I was lucky. My first proper book was the best of the Narnia series, The Magician’s Nephew.

My favourite was The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In fact some of The Scar is based on it, the boat the Morning Walker is inspired by it. I remember in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader a boy is transformed into a dragon as a punishment, but when he reforms, the dragon splits open, and the boy steps out again, rewarded for being good. The point was not that it was cool to be a dragon, but that you must be a good boy. Personally I didn’t care that Aslan was Christ so long as he was a big lion.

I’ve always been impressed both by your practical involvement in radical politics and the fact that I never feel bullied by your books, or even that they have a particularly strong political or moral message.

That’s a question readers are interested in: how do you mediate between fiction and politics? It’s a non-issue to me. Hey, I’m a fanboy, no disingenuousness there. But it does feel thin as a response. I’m a committed socialist, but love SF and fantasy and never see a contradiction. I get great joy riffing off the weird, but I enjoy politics as well. There is a lot of political texture to my books because that’s what I think about. Gene Wolfe is a great fantasy writer and his views saturate his work. They are part of the mix, politics but not recruiting or hectoring. If as a reader I want a polemic, I’ll go and find one. If someone did want to argue or recruit I’m afraid I’d say a bit flippantly that a 600 page fantasy novel was a pretty inefficient way of doing so. However I also find it interesting to see a fantasy informed by political opinion. I don’t like the idea that political fiction should be denigrated as propaganda. Iain Banks’ Complicity is a terrific novel because of its political texture.

I say the same thing about philosophy. Philosophy is a long chain of logic using clean tools to work your way to fresh and unexpected conclusions. That is not what fiction does or can do... unless it has pages of argument or uses sprinklings of philosophical quotations as seasoning.

I have no problem with philosophy in a novel. But I agree that fiction doesn’t have to have an argument or a conclusion, but it can deal with issues that are thought of as being philosophical. The opposite position, that fiction is not concerned with themes or issues, is unconvincing and a bit gor-blimey-ish. I remember seeing Ken MacLeod and Iain Banks on a panel saying something along the lines that they didn’t think about the themes in their fiction, and I just thought ‘bullshit you don’t, you’re fooling no one, you two…’ There is no firewall between political or philosophical ideas and fiction. Benjamin Peret, a French surrealist was a deeply committed political writer, a left dissident, a Trot ... and a beautifully surrealist writer, though he was far more systematically political than other surrealists. He wrote an essay ‘The Dishonour of Poets’ criticising a book of political poetry and how it hobbled itself by being crudely reductive. You can have fidelity to both poetry and politics, but you must avoid a reductive collapse one into another.
There is a certain bloodless liberal criticism that politics and literature are two separate spheres and that one should write about ‘eternal human truths.’ As a political writer that feels very unsatisfying.

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