Interview with Haldane B. Doyle, author of Her Unbound Hallux (Our Vitreous Womb, Book 1)

 

Today it gives the Speculative Fiction great pleasure to interview Haldane B. Doyle, author of Her Unbound Hallux (Our Vitreous Womb, Book 1).

Your new novella, Her Unbound Hallux, is an entrant for this year’s SPSFC. For those who don’t know, what is the SPSFC and how did it start?

The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition was started a few years ago by Hugh Howey (who hit the big time with his self-published novel Wool) and his collaborators to showcase the amazing range of writing coming out today. It is the little sister to the much older SPFBO competition for fantasy.

Her Unbound Hallux is a hard science fiction novella and the first in a tetralogy published under the series title Our Vitreous Womb. What can you tell us about the series title and the novel’s title, and what is a Hallux?

Aha- you fell into my trap! I named the first novella that so people would wonder what a hallux is (and once they find out go on to annoy their friends with that trivia). A hallux is the proper name for the big toe, which is one of the most unusual features of the human body compared to any other species. Our weird locomotion opened the door to other features like our chonky brains and our taste for vodka (ethanol is utter poison to other mammals). “Our Vitreous Womb” is a metaphor for the continent of Australia where most of the story takes place. In the distant future Australia contains an inland sea, that is preparing to give birth to a marine-adapted branch of humanity set to colonise the world’s oceans.

The series imagines a far future where modern humans are disappearing and where biotechnology - if that’s the right word - has reshaped the world. What made you pursue this idea and why are you impatient with post-apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi?

I’m also not sure what to call the biotechnology in the story. It lacks the mechanical/industrial technology we automatically think of today. The closest story I can find is Xenogenesis, but that relies on alien biology that is pretty much space-tentacle-magic. I have a background in research science and wanted to see if I could construct a biological civilisation that is completely plausible. If I missed other hard sci-fi based purely on biology I would love to know about them. I’m @DoyleHaldane on twitter.

Regarding dystopian and post-apocalyptic sci-fi- I love it, but the world can only burn for so long before the fuel runs out. I’m much more interested in what sprouts from the ashes.

Tell us about yourself. You started out as a research biochemist, and now you own and run an experimental farm in Australia. What can you tell us about your work and how much does the biology inform your imaginary future?

I take a lot of inspiration from self-taught scientists like Luther Burbank. Mostly I gather wild plants or orphan crops and do speculative breeding to develop locally adapted food systems. My most ambitious project involves hybridising a local nut tree from the Jurassic with its long-lost cousin from Brazil.  Anyone with a little patience can create completely new organisms in their lifetime with very minimal resources.

The accidental hybridisation of three wild grasses created wheat and that then formed the foundations of Babylon and Rome. Crops catalyse the growth of different societies around them. I firmly believe we are at the very beginning of a symbiotic relationship with the entire biosphere of the planet. I see my fiction as a way of shining a light on that possibility.

As a scientist, do you think you take a different approach to writing science fiction?

Becoming a scientist made it harder to turn my brain off and enjoy sci-fi. I never forgave The Matrix for explaining that humans were “batteries”, ignoring thermodynamics. Xenomorphs violated the conservation of matter by growing three sizes before Christmas and that made me spit acid. Biology is difficult to fictionalise since most things happen slowly.

I took a very ideas-first approach to my own writing, which made my first attempts utterly indigestible. Luckily, I’m almost devoid of self-consciousness, so shared my half-baked work with dozens of critique partners to refine my approach. I rewrote the story twice (80k then 50k words) before I stumbled on the idea of splitting it into four novella-length works from different points of view (thanks to a Covid fever dream- never waste your altered states). Of those novellas, I rewrote two from scratch. I’m not afraid of “wasted words”. I figure if you want to be a writer then you better enjoy putting words on the page.

