Sebastian Faulks: “The last human species did not need to be as violent and intelligent as us” | Sebastien Faulks

Your new novel, The Seventh Son, begins with an experience at an IVF clinic that pushes the boundaries of scientific knowledge and ethics. What made you take up this subject??
It’s something that’s been on my mind since I wrote Human Traces, when I did a lot of research on genetics, evolution, and the roots of mental illness. Then, around 2010, it was discovered that most people in the world had some degree of Neanderthal in their genome. I found that rather exciting. And then, about three years ago, I read a tweet from Richard Dawkins, imagining some sort of genetic engineering experiment. And I thought maybe that could be the basis of a story.

The Seventh Son explores what it means to be human and what we are capable of as a species. Do you think we are today at a crucial moment in history?
The older you get, the more you read that we are in “an unprecedented time of this or that”. Of course, there has always been a precedent. But it is clear that there are very big scientific developments, including the discovery of new species of human ancestors. I hope this will give people a better understanding of the relatively insignificant role that modern humans have to play in the world and the fact that we are just a very random endpoint of human kind. It could so easily have been otherwise. The last remaining human species didn’t need to be as extreme, as violent, or even as intelligent as we are. And I think it would be a good idea if we understood a little better what a particularly bizarre species we are and the responsibilities that come with that. Neanderthals lived for about 300,000 years and I don’t think we’ll get there. We will destroy the world before that.

The book takes place between 2030 and 2056, which is a bit of a departure for you…
I had fun thinking about some of the changes that will happen between now and 2056, especially in the area of ​​transportation. I tried to create the future world with a very light touch; I don’t want the reader to think we’re in Blade Runner country. I have to finish the so-called Austrian trilogy [Human Traces and Snow Country] following. I have another vague idea, but it’s a bit elegiac, a bit end-of-life, so I’m not sure I really want to write it. But I’m also pretty excited about the future. It’s really liberating. I never considered myself a historical novelist, nor do I consider The Seventh Son pure science fiction. I just see stories set in different decades.

In the novel, the characters wear “personal identity maps”, which record their “points of intersection”. How does identity politics affect your work?
One of the benefits of setting the book in the future is that it’s a world where people aren’t particularly obsessed with these things anymore – which can be a rather optimistic or utopian hope. I really wanted people to not see what is a big, high-level question of identity in the novel with the rather narrow focus that we’re putting on identity right now.

What kind of research did you do?
I had three technical advisers – a geneticist, an embryologist and an anthropologist. I also visited a fertility clinic, which was great; In fact, I used the machine that sends the little sperm down the pipe. There was nothing in it; I did not cause a conception!

How did you decide how to present the science?
It’s still incredibly difficult. I remember discussing my latest book, Snow Country, at a festival and saying, “Well, that was very difficult. [researching it]: I couldn’t go to Vienna at all because of the lockdown…” And a guy in the audience said, “Why would you bother? Is your reader interested in the direction in which buses used the Ringstrasse in 1910? Invent it, we believe you! So there is this output. But there is a professional pride and there is also a “wow” in all of this. I just wanted to share things that people would find exciting.

There are three very different sex scenes in this novel. I won the Bad Sex reward in 1998 for a scene in Charlotte Gray encourage you to approach their writing differently?
No, that was just nonsense. My take on sex scenes has always been that there’s absolutely no point in depicting two human beings having sex, because everyone knows what’s going on. It must tell you something that you could only find out this way. A sex scene in The Seventh Son, set on a Scottish island, was tricky. But I took a lot of advice from my [female] editor, which helped.

Some readers know you for your books on James Bond, Jeeves and Wooster, and for your Pistachio parodies [from the Radio 4 series The Write Stuff]. How does writing parody and pastiche improve on your usual writing?
I think parodies force you to focus really hard on how sentences work. On The Write Stuff, we’d do someone like Jackie Collins, [in whose writing] everything is completely superlative. “She’s the hottest pool boy in Bel Air…She’s got the biggest tits this side of the Rocky Mountains.” With a parody, you discover the style of the writer and you write 150%. With the Bond novel, I wrote about 75 or 80 percent Fleming. Otherwise, we fall into pastiche and a thriller, we have to be serious. People have to be happy.

You’ve sometimes been called a novelist of the state of the nation, but you’re more of a novelist of the state of the species, aren’t you?
I like this. Looking back, I think my first books are those of a young writer who confronts the world and asks himself: “Why is the world at war? Why is it so violently divided into different ideologies? It is an attempt to understand who we are. And then I started to think about why we are such a strange creature. The Seventh Son fits into this theme. If there is a moral in this, it is that we must be aware of our hostility towards otherness. But despite all the really big scientific and philosophical preoccupations, it has thriller elements – at least, it ends with some sort of chase – and it’s much more heavily plot-driven than most of my books. Comedy bits kept coming – and I let them in.

• The Seventh Son is out September 7 by Hutchinson Heinemann (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy from Guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.