In the course of moving the blog over to WordPress and creating an archive, I ran across the first “real” LSH post, which was about a book I’d just read: Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan. As it happens, over at Clarkesworld there’s an extensive interview with him, mostly about his book Thirteen, but also covering general topics. For instance:
Noir writers detected that, maybe without even consciously realizing it, and so you have this very strong male protagonist in most noir fiction, but he’s keenly aware of his own thuggishness, if you like. He’s keenly aware that it’s not like he’s the white knight and the stuff out there is dark and evil. He’s aware that this is in all of us. And so I suspect that mirroring happens a lot in noir because it’s a genre that’s concerned with what’s inside, as well as what’s outside. In noir plots the assumption tends to be that the system is corrupt: what appear to be the bad guys might be the bad guys, but what appear to be the good guys might be bad guys, as well. There’s a sense that things are rotten, and that this is the human condition.
After reading that, I realized that I’d never been satisfied with what my definition of “noir” was. I think Morgan captured something pretty important there, that explains both my affinity for his writing and the aspects of my writing that make other people describe it as noir-meets-something.
Anyway, check out the interview if you know RKM, and check out RKM if you don’t. He’s really the most interesting guy to come out of sci-fi in recent memory, as far as I’m concerned.