Your Mom's Basement

November 07, 2007

Interview with Josh Conviser

Empyre is your second novel. How did the process work for you the second time around? Were there any changes to the way you worked?

As far as the actual act of writing, I try to keep it the same. I get up early, brew up about a gallon of coffee and start writing before self-doubt can creep in. My office is just big enough for a chair, desk, computer and me. I settle in, pump up the music on my headphones and write for at least three hours.

I don’t know about other writers, but my choice of music really impacts the tone of what I’m writing. Here were some of my favorites while writing EMPYRE. As you’ll see, it’s pretty eclectic: Massive Attack – Mezzanine, Zero 7 – Simple Things, David Gilmour – On an Island, Philip Glass’s Violin Concertos, Vartina – a band from Finland, The Duhks, DJ Z-Trip. There’s also a DJ named Michael Smith in LA whose tracks are great.

Mentally, writing EMPYRE was a new experience. With ECHELON, there was no pressure; I just wanted to see if I could write a novel. With EMPYRE, there were more expectations. But I hope those expectations made EMPYRE a better book.

When Empyre opens it's been five years since the conclusion of Echelon. What's happened to Ryan and Sarah's world in that time?

EMPYRE starts where most sci-fi ends: Big Brother is dead and freedom reigns. The question that drives EMPYRE is – what happens the next day? How would society react to its newfound freedom? And how about Ryan and Sarah – the two responsible for this massive shift in world affairs? What happens to them?

At the end of ECHELON, Ryan and Sarah took down a system of total information control. Now, five years later the world is reeling from the loss. EMPYRE opens on a reality that looks much like ours. There’s a lot of fear, confusion and chaos. As for Ryan and Sarah, neither has reacted well to the world they created.

So, to answer your question, EMPYRE starts with the chaotic reality behind Echelon’s “happily-ever-after” finale. From there, I tried to create a mile-a-minute thrill ride, incorporating the best of sci-fi and spy thrillers. EMPYRE’s got wild technology, a behind the scenes peek into the future of espionage, and a plot that, hopefully, will keep you guessing.

I should also say that EMPYRE is a stand alone novel. No need to read ECHELON to enjoy EMPYRE. The two books compliment, but don’t depend on, each other.

Both transhumanism and singularity factor into Empyre as themes. For people unfamiliar with those terms could you explain them and how they fit into your story?

Both concepts lie at the basis of EMPYRE. But, before I get into them, I should say that EMPYRE is written to be fast and fun. The “deeper” themes serve as a backdrop for the story.

Now, into those themes… Transhumanism deals with the ever-increasing integration between man and machine. It looks at the consequences of our interaction with technology. Many feel that this integration will be a boon for humanity, and many feel that it will lead to disaster.

The Singularity is related to this integration, and to the general progress of technology. There are many definitions for the Singularity, but I think of it as the point where we can no longer predict the future based on the past. Due to advances in technology, our existence shifts to the point where it becomes something completely new.

How does all this relate to my books? ECHELON deals with a world on the edge of the Singularity. The Singularity has been held back by a system of total information control. Once that restraint is gone, the rate of progress goes exponential, driving the world to the Singularity’s tipping point. EMPYRE looks at what may happen as the world teeters over that point.

As to transhumanism, Ryan is the first true cyborg – a total integration of man and machine. There’s a lot in sci-fi about cyborgs, but usually from the perspective of a far future where the character is totally comfortable with such a situation. Ryan isn’t that guy. He’s the test case, the guinea pig. As such, his experience and evolution are rocky to say the least. The technology within him offers power, but comes at a price.

All of this lies underneath EMPYRE’s story, creating the world in which my characters operate. And while it may seem like a far future scenario, I think we’ll deal with many of these issues in our lifetime. The rate of progress continues to increase. As such, EMPYRE looks at a future that may not be that far off.

Sarah Peters takes on a much more direct role in Empyre. She has become a biomechanical junkie in a sense in that she continues to upgrade herself. Why did you decide to alter her character so drastically?

I’m not sure her character is altered; EMPYRE just continues her story. Sarah has tremendous inner strength. In ECHELON, she was a far stronger person than Ryan. She buoyed him. Events in EMPYRE test her strength and push her right up to the breaking point.

Neither Ryan nor Sarah begin EMPYRE in the best of conditions. Both are traumatized by the chaos around them – chaos they caused. How each deals with that trauma differs.

Ryan removes himself from the world. Sarah plunges back into it. Her interaction with technology gets wrapped up in the psychological issues she’s dealing with. I think that as we internalize technology, such a condition will become more and more common. The way we see ourselves will shift with the technology we develop – a fact that’s both exciting and terrifying.

You also introduce the gleefully foulmouthed CIA agent Frank Savakis. Where did Frank come from?

