I loved The Broken World, so I was really happy to get the chance to ask the author Tim Etchells a few questions.
The Broken World is out in the UK this week, published by William Heinemann.
The full interview follows....
The bio on your book says that you are "a writer and an Artist whose
work reaches across boundaries from fiction through cutting edge
theatre to video and visual art." What does that mean exactly in
non-blurb speak? Any examples for an art newbie?
What that means in non-blurb is that I do a range of 'creative stuff'.
A lot of my work has been in collaboration with a group of artists in Sheffield, UK - Forced Entertainment. We make theatre performances (which I direct) which tour in the UK and (these days) pretty well all over Europe and the world. It's kind of experimental stuff, hard to describe but quite addictive I think, quite special. I suppose the shorthand would be to say that it's the kind of theatre that comes after plays - theatre that maybe draws on cinema, or performance art or on ideas about collage or ideas from conceptual art. The company - the core group of six artists - formed in 1984 and we've been working together since then. In one sense I'd say that we've been trying to reinvent theatre - to figure out what theatre can be when it gets cut- up, re-mixed or re-thought in order to better speak of the times we're living in. So it's experimental but not for the sake of being experimental - rather, it's driven by this desire to talk about things more clearly.. a desire to get to the bottom of things. If I describe a performance involving ten performers - two clowns, two rock-gig roadies, a diva, a rock chick adrift from some MTV video, a cheerleader, a gorilla refugee from some pantomime, two backing dancers - and say that the title is Bloody Mess it might give you an idea. It's a funny show, but also quite dark... with the story of the Big Bang in it, as well as numerous fights, an attempt at five minute silence and a lot of fake tears. Maybe that gives a taste... but for the most part you just have to be there - what drives it is the energy and the experience of something unfolding live in front of you.
For video and visual art - yes - these are also areas that I've been really active in. I'd say that I've worked on my own making 'art things' - videos, installations, text-works, audio pieces - as well as collaborating with various artists in all kinds of projects. Recently for instance I made a series of neon signs for an exhibition here in Sheffield.... and am currently working on a project involving ice cream in Italy!
When you work spans many media how do you decide which medium to create a particular project in? Does the idea arrive entwined with the medium?
Ideas tend to come entwined with the medium, at least for the most part, tho there's a certain amount of cross over. I guess things can shift around... or perhaps it's more that the approaches discovered in one medium tend to find ways to shift to another, often mutating en route. So making a performance that has many different layers or strands at the same time might lead to doing a similar thing, or 'equivalent' thing in a video, or in a short story... but of course from a different position, and with a different set of restrictions and possibilities and contexts and dynamics that come with each particular medium or form.
What I like I suppose is that each form allows certain things, or gives access to certain things - for example, the relationship to a theatre audience is very different to the kind of relationship one makes with an individual viewer in a gallery, which is in turn very different to the kind of engagement and contact one gets from someone reading a novel.
There's been a lot of discussion on genre blogs about how to make a living as a writer in the modern age, and one of the frequently suggested ways has been to write for videogames. Yet you seem to have gone the other way and written a novel of a videogame! Do you fancy writing for a "real" game? Any chance of The Broken World in the future?
I've worked on several art projects that use video games as a (distant) reference point (alongside other reference points) but I'm not sure I'd cope well with the restrictions of writing dialogue for cut scenes! I think a game of The Broken World itself could be great though. I'd certainly be intrigued to play something in a world that's as incoherent as the one in the game as described in the book!
There's a lot of effort put into coherence these days - which ensures a certain consistency and consequentiality of course, but at worst it can mean very thorough but slightly tedious 'universes' - they figured it all out but somehow took the life out of it. Like art made by people from the auditors. As you can see from the The Broken World I'm attracted to something more fragmented and inconsistent and messy perhaps - something with cracks in it - I can see that this approach could pose problems for designing a playable game though.
