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- [00:01]
Joe Mungo Reed
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
Chris Holmes
I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Roman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous episodes@burnedbybooks.com and on Instagram and Twitter burnedbybooks. Let's start the show When Hannah, a talented fusion scientist in the 21st century, watches a humanoid form emerge from the sea on the coast of Scotland, everything will change in her life and in the lives of the humans on Earth who are beginning to experience the ecological catastrophes of climate change. That visitor, a Martian colonizer from the future nicknamed Red, carries with him the science that will revolutionize how humans use energy and planetary resources. The question, however, is whether those same humans are capable of using that science for the communal good. This is the fundamental uncertainty driving Jo Mungo Reed's extraordinary novel of time travel and familial inheritance. Terrestrial History Four members of the same family share the narrative in the novel, with Hannah, Andrew, Kenzie and Roban giving us an intimate picture of life on Earth and in the colonies on Mars in the years after environmental collapse. At home, each will grapple with the power and consequences of Hannah's encounter with a figure from the future carrying potentially the science to rescue the species. Humans have proven themselves capable of greed no matter how dire the circumstances, and the family members will each have to reckon with the decisions broached by that greed. A speculative world novel that is as interested in family dynamics as it is in time travel, terrestrial history imagines a future with much in common to our present moment. It makes adventure from testing the ideas that have challenged humans from our very first attempts to live together as a society. In prose that opens our eyes to all that could be lost or saved in our gone away world, Joe Mungo Reed shows us how one family's history can contain the atoms of a planetary history, one that we hope has more eras of storytelling remaining. Joe Mungo Reed is the author of the novels Hammer and We Begin Our Ascent, which is one of the best novels about sport that I have ever read. He teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge and lives in London. Welcome to Burned by Books Joe.
- [02:53]
Joe Mungo Reed
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:54]
Chris Holmes
Chris, thank you for being here. I really loved this novel and I think we could say that the promise of Martian colonies to provide a suitable home for humans in post terrestrial life has been the subject of fiction for a very Long time terrestrial history returns to the subject with a very different understanding of the choices and debates required to get to the point of abandoning our planet. Why did you want to take up the Martian problem? And did you know from the first how you would address the fundamental issues at stake in heading to the Red planet?
- [03:30]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, that's, that's a really interesting question. I think it, it highlights one of the entryways I had to this book. It came sort of to me via a number of different ways, but one of them was reaching Mark. Reading Mark o' Connell's book Notes on an Apocalypse and a section he had in that book about Mars colonization, which sort of took it very seriously in a way I hadn't seen done very often and actually talked about how many things people haven't worked out. And it included this thing that became an inspiration, which was the idea that subsequent generations born on Mars might suffer really severe problems from radiation, from being unable to sort of grow correctly and the gravity. And I kind of, I was, I was wowed by that section of that book. And it became almost terrain for a sort of thought experiment because it, it seemed like it would be the most extreme example of something we encounter in literature and life quite a lot, which is younger generations despairing of the parents and the choices those parents have made. And so one imaginative way into this book was thinking of this boy and we encounter him in the book called Roban, who finds himself on Mars. He's never known home and thinking about what it would be like for someone to be told by their parent, you know, we left behind the landscape you're more suited to and we came to this place because we had to.
- [05:01]
Chris Holmes
It is often almost kind of a lark in a lot of kind of science fictional takes of this, well, let's just get in the spaceship and go kind of thing. And when Hannah first encounters Red, who's come from the, the Martian colonies and is a first gen as opposed to a, a home worlder or a Homer, he is, he looks human, but he, he clearly shows the signs of a certain deformity or failure to grow. And that's, I, I, I, I think that's something that we just don't give the same amount of thinking that we give to, you know, the rocket ship that will, will take us to Mars.
- [05:41]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, I totally think so. And I mean, I think we're, we're sort of, we're kind of amazing as a species in our kind of our ability to invent things and our ability to think that those inventions we've Somehow how calculated for everything. So at the moment, for example, my, I'm very concerned at the moment. I have a 5 month old, so I'm very concerned with child rearing.
- [06:08]
Chris Holmes
And sleep, I imagine.