The world of Our Vitreous Womb sounds very other. Humans are a small remnant and replaced by the Ostrals, who have a very different attitude to mortality. What can you tell us about the Ostrals?

I can’t give too much away about their origins, but the Ostrals represent the next step in a long trend in human evolution. Larger brains and lower reactive aggression have steadily allowed hominins to form larger and more complex social groups, mirroring a similar process that led to beehives and termite nests. The Ostrals are a kind of human superorganism, split into small groups of related individuals, selected for specialised roles (mirroring how cells in your body form organs). All this is possible since Ostrals have almost no instinctive fear of death. Death being a bad thing is almost universally assumed in our storytelling, and I wanted to subvert that. I expect to many readers the idea seems hard to relate to. I would argue that a Neanderthal would find millions of people living in cities equally incomprehensible.

The central character of the series is a man, a sapiens, called Oji Anabasi, who you describe as “podgy, hairy, sex-obsessed and terrified of death.” You chose not to use Oji as narrator - why was that?

The first two attempts to write the story had poor Oji as the protagonist. Even though he tries his best, he is simply too unlikeable and ignorant to carry the story. The most interesting part of the world is the Ostrals, so I had much more fun exploring their journeys in books 2, 3 and 4.

In Her Unbound Hallux, the narrator is Oji’s mother, Miobeth Anabasi. What can you tell us about her and what sort of being is she?

Miobeth is an Alate, a privileged class of people kept in luxurious seclusion. Their lives culminate in meeting their Emperor- a God incarnate who transforms them into angels to fight the evil Slave Empire. Or that is what they tell themselves while they pass their days painting and sewing.

After Her Unbound Hallux, there are three further sequels or parts to the series. What is it about the shorter format that appeals to you?

I enjoy reading novels, but usually after 30k words I have either figured out the point of the story or lost interest in finding out. A novella-length story that packs in a novel’s worth of ideas, plot and characterisation is my holy grail in writing. I’ve read a few like Elder Race, so I know it can be done. Also, the dominance of novel-length stories is a hangover from the logistics of the printing press. In this age of eBooks and self-publishing, it makes sense to break out of that mould. The Murderbot Diaries is a great example of what is possible.

The three sequels are Her Lethal Secretions, Her Pellucid Pupil and His Indelible Fingerprint. What can you tell us about these instalments and the characters who narrate them: Lanella, Suvita and Remus?

Lanella is a Halian type of Ostral, selected to be irresistible to the sapiens still living in distant South America. Suvita is from a subterranean albino lineage selected to be a living library. Remus is a Lampid type of Ostral, ridiculously tall and elaborately striped. They often become envoys that cross continents on foot. Each character fails to fit social expectations and ends up forging their own path. Suvita is asexual, and Remus is attracted to other males, though the role of sex and sexuality in Ostral society is quite different from today.

When creating the world of Our Vitreous Womb, how much did you work on the details of the world before beginning to write?

World building was done first in great detail. I took my time asking lots of questions about how everything worked in terms of economics and politics, and how it could have arisen over historic timescales from today. I’m a big-time planner when it comes to plots. It is the only way to achieve the density and cohesion I like. For major characters, I need to get inside their heads before I draft, but the minor characters I leave undefined so they can surprise me when they turn up. The saucy old nun in Book 1 (Sister Janay) is a great example of this. She just burst out when that door opened, fully formed.

The words Ostral and Ostrala hint at Australia. Why did you choose that place in particular and how does the landscape lend to visions of the future?

Glad you picked that up. The story is set in New Zealand and Australia. The splendid isolation we have here means biology has more opportunities to do wild experiments. I set it here as an example of writing what I know (though 30 000 years in the future required a little imagination). Playing with sea-level rise maps got me thinking about the potential of an Australian inland sea. In many ways, the Mediterranean Sea was the womb of Roman civilisation. In my novel, a future Australian inland sea is set up to serve a similar function for the next big transformation.