I am very interested in structure - which is of course very relevant in terms of thinking about games proper... how to structure experience, how to devise paths through something, how to project and anticipate different ways of negotiating an environment (whether it's a visual one or one that exists in text alone). I think I'm especially interested in how to play something - how to offer, thwart, affect, or generally have fun with with those different ways that people negotiate a game or indeed a narrative. You can see that in The Broken World too of course - this whole device of a narrator who is apparently writing a guide to a game but who is constantly 'slipping' and letting through details of his life.... It's a sructure of layers... Until before you know it as a reader you're drawn into this quite illegitimate and unexpected story.. an unoffical one.
Are you a gamer? What's your most significant videogame experience?
I'm not much of a gamer to be frank. Often I lack the patience and the time they seem to demand. I do love the territory of games though - I guess it comes from my work in experimental performance and installation - this idea that what you're making is a space in which the user has to interact with things, or which the user has to navigate, connects games and art and writing, at least in my mind. I love also this way in which the idea of world - in a novel or a movie - becomes, in games, a 3-d navigable space, albeit a virtual one. I look at something like GTA4 and I'm really wondering what kind of labyrinthine games Dickens or Kafka might have made....
Some part of me always wants to mess with games tho. In some ways I distrust their ambitions for completeness - the way they have (or want) to make coherent worlds, to fill each and every hole in their logics. In literature, or cinema for example I'm fond of things that are slightly more fragile, which "know" themselves to be fake, worlds that know they are 'just' arrangements of words. In those early driving games I always found it tempting to drive off the race track and out onto the green at the sides - how far does it extend? What if it went on forever? I did an interview with William Gibson years ago and he talked about the world of Neuromancer being one-molecule thick... a description I really liked. M John Harrison has written some great stuff on his blog about this too.
The narrator is clearly obsessed with the game, at the expense of becoming a complete slacker. Has anything ever obsessed you like that?
Tracking down music online can lose me a morning or an afternoon pretty easily. Or starting out at Boing Boing and drifting from blog to blog. I basically try not to open sites like Pitchfork or BB or IHeartPhotograph unless I think I've got time on my hands.... otherwise before I know it half the day is gone! I guess anything that has this generative associative wandering built into it - where interesting things always lead to other interesting things - you always think you are only going to follow just one step further!
The Broken World, the videogame, spans a range of genres from horror to fantasy to Science Fiction. Are you a genre fan?
I read a lot of SF when I was a kid. I remember summer holidays reading two books a day sometimes!
But what's stayed with me is an engagement with those writers who deal with ideas, and those who play with language in interesting ways. So Ballard - esp The Atrocity Exhibition which I think is his masterpiece, as well as Philip K Dick, Michael Moorcock - people making complex fictional constructions that are unreal and real at the same time - or where the reality of the world created is under question. I read all those as a kid as well as all the more obvious people - Heinlein, Asimov, Silverberg, Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delaney. I just re-read Dhalgren in fact. Pretty incredible. I did read a lot of genre stuff but like I say I'm probably more drawn to the edges - to the people on the very edges of that - William Burroughs, or Ballard through M John Harrison who I mentioned already (I really loved Nova Swing), even people like Russell Hoban, Kathy Acker, Phillip Pullman or David Mitchell. I'm looking forward to Junot Diaz's new book which, after the geeky-sci- fi central character of Oscar Wao, is apparently going to be a dystopian SF book (it's still in progress right now according to what I read) but he's an interesting writer to me.
To be honest I'm very much a magpie when it comes to writing and writers. I read across all sorts of genres and areas of writing. I really like Nabokov, Barthelme and Perec but at the same time I love James Ellroy too. All sorts of more interesting UK writers I'd connect to too - Tom McCarthy whose Remainder is pretty extraordinary - Ballard played as farce, or Rupert Thompson, or Steven Hall or Tony White. People doing interesting stuff with the premise of their worlds, the logics that seems to operate in them, the structures, as well as stories themselves...
There's been talk about SF capturing the "Slashdot crowd", the kind-of proto-SF, geek community, who really should be reading Science Fiction. It strikes me that The Broken World is a perfect book for this audience. Was that deliberate? What do you think about the old/new categories of genre reader?
I didnt set out to write the book for this kind of audience or that kind of audience. I just wrote something that interested me, something that seemed like it wanted to be written.
