China: There is no distinction between science and magic in the Perdido world. There is, categorically, by our standards, magic. What the vodyanoi do is magic, and the academic discipline called Thaumaturgy in the book is magic as we would understand it. But what I was trying to do was scientize magic so that within this world magic is basically another kind of energy. Magic has strange rules, but they are as exact and quantifiable as physical rules. So if you are a scientist in this world you might be a biologist, a physicist, or a thaumaturgist. Isaac dabbles in everything.
Cheryl: That sounds like a role-player’s view of magic. It is magic as a game system rather than a mystical force.
China: Well, maybe. I don’t have any problem with magic as a real force in my world. I would have trouble writing fantasy if I did. But I do have trouble with magic when it is just used to sidestep the narrative. You know, when you don’t know what to do you just throw in a bit of magic.
Cheryl: Does that mean that you don’t approve of the mythic style of fantasy writing?
China: Not entirely. In King Rat, for example, the characters are very much mythic. They are animal archetypes. I have no problem with that at all, though I find it hard to write that way. What I don’t like is when narrative is mythically structured. I think Neil Gaiman at his best undermines that very well. But it is one reason why I don’t like Lord of the Rings or the Narnia books. They have no sense of narrative as being an organic thing created by the actions of individual people. It is all predetermined.
Cheryl: Perdido Street Station has received a lot of praise. It has been one of the hot favourites for Britain’s two premier SF book awards . That’s quite an achievement for your second novel. That must be a bit scary.
China: I have been really stunned by the reaction, and very, very moved by it. It has been very literally beyond my wildest dreams. It has been a fantastic year, but it is frightening and it has made me very nervous about writing the new book.
Cheryl: Are you afraid that there will be some sort of backlash?
China: Ultimately one’s job as a writer is to keep readers turning the pages. I would be sad if people say, “oh he’s really lost it,” with the new one. But if they say, “well, it wasn’t as good as Perdido but I really enjoyed it all the same,” that’s OK.
Cheryl: The new book is called The Scar, and it is due out when?
China: I think it is due out February 2002.
Cheryl: In the U.K.?
China: Yes, but I think it is coming out pretty much the same time in the U.S.
Cheryl: Where do you see your career going from here?
China: There are specific books I want to write, and other projects I would like to pursue. One day I would very much like to draw a comic. I am a very slow artist, so it will take a long time, but I would like to do it. I would like to do more music too. But as long as I can make a living writing novels, there’s nothing I’d rather do.
Cheryl: The world of Perdido struck me very much as something that you might find in a comic strip in Heavy Metal.
China: I tend to think visually, and when I am writing something like Perdido, I tend to veer between graphic novel and film. The action scenes I tend to see very filmically. Descriptive scenes I tend to think of as long, bleak panels in a comic strip.
Cheryl: Do you have an interest in movies?
China: I would dearly love someone to turn King Rat into a film. Perdido would be much harder, but I think King Rat would work very well and without too much difficulty. I would love to act in film, but then who wouldn’t? I’m holding out for a part in Buffy.
Cheryl: China, thank you for talking to Strange Horizons.
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Cheryl Morgan is the editor of the online science fiction and fantasy book review magazine Emerald City.
Read the Strange Horizons review of Perdido Street Station.
Steganography: How to Send a Secret Message
By Bryan Clair
10/8/01
This may seem to be an ordinary beginning to an ordinary article. It is not. There’s a secret message hidden here, in this very paragraph. It’s not in view, and its source is modern. But the art of hiding messages is an ancient one, known as steganography. !—Yes, this is the secret message. Web documents can hide messages in a number of subtle ways. For example, put blank spaces at the end of each line, where the number of blank spaces encodes a letter. They won’t display on any browser.—
Steganography is the dark cousin of cryptography, the use of codes. While cryptography provides privacy, steganography is intended to provide secrecy. Privacy is what you need when you use your credit card on the Internet—you don’t want your number revealed to the public. For this, you use cryptography, and send a coded pile of gibberish that only the web site can decipher. Though your code may be unbreakable, any hacker can look and see you’ve sent a message. For true secrecy, you don’t want anyone to know you’re sending a message at all.
Early steganography was messy. Before phones, before mail, before horses, messages were sent on foot. If you wanted to hide a message, you had two choices: have the messenger memorize it, or hide it on the messenger. In fact, the Chinese wrote messages on silk and encased them in balls of wax. The wax ball, “la wan,” could then be hidden in the messenger.
Herodotus, an entertaining but less than reliable Greek historian, reports a more ingenious method. Histaeus, ruler of Miletus, wanted to send a message to his friend Aristagorus, urging revolt against the Persians. Histaeus shaved the head of his most trusted slave, then tattooed a message on the slave’s scalp. After the hair grew back, the slave was sent to Aristagorus with the message safely hidden.
Later in Herodotus’ histories, the Spartans received word that Xerxes was preparing to invade Greece. Their informant, Demeratus, was a Greek in exile in Persia. Fearing discovery, Demeratus wrote his message on the wood backing of a wax tablet. He then hid the message underneath a fresh layer of wax. The apparently blank tablet sailed easily past sentries on the road.
A more subtle method, nearly as old, is to use invisible ink. Described as early as the first century AD, invisible inks were commonly used for serious communications until WWII. The simplest are organic compounds, such as lemon juice, milk, or urine, all of which turn dark when held over a flame. In 1641, Bishop John Wilkins suggested onion juice, alum, ammonia salts, and for glow-in-the dark writing the “distilled Juice of Glowworms.” Modern invisible inks fluoresce under ultraviolet light and are used as anti-counterfeit devices. For example, “VOID” is printed on checks and other official documents in an ink that appears under the strong ultraviolet light used for photocopies.
During the American revolution, both sides made extensive use of chemical inks that required special developers to detect, though the British had discovered the American formula by 1777. Throughout World War II, the two sides raced to create new secret inks and to find developers for the ink of the enemy. In the end, though, the volume of communications rendered invisible ink impractical.
With the advent of photography, microfilm was created as a way to store a large amount of information in a very small space. In both world wars, the Germans used “microdots” to hide information, a technique which J. Edgar Hoover called “the enemy’s masterpiece of espionage.” A secret message was photographed, reduced to the size of a printed period, then pasted into an innocuous cover message, magazine, or newspaper. The Americans caught on only when tipped by a double agent: “Watch out for the dots—lots and lots of little dots.”
Modern updates to these ideas use computers to make the hidden message even less noticeable. For example, laser printers can adjust spacing of lines and characters by less than 1/300th of an inch. To hide a zero, leave a standard space, and to hide a one leave 1/300th of an inch more than usual. Varying the spacing over an entire document can hide a short binary message that is undetectable by the human eye. Even better, this sort of trick stands up well to repeated photocopying.
All of these approaches to steganography have one thing in common—they hide the secret message in the physical object which is sent. The cover message is merely a distraction, and could be anything. Of the innumerable variations on this theme, none will work for electronic communications because only the pure information of the cover message is transmitted. Nevertheless, there is plenty of room to hide secret information in a not-so-secret message. It just takes ingenuity.