Author to Author: Larry Gaudet & Emily Weedon
A Discussion between Emily Weedon ("Autokrator") and Larry Gaudet ("Eris")
I recently met up on Zoom with author Larry Gaudet to chat about our books, Eris, and Autokrator1. I enjoyed Larry’s book. I especially loved the big ideas contained within. I was struck by how many parallels exist between our two dystopias, right down to their names. Eris is the Greek goddess of discord and strife. Autokrator is the Greek word that gives us Tsar, Ceasar, and Emperor and which mirrors the rise of autocracy in our time. I was looking forward to a free-ranging conversation with Larry about art, writing, technology, dystopia and more, and I was not disappointed.
“We’re having a free-range author chat, and we’re just going to ramble around talking about our two books.”
EMILY We’re having a free-range author chat, and we’re just going to ramble around talking about our two books. The reason I wanted to talk to you, Larry, is because I found so many interesting parallels between your book and mine and was fascinated by our collective need to be reading dystopias these days. Most of all I was really thrilled by how different this book is from the typical landscape of Canadian Literature. It’s something else, something which digs into the technological world we find ourselves in. Welcome, Larry!
LARRY It's nice to be with you here, Emily. I’d like to say the same thing about your book. I feel that what you accomplished with Autokrator with its very high concept that on the surface has a repellant quality, you know, all men are evil, all women are oppressed. And yet there are so many different avenues of interest I found in the book. In addition to the great narrative control you have, great characterization. This is fun to be able to spend a little time together.
EMILY It sure is. I feel like writing a book is almost the long way “shortcut” to just getting to sit around with smart people talking about books. I heard you speak at your book launch and I would’ve bought your book on the basis of your talk alone because you spoke so passionately and so clearly about this world that we find ourselves in where technology is a clear and present danger.
LARRY Yeah I feel that it’s kind of interesting at this time, that even the US Surgeon General can come to the conclusion that social media is a mental health harm for adolescents. We know it’s a health harm for all of us in a way… for the longest time, I’ve been aware of the deleterious effects of technology and media technology in particular on cognition. To me it’s almost obvious now that it’s harmful, that time we spend on screens, away from our bodies, escaping our bodies.
The question is “Why?” Why do we need to escape our bodies. Why do we feel the need to live as avatars floating around the world and do we even understand what we’re doing to ourselves? I think it’s a grand experiment. I couldn’t live the way I live without access to state-of-the-art bandwidth and communication appliances. But I feel the consequences of it is one step forward and two steps back. I don’t think I’ve become a better person as a consequence of my integration into the great global virtuality. I feel that I’ve degraded some aspects of myself that I can’t quite figure. If I feel that for myself as a writer, I think I have a responsibility - I feel that it’s a subject matter. And I was looking for interesting ways to connect to others and see if others felt that way. I think I am - finally, after 25 years of writing about this people are saying, “you know, he’s not completely wrong about this.”
EMILY Something to put on an epitaph. “Maybe not entirely wrong.” I think you are not entirely wrong. I find my sense of focus has been shattered. I used to be able to just read through books, and that sense of being able to deeply engage has been shattered by the bells and dings and whistles that are all around us and that horrible function of social media which is “did somebody like my thing? Did somebody like my thing?” We’re like those monkeys in cages they talked about hitting the orgasm bar instead of eating [John C. Lilly] We’re those monkeys in those boxes.
LARRY I’m more interested in the question of why. Technology and communication and media – on some superficial level we want to communicate. But how does that impulse turn in on itself in this narcissistic cesspool where we’re not talking to anybody other than ourselves? We’re interacting with avatars but really we’re reflecting ourselves back to ourselves. There’s something incestuous about that, you’re eating our own brain you’re corroding yourself in a way.
EMILY It’s true. I picked up a couple of themes through the book and one is an element of control. There is at least the belief that we can control our world with technology and your character, Tony, when he gets involved in this big MMORPG-type game that’s in a virtual reality, I believe he thinks he is controlling his life and has an impact on the larger world around him when in fact, I believe you are saying to us, he is enslaved by technology.
LARRY Well there’s two sides to that. First of all he’s a young boy. And so it’s a portrait of vulnerability being taken away or being manipulated. The lovely little neo-Marxist argument that capitalism is all one big game - it’s largely true - the forces of manipulation are all about fragmenting the attention span, making you believe you have wants that you didn’t have before: you need 100 different kinds of toothpaste so maybe we’ll make you believe that, hit you with hundreds of messages. The science behind dopamine manipulation and all that stuff that comes with social media communications. People who are responsible for creating these technologies all know about this stuff. There was a documentary where these masters of the technological universe guys were saying “Yeah we kind of knew. We feel kinda bad about what we did.” But they’re not giving back their stock options!
Maybe they would fit into your book.I want to talk to you about why you went away from all contemporary technology… I think it is very much connected to economic advantage, control, and within that there’s always the forces of exploitation. The people who control information management, their kids are not even allowed to use iPhones! But I wanted to ask you about Autokrator. Technology plays a role in your book.
“It’s a speculative world and I wanted to engage with especially gender and how power is exercised and I wanted to do away with historical, religious paradigms, that sort of thing.”
EMILY It’s a speculative world and I wanted to engage with especially gender and how power is exercised and I wanted to do away with historical, religious paradigms, that sort of thing. With technology, that emerged as I was working on the book. I do deal with exogenesis, the ability to gestate babies without wombs, which was emergent when I started and which is upon us now. One of my early urges was to think about ancient Rome. I’ve got a culture that depends on slaves to keep the wheels turning, literally. In Rome they had steam technology, plumbing all kinds of technologies that they didn’t use because it would have upended this structure that they had. They depended on this big base of slaves, and they would have been in trouble if they’d been left idle.
I wanted to think about technology as something in a chokehold by the powers that be. This almost broke my brain: try to think of a word a semi-technological world would use for a car – I came up with the term Autokinetic. It moves by itself. I used Greek words to keep the reader at a bit of a remove because I find if you separate a little bit from the world you’re immersed in that’s when you can have a Brechtian remove and think about things more critically, perhaps. It’s a lever I play with in my book.
LARRY It’s interesting going back to the science fiction of Edward Bellamy - looking back at the books as they try to grapple with inventions that haven’t come yet. The wireless phone. You can see them grappling with this “I know this is going to come. And I have to label it.” Because that’s part of the job, labelling things. The fog around some of these things [in Autokrator] the procreative technology, that feels very today and tomorrow and yesterday all at once.
Do you run into trouble when people say stuff like you must just hate men? How can you turn somebody who feels that way?
EMILY I love men! What I was trying to do, as part of being equal: women have to be allowed to be evil too! A lot of times I find stories wind up exulting a female character to the point where they don’t have any flaws and that doesn’t work in literature.
LARRY I’d go even further. I want to write a satire about the toxic matriarchy! That would be so much fun.
EMILY There is a toxic matriarchy in this book. The point is, men can be awful, women can be awful, HUMANS can be awful is what I was getting at. Power corrupts. If a different group of people were to wrest power from the evil men, evil wouldn’t be far behind. I had a review on Goodreads asking “Why the hell would this woman be in love with two men?” Well, one of them is her child, so [she] gets a free pass on that one. We do live in a patriarchy. We do live in a world where women don’t have as much equality. And I am a straight person. You’re not going to love people because of politics. You love who you love. That’s not something you get to choose.
LARRY Yeah one of the sharp edges you walk along, between art and ideology. I always like the Francis Bacon quote regarding making artist statements: ‘If that’s what you want, why do the art?” Where does your work deviate from a political position and what makes it art?
EMILY Wow, that’s a hefty question. I didn’t know that I was going for art. And I wasn’t going for politics. I was trying to ask a question. So perhaps that’s the starting off point. I think art asks questions and we make imperfect answers to that. And the pursuit of the most perfect answer is how art is refined. This is definitely an imperfect answer to a question, but I was asking “Could things be worse?” Outside of politics, outside of art, I just wanted to tell a ripping good story. I just wanted to tell something that rewards the reader. If a reader gives you their attention, that is a gift.
LARRY I was amazed with the narrative control, what characters were doing. It’s definitely in the shadow of The Handmaid’s Tale. There are a lot of signals there, your use of labelling. She had her female characters as appendages of men “Offred” and you’ve got “Unmale” and it’s a really creative way of doing that. Were you inspired by the book, where did you reject what Atwood was doing? It’s a big shadow to be in the middle of.
EMILY It is a big shadow! I do reject that on a few levels. The world has given us myriad dystopias for women. I don’t feel there is one dystopic story, there are as many dystopias as there are women. I adore Atwood. She is a giant of a writer. I picked up The Handmaid’s Tale when I started writing this and I put it right back down. I had to clear my head and just stick with my original question “Could things be worse for women?”
