Interview

David Louis Edelman: Wiping the Slate Clean

The wonderful Rob H. Bedford interviews Infoquakeand MultiRealauthor David Louis Edelman for SFFWorld today.

Loved this bit on worldbuilding:

Science Fiction is a language of mirrors by which we (readers and writers) can compare and contrast our own society and its problems. This is clearly the case with the Jump 225 trilogy, so when you created this future history, how necessary do you feel it was to sort of destroy everything and restart?

Wiping the slate clean with an Armageddon scenario five hundred years before the events of Jump 225 was really just a narrative trick. It enabled me to focus on the things I wanted to focus on — namely, software and business and sociology — and conveniently ignore the things I didn’t want to talk about. AIs? Boom! They were destroyed in the Autonomous Revolt. Nuclear weapons? Boom! Used in the Revolt and then subsequently abandoned. Cloning and genetic engineering? Same thing.

It’s one of the things science fiction and fantasy do really well. If I had set the Jump 225 trilogy in today’s world, I would have gotten sidetracked by lots of issues that I just didn’t feel like dealing with. It’s funny, but I think setting the books in an imaginary world allowed me to get a tighter focus on the real world.

And this bit made me laugh:

If you could take any pre-existing fictional character and plunk them into the events of the Jump 225 trilogy, who would it be?

Dr. Strange. He’s a guy who hops dimensions all the time. He ought to know how to handle MultiReal.

But you should read it all, right?

David Louis Edelman: Wiping the Slate Clean Read More »

An Interview with Robert Silverberg (by Jacinta Meyers)

Son of Manis a tour de force, a very powerful and provocative futuristic narrative that was first published in the early 1970s. There is much to be said of the influences and themes in it from that time period. I know I’ve discussed the sort of “new age” science fiction with Lou Anders, and this book could certainly be described in that category. The philosophy, history, sociology, and psychology woven into this book make it such a unique and intriguing gem.

The end of the 1960s was characterized by hippy and peace movements, free love, and racial and class struggles. I can see something of that in this book. I know that it ends with a Bible verse and certainly has a title with certain connotations, but reading this I was reminded of something out of Dante or of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 when Yossarian is entering Rome through successively alienated images and events. There was something of magical realism in this novel also, which is well suited to science fiction. Was it challenging to portray an alien Earth so far into the unforeseeable future?

Mr. Silverberg: It’s always a challenge to invent a far-future world. But this was a challenge I was glad to accept, because it allowed me such freedom of invention.

Was there a pattern in your conceptions about how humanity, or any other species for that matter, would evolve? Where did your chief inspirations come from?

Mr. Silverberg: I had no pattern in mind in the evolutionary conceptions. The book was intended as a dreamlike vision, a surreal portrait of the future, not as a scientific text. One of my chief inspirations was a book called A Voyage to Arcturusby David Lindsay, which has some of the same emphasis on color and free imagination. But mainly the imagery came from my own dreams. I found that I was actually dreaming scenes from the book each night; I jotted them down when I awoke and wrote them later in the day.

People have always been intrigued by the fact that man seems to be the only thinking, sentient creature in the universe. However, in the distant future of Son of Man, mankind shares its sentience with seemingly innumerous different creatures. I took this to be the quality of humanity shared by everyone. In many ways, this seems like part of an ideal vision for Earth. Do you think this is a possible concept, evolutionarily speaking, or was it merely a vehicle of symbolism?

Mr. Silverberg: Most of those creatures are, in the novel, described as direct descendants of man – our gene pool undergoing vast diversion over the eons to come. My intentions were literary, but I also think it’s a very possible concept: despite today’s current anti-scientific attitudes toward genetic manipulation, we are destined to see such vast changes in the physical form of the human race in the next five thousand years (let alone a couple of billlion!) that we would not be able to recognize our descendants as human.

Sex is still of some importance, mentally, emotionally, and symbolically in this future world. But there are exceedingly few instances of procreation; I recall the young of the ferret creature in the wild part of the underground city. The Skimmers, Interceders, Eaters, and so forth, all seem immortal (or at least capable of living long past our concepts of mortality). Is procreation something that has been lost by the sons of men?

Mr. Silverberg: Some sort of reproduction is probably still going on, since even long-lived people like those in my book are not truly immortal. But the normal life-span has become so long that procreation is minimal, just enough to continue the species.

The descriptions were exceedingly beautiful. In many places, you captured the tragedy of loss. I am thinking of the moments when Clay is mourning the triumphs of his species and how utterly they have vanished with time. Are these the things that you, as an accomplished author, feel are mankind’s greatest achievements?

Mr. Silverberg: Yes.

You have a long and illustrious career. Has the process and subject matter of writing changed for you over the years? Have your interests changed?

Mr. Silverberg: Not as much as one might think. The process of writing became much slower for me as the years went along, but my interests remain quite consistent.