But you can see it as a product of my own dual interests - there's a lot of science fiction in the mix and at the same time a lot quite experimental approaches to narrative and to so-called world-building, and to writing itself too. And I come to it from different contexts really - not from 'proper fiction' - and I'm used to thinking about and approaching technology and language in quite conceptual ways. So I guess I probably come from some place in between those zones myself. I have no ambition to write "proper SF" - just like I don't aspire to make "proper" theatre. Categories are at their most interesting to me when they are being demolished or hybridised.
What strikes me is that books travel by very odd routes. I've read very unexpected things because someone recommended it, or because I chanced on something in a shop, or on a friend's bookshelves. I like this ecclecticism. A lot of readers are like that I think. I wouldn't want to be in some very narrow niche as a writer or as a reader. Interesting writing doesn't work like that.
Do you have any business or craft advice for new writers?
I'm not sure I have business advice for anyone!
But for writers. William Burroughs' essay Les Voleurs (the thieves) from his collection The Adding Machine is worth a look. And everything in Georges Perec's marvelous Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Write. Collect. Write. Collect. Look at stuff. Not just writing. Other stuff too.
I would say, also, 'write what you don't know'. Write the world sideways.
I think we can live without any more novels that reflect directly the jail-time or sous-cheff or whitewater rafting experiences of someone- or-other. I like made up stuff. And stuff that knows it's made up and takes that on board in some way. There's a reality to that, if you see what I mean.
I like the saying that Terry Gilliam gives to Baron Munchausen in the movie of the same name. Munchausen is a liar, a fantasist, a fabulist.
His battle cry is: "out of lying to the truth."
What's your next project?
I'm going to be working on a dance piece with a Japanese dancer Fumio Ikeda. It's a first for me. I'm also working (slowly) on another novel - it's set in a messed up version of England called Endland. There's no title yet. I did a whole bunch of stories in the same world - some quite some years ago and about ten more more recently. Now I'm trying to do something extended in the same kind of place. It's exciting, very dense and there's a fundamental instability in it which keeps one on ones toes as a reader... like you're never quite sure if the action takes place in a depressed 1980's England or in post-Invasion Iraq or in some future New York after some further collapse. The reality of it is practically flickering.
Many thanks to Tim Etchells for taking the time to answer my questions!
What that means in non-blurb is that I do a range of 'creative stuff'.
A lot of my work has been in collaboration with a group of artists in Sheffield, UK - Forced Entertainment. We make theatre performances (which I direct) which tour in the UK and (these days) pretty well all over Europe and the world. It's kind of experimental stuff, hard to describe but quite addictive I think, quite special. I suppose the shorthand would be to say that it's the kind of theatre that comes after plays - theatre that maybe draws on cinema, or performance art or on ideas about collage or ideas from conceptual art. The company - the core group of six artists - formed in 1984 and we've been working together since then. In one sense I'd say that we've been trying to reinvent theatre - to figure out what theatre can be when it gets cut- up, re-mixed or re-thought in order to better speak of the times we're living in. So it's experimental but not for the sake of being experimental - rather, it's driven by this desire to talk about things more clearly.. a desire to get to the bottom of things. If I describe a performance involving ten performers - two clowns, two rock-gig roadies, a diva, a rock chick adrift from some MTV video, a cheerleader, a gorilla refugee from some pantomime, two backing dancers - and say that the title is Bloody Mess it might give you an idea. It's a funny show, but also quite dark... with the story of the Big Bang in it, as well as numerous fights, an attempt at five minute silence and a lot of fake tears. Maybe that gives a taste... but for the most part you just have to be there - what drives it is the energy and the experience of something unfolding live in front of you.
For video and visual art - yes - these are also areas that I've been really active in. I'd say that I've worked on my own making 'art things' - videos, installations, text-works, audio pieces - as well as collaborating with various artists in all kinds of projects. Recently for instance I made a series of neon signs for an exhibition here in Sheffield.... and am currently working on a project involving ice cream in Italy!
When you work spans many media how do you decide which medium to create a particular project in? Does the idea arrive entwined with the medium?