You mention in a previous interview that you were influenced by the ideas of Professor Joseph Tainter, who envisages the end of our industrial society. What do you think of his idea?

Civilisations come and go. Ours probably will as well. Humans long for immortality (both as individuals and as cultures) but this instinct is probably misplaced. Every new generation leads to innovations and wild experiments and that makes history worth living through, but the price of that is letting go of the old. I couldn’t think of anything more boring than achieving a final utopia.

Please tell us about the meaning of the word apoptosis and its significance in your world.

You really did your research! Apoptosis is programmed cell death. When a cell in your body gets infected or damaged, it will usually initiate its own destruction for the benefit of the whole. This process is even used to grow complex structures, with groups of cells dying to leave others behind. Human societies function like this as well. Just as a bee will sacrifice itself to defend the hive, humans will often endure incredible danger and suffering for those they love. The Ostrals just take this one step further.

What are you working on now and what can you tell us about your short fiction?

As to what I am working on now- if you had asked me a few weeks ago I was just about to start drafting a 1980s dark nostalgia magic realism novel (with a heavy pinch of environmental chemistry and nutritional science). I have put it aside for now (not because I was having nightmares about what category to click for it on Amazon) but rather to explore the possibility of creating a visual novel (a type of story-focused video game). Self-publishing Our Vitreous Womb gave me a chance to brush up my limited art skills (I made all the covers myself, partly because I had no idea what a biological sci-fi should look like to begin, partly because I am dirt poor). I also branched into audio, narration, podcasts, basic animation, etc, etc. Growing up I loved the “Choose your own adventure” books, and I suspect a more literary approach to writing non-linear fiction, combined with the many new tools for art and sound, could be opening up a whole new medium to people like me who are too obsessive to work well with others. I also hate to admit that I admire the careers of independent game producers like Toby Fox (who made Undertale with only a single collaborator) more than any living novelist. I will probably write more novels/novellas in the future, but I figured while I am at the start of my creative career it makes sense to give a few different media a serious effort.

Regarding short stories- I was lucky to win a place in the cli-fi parody anthology “The Flesh of Your Future Sticks Between My Teeth”. My story “The Recalcitrant Savior” features a geriatric gay power couple as president and vice president of the USA, dealing with a disgusting bioweapon attack. People can get a free copy of it by signing up to my email list at www.haldanebdoyle.com.

You can also find my short stories narrated on YouTube by my dear friend at “Stories from the Sky SFF”. My favourite is “The Fermi Orthodox”, which combines cheesy space opera antics with a plausible novel theory combining the rare Earth hypothesis with the Fermi paradox. I also write the occasional short story on my experimental farming blog (zeroinputagriculture.substack.com). My favourite would be “A Burr in the Woods” which explores the power of Luther Burbank style crop breeding in a very near future suburban dystopia (though aren’t all suburbs dystopian? Just ask a Neanderthal for confirmation).

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About Haldane B. Doyle:

Haldane B. Doyle is the fictional alter-id of Dr. Shane Simonsen.

Haldane grew up in subtropical Australia as a biology obsessed nerdling, consorting with blue tongue lizards, breeding mantis shrimps and molesting octopi when he wasn’t cultivating rare succulents and carnivorous plants.

He trained as a research biochemist, then made just enough money to retire before middle age to his experimental farm. There he works hard to develop novel and orphan crops that rely on zero inputs, including domesticating a staple tree crop from the Jurassic. He blogs regularly on this work at Zero Input Agriculture on Substack (or see older Zero Input Agriculture posts here) and will write a book about it someday.

Apart from farming he finds time to imagine the distant post-industrial future, creating fictional worlds that could quite possibly come to exist (though hopefully with less heart-slicing drama). His style of hard science fiction relies on extensive research into real research.

Sci-fi fans are tired of apocalypses. Star-trek futures have slipped out of reach. That just means it’s time to imagine a future that’s both realistic and inspiring instead.

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