= What’s your middle name? (I was told to ask this.)
My full name is Lawrence Arch-Voluptuary Miles.
= Why a rabbit mask?
It’s my totem. If you haven’t read it, then I strongly recommend Bill Drummond’s “45” (his memoir of a magic-realist life in pop music), or at least the first section. The rabbit-loa he describes is very real to me also, and has been following me for much of my life.
= Why name it the Beasthouse?
The flat where I live is in a building that used to be a Victorian mansion, built - I swear this is true - by a military man named Captain Scarlet. The first time a very small relative visited, she described the hallway looking like “the Beast house”, i.e. the one from “Beauty and the”. (Note that the hallway looks absolutely nothing like the Beast’s house, but everything seems huge when you’re four.)
= What did you study at university?
I never went to university.
= How does one go about starting a comedy club in London, anyway?
You make friends with comedians and ask what *they* think about it. In my case, I knew Danielle Ward through an abortive audio project: she’d recently given up running a comedy night of her own, so I could ask for advice.
= What’s your improvement on the Box of Pain trick?
My version lets the audience see all the way around it, which is impossible in the standard version (it’s based on a perspective illusion).
= Any novel advice on writing?
No, just finish what you start. I’m f***ing useless at that and I hate myself for it.
= For that matter, any on editing?
Instinct will tell you just about everything you need to know.
= Do you still compose music?
*Sigh.* Not for some years, no. I just don’t have the optimism.
= Why Twitter?
It gives me somewhere to put individual sentences I’m happy with. Also, cutting out pictures and giving them daft captions is what we always used to do in fanzines.
= How do you create and keep track of your characters?
I *don’t* keep track of them. I’m surprisingly awful at remembering my own material, especially given the amount of trivia I can recall about other people’s. A lot of characters used to get created by my watching terrible dramas on television, then figuring out how I’d do them properly.
= Partizan Empire: how did you plan to create a film, and why didn’t it pan out?
My method of resource-gathering may not have been strictly speaking legal. These days, of course, Kickstarter exists and I’d have a lot less trouble.
= You’ve mentioned being present for the recording of True History and Adolescence. Why?
Always nice to schmooze with actors. Even if Julian Glover *did* call me a prick. And occasionally, very occasionally, the director will ask for your opinion.
= How? Are scriptwriters usually brought to the studios?
I believe so. Although I wasn’t asked to the recording of the last True Histories, I suspect because I didn’t get on with certain Magic Bullet employees.
= What’s one of the remaining seven things that aren’t quite good enough to be the Enemy?
Literally an infinite number of monkeys.
= What’s the Chinese astrology approach to writing?
I have no idea. You see what I mean about my memory. I know Philip K. Dick used the I Ching to decide the plot of “Tha Man in the High Castle”, is that what I was talking about?
= Without definition by exclusion, what makes good fiction?
It’s one of those few things I don’t want to know the answer to. In the same way that a lot of comedians don’t analyse their jokes, because then everything stops seeming funny.
= Did you ever work out why the Wormhole Water Wheel wouldn’t work?
I’ve been given three different explanations, and still don’t trust any of them.
= How did you come to feel the ghost of a tower-block was possessing you? Did it have a personality, or goals? How did it influence This Town?
I’ve tried to explain this in words, but I’ve never managed it. I seem to remember that I came closest when Trina asked me about it, so you could try asking her what I said.
= If BBV hadn’t gone under, what was the rest of Protocols supposed to look like?
The series would’ve carried on with something like the True Histories, although Sutekh wouldn’t have been in so many episodes. I had fifty volumes planned, and still stuck to the plan when I started writing the Osirian cycle, but the fact of it being a self-contained mini-series changed a lot. (Eliza wasn’t meant to die, at least not that early. But she *had* to die in order for the climax of Volume Six to work.)
= What was the horror in There Are Worse Things Than Angels?
It was conceived as a horror novel, so it was all fairly grim. I seem to recall the opening scene being a ritual with a frozen chicken, like a necromantic version of the “Sledgehammer” video. Actually, given that it was set in the 1970s, a lot of the atmosphere would’ve been similar to “Dead Romance”.
= Beyond Rumpole, Smiley, Pilgrim, Bagpuss, Buffy, Clangers, Norrell and Claudius, is there anything you like and/or would generally recommend to people?
Plain goat’s-milk yoghurt? Oh, I think you missed “The Singing Detective” off the list.
= How many magazine articles have you written? Do you use pseudonyms?
No idea, but no.
= Have you written anything for radio other than that one comedy-historical skit?