I also just wanted to explore a bigger world. I was trapped in a glass cube in Budapest with a 2-year-old prison warden and my mind was atrophying and needed to escape to bigger places. I wanted to create a world that was big, sprawling epic that took on huge ideas and questions. I love Handmaid’s Tale but I do find that it has a claustrophobia to it. That is apt, because it takes on domestic issues and being yoked in various ways by your gender. I wanted to take on similar things but in a wider canvas.
I think it’s really interesting that you have a broken family. You’ve got a divorced couple and their son that is the launch pad for this, of course, I think you’re telescoping Steve Jobs, I thought it was interesting that there’s this family where, clearly, there’s some triangulation going on and dad has created this catnip world of an online game that the kid is involved in. And then it kind of goes awry. That’s intentional I believe, that you have this broken-up family behind this game.
LARRY Even broken families have to find a way to relate. It’s probably not the worst place to start with a broken family because what price do you pay for certain types of obsessions, whether economic or sexual or whatever. So that’s where we start. The existential threat’s always there – at the domestic level – what kind of love are you living in, how close are you to the people who matter to you, what have you done to them, what have you done to yourself. Toward the end of the book there’s a character, the vulnerable boy. You’d asked me whether maybe you should have killed him.
EMILY I wondered about that, yeah.
LARRY My feeling about that was, maybe I’ve done something even more pernicious: he’s metastasized into something that will have really difficult consequences later in life, based on the logic that people who are bullied become bulliers. So the fact that this young boy with so much talent and so much energy, will have come through the grinder of a virtual reality universe that we’ve surrounded him in – what kind of adult are we going to produce? I think the mother is aware of “What is my some going to become?” We’ve created this nimbus, this web of digital manipulation that is gonna have real consequences down the line.
EMILY I was really moved by the relationship with the mother and the son and the way the game is a wedge between them. I’m a parent to an emerging teen and watching that whole experience unfurl. I felt for the mom, the sense that she was losing her child to this all-encompassing thing.
LARRY I needed someone in the book and she was a “natural choice” to have the insight into the price we pay. The larger consideration for me was I’ve written eight or ten books now. But this is the first book where the accumulated scars and awareness of the [parenting] mistakes I’ve made come into play. My boys are 22 and 25. I think if there’s one thing they like about their dad it’s that awareness that I’m not perfect. Every family is on some level is like a stealth airplane. It’s not something that flies. It’s computer adjustments that keep you from crashing. It stops from falling out of the air and I think that’s how I see parenting. Maybe the book is written in part to say why can’t we be trained as parents before we go down this path? I’m astonished at how little we know and the book is in part the residue of that.
EMILY Feels like grandparenting is your chance to finally apply some of the things you learn.
LARRY There’s still hope for me yet, Emily
EMILY I grew up on a subsistence farm, with no running water, no electricity. I’m endlessly amused that I went on to earn a living with a computer. There are times when I long for the simplicity of that world. Do you think there’s any chance that this whole technological world that we find ourselves in the grip of – is there going to be a reaction to it, are we going to have neo-Mennonites showing up?
LARRY Imagine this anecdote. Down the road, another ten or fifteen years I do believe some people will opt to live in liquid internet, like a womb, sort of like The Matrix. Life extension technologies will be built into liquid bandwidth. I think we’re going to head much further down that path of ‘biology doesn’t matter, physical presence doesn’t matter, we need to escape our bodies, the forces of control want us to do this sort of stuff’. I think this is going to get much, much worse. On the other side. I think there’s going to be a counter-reaction of the next-generation hippie types that will run for the hills. They will fetishize the absence of technology. They will be built by another utopian vision that being in real physical spaces with people matter. That human relationships cannot be mediated without human biology involved. Just chemically being in a room with other people.
EMILY Chemically, that’s an interesting word choice.
LARRY I’m ok with this avatar stuff, Emily, but I met you in person once and the residue of that stays with me. And now our avatars are interacting a little bit. I almost take a sort of financial services approach to it: you and I have a very little real relationship and now we’re drawing down on it, we’re kind of deregistering our RSPs a little bit. You actually have to see people in person. But one day there will be an Amazon-like company that will buy, say, Madagascar or Crete and they’ll be 10 million wombs and people will live completely with life extension in some of matrix. And they will feel it to be much more controllable.