Ideas tend to come entwined with the medium, at least for the most part, tho there's a certain amount of cross over. I guess things can shift around... or perhaps it's more that the approaches discovered in one medium tend to find ways to shift to another, often mutating en route. So making a performance that has many different layers or strands at the same time might lead to doing a similar thing, or 'equivalent' thing in a video, or in a short story... but of course from a different position, and with a different set of restrictions and possibilities and contexts and dynamics that come with each particular medium or form.
What I like I suppose is that each form allows certain things, or gives access to certain things - for example, the relationship to a theatre audience is very different to the kind of relationship one makes with an individual viewer in a gallery, which is in turn very different to the kind of engagement and contact one gets from someone reading a novel.
There's been a lot of discussion on genre blogs about how to make a living as a writer in the modern age, and one of the frequently suggested ways has been to write for videogames. Yet you seem to have gone the other way and written a novel of a videogame! Do you fancy writing for a "real" game? Any chance of The Broken World in the future?
I've worked on several art projects that use video games as a (distant) reference point (alongside other reference points) but I'm not sure I'd cope well with the restrictions of writing dialogue for cut scenes! I think a game of The Broken World itself could be great though. I'd certainly be intrigued to play something in a world that's as incoherent as the one in the game as described in the book!
There's a lot of effort put into coherence these days - which ensures a certain consistency and consequentiality of course, but at worst it can mean very thorough but slightly tedious 'universes' - they figured it all out but somehow took the life out of it. Like art made by people from the auditors. As you can see from the The Broken World I'm attracted to something more fragmented and inconsistent and messy perhaps - something with cracks in it - I can see that this approach could pose problems for designing a playable game though.
I am very interested in structure - which is of course very relevant in terms of thinking about games proper... how to structure experience, how to devise paths through something, how to project and anticipate different ways of negotiating an environment (whether it's a visual one or one that exists in text alone). I think I'm especially interested in how to play something - how to offer, thwart, affect, or generally have fun with with those different ways that people negotiate a game or indeed a narrative. You can see that in The Broken World too of course - this whole device of a narrator who is apparently writing a guide to a game but who is constantly 'slipping' and letting through details of his life.... It's a sructure of layers... Until before you know it as a reader you're drawn into this quite illegitimate and unexpected story.. an unoffical one.
Are you a gamer? What's your most significant videogame experience?
I'm not much of a gamer to be frank. Often I lack the patience and the time they seem to demand. I do love the territory of games though - I guess it comes from my work in experimental performance and installation - this idea that what you're making is a space in which the user has to interact with things, or which the user has to navigate, connects games and art and writing, at least in my mind. I love also this way in which the idea of world - in a novel or a movie - becomes, in games, a 3-d navigable space, albeit a virtual one. I look at something like GTA4 and I'm really wondering what kind of labyrinthine games Dickens or Kafka might have made....
Some part of me always wants to mess with games tho. In some ways I distrust their ambitions for completeness - the way they have (or want) to make coherent worlds, to fill each and every hole in their logics. In literature, or cinema for example I'm fond of things that are slightly more fragile, which "know" themselves to be fake, worlds that know they are 'just' arrangements of words. In those early driving games I always found it tempting to drive off the race track and out onto the green at the sides - how far does it extend? What if it went on forever? I did an interview with William Gibson years ago and he talked about the world of Neuromancer being one-molecule thick... a description I really liked. M John Harrison has written some great stuff on his blog about this too.
The narrator is clearly obsessed with the game, at the expense of becoming a complete slacker. Has anything ever obsessed you like that?
Tracking down music online can lose me a morning or an afternoon pretty easily. Or starting out at Boing Boing and drifting from blog to blog. I basically try not to open sites like Pitchfork or BB or IHeartPhotograph unless I think I've got time on my hands.... otherwise before I know it half the day is gone! I guess anything that has this generative associative wandering built into it - where interesting things always lead to other interesting things - you always think you are only going to follow just one step further!
The Broken World, the videogame, spans a range of genres from horror to fantasy to Science Fiction. Are you a genre fan?
I read a lot of SF when I was a kid. I remember summer holidays reading two books a day sometimes!
