Q&A with Prof. Michel Marriott about his book, "The Skull Cage Key"

When did you know you were going to write? How did your identity as a writer evolve?
I knew I wanted to be a writer as soon as I could reasonably transcribe an idea into the symbols and signs of written language. I was in the third grade at the time, growing up in Kentucky. And I could not get over just how amazing it was that if I really thought about it, really worked at it, I could craft a phrase or a sentence or a string of sentences that could transmit exactly what I was thinking or feeling or both to a pair of eyes I may never see or know, eyes not yet opened upon this world. It was, for me, the sweetest voodoo. And I knew I had to devote myself to learning every spell of the written word I could learn and perhaps one day conjure.




How did your experience as a technology reporter prepare you for writing this novel?
For much of the last dozen years, I swam, almost daily, in some of the deepest, most fertile and most influential pools of technological innovation in the world. As a technology reporter for The New York Times I was given enormous access to not only the development of systems, services and software that has remade our world many times over in a single generation, but the restless minds that created them, evolved them and marketed them. As a result I began to see trend lines, many dizzyingly exciting, while others suggesting darker consequences.
My work plugged me into one of the most aggressive presents the age of mankind has ever known. As a consequence, I often felt like I was living more in the future than in the now. So, writing a novel set in 2041 sometimes felt as if I was writing about a history that isn't quite happened yet.



Why did you choose to set your story in Harlem?
I have lived in New York for more than 20 years. And when I arrived one of the first places I wanted to experience was Harlem. It was, for me and millions of African-Americans, especially those who lived anywhere else but New York, a mystical nexus of dreams and demons, fantasy and folklore, political possibilities lost and yet to be found. Harlem has long been a microcosm of black striving and struggle. A near-future Harlem, in which black striving and struggle has not yet been rendered obsolete, seemed the perfect setting for a story that is as much about our American past -- black and white, winners and losers Ð as it is about our American future.



What inspired the futuristic elements that we see in The Skull Cage Key?
One of the most enjoyable aspects of writing The Skull Cage Key was creating a bevy of futuristic devices and services without the need of multimillion-dollar research and development centers, fabrication plants and consumer marketing divisions to get products on shelves, in homes and offices and on the streets. I could, well, just make them up. But their inspirations were never far from the cup-runneth eth-over, electronic consumer culture that I closely observe and embrace.
I not only tried to fast-forward commonplace technologies, like what might be a likely successor to the cell phone or iPod or S.U.V., but I also tried to fast-forward what sort of consumers we might likely be in the next 30 years or so, which might give rise to a set of strangely provocative products, like Telefildonics and other mergers of sex and high technology. And in the end, I wanted technologies to service as markers to social class and ranking, much the way a raggedy city bus versus a late-model, German sports car does in our time.


Who are some authors you most admire, and who have influenced your own writing?
Doug, I remember writing a lot about this before. I will try to find that one and expand on it.

What are your working on for your second novel?
I am writing a sequel under the working title of Still Born Dawn. It picks up some of the surviving characters, plus some new ones, several years after the end of The Skull Cage Key. At its essence, Still Born Dawn is a protest book of wars fought aboard in the name of freedom that bleed freedoms here at home.
My second novel will play out on a much more expansive canvass than Skull Cage Key, from New York to China to Mozambique, while attempting to showcase a kind of intimacy that is glimpsed between Army and Oona in my first novel.