The Booktopia Book Guru asks
Mike Lancaster
author of 0.4 – It’s a Brave New World
Ten Terrifying Questions
————-
1. To begin with why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?
I was born in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire in the UK. I was raised in small rural villages around Huntingdon, and then when I was eleven or twelve my parents split up and I suddenly found myself living in the middle of a vast council estate. The experience left me feeling like an outsider – something I guess I actively cultivated in my teens by reading Camus and Salinger and listening to punk rock.
I went to school at Hinchingbrooke School in Huntingdon; and to university in Northampton.
2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?
Writer, writer and writer. I’ve never wanted to be anything else. I think that as soon as I started to appreciate books, I wanted to write them.
3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you do not have now?
That lovely simplistic belief in absolutes: that for every issue there is only black and white -right and wrong- in the world, and no intermediate shades of grey.
As I get older I see more and more grey.
4. What were three works of art – book, painting, piece of music, etc – you can now say, had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer?
Gulliver’s Travels, by Swift, is a book I frequently revisit, and I guess I have taken an important lesson away from it: that by viewing the world from other angles – or by distorting it and exaggerating it – you can reveal its flaws and inconsistencies in a far more enduring fashion than you can through the use of carefully studied realism.
And it’s a whole lot funnier.
The works of H. P. Lovecraft, that strange gentleman of Providence, showed me that less is very often more, that hinting can be far more effective than shouting, and that the universe was not only not built for us, but that it may actually mean us ill will.
And Harlan Ellison’s dazzling short stories constantly remind me that there is a moral dimension to writing fiction, that it is our duty as writers to explore the very limits of human emotions and actions and use them to inform our non-writing lives.
5. Considering the innumerable artistic avenues open to you, why did you choose to write a novel?
I have tried painting, drawing, music and acting and I am terrible at them all. And I can’t dance. Words I can do.
6. Please tell us about your latest novel…
0.4 is a science fiction novel for 11+ readers.
It’s the story of a single day in a small village called Millgrove – which just so happens to be the day that everything changes for humanity.
Forever.
That story is told from the viewpoint of a fifteen-year-old boy called Kyle Straker, who records his terrifying experiences onto audiotapes.
The book is a transcription of those audiotapes by a person far in the future, who adds his own comments to explain some of Kyle’s cultural references.
(BBGuru: Publisher description -
The Millgrove talent show has the same performances as any other small town: a cheesy ventriloquist, off-key karaoke singers, and bad dance routines. But after Kyle Straker is hypnotized as part of his friends mysterious new act, Millgrove will never be the same again.
When Kyle and the other volunteers awaken, the entire audience, the entire town, and possibly the entire world, is frozen still. Telephones, radios, televisions, and computers no longer work: only a strange language flashes across the screens.
When everybody suddenly wakes up, it becomes clear that they have changed and that Kyle is now an outsider, one of the 0.4.
Is Kyle still under hypnosis, or is this chilling new world real? Will he awaken from a dream to roars of laughter, or is there something much more sinister happening?
One of the last of his kind, Kyle records his story on a series of cassette tapes, describing the shift, and what it means for the future of mankind.)
7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?
I just want to do what I think all art is supposed to: to make people look at the world in a slightly different way.
I’d also like it if they used the word ‘cool’ when describing it to a friend.
8. Whom do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?
Donald E. Westlake, the great American crime writer, who died in 2008.
And simply because out of the fifty or so novels of his I have read, I have yet to come across one that I didn’t like.
He could jump from laugh-out-loud comic caper novels, to coldly amoral thrillers, to science fiction stories, all without ever letting me down.
When he died I felt like I had lost a friend in the world.
9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?
To keep telling good stories that provide my readers with exercise for that important muscle – the human imagination.
10. What advice do you give aspiring writers?
I have three bits of advice that I like to pass on:
1) Write, don’t think. Then edit.
2) Follow your instincts, even when they seem to be leading you astray.
3) Junk in: junk out. You have to read great writers to produce great writing.
Mike, thank you for playing.
Sample a Chapter of 0.4 Here
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Filed under: Author Interview, Fiction, Young Adult | Tagged: 0.4 - It's a Brave New World, Mike Lancaster, Ten Terrifying Questions | Leave a Comment »
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Toni Whitmont
When pre-publication copies of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society were passed around a couple of years ago, it was obvious that the book was going to be a hand-sell sensation. And so it proved to be with a great many editions of this lovely war-time confection going on to sell squillions.
A while ago now, whilst playing… ahem… doing important and vital Booktopia business on twitter and facebook, I decided to ask Booktopia’s followers and friends what they thought were the ‘must read’ Australian novels.
Nature v Nurture – Louann Brizendine’s take on it all
A New York Times bestseller, The Female Brain is an thoroughly readable account of how the uniquely flexible structure of the female brain determines not only how women think and what they value, but how they communicate and whom they love.
Its publication set off a storm of protest as some of her scientific claims were contested, as were some of her interpretations of them.
To my mind, the critics missed the point. Having read The Female Brain recently, I can say that Brizendine’s genius is in taking some pretty complex scientific ideas about how sex differences in our brain structures are hardwired into men and women and presenting them to a non-scientific readership in a way that assumes intelligence and judgement.
If that’s what people are getting out of my book, that’s an incorrect view. There are many more similarities than there are differences. I’m not trying to write scientific treatises. I’m writing for people who are intelligent but don’t do science. In doing honour to its complexity, I think I’ve hit the mark in some respects and missed the mark in others. Scientifically, looking at gender differences is in its infancy. It’s only really important in medicine to study diseases, for example. Gender differences per se are of less interest.
And on the subject of that old chestnut, nature vs nurture, she says:
Nature-nurture is dead because they’re really the same thing. Nature is the thing we must understand first, in terms of how things get wired in utero and the phases of brain development. The piece that used to be called nurture is genetically driven changes that come with things like stress, hormonal differences, neglect, abuse, drugs, or toxic substances. Understanding the genetics we’re born with and how they get modified by our upbringing and environment is the key.
The controversy is not surprising. Feminism, and post-feminism, what my teenage daughter calls “the F-bomb”, has made studies of gender differences a veritable minefield but at the same time, there is no doubt that we all engage in anecdotal comparative gender observations.
As the mother of a boy and a girl, whom I tried to bring up the same, I can tell you that I am still constantly amazed at how stereotypical true to gender they were from the beginning. When my son could still only speak four words, two of them were “bang” and “crash”. My daughter on the other hand, put all of her energy as a baby into creating intimacy by locking eyes and forcing relationship.
At the very least, The Female Brain is mandatory reading for a man who wants to understand their relations with women – be they their daughters, wives, mothers, significant others.
The Male Brain sounds equally as compelling.
Brizendine peppers each chapter with examples of her patients at various stages of the life cycle. At every step — the Dennis the Menace child, the oversexed teenager, the middle-aged man who falls for a younger woman — Brizendine gives a theory for how her patient’s behaviour is caused by his male brain patterns, egged on by hormones like testosterone (nicknamed “Zeus”) and vasopressin (“the White Knight”).
As with her first book, she is criticised for not leaving enough room for personal psychology or experience in explaining men’s behaviour. Maybe not, but I can tell you that reading Brizendine makes the minefield of parenting a whole lot easier, and it is saving my son from having to endure some of my completely stereotypical motherly haranguing.
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Filed under: Cutural Studies, Non Fiction, Pop Science, Social Commentary | Tagged: Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain, The Male Brain | Leave a Comment »