Bursting with humour, action and reality-bending experiences, Bridge is Lauren Beukes at her finest. She chats here about the rise of AI, parallel universes and a few of her favourite works in speculative fiction.
Where do you get your ideas?
I’m a magpie, I pick up shiny things from all over and then figure out how they fit together. There’s a subconscious magic to writing, which is partly why I think large language models AKA misnamed ‘AI’ can’t meaningfully compete with the human imagination in making original and humane art, which churns up your own experiences and feelings and everything it is to be a person in the world with external influences, the things you’ve seen or read or lived. I do think AI will generate a ton of mediocre derivative content which risks drowning out writers and artists, and threatening our ability to make a living. I realise this wasn’t the question, but I’m thinking about it a lot right now. And asking questions is a huge factor in where my ideas come from, trying to make sense of the world.
You have created different worlds from the one we know in your books. Would you like to live in any of them?
All my books are so radically different to each other, it’s no surprise there! I love Zoo City and would love a magical animal companion – without the undertow, though, or having to have committed a terrible crime or live with terrible guilt. So, not my book at all then. Bridge is great, because she has access to all these other worlds and otherselves. I’d love to explore alternate lives I might have lived, leaning hard into investigative journalism for example, or pursuing my animation career or making documentaries or being a paramedic or a human rights lawyer or a detective, although I’d struggle with dealing with people’s suffering and not being able to help everyone.
What colour is your hair at the moment?
Blonde and chocolate. I miss my blue, but, as with many things in London, it took me a while to find a UK-based expert able to operate on the same level as the brilliant people I went to in Cape Town. It’s more low-key, but still very me.
“I do think I somehow slipped into the wrong timeline and would like to go back to my reality, please.”
The launch of your previous book, Afterland, coincided with Covid. Is there something you’d like to tell – or warn – us about this time round?
Ha! I do think I somehow slipped into the wrong timeline and would like to go back to my reality, please, where fascism and anti-vaxxers are not on the rise and we’ve meaningfully tackled global boiling – or where the phrase ‘global boiling’ is not a thing. If someone could please help me find my way back, I’d be very grateful.
Who, in your opinion, is a new major talent in the genre of speculative fiction? (If we can’t wait for your next book.)
Shout out to the South Africans: my dear friends Sam Beckbessinger and Dale Halvorsen’s Girls of Little Hope is a supernatural riot grrl thriller that’s sharp as a DIY piercing, and Alastair Mackay’s climate change novel, It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way, is superb. I was blown away by Tanya Junghans talking about her novel, Dreamer: The Order of Makeba at a Bridge Books event we were both at recently. Mohale Mashigo is already ascendant and needs to finish her novel already (in between writing comic scripts for Marvel and video games). Sam Wilson’s new novel, The First Murder on Mars is also terrific and feels very relevant right now with a certain Mars-wannabe billionaire jerk setting fire to Twitter. I hear great things about Tshidiso Moletsane’s Junx but haven’t had a chance to read it yet. Further afield, Nigerian writer Wole Talabi’s supernatural African art heist novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon is fast and fierce and fun and Zimbabwean writer TL Huchu’s fantasy novels set in Edinburgh are also doing brilliantly.
Any message you’d like to send?
Buy books you love, share the thrill of reading. In other words, plunge into whole other universes, just like Bridge. Don’t use AI tools to replace real artists you would have hired to do the work.
Lauren’s new novel Bridge is out now.
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