Charlie Huston is a difficult writer to classify. Hes written some great crime novels including the Hank Thompson trilogy, The Shotgun Rule and the fabulous The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. He wrote five book Joe Pitt series, noirish tales of vampires in New York City, and the eerie cyberpunk novel Sleepless. Huston has been writing for television and written some comics for Marvel including Moon Knight and Wolverine: The Best There Is.
Hustons new book is his best yet, though its completely different from anything else hes written. Skinner is a techno-thriller that feels like its taking place today, or maybe tomorrow. It has that combination of cutting edge events and technology along with a certain dreaminess. The saga involves a global plot centered in an Indian slum, anarchic protestors, private security firms, a personal security expert who was raised in a skinner box and an incredible ending that wont be spoiled in this article.
ALEX DUEBEN: You wrote eleven novels in seven years and now its been three years since Sleepless, your last book. Why did it take so long?
CHARLIE HUSTON: Well, its a hard book to write. The first draft was close to five hundred pages. Content-wise it was hard. It took me a long time to get a handle on the character because once I was working with the conceit that hed been raised in a Skinner box for twelve years, it became trying to find a voice for that character that straddled the line between emotionally and socially fucked upbut still a character that youd be interested in as a reader. There were a lot of starts and stops getting Skinner on the page. The research was relentless. It wasnt that I was plunging deep deep deep into a lot of this stuff, it was just that it was this constant reading up on current events and technology to keep the book feeling as immediate as I wanted it to feel. That went through to the very last possible moment. Im looking at whats happening in Egypt right now, whats been happening in Turkey and the Edward Snowden stuff and Im just like, fuck, I want to go back into the book and be able to reference these things.
Also, I was doing a lot of TV work. About the same time that I started Skinner I was writing pilots for Fox and HBO. The pilot for HBO was shot. I wrote a pilot for FX. I wrote a freelance script for FX. I got attached to something in development at FX. Then I sold another pilot to FX. Also when I first started Skinner I was finishing up my last gig with Marvel, the Wolverine comic that I wrote. So theres your three years right there.
AD: When you say it like that, it sounds pretty exhausting and Skinner is a very different book for you and not just because its a much more research intensive book. Are you a fan of techno thrillers and books along these lines?
CH: I think that the most direct influenceand I feel like its a glaring glaring influence on every pageis William Gibson in general and in particular, his last three books. Theres an element of this that is almost an act of exorcism on my part. I kept feeling the influence of his writing more and more over the years. Its not the first time this has happened with me. When I first started the Joe Pitt books I didnt intend for them to be so distinctly Chandler-esque in nature, but as I was writing the first one the voice when more and more in that direction. There was a point where I was trying to fight it and I was rewriting stuff and I finally just gave into it as thats the way the book should be written. There was an element of that with this book where I just had to deal with the fact that I love William Gibson. I unabashedly love William Gibson. I dont mind being influenced by William Gibson, but it hit the point where I had to realize that and embrace the fact that I had been terribly influenced/inspired by what he did with his last three books. I needed to write something in that vein.
As far as techno thriller kind of stuff, thats where it ends for me. Ive read spy books over the years. My favorite vacation reading is Alan Furst and he writes World War II espionage tales. The only other espionage novels Ive read at length are when I was a teenage and read all of the Ian Fleming Bond. Ive never been into Clancy or any of those guys. The other writers that played a real influence on this book were Don DeLillo and Joan Didion, but nobodys ever going to mistake them for techno thriller writers.
AD: I was going to bring up William Gibson because besides Skinner, I kept thinking when I read Sleepless years ago that it was your cyberpunk novel.
CH: I think thats a fair assessment. Gibson was definitely an influence.
AD: Talk a little about the character, Skinner. As a reader, he was a difficult character to get a handle on.
