Mike Collins:The Digital Plague picks up several years after the conclusion of The Electric Church. What's happened to Avery Cates in that six or seven years?

Jeff Somers: Oh, the usual: Drinking tea, writing haikus about flowers, and asasinating police—the sort of thing every desperate career criminal does after receiving nearly unlimited wealth and a cleared police file for services rendered. That and creating a first-rate criminal organization in Manhattan, thus making himself a minor criminal deity, and as a side project (with his colleague Wa Belling) assassinating as many corrupt System Police as possible.
Avery is a pretty bitter guy by the end of the first book, and he's trying to take revenge against The System as a whole and the System Security Force in particular.I imagine that by the beginning of The Digital Plague Avery is just starting to realize that even with the immense wealth and power he's achieved, he's still just a speck in The System and all his efforts are just annoyances to someone like Richard Marin.

Mike Collins: This is your first sequel right? How was that experience different from writing The Electric Church?

Jeff Somers: First sequel, yes. On the one hand, there was a lot more freedom. I'd spent a lot of time on TEC, revising the same story over and over again. A sequel gave me the opportunity to take the universe and characters I loved and do anything I wanted with them. On the other hand, the publisher really wanted this book and pressured me subtly to deliver it,things like kidnapping my pets, sending men to break my legs, and, once,burning down my house. My Corporate Masters are terrifying folks,really.

On the other, otherhand, a sequel is an opportunity to let the universe you've created evolve. I don't like it when books in a series exist in a static world where all the basics stay the same. The real world doesn't stay static. So the sequel was a great, exciting opportunity to start tearing things down a little, remaking the universe I'd created.

Mike Collins: Avery, as usual, starts out in trouble. For a character you claim to love you sure beat the hell out of him...

Jeff Somers: Hey, he's in a hard line of work. I became a writer mainly to avoid beatings and nano plagues and guns pushed into my ears, you know? Also because I can do my work sitting in a comfortable chair with a nice drink in hand, instead of running through sewers. Plus, it's fun to run your characters through the mill. Misery is interesting.

Part of this may also be my moral compass I've created a character who kills people, who physically assaults people when annoyed, who has stepped over the bodies of friends in order to save himself — albeit, perhaps, regretfully. Then I went ahead and made him kind of fun and charming.It feels good on some primitive level to then smack Avery in the head with a lead pipe. It feels like the Literary Lead Pipe of Justice.

Mike Collins: Infecting your hero with a nanotech virus designed to murder the world is an interesting plot device. How did you come up with the basic plot?

Jeff Somers: This is an idea I've had for a while, a technology designed to mimic a natural vector. I was playing with the ideas of macro versus micro threats to survival: Societies have pretty good reactions to macro threats, like invading armies or terrorists or a nut with a gun on a clock tower (not always effective reactions, but organized reactions, you know?). But when the threat is individual, it can fly under society's radar for a while. You see someone getting sick and while you might have empathy for them or try to help them, it also seems very much their problem. By the time it's apparent that the threat is widespread or even global, it can be too late.

Thinking on that, I wondered,if I were a futuristic technological genius trying to destroy the world and remake it in my own horrible image, flying under the radar for a while would be a very good idea.

Mike Collins: Outside of New York, we also get to travel to Newark and Paris. Neither are exactly tourist destinations. Most of the settings in Avery's stories are pretty bleak. Are there parts of his world that aren't quite so dark?

Jeff Somers: Of course. You do see some glimpses of that world in The Digital Plague, I think. But Avery doesn't travel to those parts much, despite his wealth. He's limited by his worldview; the man gets itchy whenever he thinks he's out of his element. Also, the story, by design, moves pretty fast so there wasn't room to explore further.

There are areas of The System where people are fairly well off and fairly happy—because they are completely assimilated into the world, cogs in the machine. They serve The System and are rewarded for it, and most of them would be unaware of how miserable the vast proportion of the population is. They would think of themselves as normal, law-abiding citizens, and their spheres would be pretty happy ones. At least until the plague came to town, or people like Avery.

Mike Collins: Switching things up, this book features Avery thrown in with a group of SSF Stormers. Was it fun making him a fish out of water?

Jeff Somers: You bet. Here's a man who's not just a criminal—and a fairly famous one but a criminal who's well-known as a cop-killer, being carried around like luggage by the police. I think the sequences with Cates and the cops also demonstrates how similar they really are, in many ways, which was really fun for me to work with.

