NORTHAM Senior High School English teacher Guy Salvidge launched his second science-fiction novel at Two Stories Book Cafe in Northam last Saturday.Mr Salvidge was at the cafe to sign copies of his new book Yellowcake Springs.

His first novel The Kingdom of Four Rivers was published in 2009 by Equilibrium Books.

Mr Salvidge hopes his new book will receive similar recognition.

“I've always been keen on writing, but science-fiction has been my  metier,” he said.                                                                                                                                         

                                                                                                                                           Mr Salvidge has been teaching Northam for five years.

                                                                                                                                           He and his wife have two children and live in York.

                                                                                                                        http://www.avonadvocate.com.au/news/local/news/general/northam-teacher-launches-second-scifi-book/2360211.aspx

[Kayla Clibborn interviews Guy Salvidge, author of the dystopian novel Yellowcake Springs, 2011 winner of the IP Picks Best Fiction award.]

KC: Both Yellowcake Springs and your previous novel,The Kingdom of Four Rivers, depict post-apocalyptic, dystopian futures reminiscent of Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. Have you drawn inspiration from any particular authors or texts for your work?

GS: I've always written dystopian or post-apocalyptic fiction. My first story that I can recall writing was called 'The Day After' and it was a gruesome tale about a group of boys hiding in a fallout shelter after the bomb. One by one, they go up to the surface and never return. I was twelve when I wrote that.  

I certainly read those famous Huxley and Orwell texts, but a novel that influenced me profoundly at a tender age was Robert Swindells' Brother in the Land ≠ another post-nuclear tale.

As an adult, my major influences include J G Ballard, William S Burroughs, Harry Crews, Raymond Chandler and Philip K Dick, all of whom can be considered writers of the apocalypse in their varying ways. In researching Yellowcake Springs, I also read a number of factual accounts relating to the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986.

KC: You have dedicated this novel to your two children, with the message, "may they never have to live through this". What concerns or fears do you have for our society in the future in terms of themes you have dealt with in the book, such as overpopulation and environmental decay?

GS: We seem to be living on the precipice. I've always felt this way, as though our civilisation can and will be swept away by forces beyond our control.

When I was a child, nuclear war seemed to be the major threat, and so I was always writing about that. By then, the Cold War was over and the nuclear threat was fading. It wasn't until I saw Al Gore's filmAn Inconvenient Truth in 2006 that I realised that climate change would be the global threat of this era, and that I could write about it in fiction in much the same way that others had written about nuclear war previously.

Overpopulation, both as a practical and a philosophical consideration, is close to the heart of Yellowcake Springs. One of the ironies of our lives is that the planet would be far better off without us. Having children seems an especially foolish thing to do in these times, and yet I love my children more than anything and feel that they have massively enriched my life.

Here's the crux of the overpopulation problem – no one thinks of his or herself as an unnecessary surplus.

KC: Did you find it challenging to appropriate your factual research and knowledge of the issues facing our society and their potential consequences, into a fictional form?

GS: In truth, I find it more of a challenge NOT to sketch the issues facing our society on a canvascalled 'the future'. My mind is always jumping five or ten steps ahead, considering possibilities that may never eventuate. It should be pointed out, however, that I don't consider Yellowcake Springs to be an exercise in prophecy – merely a warning in the same way that Nineteen Eighty-Four was intended to warn the people of 1950 of the dangers of totalitarianism.

But if you want to write about the possibility of nuclear power being used in Australia, then you have to set your story in the future anyway, due to the long lead time it would take for such projects to be completed. What we call 'the future' is something akin to a bomb testing site, a place where we can play out our desires and fears without being harmed
ourselves. The real challenge for me would be depicting these issues in a contemporary framework.

KC: What made you choose fiction rather than creative non-fiction as a vehicle? Are confronting issues, such as those addressed in Yellowcake Springs, more easily absorbed through fiction?

GS: Absolutely. In writing fiction, one creates characters for whom the world around them is normal and mundane, even if for us it might appear nightmarish.

Instead of writing a dry tract about the possible dangers of nuclear power, foreign takeovers and climate change, all of which are pressing issues here in Western Australia, I much prefer to depict these problems imaginatively. One of the reasons for this is that fiction writers pose questions, they do not offer solutions.

