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When it comes to New Zealand's literary forebears, Samuel Butler would have to be regarded as an unsung pioneer. The English-born author and philosopher spent four years running a Canterbury sheep station in the mid-1860s, during which time he formulated the ideas behind his best-known work, 1872 utopian satire Erewhon.
Among other things, Erewhon explored the then-revolutionary concept of machine intelligence and Butler's theories laid the groundwork for many contemporary science fiction classics, most notably The Matrix - and more recently Scarlett Thomas' new novel, The End of Mr Y.
"In Erewhon, this guy crosses a mountain range and comes across a world where everyone's names are backward and they don't seem to have any machines," Thomas explains.
"With Samuel Butler, there's a real anxiety about machines becoming conscious, what we'd now call a Matrix-ness. Butler was really mad, in a good way, but really, really scary as well."
According to Thomas, Butler was inspired by the work of Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.
"He was thinking up all this evolutionary theory," she says. " If you think about evolutionary theory, you've got slime and plants for a bit and then all of a sudden you've got animals, who are conscious in a way plants aren't. Where did that come from? It must have evolved so why can't machines evolve in that way?"
The End of Mr Y is Thomas' seventh novel and the second of what the 35-year-old English author describes as "my big crazy books". Neatly described as "The Matrix meets The Historian," it is even more ambitious than her first big crazy book PopCo, as it combines time travel with otherworldly dimensions and X-Files-style conspiracy theories. Thomas originally intended to concentrate on artificial intelligence but instead became intrigued by the nature of human consciousness and the concept of language.
"I really wanted to explore that curse of language, of being trapped. I realised recently that all my books are about being trapped somewhere and this book is very much about how you're trapped in language, in what you can say and how you can say it."
Butler's influence remains in the academic writings of the novel's main character, PhD student Ariel Manto, who stumbles across an apparently cursed book, the titular The End of Mr Y, in a second-hand bookshop. Ariel is soon drawn into a web of supernatural intrigue as she is pursued into a parallel dimension, known as the Troposphere, by a pair of Men In Black-style secret agents.
Ariel makes a refreshing change to the usual idealised lead characters, as some of the biggest challenges that she faces include dealing with her demanding, married lover and finding enough cash to fund her journey.
"Ariel's kind of an action adventure heroine on one level," says Thomas.
"She hasn't got any kids weighing her down and I was careful not to give her too much of a background either with parents and hang-ups. I wanted her to be more of a William Gibson-style protagonist, where they've got no past and they've got no future. They've only got these crazy adventures that they're on now. You just don't get that with women protagonists so that was my project."
Thomas also raises questions about what she has described as "contemporary domesticity and the pressure on women my age to be part of a bourgeois family".
"I don't want to write about middle class families and the minutiae of their life," she elaborates. "You can write about the family really well and Raymond Carver does just that, but it's not for me. It's not my experience; I've got other stuff I want to write about. It's interesting as I get older because when I was in my twenties, it was quite normal to have these 20-something heroines that are not married and haven't got any kids, they're just doing whatever. I like to keep my protagonists roughly my age because I believe in authenticity when you're writing and I like to think that over my career, I'll be writing older and older protagonists. Now I'm in my thirties, it's become interesting."
And unlike many other female authors of adult fiction, Thomas' novels attract a significant number of male readers.
"I don't want to just appeal to women," she says. "You've got a real problem as a woman writer because most people who buy books are women and the men who do buy books will only buy books by men, they won't ever buy books by women. I've heard that a few times, guys have said `I just don't like women writers' and on one level, you can see why. But I actually have a male readership, which I'm really pleased about. It's much harder for a woman to attract a male readership than it is for a man to attract a female readership, particularly because a lot of women write about domestic stuff."
- Detours, HoS
