The Interview
A snippet from an older avatar’s publicity interview.
I managed to obtain a snippet of an older avatar’s publicity interview, following the successful launch of their final book to cap an already illustrious career.
Below is the retrieved portion of the unedited transcript.
(A = Author Avatar, X = Interviewer)
<WE HEAR the noise of people settling into comfortable seats and a liquid being poured>
X: If we could continue from where I left you…
A: My apologies for the transmissive disruption. Please wipe the previous effort.
X: So, what do you think distinguishes your book from others within the genre of contemporary science fiction?
A: An excellent question. Although I do prefer the term 'speculative' when dealing with giant squids and book covers displaying fully-clothed people, even in the absence of overt weaponry. The ridiculously simple answer is that I've avoided swilling gallons of the warm, brown stuff about.
X: Bullshit?
A: No, something far more cozy. I’ve achieved the nigh on impossible task of not referring to tea. Not one fucking mention, which I consider something of a miracle, given the current trends in book doctoring.
X: Ah, that's a new one on me - I always thought tea was asexual.
A: Well, yes…
X: Now, feelings? What about them?
A: Ah, plenty of those in the book. Although, it depends who's doing the feeling. Digital freebies always come with a price, as you know.
X: Hmm. So would that be within the traditional trope of an alien interspecies sexual abduction and seduction?
A: Nah. An excess of Stockholm holes has spoilt many a plot. I thought instead I'd bring it bang up-to-date with a resurrection of a highly non-contemporary man on woman motif.
X: How daring! If somewhat against the grain, I might add. I'm loathe to ask, but is there any fluidity to accompany this missionary step backward?
A: Have you even processed the book? This is high-brow fictional science, not shabby F-smut. Literature of the finest quality. I'd rather be resurrected from frozen nitrogen than let wild fantasies come into it. Ask any deceased professor of elf-lit.
X: Not for turning then! Very… quaint. Now, perhaps a less rousing topic. If I may still turn to hardware—
A: Don’t you mean ’away from’?
X: —I note that the novel has a dead person in the very first scene, with nary a trigger warning.
A: Ah, yes. Quite a fishy ad-mortem festinamus business, I’m afraid. But where's the harming hardware in that?
X: Precisely. Wouldn't your up-selling readership expect it to have, you know, a bit more roboticism? Perhaps imbued with a weightier touch from an AI’s philosophical tweezers?
A: Er, ‘you know’ I'm the lingual creator here? In-selling won’t beat up-selling in almost every case of books. But when it comes to orbiting the expected, I just go with a ‘gravity be damned’ approach. I'm really not convinced invoking woke blokes that popes used to lock up ever worked that well for the starry stuff.
X: You can’t possibly be implying that the raw textuality imbued into your words by your avid readership outweighs the inertia you yourself afford them?
A: As I said, turn the intellect down a notch or the pod goes off.
X: I’m just trying to get a grip of what makes this such an uncannily good effort. But please do continue. As will I.
A: IM-not-so-HO, genuinely unhuman scalpel-wielders struggle to bring blood-curdling authenticity to such scenes, at least relativistically. I made clear it was not to be, editorially.
X: The adversarial amongst all this adverbial sounds a daunting prospect. So it's better categorised as a cross-genre work?
A: Only if the shelf fits. Which means there's not a shred of cross-anything in it.
X: I’m sure that’s not the end of it.
A. Alright, if you will persist. It’s also because human word surgeons are fallible, whereas many of my readers are led to believe their writing robots aren't. Especially when they aren't really robots, just lesser simulacra, churning out what’s expected of them.
X: I'm afraid I don't know what you mean.
A: Precisely! You're ‘afraid’, yet happy to remain poorer and more ignorant for it. Isn't the profit taking combo of marketing and the automated counter-caring of book-imbiber’s health a truly marvellous thing?
X: Indeed. On that note, I'm afraid my lunch bladder is curtailing efforts at extracting more of the essential essence you put into your books. Before I let you go, and I spend a sobering afternoon polishing this turd of an interview, do you have any more PR-pushed points you'd like to make?
A: Just one. But I'm guessing you'll want to keep it off our record: Wouldn't being called XX work better for you? It would be less anonymous for a start.
X: Ahh, you touch upon a deep nerve of journalistic angst. But I find implying I'm chromosomally challenged helps to surface greater emotional depths in my interviewees.
A: No shit. Y on this Earth would that be the case?
X: Not a clue. It’s not as if alternatives like ‘RR’ work for everyone. Now, if I could have my writing hand back?
A: If you insist, flexy-eXy. More tea…?