Thus Yellowcake Springs explores some of these issues in a way that doesn't pretend to have all the answers. If these problems were easily solved, then they would be solved. The Fukushima nuclear crisis, which occurred after Yellowcake Springs was completed, brought the issue of nuclear power to the forefront of public consciousness again. Instead of boring readers with a polemic on the dangers of nuclear power, I chose to imagine a scenario in which this debate had been won decades before.

KC: What do you consider to be the appeal of the post-apocalyptic/dystopian sub-genre of speculative fiction? Do you think it acts as a reversed form of escapism for the audience i.e., offering an exaggerated view of a possible bleak future – prompting an appreciation for reality, rather than a desire to escape it?

GS: Dystopian fiction is necessarily exaggerated, offering extreme visions that provoke readers into responding emotionally and intellectually.

One of the aims of such writing is to allow readers to engage with the issues of the present time in a different context. This desire to confront the issues of our time means that dystopia fiction is anti-escapist.

Personally, I find that problems like climate change are so vast and seemingly intractable, especiallygiven the squabbling between nations and within them, that eventually they become a kind of background noise. The desire for escape has a powerful pull on us all, a desire which we satisfy with media, entertainment and gaming.

Yellowcake Springs imagines an even more seductive form of escapism, depicting some of the dangers of disengagement from the political process. Dystopian fiction allows us to re-engage with these problems in a different way.

Published in IP E-news 52: http://www.ipoz.biz/News/eNews52.htm

This novel takes on some serious social issues. Which did you enjoy exploring the most and which do you think is the most important?

Yellowcake Springs tackles a number of social issues in various ways. Firstly, there is a widening chasm in the distribution of wealth demonstrated by the towns of Yellowcake Springs (the rich) and East Hills (the poor). This unequal distribution is evident in our own world and the gulf is widening by the year. The novel also explores the problem of disengagement with the political process through the character of Sylvia Baron. The extremely poor do not have the luxury of disengagement, and in the novel they have become increasingly radical and militant in their opposition to a government which no longer even pretends to service their needs.

What sort of impact do you think a book like this will have on public perception regarding these issues?

In Yellowcake Springs I have sought to offer an extreme worst case scenario of W.A. in the year 2058. Readers may be shocked to read of a world where conditions have been allowed to deteriorate to such an extent, but there are worrying trends in the privatisation or dismantling of public systems in areas such as health, education and social services that might one day lead to such conditions as we see in the fictional town of East Hills. More obviously, however, the issues of nuclear power and the foreign ownership of Australian assets are foregrounded in a provocative way in the novel. My expectation is that readers will see Yellowcake Springs as a dystopian novel in the tradition of 1984, thus offering a warning about the dangers of allowing such trends to continue unopposed.

What do you think of avatar-based technologies like second-life?

Such technologies offer both profound benefits and potentially hazardous consequences to users. Communication media such as Facebook, Skype and Steam allow us unprecedented powers to transcend physical distance and truly 'be' a part of online communities, often in avatar form. However, there is a danger that people will increasingly retreat into these virtual worlds, disengaging with the difficult and often seemingly insurmountable problems of our physical environment. In Yellowcake Springs I have imagined a technology called Controlled Dreaming State which allows users to escape their real lives in a way that transcends the current technical limitations of keyboard, mouse and screen. Such a technology would probably be enormously addictive.

What influence has the ongoing boom in Western Australian mining had on this novel?

In the twenty or so years I have lived in W.A. I have seen the state transformed from a sleepy backwater into something of a mining mecca.Yellowcake Springs was written in the context of the political debate over uranium mining, which I felt might eventually lead to nuclear power plants being built for domestic power generation. I also have concerns about foreign (and particularly Chinese) ownership of mines and related infrastructure. In the novel I have invented a company, CIQ Sinocorp, which not only owns nuclear power plants in W.A., but also the surrounding land. While I have nothing against the Chinese people (indeed I have long been a student of Chinese history and culture), their government's track record on environmental issues and human rights leaves a lot to be desired.

Do you draw any inspiration from your teaching?

Teaching offers me valuable insights into the human condition, in terms of group dynamics and the way that social pressures demand conformity, but often provoke disobedience or withdrawal, in individuals. A school is a society in microscopic form, and as a novel offers a 'world in miniature', so school life can and does inform the creation of fictional worlds. Teaching also gives one access to a far wider range of the social spectrum than might otherwise be the case, and this is useful in imagining how those living in extreme poverty and disadvantage think and behave.