CH: That was by design. I had this conceit that I wanted to use that the guy was raised in a Skinner box. I thought it was a really fun over the top genre idea and it would produce an interesting character to write. Trying to come up with a scenario where you could have thatbecause I didnt want it to be mad scientists, I didnt want it to be a government thingI wanted it to be some kind of twisted or misdirected parenting strategy. I wanted there to be a family behind it. That led to me thinking about the parents existing something somewhere on the aspergers/autistic spectrum, so they would have their own reasons why for them this might seem like acceptable behavior. It was inspired initially because I had read this New York Times article about scientists incorporating their own children into their research. The focus of the article was this MIT guy who as I recall was interested in development of language. He had an infant son and he saw this as an opportunity to see how language is shaping form, so he wired his entire house for video and audio and monitored all the interactions between his son and everybody else. Anytime any kind of speech entered his sons awareness and how different words started to be shaped and how they evolved into recognizable words.
In the article there was lots of other stuff like that, but that was by far the most extreme. I twisted that into something far lessI dont think any of that is benign particularly, but something much more overt. The larger question for me was, is it genetics or is it being raised in a box until youre twelve? If youre not socialized at all except for the behaviorisms they used to try and socialize him, then what pops out at the other side? That was the trick of trying to figure out how to write the character. More than likely someone raised in those circumstances would probably never be able to properly socialize. By the time youre twelve years old I think the level of functionality I imbued Skinner with is probably far beyond what an actual person would come out of that situation with. I dont know how realistic he is.
AD: The book is set in this world of private intelligence agencies, which I think people have started to pay more attention to in the past decade and especially since Edward Snowdens disclosures.
CH: Using freelancers for intelligence services is probably something that dates back as long as there have been intelligence services. Somebody in government had the idea that there are things we should know, but there is no dedicated professional spy service at that point so youre going out and finding somebody in a position to find those secrets and paying them money to do that. It is a heavily privatized industry going back to the beginning. This stuff didnt start post-9/11, but it mushroomed post-9/11. The growth of the private intelligence services is pegged to September 11th and its what you think it is. Its money. Theres a tremendous amount of government money pumped into that arena and so of course these companies proliferated. Whether or not theyre any more reliable or trustworthy than the government agencies themselves, I tend to look on it with jaundiced eyes. Once youve got a spy service thats running on a purely for profit basis then that raises profound conflicts of interest and draws the whole industry into doubt.
AD: At the heart of the book is this idea of contraction. Ive come across similar ideas, but talk a little about this concept.
CH: Part of it is that I dont think there are people in back rooms twirling their mustaches and making plans like this overtly. I think were fortunate that there arent a lot of people in the world who think in these terms overtly. What there is, is just plain old human nature which takes care of its own before it takes care of everybody else. Our world has become more and more complicated and the systems that were our politics and our commerce have become more and more complicated. Weve learned more about what weve done to the environment and how little can be done to rectify it on a local level or even how much can be achieved by a single government. The United States could do a lot just because of our reach and the amount of industry we have here. If there was some radical redirecting of resources here in defying global climate change then that could actually do a tremendous amount, but to really reverse things it would take a worldwide effort. If youre someone like me whos cynical despite himself and more of a pessimist than hed like to be, then it seems pretty apparent that were way past the threshold where any change, even corrective, is going to take place. What were going to have is a scenario where things are going to get really bad in a lot of places. No places are going to be untouched when you get twenty-thirty years out. Theres going to be a lot of misery to go around. But the places that its going to affect the most are those with the fewest resources. Whether they dont have a lot of food or they dont have a lot of water or they dont have a lot of material resources. Those are the places that are going to be hardest hit. What it means is people dying in tremendous numbers. Its going to have to get to where that stuff is happening constantly for our governments to really respond to this on a scale that is required and by then itll be far too late. Youll be looking way downstream for when you can make this better.
The problems for the United States and Western governments and the haves of the world are going to be so profound in our backyards that the only places that thats going to be the only place where theyll be able to, or interested in, bringing their to resources to bear. The net result is going to be that a mind boggling number of people are going to die. In the end that is probably going to be how the battering we do to the environment is corrected. I dont know. Im not a scientist. Im not an expert on climate change. I dont know what the numbers would have to be where at some point x decades out there is a numberprobably in the billions fewer peopleand without those people in the world thats going to be the part that makes it possible to reverse global climate change because the pull on our resources will be that much lower. Thats where it comes from. Thats what it looks like to me. I desperately want to be wrong. I desperately want for our leaders across the board to be more invested in everybodys well being, but Im not optimistic about that. The way my optimism manifests is with what happens at the end of Skinner. To me, thats a happy outcome. To me, the happy outcome is people on a very small scale finding ways to sustain themselves and protect themselves and create their own independence because I think that that is ultimately how theyre going to force their way into the conversation and force themselves to be dealt with. And create their own future, I hope.