But what's stayed with me is an engagement with those writers who deal with ideas, and those who play with language in interesting ways. So Ballard - esp The Atrocity Exhibition which I think is his masterpiece, as well as Philip K Dick, Michael Moorcock - people making complex fictional constructions that are unreal and real at the same time - or where the reality of the world created is under question. I read all those as a kid as well as all the more obvious people - Heinlein, Asimov, Silverberg, Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delaney. I just re-read Dhalgren in fact. Pretty incredible. I did read a lot of genre stuff but like I say I'm probably more drawn to the edges - to the people on the very edges of that - William Burroughs, or Ballard through M John Harrison who I mentioned already (I really loved Nova Swing), even people like Russell Hoban, Kathy Acker, Phillip Pullman or David Mitchell. I'm looking forward to Junot Diaz's new book which, after the geeky-sci- fi central character of Oscar Wao, is apparently going to be a dystopian SF book (it's still in progress right now according to what I read) but he's an interesting writer to me.
To be honest I'm very much a magpie when it comes to writing and writers. I read across all sorts of genres and areas of writing. I really like Nabokov, Barthelme and Perec but at the same time I love James Ellroy too. All sorts of more interesting UK writers I'd connect to too - Tom McCarthy whose Remainder is pretty extraordinary - Ballard played as farce, or Rupert Thompson, or Steven Hall or Tony White. People doing interesting stuff with the premise of their worlds, the logics that seems to operate in them, the structures, as well as stories themselves...
There's been talk about SF capturing the "Slashdot crowd", the kind-of proto-SF, geek community, who really should be reading Science Fiction. It strikes me that The Broken World is a perfect book for this audience. Was that deliberate? What do you think about the old/new categories of genre reader?
I didnt set out to write the book for this kind of audience or that kind of audience. I just wrote something that interested me, something that seemed like it wanted to be written.
But you can see it as a product of my own dual interests - there's a lot of science fiction in the mix and at the same time a lot quite experimental approaches to narrative and to so-called world-building, and to writing itself too. And I come to it from different contexts really - not from 'proper fiction' - and I'm used to thinking about and approaching technology and language in quite conceptual ways. So I guess I probably come from some place in between those zones myself. I have no ambition to write "proper SF" - just like I don't aspire to make "proper" theatre. Categories are at their most interesting to me when they are being demolished or hybridised.
What strikes me is that books travel by very odd routes. I've read very unexpected things because someone recommended it, or because I chanced on something in a shop, or on a friend's bookshelves. I like this ecclecticism. A lot of readers are like that I think. I wouldn't want to be in some very narrow niche as a writer or as a reader. Interesting writing doesn't work like that.
Do you have any business or craft advice for new writers?
I'm not sure I have business advice for anyone!
But for writers. William Burroughs' essay Les Voleurs (the thieves) from his collection The Adding Machine is worth a look. And everything in Georges Perec's marvelous Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Write. Collect. Write. Collect. Look at stuff. Not just writing. Other stuff too.
I would say, also, 'write what you don't know'. Write the world sideways.
I think we can live without any more novels that reflect directly the jail-time or sous-cheff or whitewater rafting experiences of someone- or-other. I like made up stuff. And stuff that knows it's made up and takes that on board in some way. There's a reality to that, if you see what I mean.
I like the saying that Terry Gilliam gives to Baron Munchausen in the movie of the same name. Munchausen is a liar, a fantasist, a fabulist.
His battle cry is: "out of lying to the truth."
What's your next project?
I'm going to be working on a dance piece with a Japanese dancer Fumio Ikeda. It's a first for me. I'm also working (slowly) on another novel - it's set in a messed up version of England called Endland. There's no title yet. I did a whole bunch of stories in the same world - some quite some years ago and about ten more more recently. Now I'm trying to do something extended in the same kind of place. It's exciting, very dense and there's a fundamental instability in it which keeps one on ones toes as a reader... like you're never quite sure if the action takes place in a depressed 1980's England or in post-Invasion Iraq or in some future New York after some further collapse. The reality of it is practically flickering.
Many thanks to Tim Etchells for taking the time to answer my questions!
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