- [06:09]
Joe Mungo Reed
And sleep. Yeah, exactly. But one thing that you kind of is amazing when you look back at child rearing is the kind of ways in which we've again and again said, you know, let's not do it in the, in the natural way, in the way that human bodies are designed to do it. Let's, you know, the Victorians saying, you know, let's feed our children on flower paste and honey or something like that. And in some ways it feels like the, some of the Mars colonization kind of thinking is built on that kind of hubris of just thinking, well, we can steamroll or any, any problems. There's not, there's not any essential quality that is somehow ineffable and we haven't quite grasped about being on Earth. And I, I find that kind of wild.
- [06:54]
Chris Holmes
I, it is wild. I mean, look, just look at like Bezos and, and Elon Musk and their sort of Martian dreams and they're so, they're thoughtless.
- [07:06]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, yeah. And, and maybe, maybe a society needs some of those people, but I think it also needs the other people to, to do the thinking for them or to at least raise some alarm because. Yeah, yeah, I think there's probably some gaps in their plan.
- [07:22]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, no doubt. So when we begin the novel, the apocalypse has essentially already arrived. For the people of Scotland and for much of the world. A biblical level flood that will surely be one of many has begun to undo the fabric of society. This ecological disaster splits the society into those who will attempt to leave and those who will stay. This fracture runs along lines of privilege, with corporate interests taking along the wealthy and powerful on their Mars mission and populists like Andrew arguing that only through community and kindness can humans survive. Can you talk us through how eco disaster intertwines with inequality in the novel?
- [08:06]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, yeah. So I, in a way, in one thing I wanted to build in, in a way that I hope kind of work to articulate debates without hopefully being too cartoonish. Was the feeling that different characters in novel have different approaches. So some characters are quite technologically obsessed. So Andrew's daughter Kenzie, she's very obsessed with the idea of kind of making a technology which will allow people to have enough and that being the way
- [08:36]
Joe Mungo Reed (reading excerpt)
to solve climate catastrophe.
- [08:37]
Joe Mungo Reed
And Andrew in turn is obsessed with the idea that we can only solve these kind of problems if we solve them as, as a collective and that people need to be brought on board to solve these problems. And I, I, I suppose my own, my own feeling is that the, probably, probably the truth is somewhere between those two poles. And I enjoyed kind of creating those characters as examples of kind of very extreme versions of different ways of thinking about the key problems of the catastrophes facing us. But I think one thing that really maybe Andrew is attuned to and Kenzie misses is that the power dynamics are always going to shape how technology works, works. And we've seen that again and again and again in history. And it's. Well, to take a current example, you know, I'm not sure whether AI is good or bad. I think it might be neutral. But there are definitely ways in which AI can be used which will be bad and those bad ways are going to be shaped by the particular incentives of our societies and the particular leeway that that kind of bad actors have, have to move. And I suppose I was kind of imagining a future in this novel is funny one sort of creates a backstory that doesn't feature in the book. But the company that goes to Mars is an American company that has kind of become untethered because it just sort of floats through the global capital sphere and has moved to Scotland because there's no regulation. And so I suppose I'm imagining a world in which corporate actors are totally unconstrained. And I think in that environment it would become quite easy for those in charge to sort of say well we're going to take our, our toys and run away far, far easier than I think it would be to say we're going to share out what we have.
- [10:39]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, I fear that that is not a, that's not future looking as much as, you know, operational now. And you have, you know, with the question of the, the science that is, that is gifted to Hannah and then ends up in Ken's, Kenzie's hand and mind and mind. There is the question that the novel asks which is you can solve that, the formula, but there's always the question of who controls the formula. And you know, that power dynamic is one that Andrew sees so clearly and Kenzie does see it and understands the danger of like corporate oligarchy and yet she makes the choice to leave. And, and I think that's, I mean it makes her a very believable character. But I wonder what your thinking was in kind of imagining Kenzie as someone who can, who does have the vision and self awareness to understand that, you know, the corporate oligarchy is not good for human society, but still goes in the hopes that it is a way for her science to move forward. And talk a little bit about Kenzie.
