Interviewing Chris Farnell

How would you book tempt the Fermi’s Progress Series?

It’s a series of all-out adventure stories about a crew of extremely flawed people using a spaceship cobbled together from Cold War tech and mad science to visit genuinely strange and amazing alien worlds- which then explode.

What led to the choice of a linked novella series?

I can’t find the exact quote anywhere, but in an interview Mike Mignola once said he wrote Hellboy because he just wanted to draw lots of monsters. Fermi’s Progress came from a similar place. Space opera was starting to get cool again, but the stuff I was seeing was either very human-centric space gangster stuff or galactic scale warring civilisation stuff.

What I wanted was a procedural, where the alien planet is to the characters as a locked-room murder is to the regulars in CSI. Yes, you want characters who are relatable and compelling and all of that, but their job is to guide you through the mystery that is the actual star of the story.

What I wanted was characters and a situation I could use as a lens for telling lots of stories about different alien planets.

I was interested in how you make it routine to encounter things completely outside your experience.

I didn’t want those characters to get bogged down in continuity, and end up with a very crowded universe with three different space empires you kept running into.

I also really wanted to avoid the colonialist-to-outright-racist tropes of humans landing on alien worlds and overthrowing their dictators or teaching them the importance of rock and roll.

So a simple way to avoid both of these problems was to blow up the planet when I was finished with it.

You haven’t just played this for laughs – is it difficult to balance drama and comedy?

The honest answer is I don’t think I do.

I’ve got an 18-month-old daughter and to make her laugh I will try convince her she’s been abandoned (by hiding), trick her into thinking I’m going to drop her, physically attack her (with tickles) and in extreme circumstances even threaten to eat her. I am a responsible and loving father (make sure you print that bit).

But it’s made me think a lot about the idea that laughter is, at its roots, a fear response. If you go on Twitter during whatever the latest horror is, people are lining up to make jokes. When my Dad was dying of cancer he was, among many other things, hilarious about it.

And I don’t think that’s about making light of it, or even trying to make yourself feel better. I think we use jokes because they’re a very efficient way of using your common frame of reference to share information about things from outside it.

So I think if you took a collection of humans, destroyed everything else they knew and put them in completely strange and alien surroundings, they would make a lot of jokes. Glib jokes, sad jokes, angry jokes, laughter doesn’t automatically mean “happy”. But I think if humour has an evolutionary purpose, it’s probably got something to do with things we’re terrified of but don’t understand.

Did you know all the storylines or has this been a voyage of discovery for you?

Most of the storylines that we’re going to see in Fermi’s Progress are ones I’ve had floating around for a while. There is a huge gulf between “A cool idea” and “A story”. My original list was much longer than the four main ideas we’re going to be exploring over these four novellas.

What followed was a process of watching those ideas grow and develop and see which of them were stories, and which of those were the stories I wanted to tell here.

I’m really excited for people to see the four that made it into Fermi’s Progress. As for the others, that’s a discussion for another time…

In three words what can we expect for the next adventure?

Philosophical. Zombie. Apocalypse.

If there was one book you could make everyone read (not your own) what would it be?

Obviously the answer to this question is going to change every day, but at this precise moment I’m going to say Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky. It’s a book that is dark, and unworldly, and incredibly humane, while depicting just how outside our understanding aliens might be.

Also, if I can sneak another one in, Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries is a fantastic collection if you want lots of high concept alien planet-based silliness. Lem does Douglas Adams before Douglas Adams was even a thing, and my dream project would be to do a TV adaptation of it with the budget of some of the cheaper episodes of The Mighty Boosh.

What’s next for you and where can we find out more from you?

With Dyson’s Fear out we now have three more parts of Fermi’s Progress to go, with the next one due out on April 15th. You can keep track of what’s been released at this handy little Fermi’s Progress landing page, and with a couple of clicks from there you can find the other books I’ve got out. You can also find me on Twitter, where I’m regularly throwing out book plugs and Too Many Opinions.

As for what’s next, I’ve written some material for an as-yet-unannounced project for Spire: The City Must Fall RPG.

And there may be yet more stories to tell about the Fermi…