Introduction:

I am currently running a post “mini-series” titled “Here’s SpecFicNZ-Christchurch” in which my fellow SpecFicNZ-Christchurch authors introduce themselves using a series of  common headings:

Here’s Who: a short, first person introduction to the writer
Here’s Why: the writer writes speculative fiction
Here’s What: an example of the writer’s work
Here’s Where: you can find out more about the writer and their work—and I really hope you will!

Today I am very pleased to invite you to meet Gareth Renowden.

—

Here’s SpecFicNZ–Christchurch: Featuring Gareth Renowden

Gareth Renowden

Here’s Who:

Who I am depends on who you talk to. Ask my neighbours here in the Waipara Valley, and they’ll say that I’m the bloke who grows truffles and has a famous beagle to sniff them out. They might remember that I wrote a book about truffles a few years ago.

Ask a climate scientist, and they’ll tell you that I’m a science writer who has been blogging on climate science and policy since 2007. Ask a climate denier, and they’ll tell you I’m a propagandist who probably takes money from Al Gore to make fun of them.

I am most of these things (the bit about propaganda and Gore isn’t true, but I do make fun of deniers), but in nearly 40 years of working with words I’ve also been a journalist, magazine editor, publisher and consultant, and my work has appeared in magazines, journals and newspapers in NZ, the US and the UK. I also take photographs to illustrate my articles and books.
.

Here’s Why:

I started writing science fiction because I wanted to find a way to explore some of the wider issues around climate change, to convey some of my thoughts about the seriousness of where we’re heading. Sometimes you need to tell a story, make people suspend their disbelief and go with the flow of an imaginative world, to allow people to think about big issues. Speculative fiction has a long history of doing that.

I’ve been reading science fiction since my childhood in Britain. I devoured HG Wells and Jules Verne alongside Biggles and Jennings & Derbyshire, loved Dan Dare’s adventures in The Eagle, watched the original Dr Who every Saturday afternoon and spent my teen years reading the works of Ballard, Bradbury, Aldiss and Moorcock. These days I read (nearly) everything by Iain M Banks, Peter F Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds, Neal Stephenson, and Kim Stanley Robinson alongside Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, William Boyd, Pynchon, Faulks and many more. After a career devoted to journalism and factual writing, it was a real pleasure to try my hand at crafting a work of fiction.

If you’re writing stories set in the next few hundred years you can’t ignore climate change. It becomes something any sci-fi earth has to get through before the heroes can start hurtling through interplanetary space. You have to envisage a way through the bottleneck imposed by climate change, population growth and resource restrictions. Kim Stanley Robinson does it very well in 2312 — he has some lovely descriptions of New York as a new Venice, and of Earth’s ecosystems preserved inside asteroid habitats. What I wanted to do was to take a closer look at the inside of the bottleneck, and at the same time poke around inside (or at) some of the ideologies that are trying to shape our future or forcing the bottleneck to be narrower than it need be.
.

Here’s What:

My latest book, The Aviator: The Burning World Book One — started out as a re-imagining of Gulliver’s Travels set in a climate-changed world. Gulliver is often thought of as a children’s story, but Swift’s original was satirical in intent, and I built on that aspect for my story. It’s not a slavish reconstruction, though. There’s more plot, for one thing… I needed to get my Gulliver around his world, and didn’t have the luxury enjoyed by Swift of a world map with lots of large white spaces saying ‘here be monsters’, and wooden ships regularly being wrecked on uncharted reefs. I couldn’t escape our Googled earth with its satellite maps and ability to let you look over everyone’s fences. The airship gave me a device to snoop around the planet. From there it was a short step to giving the airship artificial intelligence and making it a character in its own right, and that lead to other things, and so on.

When I first started thinking about The Aviator I was planning a single, self-contained book, a project to fit in before another non-fiction work – a toe dipped into fiction writing, not a new direction. Unfortunately, as soon as I started writing, things got messy. The ideas wouldn’t stop coming, loose ends dangled and lacunae opened up. It became obvious that I would either have to write a much longer book or commit to a follow-up. And so I find myself committed to at least one more book, perhaps two. I’ve created a world with its own denizens and destiny, and I want to find out how it all turns out…
.

Here’s Where:

You can find out more about The Burning World here on the website, or follow me on Twitter.

I blog on climate science and policy at Hot Topic, and fortnightly on The Daily Blog. You can read about my interests in truffles, wine and everything else at my Limestone Hills Blog.

—

The “Here’s SpecFicNZ–Christchurch” series will continue posting  for the next two Wednesdays.