Imagining Our Post-Human Future: A Q&A with Author John Scalzi

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In Scalzis thriller, Lock In, people can mentally inhabit robotic bodies

In his new science fiction thriller, Lock In (Tor Books, 2014), novelist John Scalzi portrays a near future in which a virus has rendered some people completely paralyzed, or locked-in their bodies. A wealth of new technology has sprung up to meet the needs of these people, known as Hadens, after the virus that took their mobility. Most notable are the threepsrobotic bodies that Hadens can mentally control, giving them some strength and talents that able-bodied humans do not have such as the ability to transfer their consciousness instantly from one robotic body to another one in a different location.

Scalzis storyone of Scientific Americans Recommended titles for Novemberis a rollicking murder mystery, with meditations on disability politics and gender issues woven in. Many readers may not even notice, for instance, that the gender of Haden protagonist Chris is never revealed (pronouns for Chris are avoided throughout). Scientific American spoke to Scalzi about imagining this possible future and the parallels he sees to the real world.

[An edited transcript of the conversation follows.]

Characters in the book argue about many disability issues, such as whether or not Hadens deserve special accommodations and funding from the government. Did you aim to avoid taking a side on those questions? I wasnt interesting in doing a polemic. We live in a very politically polarized era right now. I do think people of good will can have different opinions but still be coming not from a place of malice.

I had the lot opportunity as part of world-building to show these different points of view and to show there are a lot of different ways of looking at things. There are some people who think that funding for Hadens has outlived its usefulness and can be allocated for other things. There are other people who see it as a willful act of bigotry. Rather than say one of these is right and the other is wrong, to me its more interesting to do the thing that happens in real life and say there are certainly ways to look at this as right or wrong or good or evil, but most people are looking at it with sound reasons for believing what they do.

Do you see Hadens as a metaphor for any disability cultures in the real world? There are some parallels but you have to be very careful with that. I know a little bit about deaf culture because a friend of mine has been in the deaf culture for awhile. Over the course of 25 years she and I have talked about many of the issues and concerns for deaf people and deaf culture. I used that as a starting basis for how Hadens see their identity, and having what other people would see as a detriment be a cornerstone of a cultural and social identity. But Haden culture is not deaf culture. It has very specific things about it that real-world cultures dont have.

Im also aware of the simple fact of the matter that when Im a man with no disabilities greater than wearing glasses, you have a potential minefield when you model a disability culture. This was my attempt. It was worth it to make the attempt. But by all means criticize it, because the next time I do it I dont want to make the same mistakes.

Why did you choose to leave the gender of the protagonist unspecified? Chris spends all of the book in a threep. Theres no immediate reason for Chris to be gendered one way or the other. Threeps do not necessarily have to show any gender preference.

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Imagining Our Post-Human Future: A Q&A with Author John Scalzi