So if this is what I think the potential end game is, then how would that manifest as a strategy that a government might embrace? Then I can start entangling how that would be put into play and how it might originate. From a plot point of view I needed something and I wanted something awful and horrible that wasnt the usual kind of government plot. Something that was much more subtle and insidious.
AD: Its a very banality of evil kind of an idea and its a great ending, which I wont spoil. One issue I did want to raise, in a lot of these kinds of books, theyre very United States-centric. Even if the characters are not working for the government or military, its about American power and interests and this book flips that with characters who ultimately are fighting against the position and policy of the U.S. government.
CH: Very much so. Part of it is that theyre serving their own interests. The protagonists here are not patriots at all. Skinner is serving a psychic need for himself, trying to feel like doing the job that makes him feel the most like himselfwhether thats human or inhuman, I tried never to really resolve. Jae is doing this ultimately for a similar need to find some kind of mental peace so that her fractured mind can find something that makes sense. Ultimately Terrence has his own motivations, which are global in scope and not American. Cross [motivations] are purely profit and self-serving.
AD: Whats next for you?
CH: Im still working on TV so Ive got scripts on top of my desk right now. Im working on a followup book to Skinner as well. Its a different character. I want to stay in that worldnot just the generic world of espionage, but that specific world with a lot of the same supporting characters and the same companies and the same aura and approach to intelligence work. It would take place after the events of Skinner, so that situation would have evolved a bit. Skinner and Jae may be referenced in the book, but will probably not appear in the book.
AD: Im supposed to ask you about the Powers pilot youre writing for FX. I dont know what you can say about it.
CH: Not really much more than the fact that Im working on it. Its still Sony and FX. I am the current writer/showrunner. I have written drafts of the script. With a project like this where its been in development for years and theyve shot a pilot and they spent a lot of money on it, there is no urgency. They would not be continuing with this if they did not love Bendis and Oemings work, but at this point they will only move forward if they really are in the right place and everything really works. Its a very deliberate process. Its hard to say where we are in terms of anything happening or any next stage happening. Its in development. I am indeed writing a script for the pilot and well see what happens.
Hustons new book is his best yet, though its completely different from anything else hes written. Skinner is a techno-thriller that feels like its taking place today, or maybe tomorrow. It has that combination of cutting edge events and technology along with a certain dreaminess. The saga involves a global plot centered in an Indian slum, anarchic protestors, private security firms, a personal security expert who was raised in a skinner box and an incredible ending that wont be spoiled in this article.
ALEX DUEBEN: You wrote eleven novels in seven years and now its been three years since Sleepless, your last book. Why did it take so long?
CHARLIE HUSTON: Well, its a hard book to write. The first draft was close to five hundred pages. Content-wise it was hard. It took me a long time to get a handle on the character because once I was working with the conceit that hed been raised in a Skinner box for twelve years, it became trying to find a voice for that character that straddled the line between emotionally and socially fucked upbut still a character that youd be interested in as a reader. There were a lot of starts and stops getting Skinner on the page. The research was relentless. It wasnt that I was plunging deep deep deep into a lot of this stuff, it was just that it was this constant reading up on current events and technology to keep the book feeling as immediate as I wanted it to feel. That went through to the very last possible moment. Im looking at whats happening in Egypt right now, whats been happening in Turkey and the Edward Snowden stuff and Im just like, fuck, I want to go back into the book and be able to reference these things.
Also, I was doing a lot of TV work. About the same time that I started Skinner I was writing pilots for Fox and HBO. The pilot for HBO was shot. I wrote a pilot for FX. I wrote a freelance script for FX. I got attached to something in development at FX. Then I sold another pilot to FX. Also when I first started Skinner I was finishing up my last gig with Marvel, the Wolverine comic that I wrote. So theres your three years right there.
AD: When you say it like that, it sounds pretty exhausting and Skinner is a very different book for you and not just because its a much more research intensive book. Are you a fan of techno thrillers and books along these lines?
CH: I think that the most direct influenceand I feel like its a glaring glaring influence on every pageis William Gibson in general and in particular, his last three books. Theres an element of this that is almost an act of exorcism on my part. I kept feeling the influence of his writing more and more over the years. Its not the first time this has happened with me. When I first started the Joe Pitt books I didnt intend for them to be so distinctly Chandler-esque in nature, but as I was writing the first one the voice when more and more in that direction. There was a point where I was trying to fight it and I was rewriting stuff and I finally just gave into it as thats the way the book should be written. There was an element of that with this book where I just had to deal with the fact that I love William Gibson. I unabashedly love William Gibson. I dont mind being influenced by William Gibson, but it hit the point where I had to realize that and embrace the fact that I had been terribly influenced/inspired by what he did with his last three books. I needed to write something in that vein.
As far as techno thriller kind of stuff, thats where it ends for me. Ive read spy books over the years. My favorite vacation reading is Alan Furst and he writes World War II espionage tales. The only other espionage novels Ive read at length are when I was a teenage and read all of the Ian Fleming Bond. Ive never been into Clancy or any of those guys. The other writers that played a real influence on this book were Don DeLillo and Joan Didion, but nobodys ever going to mistake them for techno thriller writers.
AD: I was going to bring up William Gibson because besides Skinner, I kept thinking when I read Sleepless years ago that it was your cyberpunk novel.
CH: I think thats a fair assessment. Gibson was definitely an influence.
AD: Talk a little about the character, Skinner. As a reader, he was a difficult character to get a handle on.
CH: That was by design. I had this conceit that I wanted to use that the guy was raised in a Skinner box. I thought it was a really fun over the top genre idea and it would produce an interesting character to write. Trying to come up with a scenario where you could have thatbecause I didnt want it to be mad scientists, I didnt want it to be a government thingI wanted it to be some kind of twisted or misdirected parenting strategy. I wanted there to be a family behind it. That led to me thinking about the parents existing something somewhere on the aspergers/autistic spectrum, so they would have their own reasons why for them this might seem like acceptable behavior. It was inspired initially because I had read this New York Times article about scientists incorporating their own children into their research. The focus of the article was this MIT guy who as I recall was interested in development of language. He had an infant son and he saw this as an opportunity to see how language is shaping form, so he wired his entire house for video and audio and monitored all the interactions between his son and everybody else. Anytime any kind of speech entered his sons awareness and how different words started to be shaped and how they evolved into recognizable words.
In the article there was lots of other stuff like that, but that was by far the most extreme. I twisted that into something far lessI dont think any of that is benign particularly, but something much more overt. The larger question for me was, is it genetics or is it being raised in a box until youre twelve? If youre not socialized at all except for the behaviorisms they used to try and socialize him, then what pops out at the other side? That was the trick of trying to figure out how to write the character. More than likely someone raised in those circumstances would probably never be able to properly socialize. By the time youre twelve years old I think the level of functionality I imbued Skinner with is probably far beyond what an actual person would come out of that situation with. I dont know how realistic he is.
AD: The book is set in this world of private intelligence agencies, which I think people have started to pay more attention to in the past decade and especially since Edward Snowdens disclosures.
CH: Using freelancers for intelligence services is probably something that dates back as long as there have been intelligence services. Somebody in government had the idea that there are things we should know, but there is no dedicated professional spy service at that point so youre going out and finding somebody in a position to find those secrets and paying them money to do that. It is a heavily privatized industry going back to the beginning. This stuff didnt start post-9/11, but it mushroomed post-9/11. The growth of the private intelligence services is pegged to September 11th and its what you think it is. Its money. Theres a tremendous amount of government money pumped into that arena and so of course these companies proliferated. Whether or not theyre any more reliable or trustworthy than the government agencies themselves, I tend to look on it with jaundiced eyes. Once youve got a spy service thats running on a purely for profit basis then that raises profound conflicts of interest and draws the whole industry into doubt.
AD: At the heart of the book is this idea of contraction. Ive come across similar ideas, but talk a little about this concept.
CH: Part of it is that I dont think there are people in back rooms twirling their mustaches and making plans like this overtly. I think were fortunate that there arent a lot of people in the world who think in these terms overtly. What there is, is just plain old human nature which takes care of its own before it takes care of everybody else. Our world has become more and more complicated and the systems that were our politics and our commerce have become more and more complicated. Weve learned more about what weve done to the environment and how little can be done to rectify it on a local level or even how much can be achieved by a single government. The United States could do a lot just because of our reach and the amount of industry we have here. If there was some radical redirecting of resources here in defying global climate change then that could actually do a tremendous amount, but to really reverse things it would take a worldwide effort. If youre someone like me whos cynical despite himself and more of a pessimist than hed like to be, then it seems pretty apparent that were way past the threshold where any change, even corrective, is going to take place. What were going to have is a scenario where things are going to get really bad in a lot of places. No places are going to be untouched when you get twenty-thirty years out. Theres going to be a lot of misery to go around. But the places that its going to affect the most are those with the fewest resources. Whether they dont have a lot of food or they dont have a lot of water or they dont have a lot of material resources. Those are the places that are going to be hardest hit. What it means is people dying in tremendous numbers. Its going to have to get to where that stuff is happening constantly for our governments to really respond to this on a scale that is required and by then itll be far too late. Youll be looking way downstream for when you can make this better.
The problems for the United States and Western governments and the haves of the world are going to be so profound in our backyards that the only places that thats going to be the only place where theyll be able to, or interested in, bringing their to resources to bear. The net result is going to be that a mind boggling number of people are going to die. In the end that is probably going to be how the battering we do to the environment is corrected. I dont know. Im not a scientist. Im not an expert on climate change. I dont know what the numbers would have to be where at some point x decades out there is a numberprobably in the billions fewer peopleand without those people in the world thats going to be the part that makes it possible to reverse global climate change because the pull on our resources will be that much lower. Thats where it comes from. Thats what it looks like to me. I desperately want to be wrong. I desperately want for our leaders across the board to be more invested in everybodys well being, but Im not optimistic about that. The way my optimism manifests is with what happens at the end of Skinner. To me, thats a happy outcome. To me, the happy outcome is people on a very small scale finding ways to sustain themselves and protect themselves and create their own independence because I think that that is ultimately how theyre going to force their way into the conversation and force themselves to be dealt with. And create their own future, I hope.
So if this is what I think the potential end game is, then how would that manifest as a strategy that a government might embrace? Then I can start entangling how that would be put into play and how it might originate. From a plot point of view I needed something and I wanted something awful and horrible that wasnt the usual kind of government plot. Something that was much more subtle and insidious.
AD: Its a very banality of evil kind of an idea and its a great ending, which I wont spoil. One issue I did want to raise, in a lot of these kinds of books, theyre very United States-centric. Even if the characters are not working for the government or military, its about American power and interests and this book flips that with characters who ultimately are fighting against the position and policy of the U.S. government.
CH: Very much so. Part of it is that theyre serving their own interests. The protagonists here are not patriots at all. Skinner is serving a psychic need for himself, trying to feel like doing the job that makes him feel the most like himselfwhether thats human or inhuman, I tried never to really resolve. Jae is doing this ultimately for a similar need to find some kind of mental peace so that her fractured mind can find something that makes sense. Ultimately Terrence has his own motivations, which are global in scope and not American. Cross [motivations] are purely profit and self-serving.
AD: Whats next for you?
CH: Im still working on TV so Ive got scripts on top of my desk right now. Im working on a followup book to Skinner as well. Its a different character. I want to stay in that worldnot just the generic world of espionage, but that specific world with a lot of the same supporting characters and the same companies and the same aura and approach to intelligence work. It would take place after the events of Skinner, so that situation would have evolved a bit. Skinner and Jae may be referenced in the book, but will probably not appear in the book.
AD: Im supposed to ask you about the Powers pilot youre writing for FX. I dont know what you can say about it.
CH: Not really much more than the fact that Im working on it. Its still Sony and FX. I am the current writer/showrunner. I have written drafts of the script. With a project like this where its been in development for years and theyve shot a pilot and they spent a lot of money on it, there is no urgency. They would not be continuing with this if they did not love Bendis and Oemings work, but at this point they will only move forward if they really are in the right place and everything really works. Its a very deliberate process. Its hard to say where we are in terms of anything happening or any next stage happening. Its in development. I am indeed writing a script for the pilot and well see what happens.