- [11:49]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, I think you're totally right that she's not a character who's so naive that she thinks that she's necessarily making the right call. I think I sort of. I think I ended up drawing her as a character who. Well, one reason she goes is she's promised her wife that she's gonna leave. And I think that's kind of operative in. Kind of in shaping. Shaping her decision. But also I think. I think there's a choice to be made. I mean, Andrew is not a character without his faults. And one of his faults, I think, is to be quite happy being wrong. We meet. Sorry. Being right. Being right and disadvantaged. Sorry to being right and kind of losing, basically. And I think Kenzie maybe makes the choice to be wrong and to win somehow, which, you know, I'm not sure if it's really the right choice. I mean, I'll leave that for readers to. To understand, but. Or to work out themselves. But. Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes one's principles can. Can leave you in a pretty uncomfortable place.
- [13:00]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, it's true. I mean, one of the most uncomfortable for me as a reader because it. It feels like the kind of compromises that we may need to make in. In the future is that Andrew is asked about whether he would partner with a nativist party to be able to form a government and in the hopes that that government would be able to, you know, push forward his communitarian ideals. But that nativist government is a sort of blood and soil. They're literally called soil party and are abhorrent to Kenzie, whose. Whose life she sees as contingent on not having them in power. And I. I thought that was. That was clever. And. And you see. You see evidence of the need for this kind of very uncomfortable compromise in places like Poland that was able to, you know, kick out. We'll see how it goes in the future, but kick out a. A fascist government only through that kind of uncomfortable compromise. And this is a novel about uncomfortable compromises. And I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about that and. And say maybe the ways in which our current moment is inflected there.
- [14:11]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can probably talk too much about it. So my undergrad was in politics and philosophy, so I had to do far too many courses on political systems. But yeah, it's kind. It's interesting in countries which have more proportional representation, so unlike the us and unlike Britain, although who knows what's going to happen at the next election, they kind of have multiple parties and thrive on coalitions. And Scotland in its devolved, in its devolved Parliament is one such place in which conceivably you might have the balance of power tipped by quite a marginal party. But yeah, I was thinking of examples like Poland. I was thinking of New Zealand actually. I'm a New Zealand citizen as well. Yeah, the Labour Party was propped up by a party that had quite right wing views about immigration. And I, I don't, I don't welcome that change, but I think it might be something that we will see more and more often. I'm, I'm often surprised that right wing politics doesn't embrace a kind of reactionary, kind of ecological strain more often. So that was a kind of a bit of political geek kind of prognostication, I suppose.
- [15:28]
Chris Holmes
Hopefully no one's my favourite kind of prognostication.
- [15:33]
Joe Mungo Reed
I hope there are no, you know, reactionary politicians looking for tips or anything, but yeah, I'm, I doubt it. I mean, I think, I think we're all, we're all in a period where, I mean, speaking from Britain to the us, we're all in a period where we had no, could have had no notion 10 years ago of where our politics would go. So I kind of wanted to play in that terrain and think about the different ways in which, you know, people might be thrown into unlikely, unlikely coalitions or unlikely oppositions. And yeah, it's, we're entering, it feels like, you know, socially, presently now an age of chaos. And I wanted to try and write towards that.
- [16:18]
Chris Holmes
Mm, God, that's, that's something. So you're very, you mentioned political systems, but you're, you're interested in system theory just in general, I think, and, and how things like science enters into non scientific systems and how it gets distorted, used, benefited. And you know, one of the things that, you know, Kenzie's seems pretty convinced of is that it requires systems of political and corporate power in order for science to be extrapolated out broadly. And, you know, it's system theory that, you know, gets folks to mars, but it's also systems that corrupts those, you know, initial perhaps idyllic or at least communitarian impulses. So could you say a bit more about your interest in systems?
- [17:14]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, definitely. So to put another, to put another hat on, to put an English literate hat on, I guess My, my PhD was, I wrote a creative PhD, but I also wrote on Don Delillo and I wrote on some later novels and I'm a huge DeLillo fan and he's often described as a systems writer and I, I've, I've learned a lot from him and some of the later novels in particular. So 0k, for example, is a book about rich people going off into the desert in Kazakhstan and creating a facility for sort of eternal life. And I think One thing that DeLillo is super, super insightful about is a lot of his kind of sci fi, dystopian speculative stuff. It sort of follows the logic of capitalism in a way. And I feel like zero K is a book about rich people who want to live forever because in a sense, financialization makes everything forever. The interest pushes reward into the future, kind of keep accumulating and keep going forward. And I think there is a kind of, there is a logic shaping the way that we think about the future which is informed by the way in which money works. Because money is kind of the water that we all swim in. And there's a lot of the thinking about money is about deferment, about. I mean, there are sort of social theorists who would talk about a lot of it taking over kind of religious thinking, but it's about, about kind of pushing forward reward into the future, even owning the future, in a sense, receiving a debt from someone else is kind of owning their future. And so.