Mike Collins: Aside from several returning characters from The Electric Church, we get a whole new cast in the sequel. Can you talk a little bit about the two major new characters, Happling and Colonel Hense?

Jeff Somers: I love these two, to be honest. I really enjoyed having some System Police along for the whole ride to get into their heads a little, and I love the contrast between Happling, who's a gorilla of a man with a temper so volatile you wonder that he doesn't have six or seven strokes a day, and Hense, who looks like she'd be small and weak, and yet is pretty firmly the one in charge. I liked the implication that in the System Security Force, the chain of command really means something.

I have to admit, having Happling be at near-stroke levels of rage for most of the book was also a lot of fun.

Mike Collins: Something that gets mentioned a few times throughout the book and especially plays a part at the end is Chengara. What exactly is that?

Jeff Somers: Chengara is a System Penitentiary. We're going to spend a bit of time there in the next book, and that's all I can say right now.

Mike Collins: One of the things I really enjoyed with both of the Avery Cates books is how you name each chapter with a phrase that appears in it. Why did you decide to go that route?

Jeff Somers: Frankly, it's fun. I like the foreshadowing, especially when I manage to pick a phrase that ends up meaning something different from what your first expectation might be.

Mike Collins: The Digital Plague has a wide open ending. Can we expect to see more of Avery Cates in the future?

Jeff Somers: Well, I've got the third book almost ready right now. Beyond that, it's hard to say at the moment—I think poor Avery's got a lot more stories in him, but there's a lot of daylight between that and actual books, you know? Beyond the third one—The Eternal Prison—nothing is certain, though I'd love to find the time to write more about this world.

Mike Collins: Do you envision staying with sci fi or do you want to give other genres a shot?

Jeff Somers: I work in a variety of genres. My short fiction has been all over the place (you can see http://www.innerswine.com/oldfic.html for an overview of my published stories) and my first novel, Lifers, was more or less mainstream. I'm planning to work in all sorts of forms and categories, if anyone is, you know, willing to pay me to publish them.

Mike Collins: Writing isn't a full time occupation for you. What kind of work do you do as a day job, and how if any does that impact on your writing career?

Jeff Somers: I'm an editor. I work on unexciting technical and academic books. When I started in this career approximately seventy years ago, my boss told me "No one chooses to work in technical publishing. We all just fall into it." What happened, of course, was that after five wonderful years
lazing around college as an English Major, the idea of actually working for a living horrified me, so I took the lowest-paying job that utilized and required only my word skills, which meant I could do the job half asleep.

Mike Collins: Is it hard to balance out both careers?

Jeff Somers: Only occasionally. For many years, of course, I had very few paying gigs and all my writing was at my own pace and mainly for my own eyes, so if I had a long day at work that precluded writing or a few weeks of being extraordinarily busy, it was no big deal. Now that I have actual deadlines and contractual obligations, sometimes it gets a little hairy.

Mike Collins: Do you ever envision a time when you would be able to just write full time? Is that something you even want to do, or do you prefer being able to write what and how you want?

Jeff Somers: Do I envision it? I envision it constantly. In my vision I am wearing a purple robe made of something very soft and comfortable and carrying a scepter of some sort. When I wave the scepter, beer appears on the table before me. In the afternoons I lounge on a hammock in the back and dictate some brilliancies to my unpaid secretary, who volunteers to work for me because of my recognized genius.

Wait, I blacked out for a moment...

I wouldn't want to write for a living in the sense of being paid to
write specific things, except in very limited circumstances. For
example, I write a regular column for Brutarian Magazine for American cash money, but the subject of the column is all up to me, so I can just do what I like. If I could get paid for doing stuff like that, and for writing books and stories as I feel like it, then, huzzah, let's do it. But I wouldn't want to write what others tell me to. I'd prefer to work the day job, to be honest.

Now, ask me if I want some Hollywood fool to pay me for film rights to "The Electric Church" so I can fill my bathtub with hundred dollar bills and lay around until the pressure sores become intolerable, and I'd say, sure, why not.

Mike Collins: What else do you have coming up Jeff?

Jeff Somers: Aside from working on the third Avery Cates novel, I'll be appearing on
the Joey Reynolds radio show (710 AM, WOR; at 1AM on May 12th (technically
the morning of May 13th) and I'll be reading at the KGB Bar in Manhattan on August 20th as part of the Fantastic Fiction Series run by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel. If you're in the area, come on by and accost me. I enjoy it.