Ask The Author: Matthew Battles

Posted on by

You must read “For Provisional Description of Superficial Features” by Matthew Battles. And, also, you must read this interview.

1. How would you murder someone using Wikipedia?

Well, I suppose I’ve specified one way of doing so, but it’s beyond any current feature set of which I know. Failing all, load it up on a sturdy laptop—the English Wikipedia, because it’s the biggest, and packs the most punch—and wallop someone with it from behind. I’ve always counted it a deficit of the game Clue that a book isn’t available to use as a murder weapon—I’d love to off Professor Plum, in the Library, with the Book.

2. What fictional starcraft would you like to pilot? Where would you go?

The ships in Iain M. Sinclair’s Culture novels are enormously attractive, but of course they’re supra-intelligent, essentially immortal, and more or less godlike; one doesn’t exactly pilot them.  My second pick would be the incendiary lunar shell piloted in Georges Melies’ Le voyage dans la Lune; I’d use it to visit the Lagrange points of Earth’s orbit to search for Planet X, where my nemesis surely lives.

3. Would you say there’s a parable hidden in “For Provisional Description of Superficial Features”?

No—and let that be a lesson to you! More seriously, the story is a parody not so much of science fiction, but of the strange way we talk about the past: there are people, most of them allegedly well-educated and quite influential, who can look at a mass-market paperback and think they’re seeing the Gutenberg Bible. The irreducible weirdness of that way of thinking, projected forward into an SF-archetypically recognizable far future, is the basic motivation for the telling.

4. Are you on the Internet because you’re an Internet thug?

No! The two facts are merely coincidental.

5. Would you take advice from someone who has another being fused to his stomach?

Why phrase it in the conditional? It’s likely already happened without my knowledge.

6. How fast would you get your ass to Mars if instructed by your past self to do so?

I wouldn’t wait around for Sharon Stone to kick my ass, I can tell you that much.