- [19:03]
Chris Holmes
And isn't that, isn't that the corporate motto of this American corporation we own in the future?
- [19:10]
Joe Mungo Reed
Exactly, exactly, yeah. So that, that thinking, I mean, it's funny, isn't it, because I try, I try not to write too much with my critical hat on, but it, that kind of. I'm sure that is kind of influencing the way that I was thinking about creating these kind of scenarios, mainly because I just so admire it in, in DeLillo's work. I think he's, he's pretty masterful doing.
- [19:36]
Chris Holmes
I'm gonna have to read his later novels because I'm, I'm really in the sort of White teeth era with him. Yeah, not white teeth, sorry, the white. White noise.
- [19:46]
Joe Mungo Reed
White noise, yeah, yeah, yeah. Although White Teeth. Also a very good novel.
- [19:50]
Chris Holmes
Very good, yeah. Very different.
- [19:51]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, yeah, no, I. So I wrote on 0k, which is, is good. I wrote on Cosmopolis, which is, is funny because it's a, it's a novel about evil financiers in, you know, Naughty's New York and feels almost quaint because that evil evilness seems somehow behind us as a society now.
- [20:14]
Chris Holmes
And I, I was banal in comparison.
- [20:17]
Joe Mungo Reed
Exactly, exactly. Very banal. And I did my bit for writing about Underworld, as so many people have in the past. But yeah, no, I, I, I, I'm always a D fan. Although I think I do think White Noises is his best work by by a long way.
- [20:33]
Chris Holmes
So I'd love for you to read a little section from one of Roban's sections on the Martian colony, just to give us a sense of the speculative writing that you do about life on the red planet.
- [20:48]
Joe Mungo Reed (reading excerpt)
Sure. I will do so. The days of training are so hard. As I will tell Miss, they are days of three or four or even four pain pills. But they are revelatory days. The 12 of us new recruits, all First Gens, share a dormitory block. We wake early and take our supplements. We do our exercises. Then we suit up and run for hours through the uneven landscape. Then we are back to eat.
- [21:15]
Joe Mungo Reed
We fly in a craft.
- [21:16]
Joe Mungo Reed (reading excerpt)
After that, paired up, we rise away from the surface and practice maneuvers. We eat again. Finally, we rehearse taking samples from the rocks around the base. For the first month of training, my hands were in agony from grasping the controls of the suit and gripping the flight stick. My palms bled, but then they scabbed, and beneath those scabs formed calluses. At some point in the bewildering run of days, I found that I could walk more easily from my anterior exo to my bed. I looked at myself in the mirror and my posture was different. I held myself up. Now my first leave is imminent and I'm unsure whether to relish or dread its approach. These relentless days have given me so much. I want to stay here, tempering like metal. Yet I understand that this intensity cannot go on forever. The weeks before leave is due to begin. The recruits of the previous intake check into the dormitory block down the corridor. They're an M year older than us, these cadets, just back from their own leave, granted after their missions prospecting the planet in the asteroid belt. They were the first intake of first gens to be trained, the oldest of us in the colony. They are doing the job already, the real work, and we newbies are shy when we pass them in the transit ways. We encounter their group on exterior exo maneuvers. When we do so, there is always one of them out ahead.
