Sex dolls come to St Albans
INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE MCCABE
Q. What made you move from consulting on technology and innovation to writing a frighteningly real book about where technology might be going?
A. Everything that matters in my ‘other’ work is about the impact, and potential impact of technologies on people, but non-fiction writing is necessarily constrained. Writing fiction allowed me to explore the human issues and the emotions far more powerfully. When I’m writing fiction, I’m off the leash!
Q. How did you come up with the word ‘skin job’ to describe the completely realistic sex dolls who populate the ‘dollhouses’ (brothels) in your book?
A. It was the perfect fit! When you read the story and see the critical features incorporated into the ‘dolls’ – i.e. what makes them commercially successful – you see that it couldn’t be anything else. I was probably channeling previous authors too. Skinjob has been used multiple times in fiction and television, most famously by Philip K Dick in ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’, although his reasons were slightly different.
Q. How close are we to ‘skinjobs’ in the sex doll industry? Do you think that there would really be a huge market for skinjobs if they came on the market today?
A. All the technologies are based on real developments. There is already a market in ultra-real sex dolls, it is growing rapidly, and it is already making us question ourselves (or at least the men who buy them). Of course I’ve been playful, exaggerating what sex dolls might be capable of in ten years time, but the themes really relate not so much to dolls as to digital pornography today, and how sexual norms are being redefined, and the potentially disastrous consequences – especially with respect to violence against women. Those issues are already upon us.
Q. A woman doesn’t have to be a card carrying feminist to find that scary. Any comments?
A. See my answer above. It is very scary. And yet we are already travelling at light speed, redefining sexual norms at a faster rate than at any time in human history. That’s why I wrote about it!
Q. In Skin Job, corruption occurs at every level of politics, religion and business. Few people seem to believe in anything except their own self interest. Are you deeply cynical about the world?
A. There is good and bad in everyone. It’s part of who we are. And I love writing about those shades of grey (especially the darker shades!) Much more interesting and realistic to me than characters who are wholly ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
Q. The technology in the novel seems very easy to believe in. Is that because we’re nearly there? For example, the G-rings seemed implausible when I started reading but of course mobiles track our every move and feed us information we don’t even know we want.
A. When we get into the other technologies that appear in the story, they are all very real indeed. The G-rings, and the reconceptualized operations of a modern church, are perfectly feasible now, no problem at all. Much of the book deals with the politics of lies and lie-detection – how it changes people, attitudes, life for Shari Sanayei and Dan Madsen, the rank and file police, internal affairs, criminals, and so on. Those developments, perhaps the ‘scariest’ in the story in terms of what our future holds, already exist and have been trialed in prototype form. Some have been demonstrated to me. All I’ve done is polish them up a little.
Q. What innovations do you think we’ll see in the next 5 years?
A. I’ll skip this one – too big a question! The only thing I’ll say is that ‘darker’ technologies make for good thrillers, so of course, that’s what I focus on in fiction, but the developments that truly excite and inspire me are those that will completely change the world for the better, especially in medicine. There is some exceptionally good news coming our way inside 5 years in genomics and treatments of various cancers, for example
Q. To return to the book, will we see Daniel Madsen again?
A. I had no plans to bring him back when I wrote Skinjob, but I’m coming around to it …
Q. Any hints about what your next book is about?
A. This one is also a thriller, and I hope also a thriller unlike any anyone has read before. That’s the aim any way (perhaps why it’s taking so long to write!). I can reveal that it is also set around ten years from now, and most of the action takes place in Japan.
Looking forward to hearing you speak at the Festival.
Looking forward to being there!