter, so to speak, and yet, this particular spider’s behaviour is every bit as complex as I’ve described in that chapter. It certainly seems to us – as thinking creatures – that there is thought going on.

And yet at the same time that contradicts everything we know about the equipment required for that thought. So obviously it’s possible that the recognition I’m referring to is somehow just an extremely sophisticated kind of cause-and-effect, instinct, and in most cases it would be written off as just that. But the behaviour is so complicated and sophisticated in this case that it is extremely hard to explain, especially because there’s a lot of complex problem solving going on, for example with the spatial mapping and the object permanence issues that I brought up there.

TD: This feeds in to a theme I noticed throughout the book – and it’s one I really like – a kind of functionalist theme: as long as something behaves in the same way or does the same thing, we should just call it by the same name. That’s what matters, not what it’s made out of. So we see that the planet’s inhabitants have organic equivalents of human tech, things like radios, and in such cases you call them by that human name – like a radio – which despite…

AT: Well, that’s actually one of the examples where it’s not an organic equivalent. Certainly what they’re doing at the beginning when they’re picking up the signal with the radio is very much like the sort of wireless set my dad used to build.

TD: Sure, I meant towards the end when [spoiler redacted]

AT: Oh yeah, sure. And elsewhere, because of their different sensorium and the different trajectory their tech takes, they end up solving problems that we would use mechanical means for by biological and biochemical means because those as the tools they have and can manipulate.

TD: So, another example then, take the consciousness of Dr Kern, whose location (or what constitutes that consciousness) changes from an organic thing to an organic + artificial thing, and then later on is more distributed. What inspires that kind of approach? What ideas do you have about the mind? Do you think she’s the same person across time? [Editor's note: in hindsight, this was a lot of questions in one breath]

AT: I think she’s not, but she doesn’t realise she’s not. The thing with Kern is, she’s got a dichotomy of identity. There’s her, and then there’s…

TD: Eliza.

AT: …which is a more true Artificial Intelligence which has semi-merged with her (at the time for a very specific purpose, but then she’s in that state way longer than was ever anticipated and so the boundaries become very indistinct). There is a thought experiment: you have the two halves of the brain, and you can – as I think was done for epilepsy at one point – sever the connection between the two halves. The thought experiment is: what if you had some sort of computer between the two halves of the brain, which effectively acted as a relay station for all the communication. And therefore, it would get all the thoughts going through both sides of the head and would be able to insert things. You as the effective owner of the brain wouldn’t realise, because all of your communications between the two hemispheres are going backwards and forwards through this relay.

Eliza is kind of in that position, and so you get that merging, until it’s not entirely clear what is originating in the brain and what is originating in Eliza. Eventually you get to the point where Kern tries to check up on Eliza and finds out that what she’s checking up on is Kern, and the thing that thinks it’s Kern is Eliza. So she’s obviously not the same, but then there are problems when she tries to access memories of who she was as well. She’s not the same, but there has been a seamless transition.

And the other thing I’m looking at there is that we have, as human beings, the incredible ability to fool ourselves and to rationalise things that have happened to us; so that whatever may have changed or been lost has effectively been smoothed away in Kern’s consciousness. Even when she is in her final form, which is radically different, and presumably offers radically different abilities, she is effectively telling herself that there is that continuity, and believing in her own narrative.

TD: I’m going to be mulling all that over, as there’s a lot there that’s really interesting. But moving on slightly, to a similar question insofar as it feeds off this changing identity business. There’s this fabulous juxtaposition in the novel between the time lapse for the humans, and the generational narrative for the planet’s inhabitants. What were you trying to achieve with that?

AT: To a certain extent it was just a plot necessity – I needed the spiders to evolve, and even with the nanovirus as a kind of McGuffin to allow that evolution to happen way faster than it actually would, it still requires the humans to be kicking their heels for a very long time. I could have conceivably had the evolution happen and then the humans arrive, but I think I gain a lot narratively from being able to link the sections in real time, rather than just having flashbacks to the evolution (which I think would have been a bit of a cumbersome device).

Originally I was going to do the whole thing with time dilation and have humans travelling at near-light speed, and unfortunately the mechanics of that and the energy required ruled it out for the sort of human civilisation I was looking at.

But I gain colossally from having at least Holston Mason coming in and out from hibernation, because you get that wonderful kind of disjointed punctuation, where everything has changed every time he comes out.

TD: Which is fabulous. One thing I really liked about it, is you’ve got the changing (this isn’t a question, this is just a comment, sorry), perspectives every chapter, and so often when you have a changing perspective in a novel you think ‘oh, I was really enjoying the previous bit, I’ll just put the book down now’, but I couldn’t do it! Every time I was really into the new story within half a page of the next chapter.

AT: Good, good.

TD: You mention the restrictions on the technology that the humans would have. How important was it to you to have the tech be scientifically plausible?

AT: I did my level best. What I think that comes down to is that the technology is hopefully plausible for someone who knows slightly less about the science than I do.

[TD laughs]

AT: For people who know more… I’ve already been brought up I think on one thing – something to do with the travel speeds and travel times – so there’s always someone who knows more than you, and there’s always a limit to how much research you can do. I did have a dialogue going on with some physicists, and I went down to the entomology department at the Natural History Museum and spent a day there, discussing the various ramifications of having, basically, giant spiders.

TD: Fantastic.

AT: And gained a lot of incidental stuff that then went into the book, just purely from what people were discussing at the time.

...academics also have a use in inspiring the creation of works in the first place.

TD: So on the collaborative front – doing research and seeking out information – we often see academics deconstructing texts after they’ve been written, coming along and reviewing them, or teaching them. Do you think there’s a role for academics in the production of fantasy and sci-fi?

AT: As a writer, you never know what you’re going to need to know, and quite often the most efficient way of getting on top of a subject is to find someone to talk to about it. Because even if you decide ‘well I will read some books!’, it can be very hard to track down precisely which are going to be the best books or papers to go through.

I think academics also have a use in inspiring the creation of works in the first place. The whole of Children of Time comes out of me reading some papers and articles about the Portia Spider, so that research was the entire impetus for the book.

TD: Back to the spiders, since you’ve just mentioned them again: I really liked the continuity of names across generations. Why do it that way?

AT: It’s useful because it stops people getting confused. Quite a lot of the reviews have basically said that it helps you continually associate and empathise with the spider characters, whereas if they had different names each time you’d be relearning a new cast. There isn’t, really, so much a continuity of personality as some reviewers have thought, because my rule of thumb was actually that the first spider you run into is Portia, and then effectively there’s Bianca, and then the male spider is always Fabian…

The other thing is that the names are obviously entirely a convention of me as a writer, because the spiders have a completely non-auditory language, and so they’ll have names, but the names will not be anything that could possibly be written down. So using names is a necessary evil at that point. I think that if I’m using the same names over and over again, it’s obviously a device, whereas if I’m giving each one individual names, it starts to feel like I think they have human names.

TD: Yeah, I get the pragmatic side of it, that makes perfect sense. I did find it interesting though – and maybe this is me reading too much into it – that, when we give somebody the same name over time, it’s usually because we recognise them as the same creature over time. And as you rightly point out, there are quite different personalities across the different spider generations, but also, as the human characters wake up and go back into cold sleep, they don’t wake up exactly the same. With the situation they find themselves in, especially from the protagonist’s point of view, they seem like drastically different people. So as a reader, I almost felt that, just as I was meeting each new generation of spiders, I was meeting each new incarnation of the human characters; that was a nice symmetry.

AT: Yeah. I think Holston, who is the protagonist, changes least because he is active least, so he is the one who is constantly coming to the new situation the other human characters have created. So you’re seeing the other characters change under the necessity of whatever is going on in the ship, or whatever some of the other characters are doing. And you get to see some of them rise to the challenge, and some of them fail to do so.

TD: [Laughs], yes. So one more question about spiders: you did some interesting things with gender and the planet’s inhabitants. On the one hand that looks like, politically, a really interesting subversion; on the other hand, it seems to be motivated – or at least on the account you get from the spiders, it is motivated – biologically: that the females are bigger, that they have certainly biological urges. That’s potentially worrying if we extrapolate it to humans. Were you trying to make a point? And if so, what was the point?

AT: I think that if I hadn’t gone there, it would have been a very glaring omission. So obviously with real-world spiders in most cases the females are considerably larger, and famously various species may or may not devour males. I understand that currently that’s a matter of some scientific controversy, because apparently they may just devour males when they’re being kept in a small tank cage by scientists.

[TD laughs]

AT: So I don’t actually know the full truth of that, but certainly the females tend to be larger, and more aggressive. And so you get the situation where spider males end up in a very socially submissive situation – it kind of goes from ‘well they get eaten’, to they simply get discounted. They get treated in ways that are similar to the ways that women have been treated historically: there were times that women couldn’t vote, and weren’t allowed to own property, and were scientifically believed to be incapable of certain kinds of thought. That’s the sort of thing I’m riffing on with the way that the males are treated, except they also might occasionally get eaten.

And so, yes, that is a very definite political thing, but it also seemed a logical way that the society would develop. And I appreciate that evolutionary explanations for social phenomena are very fraught to go into, so I’m not necessarily saying ‘people are like this because of the way we evolved’. Although interestingly, one of the reasons it seems to me most fraught is that it is then used as a justification for why it should be perpetuated, which is certainly not something I’m doing, as you can see from the way things go in the book.

TD: Exactly. And that is actually one of the most hopeful things about the book, I think, that the more civilised we get, the better we treat other people.