- [22:33]
Joe Mungo Reed
Though I know that I should be
- [22:34]
Joe Mungo Reed (reading excerpt)
concentrating on my own progress, I always find my gaze drawn towards this figure moving in their suit like a virtuoso, a balance of stillness and speed. The figure leaps and lunges and yet carries their own core so steadily. Their foot speed is amazing. I learned from rumors that the figure is Vishay Sims, the top recruit from that intake. I see him in the canteen sometimes with the older group. He's smaller than the others. He eats with his head down. His cohort have a bravado that my intake, new to all this, have not yet gained. They joke loudly, but Vishay doesn't join in with the antics of his comrades. He holds himself back, seems to be granted license to do so by those around him. When our leave begins, the 12 of us who have trained together file up the gangway of a transport bound for the colony. We are in our interior suits, and we strap ourselves into the bench seating that runs down the length of the hold. The air smells of the last cargo, the algae stock used in the base kitchens. The craft shakes as it takes off, rising up through the airlock and out into the swirling dust. When the thrust is really engaged, the resonance changes and the shaking dies away. We are up above the local storms, just the thin atmosphere and then the darkness of space over us. Others around me watch entertainment on their suit displays, yet I just sit in the dim hold space. I feel that I need to reflect on how I've changed, to prepare to feel new in an old place. Thoughts of recounting my training to Miz have kept me going, yet I am unsure of how much to bring back to her. Miz was so good in her suit when we were young. At school, as I kept gaining confidence in suit maneuvers, I waited to be passed by Ms.
- [24:07]
Joe Mungo Reed
I expected her to recover and return
- [24:10]
Joe Mungo Reed (reading excerpt)
impatient as she had once been. It took too long for me to realize that we wouldn't graduate together, and when this realization did come, I felt embarrassed by it, unable to vocalise my disappointment at a fact she had come to terms with long ago. I won the exterior exo race in the final year, still feeling, as I paced back to the colony in first place, that Miz should have been ahead of me. I got top grades in most of my classes too, and at graduation I received the Falk medal from Virginia Falk, Axl F's daughter. I tried to give the medal to Ms. I went straight from graduation to see her in her room. I dropped the thing into her bed, where it made a crater in the crisp white duvet. We looked at it together and she said that she was proud of me. She would have loved to meet Virginia Falk because she idolizes Axl F for all the work that the man did to bring us to this place. Yet she wouldn't accept it as a gift. It's yours, Rayban, she said you earned it. The most she would consent to was to look after the medal while I was away and still coming back. I cannot cure myself of the thought that she should be here with me, first among us recruits. I still have in mind an alternate timeline where she is healthy and we are doing these things together. I sit in the rattling transport craft and wonder what I should say to her. She'll be glad of my success, but I don't want to give her too much cause to consider what she is missing. I think of a run that I and my fellow recruits did three weeks before where we came out of a thick sandstorm to encounter the sun rising over a craggy ridgeline. The color of the sky was unlike anything I've ever seen. It all felt like another world, truly. And I resolved that if I find the right moment to do so, I will tell her about this.
- [25:48]
Chris Holmes
Thank you so much. That was lovely to hear and made me think so much about the. One of the costs being of being on Mars that you know that Roban and others will lose friends to the. To the cost to, to human bodies in an environment where humans are not necessarily meant to live. But this brings me to a question of, of genre and I, I think that we live in a, in a particular moment that's been really good for literary fiction's to what we might have called genre fiction in the past. Novels like Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go borrowed tropes and forms from science fiction without ever sacrificing character to exposition. What's your relationship to science fiction or speculative world fiction and how does it operate in what is essentially a domestic novel?
- [26:45]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, I think I feel that I was maybe lucky to come of Rob writerly age when this was, this was sort of less of an issue. I, I was in the course of finishing this novel, I started to read into the, the term speculative fiction and sort of got back in touch with, with the debate that Margaret Atwood was having at some point about, you know, speculative fiction v Sci fi. And it all felt so. It felt very, very old fashioned. I mean it wasn't actually that long
- [27:15]
Chris Holmes
ago, but the debate is done now.
- [27:18]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, I mean it seems wild that it should be in any way a question that you are writing about things that don't 100% exist in reality. And I think, I mean ironically we have Atwood and Atwood to thank for that in some part along with Ishiguro and so many writers in the 90s who kind of just shrugged off that idea that it was kitchen sink dramas were the real thing and you know, anything that contained, you know, stepping beyond our current day to day realities was somehow trivial or you know, excessively, you know, obsessed with technology or something.
- [27:56]
Chris Holmes
So I mean a whiff of dragon smoke and you're in, you know, a teenage boy's bedroom and God forbid.
- [28:04]
Joe Mungo Reed
Exactly, exactly. I mean the other thing, the other thing that I felt was, was has I've really enjoyed about the kind of speculative kind of sci fi area is that it's been, it feels really, really open to all every kind of writer at the moment. I, I mean I'm a huge Emily St. John Mandel fan. I just love.
- [28:27]
Chris Holmes
Oh absolutely.
- [28:28]
Joe Mungo Reed
The sort of elegiac sense of, sense of kind of sci fi working to kind of kindle a nostalgia for the world as we're experiencing it presently. But then equally, you know, one can be a writer like Ted Chang who just writes these just exquisite sort of puzzle boxes of stories that really much more play into the kind of, play into the logic problems that technology and sort of sci fi writing can throw up. And I think we're living in such a, a bit of a glory era for, for different kinds. I mean I know there was the kind of post war period that gave us writers like Vonnegut who had, who started out kind of in, in. In those kind of sci fi magazines. But I think now maybe it is one of the areas where the long tail of the Internet that we were promised has kind of worked to give exposure to different types of writing and yeah, get. Find ways for all these different areas of writing about, about sci fi to kind of flourish at the same time.
- [29:36]
Chris Holmes
And now that you mention Emily St. John Mandel, I can't help but feel her coursing through this novel and I wonder if she's a big influence for you.
- [29:46]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, yeah, hugely. So yeah. I've listened to an interview where she talks about the kind of key to station 11 being for her almost being. I think she sort of described it as almost a psychological novel about almost a yearning amongst people to return to a pre technocratic technological past in a way because she's sort of writing a medieval novel in some ways.
- [30:11]
Chris Holmes
She is, yeah. A novel of players.
- [30:14]
Joe Mungo Reed
Exactly, exactly, yeah. And yeah, I think there's something wondrous in that. I mean I go back to one section I go back to so often with students who are writing in this area because I supervise quite a few students who like working in this mode and I, I just love the period in Station 11 where she just simply lists off all the things that no longer happen, you know, no, no more diving into swimming pools at night. It's just. Yeah, that, that the kind of. We don't really see. We don't really see our world properly until we imagine. Imagine losing it, I think. So good. So good, so good.
- [30:54]
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- [31:01]
Joe Mungo Reed
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- [31:03]
Chris Holmes
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- [31:22]
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- [31:51]
Joe Mungo Reed
Your.
- [31:51]
Chris Holmes
Your characters exist in multiple timelines. The first is familial generations that move in what we could say is one direction. But the second operates in a time loop activated by time travel. And I wonder if you'd talk about how you manage the craft of time work in the novel.
- [32:14]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, so the. I must say that adding a time travel element was definitely, definitely something I
- [32:22]
Joe Mungo Reed (reading excerpt)
felt a bit trepidatious about.
- [32:25]
Joe Mungo Reed
I've touched on having kind of a philosophy background. I did do a fantastic course in the philosophy of time travel and.
- [32:32]
Chris Holmes
Oh, wow. Yeah, I'd love to take that class worth.
- [32:35]
Joe Mungo Reed
Worth all of the tuition. Just that one, really. But actually one thing I learned from that is that, you know a grandfather paradox. That is a paradox in which, you know, one is side by one's own grandfather or in which one received a phone call from a future version of yourself that tells you how to make a time machine that you then use to get to the future to tell yourself how to make a time machine is possible, apparently philosophically. So I wrote that down and 20 years later kind of pushed it into a book. But I suppose the kind of one of the macro other things is just the novel in itself is a time travel machine always. Whether that be like sort of literally me sitting down and reading something that Jane Austen wrote, you know, a couple of hundred years ago, or whether it be that kind of that ability to Jump through time. I mean, I, I, I tell my students that every novel is a time travel story because there's no such thing as a novel that occurs at the pace of, you know, the reading experience. It's simply, it's simply impossible. So you kind of always making these, these judgments about where to skip, where to put different eras in, in conversation with each other. So in some ways I, I think the, the generational skipping, but then the recursion that occurs through the, the time loop felt quite, quite natural to me because it felt a little bit like the, the novels I'm so attracted to because you kind of, you go forward and you go backwards at the same time. And I'm often trying to reconcile, I'm often trying to reconcile, you know, this sense we need our rising action, we need our characters to change, we need things to progress with perhaps a view of reality that feels that that's not always the case. We don't always learn our lessons, we don't always progress. And I suppose I'm always actually, in some ways trying to write the, write a circular novel. I'm always writing a book that comes back to its beginning, hence this love for DeLillo's underworld, which kind of does, does that to a degree. And here the time loop was a way in which the novel, it does become a kind of a serpent eating its own tail.
- [34:58]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly the metaphor I had in my head for sure.
- [35:04]
Joe Mungo Reed
Okay, nice. And I hope, I suppose so the other rule of recursion in fiction is as soon as something happens for the second time, you kind of say what changed? And I suppose I want, I want something to have changed for the reader. I want the reader to come back into the, the start of the book. I mean, the book begins in, I set it as beginning in 2025. So I kind of want them to come back into 2025, which is the timeline it ends in, and think what has changed? And I suppose in a, in a, in a sort of meta way, in a, maybe in a, in an excessively earnest way, I want one of those things to have changed to be the reader's relationship with where they are and to think, maybe, wow, we're in an amazing place now in 2025.
- [35:50]
Chris Holmes
It's so funny that you put it that way. But first I want to say that I think Ali Smith tried to outwit your concept of the novel, as always, of a time that's not in our exact present moment by that series of novels that she wrote. It doesn't quite do it. But she, I think she really had that in mind when she, when she wrote those Covid era novels like all in 30 seconds or however she, she quickly wrote it.
- [36:19]
Joe Mungo Reed
Exactly. Unbelievable. We actually had her at Cambridge. We hosted her just two months ago talking about those exact novels and talking about.
- [36:26]
Chris Holmes
Oh wow, I'm fascinated. What did, what did she say?
- [36:29]
Joe Mungo Reed
Well, she, for her it was very much she. She spoke of it as a way of. The novel has always been something that's kind of tested itself and changed and evolved. And I think she felt it was sort of taking on the information environment we lived in where the news comes out every day and is. Is completely stale by the time it's an hour old. And I think she felt she should have a crack at writing a novel that could kind of live on those terms. And I think did. Did a very good job in many respects.
- [37:01]
Chris Holmes
Yeah. Audacious and yet somehow managed to, you know, several of them I thought pulled it off. I just to show you how much I. Either I was reading your mind or you were reading mine, but I've. I have as one of my final questions here. Do you see literature in some way standing in for time travel? And does the novel allow us to learn from mistakes that we should have never made in the first place? But the beginning of that, which you've already sort of answered and in the affirmative. But the beginning of that question is one that starts, you know, what if every choice is a bad one? And I think one of the things that I really like about terrestrial history is I guess that neither Andrew or Kenzie had had it right this time around. And Andrew's seeming end is I found terrifying. And, and the. We see what I think of as, as kind of maybe nativist militia or just pure sort of scavengers pulling up to the. To the shore about to kind of invade his, his area that he's, he's living out his last days in. But in any case the, what the novel allows for is them to have made, you know, faulty choices in some small or large way. But then to wrap it around again and I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about what if all the choices are bad ones.
- [38:28]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, I think it's really interesting because I think one thing, one response I've had from publishing this novel and giving it to friends is like, I think people sort of come and look at me with a like slightly side eyed glance of like, wow, it's sort of dark in your head. Are you okay? And, and I suppose the, the thing My answer to that is that the novel for me is an, is an imaginative form. Is. Is there. It's not what I think is going to happen, but it's a play at what might happen in certain circumstances. And I mean I've, I've just mentioned at the start of the call that I, yeah, I've gotten five month year old now. So I mean that's certainly a. Having a baby is certainly a choice where you look forward and think. So this novel is set from 2025 into the 2100. So, you know, 75 years from now. So touchwood. This could well be a timeline my, my son is, is living into. So I do actually on a personal level kind of have hope that maybe we're not going to make the mistakes that the characters within the book make, but the, the novel lives. I mean, I also touched upon, I guess this, this background is doing philosophy and philosophers really can't get out of bed without making a thought experiment, making an analogy, talking about, you know, yeah, someone's on one train and someone's in another and you've, you know, the school bus of nuns is heading in one direction, school bus of serial killers in another. Who do you, who do you crash into?
- [40:14]
Chris Holmes
I don't know. I'm wary of nuns.
