Martin MacInnes was born in Inverness in 1983. He is the author of Infinite Ground and Gathering Evidence, and he is the winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and a Manchester Fiction Prize. In 2020 he was selected by the Guardian/British Council as One of Ten Writers Shaping the UK's Future. He lives in Edinburgh.
1. Why do you tell stories?
Because it’s the only thing I’m really good at, and I love doing it. Being in the middle of a project is like living through a sustained heightened experience - everything is urgent, purposeful, building towards something. Writing has given me some of the happiest times of my life.
2. Describe In Ascension in one (or two) sentence(s).
A journey through the solar system to the tangled heart of earth.
3. How did the physical process of writing the novel longhand in an isolated environment impact the work?
I’ve always written longhand as it’s more fluent for me. I don’t think it impacted on this specific work - though I suppose it was satisfying, and encouraging, seeing the piles of A4 sheets mounting up for each section of the book. I was alone in a small village with no WiFi during lockdown, so I was using the work to give structure, focus, and meaning to my days. And hope. In retrospect this probably wasn't very healthy as it could have backfired, but thankfully it seemed to work out.
4. Leigh's story takes us from the cellular to the interstellar, how did you balance scale and perspective in this novel?
There are torrents of information passing in every microsecond, events never to be repeated - this has been the case for almost 14 billion years - and I suppose switching from the microscopic to the macroscopic is one way for me to gesture at this. I’m obviously interested in where animal lives, including our own - and the great events within them - fit in against this context. For me, anyway, the very small and the very large do not denigrate humanity, they celebrate it. And I’ve found, over the years, that looking at these different perspectives - ‘non-human perspectives’, I guess - can add a tremendous amount of value and intensity to everyday experience. The child-like realisation - ‘it is astonishing that we are here, that we have been created’ - cannot be repeated enough. It’s not just wonder, it’s the beginning of empathy.
This is slightly different, but still related to your question - I found in writing this novel something that seemed quite useful: the more ‘outrageous’, big stuff I write about - spacecraft; the edge of the solar system; the beginning of life - the more impetus I have to focus on the more mundane parts of life. Equally, the more time I spend writing about family dynamics, nostalgia, regret, pain, the more permission I have to write the outrageous stuff again. It’s a mutually-reinforcing process, and I don’t seem able to stick to just one side of it
4.a) Did you at any stage feel overwhelmed by the sheer scope of In Ascension?
Certainly at the start. I had an idea of where I wanted to get to, and the thought of the labour involved in arriving there was daunting. Could I do it? I tried to go easy on myself, to readily admit that there would be a lot of failure involved for a good while, that it might not come together straight away. I tried to make the book more manageable by constantly breaking things down: I had different coloured folders for each of the five main sections, and I split each of these up into broad notes, condensed notes, and plans. I usually only looked at one folder at a time, though sometimes I’d sit on the floor in my front room and lay things out horizontally. I did a lot of walking in the afternoons, tiring myself out by going quickly, and this definitely helped me to look at the book in new ways, escape out of problems, find new connections and ways in. After a few months, I’d written a lot, and sensed enough promise in the whole venture, to know that I wouldn't give up.
5. How did you go about imagining and conveying the psychological consequences of deep space travel? Do you have a scientific background?
I don’t have a formal scientific background, barely even studied sciences at school. I’m fairly conversant in the life sciences after fifteen years or so of obsession, but physics, and astrophysics, is another matter. Space agencies have run several long-term isolation experiments, so I researched those, I read obscure journal articles speculating on the medical side of space travel, but the great thing from my perspective is that no-one really knows much about what will happen - it’s all speculation. So it really was a case of just imagining myself in the character’s position. I’m very comfortable speculating, over-speculating perhaps, and I felt I pretty much had free rein here. So stuff like the psychologists being interested in the moment of Earth-loss, and possible pharmacological treatments for it, just came from here.
6. Leigh and her fellow scientists are inexorably drawn to the mysteries of the sea. Do you share this fascination?
Yes, of course. Like Leigh, I’ve swum by the equator in the mid-Atlantic, though sadly I’ve never learned to dive. Something I go back to a couple of times in the novel is cellular breakthroughs in the early-ocean, and how that environment is still held in us, still composes us. Leigh says something like ‘I’m not ready to get over this’ - there’s not much authorial distancing going on there.
7. The heart of the novel, seems to be our inextricable relationship with Earth, plants, and other species, and the harm done when we are alienated from those relationships. What role does fiction play in addressing our loss of connection to the natural world?
That’s absolutely right. I could talk about this for a long time, though I’m not sure there’s the scope for it here. I’ll mention a couple of books that I think are important and useful on this topic: The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard, and The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh. One of the reasons I started writing fiction was that I didn't recognise the world in most of the books I was reading; there was the solid world of humans, with an often very affecting and subtle rendering of psychology, but everything outside of that - the air, the land, and everything that grows - was indistinct, subordinate, and more than anything, unreal. Like a hologram or something. Characters were completely walled off from it all. There was - there still is, in most of what gets published - a disdain for the non-human. The level of denial - regarding where we come from, what we are kin to, and the precarity and responsibilities inherent in all that - is just stunning. English language fiction, as a whole, perpetuates two dominant illusions enabling ecological destruction: that the world is there for us, and we are qualitatively distinct from everything else inside it.
8. When and where do you write?
I wrote In Ascension in the mornings, 5am-9am, at the desk in my front room in a small beach-side village. (I had to get up early because the walls separating me from my neighbours were so thin.) I moved back to Edinburgh last summer, and I now work at a desk in the spare room / study room, and in the reference room in the Central Library, a beautiful, generally quiet space with an ornate, high ceiling.
9. What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing?
Ear-plugs; library card; passport.
10. Name three books that you couldn’t live without.
The Waves, Virginia Woolf; The Kills, Richard House; The Passion According to G.H, Clarice Lispector.
Bonus Question:
What books are on your to be read pile OR which books/authors have influenced the writing of In Ascension?
Oh man. A long list, in either case. Loosely, as a partial answer to the second question: The View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel; Biophilia and The Diversity of Life, Edward O. Wilson; What is Life?, Lynn Margulis; Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith; Mother Nature, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy; J.G. Ballard’s short fiction; Sketch of the Past and To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf; Spirituality in the Flesh, Robert C. Fuller; Power, Sex, Suicide and Oxygen, Nick Lane; Mind in Life, Evan Thompson; The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard; The Apple in the Dark, Clarice Lispector; Solaris and His Master’s Voice, Stanislaw Lem; all of Iain M. Banks’s fiction; The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry.