The following is an extract from New Territories: Sophie Cunningham talks to Steven Amsterdam by Sophie Cunningham which appears in the new edition of Meanjin - Volume 69 Number 1.

Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming was the recipient of 2009’s Age Book of the Year Award, and has recently been added to the 2011 VCE reading list.

Sophie Cunningham: I read Things We Didn’t See Coming as a novel but it’s also been called a short-story collection.

Steven Amsterdam: Even on the book itself it’s not that consistent. On the flap copy it says it’s stories and some other place I think it says ‘novel’. But Sleepers has pitched it as a novel. In the States it’s going out as a collection, in the UK as a novel. Marketing departments make some of these decisions and I’m fairly happy with either mode, though I think a reader would be poorly served by reading the last story or chapter first.

Sophie: While there were leaps that meant that we were a bit surprised by where the main—unnamed—character was, I read him as the one character the entire way through. Have the words ‘discontinuous narrative’ been used?

Steven: Only with people who work at university presses. It’s just not one of those phrases that brings in the crowds. I’ve been a little sensitive to it because I’ve seen certain reviews where people seem confused, and to me it’s pretty straightforward that the grandparents reappear, Margo is Margo in three different stories. Time passes and life alters people. To me, that was part of the reward of writing the book. How would they have changed since we saw them last?

Sophie: You’ve spoken about the human tendency to catastrophise and be pessimistic when in fact people tend to rally, no matter what’s thrown at them. Was each chapter intended to work through the implications of a different catastrophe, or were you making a point about the way the personality can change and shift quite dramatically over time? I know I’ve felt like a very different person in different phases of my life.

Steven: Yes, same. I was very conscious of the fact that I could not have imagined my current self five years ago, and letting that growth in character occur offstage seemed like an interesting way to go. In a sense, each of the stories/chapters leaves the narrator on the verge of another 180-degree turn. Not everybody experiences that much change in their life. Maybe this is actually the answer: the readers who have a hard time with that have been in the same place for thirty years, and the people who related better have had more experience with dodging through life. Finding yourself in a new territory and finding yourself surviving things you didn’t think you’d survive, that’s interesting to me. If I set out to make a point, that was probably the point.

Sophie: I wanted to know if you could literally connect these catastrophes or whether you played with different catastrophes and hoped that they created some sense of relationship. Did you try and map out the disasters?

Steven: I hate sounding a little haphazard, but someone in my writing workshop at one point said, ‘You have to give a timeline of what’s happened in all these stories because I’m not understanding it.’

Sophie: You do that with the character’s age.

Steven: That’s about the only thing. When editing it into its final form I was conscious of things that had happened in the past, so was able to call on the post-viral stuff after the plague chapter, for example. But I didn’t have a consistent history for exactly everything that would have happened. I did indulge a lot of these ideas at the same time because I think (and this is maybe a bit of Y2K thinking) it was all supposed to happen at once anyway. It wasn’t like I threw a whole lot of different dystopias at the wall and said let’s try them all. I did come to something of a timeline: the government split and then it rained a lot and then everybody got the plague and then everybody was living in communes and so on …

Sophie: And in the end everyone was getting cancers. Were they post-viral or …

Steven: … exposure to things. And some were post-viral. After that chapter with the senator I started focusing on what could be good, not just the disasters of the future, but what sort of advances might come to help us. It can’t all be bad news. And I kept thinking about medication.

Sophie: How much was your interest in writing about a survivor? I’m thinking here of Polanski’s The Pianist, and how the main character in that survived by not being brave. There’s a kind of bravery about just doing whatever it takes, I know, but sometimes what it took was to be a coward.

Steven: To weasel out of things. Yes, I don’t think there’s a lot of proud, brave moments in this book. My character’s quite shifty in what he has to do to get by. He does a lot of second guessing other people and uses skills other than sheer brute force that get him though. That personality is, for better or worse, something I relate to a little. Those are skills I am better able to draw on than picking up my shield and running into battle.

Sophie: How interested were you in wrestling with the science fiction genre?

Steven: I didn’t hear the words ‘science fiction’ until very late in the game. I’m more comfortable with the word ‘speculative’. I was on a panel at the Melbourne Writers Festival with China Miéville and felt uncomfortable being genre labelled. But the American publisher has just sent me the flap copy and it reads like a little more sci-fi than I imagined the book. But I’m sure you’ve had this experience, that the book doesn’t exactly come out as you …

Sophie: It has other lives.

Steven: Yes, and so at some point I just thought, okay, that’s what the experts think.

Sophie: Have you read The Road by Cormac McCarthy?

Steven: When Sleepers first brought me in with this they asked, ‘Have you read The Road?’ I said no. They said, ‘Good. Don’t read it, because then you don’t have to answer questions about it and the similarities … people are going to bring them up.’

Sophie: Well, certainly there’s the father–son thing. The emotional shape of the narrative is very much dictated by the relationship with the father.

Steven: That arc only really came up at the very end when I wrote the first chapter.

Sophie: So you wrote the first chapter last?

Steven: Yes. The grandparents [chapter two, ‘The Theft that Got me Here’] was the one I wrote first. The Y2K really came to me somewhere in the writing process. It was the result of something I was worrying about. Remember the West Nile virus? It probably didn’t make a splash here, it was this encephalitis that hit in New York. A mosquito-borne virus that, because of climate change, has become comfortable in the northern United States. Anyway, there was a summer when it just seemed we were all going to die. Not long after that, to ‘celebrate’ Y2K, my ex and I packed the car and rented a house in the country. He was calm, I was the nervous one, making sure the place had a generator and all that.

Sophie: So there is some autobiography in Things We Didn’t See Coming then?

Steven: Well, it has been pointed out to me that perhaps I worry a little more than necessary at times. I thought that the Y2K thing was a compassionate place to start the reader because it located them in the past. (Actually, Toni Jordan told me it was.)

Sophie: I thought it was fantastic because it blew the book open. That is, you get to the end of the first chapter, and you think, Y2K, wasn’t that a crock of shit! and then you get to the next chapter and you think, Oh! It allowed me to go with you and not question anything you did.

Steven: So this is an argument I’m having with the flap copy in the States … do you think the book suggested that Y2K did lead to the breakdown of things and the things happened after or …?

Sophie: … did I read it as a parallel universe?

Steven: Yes. A kind of variation on a theme.

Sophie: I thought you were saying, ‘Okay, what if in fact it did happen?’ While I didn’t follow all the reasons why the social breakdown might have occurred as a result of Y2K, that didn’t worry me.

Steven: In my mind the Y2K thing was still a fizzle in the book, but something else happened. Something that led to the next chapter. The political stuff in the grandparents’ chapter was based on the awful election we had in 2004 in the States, when it just seemed like the country folk and the city folk were just going to declare a war on each other. I saw the religious fundamentalism as a symptom of that. So between midnight on the turn of the millennium and the next chapter, something broke.

Sophie: Are you working on another book at the moment? Do you now see yourself as a writer?

Steven: Nobody used to ask me about what I was working on next, but I am. And yes, almost a writer. I still put down ‘nurse’ when I have to fill out most forms. It’s simpler. About ten years ago I decided I’m not going to call myself a writer if I’m just going to be beating myself up for not writing, so I’ll write when I can write and see how it works. But now that I’ve been legitimised by being paid for it, I’ve gone down to four shifts a week [as a psychiatric nurse at the Alfred Hospital] and am trying to dedicate that other day and parts around the other days to plotting up the next thing.

This extract is from Meanjin Vol. 69 No. 1 2010. Visit Meanjin online at www.meanjin.com.au and check out Steven Amsterdam's great website too - www.stevenamsterdam.com.