- [40:16]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, exactly. They might be serial killers just in disguise, who knows. But yeah, I think in some ways this book is a version of that. It's a version of saying these things might happen and that's the risk we run living. But I don't necessarily believe that they're going to happen. I'm sort of quite a hopeful person, personally. Yeah. Live your. To. To sort of. Yeah, live your life, hopefully personally and extremely unhopefully. On the page, perhaps. I think.
- [40:56]
Chris Holmes
I love that. I love that mantra. Before I let you go, Joe, I'd love to know a little bit about what you've been reading and loving recently.
- [41:05]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, that's. It's a great question. So. Well, one, I just, I mean, this is so not. It's so not the Undercover choice. Cause it literally just won the Booker Prize. But I absolutely love David Soleil's Flesh.
- [41:21]
Chris Holmes
Me too. Me too.
- [41:23]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, I've been a fan of. I've loved his work since spring, but I just feel like this book is just masterfully told. If you're a geek about how to tell a story. I just think I really, really enjoyed it and yeah, I just can't recommend it enough. I mean, hopefully lots of people.
- [41:42]
Chris Holmes
Let's hope that he's more hopeful than, than he is on the page.
- [41:46]
Joe Mungo Reed
Exactly, exactly. A fellow writer. He's a misanthrope when on a line by line basis.
- [41:52]
Chris Holmes
Definitely everyone should read it though. And the, and the collection of short stories that preceded it should be read as well.
- [42:00]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, totally agreed. Yeah. The other one, I've actually quite belatedly got into graphic novels. So I've just finished reading Tokyo these Days by Taiyo Matsumoto and I really recommend that. It's just a, that was a, that's a lovely, not a downer as a book, but a lovely book about a publisher of graphic novels. So I really recommend that.
- [42:24]
Chris Holmes
And finally, the Japanese, the, the trend for novels and graphic novels, about books and bookstores and publishing and writing coming out of Japan right now is so rich.
- [42:38]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, totally agreed. And when I was a snotty sort of 20 year old just getting into writing, I used to think, God, why are there so many books about writers? And I guess I'm too deep in the game now because I completely lap them up. And this kind of metafictional reflection on telling stories and publishing stories was. It's just a lovely, a lovely book to, to dig into and it's a trilogy. So I've just read the first and I'll, I'll get onto the next two pronto. And finally I, I wanted to recommend it. This has just come out, so White river crossing by Ian McGuire. So he's, he's a writer I work with in the University of Manchester and he's, he's a fantastic writer of historical fiction. He wrote the Northwater which was.
- [43:25]
Chris Holmes
Oh sure. Oh, that's an incredible book. Oh my gosh. Why is that not a film?
- [43:32]
Joe Mungo Reed
Well, it was, it was turned into a six part series with Colin Farrell being utterly repellent if, if that floats anyone's boat. I really, really recommend it.
- [43:43]
Chris Holmes
Oh, good. I, I kept thinking people are idiots. We're not adapting it.
- [43:49]
Joe Mungo Reed
Yeah, no, it's, it's a fantastic book and we've had some, some conversations, this talk about the predations of capitalism and I think Maguire completely nails it in that book. He's got this analogy about, you know, money just flows downhill and it does what it wants to do and you know, spoken by the man sending a whaling expedition out to the middle of the Arctic with a plan of scuttling it with everyone on board.
- [44:14]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, well, these, these three are amazing recommendations. I'm, I'm absolutely going to get the ones I haven't read yet. Tokyo these Days and White River Crossing and I really want to recommend Terrestrial History to my listeners, which is a speculative novel that involves time travel and ecological collapse. But it's also a wonderful novel that I would say is hopeful, and hopeful perhaps, about literature's ability to return us to the to the crucial questions that we must ask about living together if we are to have a different kind of future. But I was really happy to get to talk to you, Joe, and thank you for coming on.
- [44:55]
Joe Mungo Reed
No, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.
- [44:58]
Chris Holmes
Thank you. Well, that's all from me for now. My thanks to Joe Mungo Reid for coming on to talk about his latest novel, Terrestrial History. You can find links to purchase Terrestrial History and all of Joe's recommended books at the website Burned by books dot com. There you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast, T shirt, and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on iTunes, Spotify, or now YouTube, or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been burned by books.
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Joe Mungo Reed
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Joe Mungo Reed
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