Q&A with Stephen Webb

 

 

 

Stephen Webb is the author of the new book Visions of Tomorrow: Exploring Classic Sci-Fi Stories Through the Lens of Modern Science. His other books include New Light Through Old Windows.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Visions of Tomorrow, and how was the book’s title chosen?

 

A: The book is a follow-up to New Light Through Old Windows, which was published in 2019. The idea there was to reprint 12 old science fiction stories and look at them through the lens of modern science. I had so much fun reading those stories, and exploring the science in them, that I wanted to repeat the experience. But I also wanted to try something slightly different.

Take a story such as Chesterton’s “The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown,” for example, which I reprint in Visions of Tomorrow. Unlike the stories in that first volume, this isn’t a science fiction story in the traditional sense. But its central conceit involves a new type of job, dreamed up by Chesterton: that of “world-builder” for alternate reality games.

 

Well, you can use this as a springboard for thinking about how new technologies might generate future jobs (world-builders in virtual and extended realities, perhaps).  So the “Visions” in the title of the book refers to some of my thoughts about what tomorrow might look like, using these stories as a jumping off point. 

 

Q: How did you choose the stories to revisit?

 

A: The stories in New Light came from well-known authors such as H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Jack London. For this volume I wanted to showcase authors who hadn’t appeared in that earlier volume. I also wanted to explore different scientific themes. So with those constraints, the stories jumped out at me.

 

Q: Did you find new meanings in the stories upon rereading them?

 

A: You can read a story like “The Horla,” by Guy de Maupassant, in multiple ways. Indeed, the author forces the reader to decide between interpretations. Is the narrator being harassed by an invisible creature? Or is he descending into madness?  (There’s an added kick in this case because in real life de Maupassant lapsed into insanity, and died aged 43).

 

Another story, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemaar,” by Edgar Allan Poe, is another troubling tale, which I read in a new light as I linked it to genuine recent medical cases.

But de Maupassant and Poe were skilled writers. In honesty, some of the stories in the book permit only surface-level readings!

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: Science and technology continue to advance, so it can seem as if the challenges we face are different to those faced by earlier generations. Some - such as climate change - really do pose fresh dangers.

 

But I hope readers will appreciate that many of the problems we face today have appeared in different forms in the past - and earlier thinkers often offer us a more nuanced guide to those challenges than the “hot takes” we get today on social media.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I like to have three projects on the go at once - that way, if I hit a problem with one project I can swap to another.

So I have just completed a manuscript with a similar idea to New Light and Visions of Tomorrow. In Of Arsenic and Alibis I reprint 13 crime/mystery stories, each involving a different poison. And for each poison I present a true-life case in which that substance was used. I also discuss the effect that the substance has on the human body. In other words, how it kills.

I have almost finished the first draft of a book about the year 1956. This was a momentous year in science fiction, but also in the wider world (it was the year of Suez; the Hungarian revolution; Grace Kelly’s wedding; Laker’s Test; advances in rocketry; the Melbourne Olympics; Devon Loch; atmospheric nuclear weapons testing; and on and on … a lot happened). Month-by-month, I look at a key science fictional theme and relate it to broader events taking place that year.

And I’m gathering material for a third edition of my book Where is Everybody?, which discusses the Fermi paradox. I’m still at the stage of thinking about how best to bring the material together.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb