Brasyl Posits Alternate Histories
Multiple-award-winning SF author Ian McDonald, whose novel Brasyl is a finalist for this year's British Science Fiction Association Award, told SCI FI Wire that he wanted to do another book set in a non-Western country as a filter for Western SF notions. His previous novel, River of Gods, was set in India.
"I didn't want anything as obvious as China or Indonesia--they're overserved anyway," McDonald said in an interview. "I was looking for somewhere off the U.S./U.K. radar, and an inner voice one morning in the shower whispered the word 'Brazil,' which is a very beautiful word, laden with exoticism and possibility. I knew next to nothing about Brazil, which is itself a stimulating challenge."
In the novel, McDonald tells three stories set in three histories of Brazil. "The reality-shifting, many-worlds approach seemed to rather suit a country that has always prided itself as 'the nation of the future,'" McDonald said. "It's just that that future seems to be constantly changing, constantly elusive."
McDonald added that it's not clear that the three histories deal with the same nation. "Are they necessarily all the same Brazil?" he said. "For even though one is set in 2032, another in 2006 (or so it seems) and one in 1732, they are all tied together by the wilder implications of quantum theory and quantum computing. Ultimately, it's about what it means to be quantum. And there's the Brazilian dance/martial art of capoeira, what [Americans] call soccer, floating basilicas on the Amazon and sword-fighting Jesuits. And knives that cut down to the quantum level."
Brasyl also explores the wilder shores of quantum theory, McDonald said. "It's one of the most accurate scientific theories we have produced: Its power of prediction is awesome. But for it to be true means everything we assume about physical reality is untrue," he said.
There are three main interpretations of quantum theory, McDonald said. "[There's] the Copenhagen, the Everett Many Worlds and the Bohm Carrier-Wave theory, [and] all of them have profoundly disturbing implications for our place in the universe," he said. "I took the Many Worlds theory, but my writing twist was to take it not as an alternate history, which is how different this alternate world is from ours, but how similar."