EMILY I just want to go back to the chemical bit. I remember getting upset by the idea that there’s so much space between atoms that you never really touch anything. You have the sensation that you do, but nothing really touches. So in a way, migrating everything about our experience to a digital world where there is no touch isn’t so alien. But one thing that we would miss is that chemical response, pheromones. I believe we do communicate, humans, still , on an animal level, we do pick up chemicals from situations, from other people. To miss that, I wonder what would happen to us in the long term? I suppose they would inject chemicals into these wombs you imagine.
LARRY. Something really interesting to me, at the beginning of the 20th century with relativity and Einstein, that the novel was affected by that. Something as old fashioned as The Alexandrian Quartet was affected by relativity. We’re quantum beings that don’t really know what we’re made of. I wonder how that’s going to affect the kind of art we create?
EMILY In a world you’re envisioning where everyone is squirreled away into in their womb pockets… one thing that doesn’t get talked about a lot is that there’s a procreative or sexual impulse to a lot of creativity. A lot of human endeavour over the millennia have been like “I want to impress that girl over there and discover x, paint x, build a fire. I see us in a way as our genes are perhaps the driver and these bodies we live in are just a means for our genes to get more genes. I’ve heard chickens described this way – a device for eggs to get more eggs.
“Sex plus technology equals the future. That’s in a good and a bad way.”
LARRY I like that. I like that. Sex plus technology equals the future. That’s in a good and a bad way.
EMILY I want to go back to Eris and say what I love about it is that what created a lot of the sparks in this conversation. You’ve written a book that is about ideas, big ideas. The book is kind of a keyhole entry into these big ideas. It’s the kind of thing that gets people questioning and talking and you should feel very proud of the work you’ve done. You’ve created something that will continue to spark more conversation.
LARRY I’ve been doing this for a long time for the rewards of just doing it. To a fault I’m invested in the idea of doing this stuff. I like big ideas. I think the difference to when I started doing this and today is the control I have over these keyholes and how I design them. I don’t read reviews anymore. At the beginning I went to see a couple reviews on Goodreads. The one that entertained me the most was somebody who was expecting a thriller about Ready Player One, that was a game. And this person said something like: there seems to be some messages in this book but I’m really not sure what they are. It’s a big info dump. I was greatly amused by that. People will read the book…. I can feel their heart fluttering a bit because if they get into the implications of the book – it’s too hard for a lot of folks.
“It is so interesting how people come to books so often with a sense of what they want it to be instead of embracing it for what it is.”
EMILY It is so interesting how people come to books so often with a sense of what they want it to be instead of embracing it for what it is. I feel there is a loss of ability to regard any work and just go: ok, this is this. We want to impose ourselves onto things. I’ve also become aware in the last year as I’m engaging with reviews… there’s almost a violence in people, something about the act of reading a book that injects another person’s voice and ideas and animus directly into your brain. In a way that it sits right next to your own inner voice and maybe talks over it. And I think that’s why some people react as viscerally to books they don’t like. There’s this sense of this other being inhabiting your mind for the time you’re reading their book.
LARRY There are two reasons why writers lead terrible lives. One is that when you drink from the human condition which has a lot of poison in it, that’s your day job in a way. The other one is this unleashing of creative vengeance by those who think they understand what you’re doing and have the need to dominate what you’ve done. I want to end this conversation by asking another question. Imagine me as this anxiety ridden facilitator of a Wednesday night book club. What would you like them to focus on so we have a good conversation?
EMILY I imagine some people saying “I recognize my ex-husband in this book.” Some ex-relationships are in there, and some ex-bosses too. My whole life I’ve felt like I’ve had a speed limiter put on me. A kind of “yes yes” patting me on top of the head “Nice idea, for a girl.” And how frustrating that is to still have a feeling of being squished into a box. I think other women who are reading this book are recognizing that squishing and wanting to burst out of it and be other than what we’ve been prescribed to be. As well, I hope people come back to love. Because there is love in this book despite the darkness and the caution. It’s largely driven by love between individuals. And if we don’t have that, what do we have?
What a delight this has been, Larry. I’m so glad we could spend this time “together” in “digital space.” Once again, I hope people pick up a copy of Eris and Autokrator and perhaps read them together. What a great book club that would be!
What a brilliant conversation! Thanks for including us in it.