‘Human perception of time is one of the biggest limitations of being human’

You studied zoology and psychology at the University of Reading. How has that influenced your writing?

I'm afraid that I honestly wasn't a good student, and the course itself didn't go in the directions I'd have chosen. There were a lot of stats, which I was terrible about, and a lot of experimental methodology and modelling. I think that I was looking for Magic Secrets of the Human Mind, which isn't really a thing. Between my own inadequacies and the particular curriculum, I feel that the academic side of university life didn't help me as much as the social side – my university years were definitely essential to me as a human being.

Time is a central theme in some of your fiction that I have read. Can you sum up how you see time, our psychological relationship with it, and whether that's particularly important to you?

Human perception of time is one of the biggest limitations of being human. As our species has developed, and gained more control over our environment, this has become a more and more problematic shortcoming. We are capable, as a species, of actions that have repercussions extending beyond the natural human ability to predict or – critically – to care. Hence long-term issues caused by mass human activity – climate change most obviously – and hence repeating cycles of history constantly come round again when nobody is expecting them.

As a species, we are good at learning lessons within certain time frames, and find it very hard to plan ahead outside those time frames. The time frames that were important to us as we evolved, are those that impact within our lifetimes. And some societies, historically, have been far better at finding systems that maintain stability and balance over generations, but they lose out to the short-term thinkers, it seems.

I'm thinking here of animistic ways of relating to nature amongst hunter/gatherer cultures, where taking from the world is balanced with maintaining a relationship with it. I have a version of this in The Tiger and the Wolf where the shapechanging people of that world have a complex but mutual relationship with the natural world.

I'm also, on another level entirely, fascinated by the way that non-human creatures may perceive time – whether it's a pigeon or a fly that lives far faster than we do, or a cold-blooded creature whose subjective perception of time might change with their body temperature. I have ideas for a book focusing on this but I haven't written it yet.

Specifically in the context of space and space travel, do you think humans do/can have any comprehension at all of the scale of it, time as distance etc? What kind of reactions have you had to your writing in those terms?

I don't think we do, but I think that – despite my previous answer – it's something we could workaround, if we can let go of certain other 'constants'. For example, interstellar space travel makes a mockery of human contact, but SF is still very keen on space empires.

Without some kind of Faster-Than-Light travel, space empires or any extended polity between stars can't exist, because the communication differences would make contact impossible. This begs the logistical question of what human society would invest the vast resources required for an interstellar colonial venture if that society could never receive any benefit from it within a workable human timeframe.

However we could make it happen if we were able to become accustomed to working towards goals at the multigenerational scale, and if we were able to let go of our urge to control those we send out. I feel that few current human ideologies are really suited to those demands though.

What kind of psychological challenges would you expect to see, and have you tackled in your books, with FTL travel?

FTL travel is a system that actively removes the psychological effects of space travel, by contracting the time periods to something the human mind can better appreciate. It makes travelling to another planet, time-wise, like going to another country or town. The actual physics effects of FTL would likely more than outweigh these conveniences though – see Ian Sales' The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself where an FTL-powered planetary mission is undone – literally erased from existence – when it is caught up by the regular speed of light which re-establishes perceived reality. The moment you travel faster than light you are kind of messing with the amount of matter and energy in the universe. It could be really rather bad.

What's your own relationship with time like?

I'm into live-action role-playing, and I think role-playing of any sort can lead to a curious compression of time… the sense that simultaneously a great deal of real-time has gone in a bit of a blur (time flying when you're having fun as per usual) but also that there's a wealth of experience and memory locked up behind that subjectively abbreviated period, that will filter out in bits and pieces of recollection later.

I think this is part of the way we create and experience stories – the partnership of the teller and the audience or the players of a game where each provides part of the narrative, but also needs to generate a lot of connective details to incorporate the details generated by other players.

Writers often seem to talk about their fraught relationship with time/deadlines / ensuring they use their time productively. Do you feel that, more than you think other professions might?

Whilst writers are often under the deadline hammer I don't know that it's necessarily different to most jobs these days. Everyone has time pressures and deadlines, and writers tend to at least have more self-determination in how they approach their work.