I wrote a few sketches for that programme, whatever it was called. The abortive audio project mentioned earlier was a pilot for a radio sitcom, but it didn’t end well.
= If information is dynamic, sensual, and ill-suited to language, how should it be communicated?
Bee dances.
= Is there any method that retains precision and immediacy? There’s a kind of romance to a world where people speak in paintings and dérive, but I don’t see how they’d ever measure anything.
There *is* no method, because sensual information is sensual information and can’t be translated into any other medium, much as music can’t be turned into words in anything other than the clumsiest imaginable way. But the tools we use to try to capture beauty - language being the most obvious - can in themselves be beautiful. I find that writing is at its best when it *means* something but isn’t trying to *describe* something.
= Could you expand on the prospective season following The Book of the World?
Yes, in rather more detail than we have time for here. Also I have a complete Fiftieth Anniversary Special in my head which I bet is a massive improvement on the real one. The same goes for Star Wars Episode VII, because I waste an awful lot of my life imagining things that can never, ever be made.
= Why so many two-parters?
I liked the RTD approach to two-parters. Instead of writing a feature-length script and splitting it down the middle like everyone else did, Big Russell would write separate but interlinked stories, which I felt had a lot of potential for world-building. (The only classic-“Who” story to attempt something similar is “The Ark”, which is the series at its most epic and ambitious even if the script’s terrible.) Also, bearing in mind that I wrote the list while pretending to be a proper producer, two-parters help to reduce the budget. And “The Book of the World” would be a hugely expensive season opener, as even the script acknowledges.
= The cache hosting the Protocols scripts disintegrated this year, and my site’s one of the only two places with public copies left. Would you like them back?
No, but please do hold onto them just in case.
= In old interviews you’ve sketched brief summaries of Seconds, Valentine’s Day, Ends and the Requiem cycle; what were The Spectacular Afterlife of Bernice Summerfield and Beneath the Planet of the Spiders meant to be?
I have no idea what “Beneath the Planet of the Spiders” was, and if I didn’t know better I’d think you just made it up. I know I wanted all the Faction Paradox audios to have a monster that was *something like* a “Doctor Who” monster, though, and I know I was planning to use Metebelis-style spiders: could that have been it? “Afterlife” never got further than a one-page proposal, so all I remember is that it was set decades after the other Bernice books, and that it featured her son Escape Summerfield (this was before Big Finish got hold of her bloodline, natch).
= After all of the different media you’ve worked in, and after all of the criticism you’ve lobbed at both, why do you place so much importance on television and the novel?
I genuinely believe that television is, or should be, the greatest of all media. I’m with Dennis Potter on that. Novels are important because they can do things that can’t be done in any other form, which is obviously true of *any* medium, but in the case of novels I feel their very nature is being compromised by the existence of cinema. As others have pointed out before me, since the mid-twentieth century, books have increasingly pretended to be movies. This is why I had a tendency to write novels that would be almost unfilmable.
= Conversely, given your tolerance of the superficiality and noxious surrounding culture of print and TV, why do you have such a distaste for video games?
I could just say “the stench of masculinity”, though that rather misses the point. I *like* video games in principle, but the things we now call video games aren’t games, as such: they’re crude attempts at interactive movies. As a result, they’re badly-written and entirely reliant on cliches, which locks games and cinema into a terrible necrotic spiral. Games are shonky parodies of films; films reflect the popularity of gaming culture by becoming shonky parodies of themselves; new games copy the films that they helped to make worse.
= How is difference a tenable virtue? The sentiment that there’s nothing new under the Sun is clearly evil, but if you adjust your every action away from the preexisting and banal, or build a civilization where everyone must be as different as possible, aren’t you eventually going to run out of new things?
I take it as a given that the development of new technology changes the nature of human thought. Therefore, as long as new technology develops, new thoughts and new forms of culture can emerge. And since I believe technology to be infinitely upgradeable, we can theoretically keep being different forever.
= As an ex-editor of the range, what were your criteria for publishable Faction Paradox stories? Roughly how high was the series’ submission-to-rejection ratio?
Nobody “submitted”, really: I just approached writers whom I thought might be interested, or whom I knew had an idea that might work in the Faction range. So the submission-to-rejection ratio was one to zero. (I know a couple of people approached Lars with half-finished ideas for books, some of them quite good, but I don’t think any of them ever sent a detailed proposal. The only “missing” novel was Simon Bucher-Jones’ abortive “Breakspear Passage”, which I believe got recycled after I stopped being editor.)
There is one untrue answer on this list. Two if you count the joke about the bee dances.
- LM.