Duncan Sarkies’ latest novel, Star Gazers, is about the collapse of democracy in a society of alpaca breeders. Here are some things his intensive research revealed.
1 How greed works, psychologically
Yes, I guess I already understood greed, but I could never understand why people who already have everything they could ever need crave more. Jeff Bezos would probably like to expand Amazon even more, Zuckerberg wants to grow beyond the limitations of governments, Google wants to be the platform we use more than our own brains, Elon Musk wants to destroy everything so that he can save it again, and along the way he wants ownership of all the systems that we now rely on thanks to people like him.
What motivates these people? It’s hard to relate as a human that struggles to pay for basic things, but there is something awful about the human condition that makes us focus on what we don’t have: to strive for what we don’t need, blind to others who need much, much more.
Why do people who have everything always want more?
2 The noise a male alpaca makes when mating
It’s called orgling and I have had many excitable alpaca breeders demonstrate it to me. Which is more terrifying? The alpaca making the sound or the humans imitating it with such gusto? (That’s an easy answer by the way. Humans are infinitely more terrifying than any other animal).
3 How to have a more comfortable relationship with time
I’m impatient. I didn’t want writing a novel to involve hard work or a length of time beyond, say, a couple of years. Ha! Like the Bowie song, Five years, stuck in my eyes, five years, what a surprise, five years, my brain hurts a lot…
4 Sunk cost fallacies can lead to a certain form of pride (Related to point 3)
5 Berserk Male Syndrome is a thing
It’s a condition that commonly occurs when an alpaca is brought up by a human and starts thinking of itself as human. As it grows it challenges humans the way it would challenge other alpacas in the herd. Where does this lead? Spitting, chest-butting, anti-social behaviours that result in ostracism from the herd. Berserk Male Syndrome is also a thing in humans, but we knew that already.
6 Writing an allegory is challenging when the world moves so fast
I started writing near the end of Trump’s first presidency. Then came Covid. The world threatened to rally around, the environment threatened to recover, it seemed people might learn to be kind to each other, to look out for those more in need. But that didn’t happen, did it?
7 People should take laughter more seriously
If you can make people laugh, that doesn’t mean you don’t have something to say, something to explore. When Stanley Kubrick wrote Dr Strangelove, he chose comedy over other genres, because it had the power to relax its audience and then deliver a sucker-punch. People often ignore comedy’s worth, underestimate what it is doing, the craft of it, the potential of it to be persuasive, to reveal absurdities, to examine dogmas without becoming a boring lecture. Or the other thing happens (see point 8).
8 People want to put things in boxes
They want to describe exactly what something is and they don’t want that thing to misbehave and be more than one thing. I was toying with calling my novel a satire. I got told that a satire had to be funnier than what I had written. Then I got told a satire doesn’t have to be funny. Should I call what I have written a satire? Would that make people more comfortable? We have a generation coming through that are fighting those boxes with regard to gender, and they are right to do it, but in art why is it becoming harder to be genre-fluid?
9 Alpacas are intelligent, and alpacas are stoic
I laughed when an alpaca breeder told me the stoic thing. But they are; they hide pain. They adapt. They carry on. They ruminate (something more of us should take up) and they look out for each other, except for when they are having their squabbles. Can I say these same qualities apply to humans? Well, yes I can, but not all humans.
10 Democracy is fragile
11 Revenge is a dish best served acrid, and very, very cold
For more on that one, read my novel.
Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies ($38, Te Herenga Waka University Press) launches in Wellington on Tuesday February 18, 6pm at Meow; and is available to purchase from Unity Books.