Is there anything new coming up that we should look for on bookshelves soon?

Mr. Silverberg: I haven’t written a new novel in some years. I do have a pair of short stories coming up in anthologies edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.

John Picacio produced the cover artwork for this Pyr edition of Son of Man. We thought it suited the book well. How do you like it?

Mr. Silverberg: Very handsome. He’s a splendid artist.

I have heard many people say we are living in a strange age now. Son of Man is as relevant as ever for this reason. Do you have any words of wisdom to impart to sci-fi readers at this point in time?

Mr. Silverberg: No. Whatever wisdom I have available is to be found in my novels.

Thank you so much for participating in this interview, Mr. Silverberg! We appreciate the wonderful insight into the writer’s mind.

For more information on Robert Silverberg and this book, Son of Man, visit the Pyr page. Interview conducted by Jacinta Meyers.

An Interview with Robert Silverberg (by Jacinta Meyers) Read More »

SFX on How to Sell Your Fiction

I’m a big fan of Gollancz list (“Duh!” I hear you say, as Pyr shares quite a few authors in common with that wonderful UK imprint). Well, the folks at SFX have been running a series of interviews with authors, publishers, and editors on how to write and sell your fiction, and here they are interviewing Gollancz editor Gillian Redfearn and editorial director Simon Spanton, and here they are talking to editorial director Jo Fletcher.

Great advice in both interviews, and I’m down with all of it. Some of my favorite bits:

SFX: So what’s the most powerful lesson you’ve learned about the writing business in the time that you’ve been working in it?

Spanton: “Being good isn’t good enough – you have to be excellent or at the very least good and very different. The hardest rejections are when you are so close to being publishable you can smell it, but you have yet to take that final step. And the step you need to take may very well be different for each and every editor you send your work to.”

SFX: What’s the biggest mistake that inexperienced writers make when trying to get into the SF scene?

Fletcher: “Not reading enough, either in the genre or outside. If you don’t know what’s gone before, you don’t know what’s really an original idea. If you’ve not read much SF, you might think building an elevator to the moon is the coolest idea ever – and not realise that one of the world’s most successful SF writers ever had that particular idea 30 years ago – Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise was published in 1979… and Charles Sheffield’s first novel, The Web Between the Worlds, also published in 1979, features the building of a space elevator. Robert A Heinlein’s novel Friday, published in 1982, has a space-elevator type construct, the Nairobi Beanstalk, Larry Niven’s Rainbow Mars, a few years later, has a Hanging Tree, an organic Skyhook. So it doesn’t mean you can’t use that idea, but you do need to use it originally – and even if you’ve never read Fountains of Paradise, for example, you can bet your bottom dollar that a great many of your potential readers will have, and may well think you’re ripping off a master, even if you’re doing it unknowingly.”

SFX: Should an author be encouraged to write what they love, or what sells? Fantasy does well at the moment, so does that mean an aspiring author should keep his nose out of hard SF?

Redfearn: “Write what you love. If you don’t love it, why should anyone else?”

SFX on How to Sell Your Fiction Read More »

Edelman Interview

There’s an interview up with MultiRealauthor David Louis Edelman online at both Mike Brotherton’s blog and Simon Haynes’ blog.

Well worth checking out. Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt, apropos in light of my earlier post on conflating an author with his/her protagonist:

The political factions in the Jump 225 trilogy are divided between governmentalists and libertarians. If you were a character in the books, which would you be?

A lot of people who’ve read Infoquake assumed that my sympathies lie with the libertarians, because that’s where Natch’s sympathy lies. But I’m definitely more conflicted in my politics. I like to pick and choose among the different parties and philosophies. I have some definite liberal tendencies but a number of conservative ones as well.

You’ll discover in MultiReal that the political situation is much more nuanced than Natch makes it out to be in Infoquake. The central government, which really seems like the epitome of evil in Infoquake, is a conflicted organization itself with some do-gooders working in the fringes. And the libertarians are full of self-interested schemers who’ll stab you in the back.

Update 7/09/08: John Joseph Adams conducts another interview with Edelman over on the SciFi Channel’s Sci Fi Wire:

“In Infoquake, our hero, Natch, managed to connive his way into co-owning this mysterious new technology called MultiReal. Now, in the sequel, this all-powerful government agency called the Defense and Wellness Council decides that MultiReal is too dangerous to be left to an unscrupulous businessman, so they come after him with both barrels.”

Edelman Interview Read More »

Has It Really Been So Long Since "Who Shot JR" ?

The latest issue of Locus magazine has a review of David Louis Edelman’s just-released MultiReal,chocked full of good and quotable things like:

“As SF, it’s a brilliant imagining of a near-future that not only extrapolates convincingly from current technology and culture but fills in the gaps with world-building so detailed as to verge on the tedious.”

…and….

“Others have imagined a future in which nano-machines have colonized the human body, …but few have done so as convincingly as Edelman does in these books.”

…and…

‘Others have also focused on the business side of SF, …but I’ve never encountered an SF writer whose focus is so relentlessly on the nuts and bolts of the entrepreneurial world, from the boardroom to the factory to the sales office, and who—pontification aside—can make the minutiae of that world seem as exciting and dangerous as a military operation.”

But the reviewer does seem to have tripped up on the idea that because Dave’s character Natch is the protagonist that he is being held up as a laudable individual. As witness:

“I have no doubt that others will be enamored of a novel in which the main character is frequently referred to as ‘the entrepreneur,’ as if there were no higher accolade available, and no one else worthy to bear it. Whenever I came across this descriptor, I simply replaced it with ‘the demigod’ and read on.”

Mind you, I’m not arguing with the review – because it’s always a bad idea to contest someone else’s subjective opinion – and I’m plenty happy with the quotables above. I’m just interested in the notion of protagonist as role model because a few other people came away with similar sentiments from the first book. (I myself worked for someone very much like Natch once upon a time, and so had no trouble recognizing exactly what he was.) But I find myself wondering why we seem to have such a hard time with flawed protagonists in SF. Our sister genre, mystery, is practically built on the adventures of broken human beings you might want on your case but wouldn’t necessarily enjoy having a beer with, loaning money to, or dating.

Anyway, I find this amusing, given that Dave himself just compared Natch to Adolph Hitler here in his post on John Scalzi’s Whatever blog author spotlight, The Big Idea.

Has It Really Been So Long Since "Who Shot JR" ? Read More »

Kay Kenyon in the Wenatchee World

I love Kay Kenyon. In the past two days, I’ve been talking with a journalist at a major newspaper about “big idea” science fiction and with a major chain buyer about women who write science fiction (as opposed to fantasy), and I’ve been involved in a discussion of cover art with both said buyer and SFSignal, so how could Kay Kenyon’s name not come up in all of this? Beautifully written, mind-expanding sensawunder with cover illustrations to match.

Kay is interviewed by The Wenatchee World this week. And – lo and behold! – she’s talking about all three of these topics too! Speaking about the protagonist of A World Too Near,she says, “hes, he’s almost an antihero, in a way, because he has some bad-boy qualities, and he’s thumbing his nose to some extent at the status quo. Although I meant to suggest that he’s becoming seduced by the grace and the monumental scope of the Entire — and he’s in this dilemma of loving this new world, but realizing that he was too co-opted by it last time around. The last time he was there, he was a prince of the Demon City, if you will, and he has this guilt about that. Yet he can’t help himself that he loves it still. And that need to have redemption from past actions, and the love of the Entire — I think they fight with each other and make for an interesting internal story.”

Kay Kenyon in the Wenatchee World Read More »

Joe Shoots His Mouth Off

A great interview with Joe Abercrombie over on SF UK Book News. Even though it deals with the conclusion of The First Law trilogy, there’s no spoilers for us US folks. My favorite bit:

UKSFBN: Throughout The First Law you’ve taken great and deliberate delight in subtly subverting established fantasy conventions. Given that you freely confessed, last time you talked to us, to doing this on purpose, will you also admit to having increased the satire levels in the final volume, or has the trope-bashing been kept to a minimum this time around?

Joe Abercrombie: “The trope-bashing is certainly still going, more than ever in a way, since the trilogy is a single story and it perhaps diverges further and further from what the reader expects as we draw near to the end. Epic fantasy is a genre full of clichés, so you can’t really write in it without reacting to them yourself in some way – whether you embrace them, consciously reject them, or try to twist them to your own evil purposes.

“But, you know, for all the attempts to do something surprising and rework the formula and all that, I hope that what I’ve delivered first and foremost is a cracking fantasy tale. I’m aiming more for Unforgiven than for Blazing Saddles, if you like. A re-examination of the classic form, perhaps, a self-aware comment on it, perhaps, but also a solid example of the form. I’m not taking myself too seriously (despite appearances), but I’m not taking the piss either.

“Not too much, anyway.”

Joe Shoots His Mouth Off Read More »

A Place of Demons and Wonders

John Joseph Adams interviews Kay Kenyon on Sci Fi Wire about her latest book, A World Too Near.Kay describes her lead, Titus Quinn, as a “former starship pilot, and, against his will, former prince of a demon city. [It’s also] about Titus coming back to a place of demons and wonders–a pocket universe called the Entire–to redeem himself and save a lost daughter. The redemption involves a kind of labor of Hercules, the sort of mythic thing you can never really expect to pull off. He has to bring down a 100,000-year-old castle belonging to the masters of the universe.”

Hey, I’d read that (if I hadn’t already)!

A Place of Demons and Wonders Read More »

Scroll to Top