Richard K. Morgan has spent most of the past decade working on his fantasy trilogy A Land Fit For Heroes. The books were popular with readers, but Morgan has received a steady stream of emails urging him to write more science fiction in the vein of his 2002 debut Altered Carbon. His new novel Thin Air definitely fits the bill, delivering more of Morgan’s signature blend of mystery, sci-fi, sex, and violence.

“I’m coming back to science fiction, and what I really wanted to do was have some fun with it,” Morgan says in Episode 332 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “And go back to that noir vibe, and really pick up on the pulse that the Kovacs books had.”

Thin Air is set on a futuristic Mars colony in the Valles Marineris. An ambitious terraforming effort has stalled, a victim of corporate greed, and now the Martian settlers huddle beneath a thin screen called the Lamina, which helps keep in the breathable air. It’s a grim vision, but one that Morgan finds far more plausible than the cheerful visions of plucky Mars colonists common in sci-fi.

“I think the idea that it’s going to be some sort of reprise of the American frontier, that this is where men will go and test themselves against the cutting edge of human progress, and the expansion of the human sphere—I mean, that isn’t what it’s going to be like at all,” he says.

He’s particularly skeptical of the sort of techno-utopian thinking typified by figures like Elon Musk. Morgan would prefer to see humanity organize itself into large-scale government initiatives, rather than relying on the personality quirks of a handful of super-wealthy individuals.

“While I’ve got an immense amount of respect for what Musk has achieved in technological terms, I don’t think he has a very grown-up view of how the world works and how human beings work,” Morgan says. “And I think we need people with a bit more thought and a bit more balance to their vision.”

He also worries that excessive optimism about the prospect of settling other planets may distract people from the serious challenge of maintaining a livable biosphere here on Earth.

“For the forseeable future, the home of the human race is on Earth, and once a lot of minds and attention start turning away from that, it’s bad news for Earth,” he says.

Listen to the complete interview with Richard K. Morgan in Episode 332 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Richard K. Morgan on colonization:

“I’ve read quite a lot about the various initiatives that there are as far as this idea of colonies on Mars is concerned, and [Newt Gingrich] features very widely. He’s been in a lot of working groups and so forth. And clearly what he sees is a transplant—taking a culture of the most rapacious of Republican-right unfettered capitalism in America, taking that and transplanting it out there, and just culturing it and seeing if it grows. … And I imagine Carl Sagan listening to him and wrinkling his nose. We’re talking about the human species taking its first steps out into space, and what are you about? You want to lock it all down and sell it as parcels of land. There’s something pretty pearls-before-swine about the whole thing.”

Richard K. Morgan on the Andes:

“In Black Man, I posited that one of the things they would be doing is sending Andeans—Andean Native Americans—to Mars. Because one of the things obviously is if you’ve got a very, very thin atmosphere, then guys who are used to living at altitude are going to be genetically predisposed to cope with that better. So in Black Man, the Western world has built its Mars prep camps in the Andes, because you get the altitude there, and also something of the bleak environment these people will be going to. So the idea is you’ve got several generations of grunt labor coming from places like Peru and Bolivia, and they’ve brought their culture with them. So that’s one of the baseline cultures that operates on Mars.”

Richard K. Morgan on biotech:

“I was just thinking about what’s going to happen when genetic engineering works like [software], where they fix you for cancer, say, but then later they come along with something else and say, ‘This is the new patch for this.’ So it doesn’t just fix it, it also forces the cells to do this other thing, which is really cool because then you can’t get cancer in those cells ever again. But somehow you’ve got to get it into people, so you’ve got these little post-organic mosquitoes flying around, and they carry the code activators, and they sting you and pump that shit into you, and then it goes to work within the genetech that’s already in there. So over time your lungs get more efficient, or your skin hardens up a little bit better or retains moisture that much better, and this is going on all the time.”

Richard K. Morgan on AI:

“It occurs to me that one very obvious thing that algorithms and AI would be good at is comforting the dying. It doesn’t have to be a deeply implanted version, as it is in the book. With a simple version of a bone phone, or some kind of induction system so that you can hear the voice even though you’re going under—as it were—it should be possible to provide companionship in someone’s last hours, and I think that might be a good thing. … I think it would be nice if technology meant that we didn’t have to die alone, even if we were functionally alone at the time of our death. So yeah, I’d say that in an ideal world I’d want another human being there, someone I cared about, but failing that I’d settle for the AI.”

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