AT: It would be nice to think so, anyway. [Laughs]

TD: If we think fiction can teach us lessons, I think that would be a lovely lesson to learn. A less fraught question: you mention the Prisoner’s Dilemma in Children of Time. How would you respond in a prisoner’s dilemma, should you be put in one?

AT: I really don’t know. The classic prisoner’s dilemma, like a lot of those kind of thought experiments, is obviously a very artificial thing. And when I use it, when the scientist character brings it up, she is massively misquoting it.

TD: Yes [laughs], I enjoyed that.

AT: Yes, and one of the things that they’ve got there which you don’t have in the prisoner’s dilemma is an avenue of communication. The key point with the prisoner’s dilemma – the thing that makes it so difficult to call, and effectively so artificial, is that you have absolutely no communication and you have no knowledge of the other prisoner. Let’s say you had a real life prisoner’s dilemma, where two thieves have been caught, and each is wondering whether they would rat out on the other: they would at least have some knowledge of the other individual to base their decision on. But in the classic prisoner’s dilemma, you’re effectively complete strangers with no backstory or background at all.

TD: So you’re not optimistic enough to think, ‘oh, I’d just do the right thing’.

AT: I think we’d all like to think that, but I think that realistically, it would be very difficult, if you were suddenly captured by aliens and put in that logic trap.

...you can find the mountain peak that is ‘peak sci-fi’, and... somewhere off in the distance there is a peak which is ‘peak fantasy’

TD: Fair enough. So, I have two more questions, if that’s ok?

AT: Yeah, sure!

TD: The first thing is: there is science in your fantasy novels, so what makes Children of Time different? The broader background for this is: do you think there’s a clear-cut distinction between fantasy and sci-fi?

AT: It’s a tricky one. It’s one of those perennial favourites for convention panel topics. Just last week at a convention I was on the ‘Does genre matter?’ panel…

TD: Ah, I’m sorry to be derivative!

AT: No, no, no, no, no! That one was more of a genre v mainstream focus, but one of the things I said on the panel was that it’s basically a morphospace. There’s a terrain, and the terrain is real, but the borders drawn on the terrain aren’t necessarily real. So I think that you can find the mountain peak that is ‘peak sci-fi’, and that somewhere off in the distance there is a peak which is ‘peak fantasy’. You can travel from one to the other, and there is going to be a large disputed border land in between, and that’s where, for example, you used to get a lot of science fiction books which were ostensibly written as fantasy. So for example, The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe very much comes over as a fantasy narrative, but behind it there is a lot of extremely complex and well-thought-through science.

And then you have something like Anne McCaffrey’s Dragon Riders, which was originally a fantasy idea, and because of the way that science-fiction was selling at the time it was rejigged by Stewart and Cohen – the two guys who would go on to do Science of the Discworld – as a science-fiction setting. So they basically gave it a scientific underpinning, which – if you want to go back a few questions – that’s another way that academics can and have come into genre writing. For me, I think that one of the things that marks science fiction out against fantasy most is a certain analytical context, of things having an explanation which can actually be broken down and discovered by the characters in a way that, with fantasy, it’s not really the priority of the book to do that. Although having set that, I’m currently reading The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisen, which is…

TD: Me too!

AT: Oh, splendid! One of the things I love about that is the way that characters are genuinely and scientifically trying to work out what’s going on and how the world works.

There’s another thing which is not really a defining difference, but a lot of fantasy is quite circular in the way its plots work, so that you end everything kind of how you began it: everything’s lovely, Dark Lord turns up, Dark Lord is defeated, everything’s lovely. Whereas a lot of science fiction has more of a ‘time’s arrow’ kind of plot, where you’re going forward to discover a kind of a thing, or invent a thing, and the universe at the end is different to the way the universe is at the beginning. One of the things I was trying to do with Shadows of the Apt, my fantasy series, was give it that science-fiction sense of forward motion, so you get a very quick ramp-up of technology and a lot of political change. It is not simply a matter of restoring the One True King at the end of the series.

TD: And finally, if anyone’s reading this interview who has never read any of your work, if you could get them to read one particular thing first, what would it be?

AT: That depends what they like. If they like science-fiction, it’s going to have to be Children of Time, because although I’m working on more of it, currently none of it is in print. If they are more of a fantasy fan, while Shadows of the Apt is probably always going to be my magnum opus at ten books, that in itself may be enough to put off people who don’t know my writing. So I would say either Spiderlight or Guns of the Dawn for that, because they’re both standalone books and fairly easily accessible.

TD: Excellent. Thank you so much for this, it’s been really informative, and makes me want to go off and read Children of Time again!

[Adrian laughs, and thus we end.]

This is the second in a series of interviews with authors, developers, critics, journalists, and academics. If you'd like to make a suggestion, or be interviewed, do get in touch.