Glad you mention him; he’s a favorite of mine. Frank was inspired by a couple real people from the world of espionage. In Frank, I was trying to create a counterpoint to Ryan – a guy who is boisterous and crude, but also a true believer. While Ryan has lost the faith that drove him through most of his life, Frank hasn’t. He’s fully committed to his country and to what the CIA is doing in EMPYRE. That clarity of purpose both makes him powerful and narrows his vision. For much of the story, Ryan envies Frank’s faith.

Empyre continues the extremely visual setting from Echelon. Do you just let your imagination run wild or do you try to have basis in reality?

I loved the idea of Manhattan protected by a surge wall that doubles as a surveillance platform, a floating city/state and a hovering hospital airship.

I’d say EMPYRE is a combination of reality and imagination. I’m fascinated by the impact of technology on our lives. As such, everything I write has its basis in reality. I spend a lot of time researching what’s on the cutting edge to come up with my possible future. On my website (www.joshconviser.com) I outline some of the actual technology that inspired EMPYRE.

I really got into conceiving a possible future for Manhattan. I’ve spent a lot of time in the city and always find it slightly claustrophobic. Adding the surge wall you mention only heightens that sense. Then I amped even that by making Manhattan into a reverse Panopticon. I’m fascinated by the idea of living under an invisible, omniscient eye – of never knowing if you’re being watched – and thus having to assume that you’re under constant surveillance. How would such a state shift life in a city?

It’s something we’re all going to have to deal with as we move into the future. Like it or not, eavesdropping - be it by the government or the private sector - is only going to increase. I’m interested in how this will impact our experience of the world.

Ryan Laing continues to gain more control over his drones and he becomes something pretty amazing at the end of Empyre. Do you ever worry about creating a hero who might be too powerful?

Of course. In Ryan, I’m looking to create a bad ass – next century’s Bond or Bourne. But, he also needs to have the weaknesses and frailties (both physical and mental) that make him human. In EMPYRE, Ryan’s integration with the technology inside him becomes more complete, but new threats also come up that drastically impair his abilities. I made sure the threats in EMPYRE equaled Ryan’s abilities.

We learn that Empyre was created to be a more direct and violent method of controlling the world from Laing's mentor Christopher Turing. Empyre also created an opposite number to Laing in Alfred Krueger. When you began working on Ryan's story did you already have this planned out?

I had the general idea that Ryan would have an opposite with the same goal. That said, Krueger took a long time to develop. I’m a little hesitant to talk about him too much as I don’t want to ruin the suspense of the book. But suffice it to say that I’ve been pondering Krueger for years and I’m thrilled with how he turned out.

Ryan is forced with a horrific choice. He can either save the woman he loves or stop a madman who is planning to send the world down a path it might not recover from. Why not give him a little more to do?

That’s not enough?!

I love the intensity offered in both sci-fi and spy thrillers. The scope of decisions a character can be forced into within these genres can be monumental. My method is to create characters I understand personally, then throw them into situations far beyond any experience I’ll ever have and see how they react.

The ending of Empyre is powerful. Is it safe to assume that you are going to come back with a third book in the Ryan Laing series?

I always saw the Laing series in three parts. There’s a lot more to tell with Ryan. He’s not done yet…

You have coined the phrase "spy-fi" to describe your books. What can you say about this style?

EMPYRE is a near future spy thriller. It’s part Orwell, part William Gibson, part Robert Ludlum. I didn’t set out to write a genre buster; the ideas behind the series just led me down that path. That said, I think the sci-fi and spy thriller genres compliment each other in that they both offer a fresh angle from which to see our world. Sci-fi looks at our world through its possible future. Spy thrillers look at it through the filter of a clandestine reality lying underneath. Combining the two gave me a great foundation to develop a driving, exciting story with room for some deeper ideas.

Ryan and his world seem tailor made for comics. Have you given any thought to the possibility of exploring that medium?

I have. It’s in the works.

This summer you were part of a panel at the San Diego Comicon. What was that experience like?

It was great. I love Comicon. It’s a trip. And my panel included two of my heroes: David Morrell (Rambo) and Richard K. Morgan (Altered Carbon). One of the great parts of being writer is getting to meet other writers whose work I admire.

What else are you working on?

I’m working on two television series – one set in the world of espionage and one in my home town of Aspen, Colorado. I’m working on a feature called Inferno, which is a modern day adaptation of Dante’s poem set in Vegas. I’m producing a CGI Animation film for Fox. And, with EMPYRE on the shelves, I guess there’s no excuse not to get started on the next book!

Posted by YourMomsBasement at 12:00 PM

October 17, 2007

Interview with Jeff Somers

by Mike Collins

1. For people unfamiliar with you can you give us a little background on who you are?

I'm always tempted to make up a fake life when I get this sort of question--it seems the perfect spot to make myself mysterious and interesting. Except then I'd lose track of the web of lies and make a fool of myself, and no one wants that, although it would be entertaining.

I was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, played a lot of stickball (badly) and learned lots of Spanish curses from my neighbors (now largely forgotten). Went to public grammar school and private Jesuit high school, where I lost religion. Then a few listless years at Rutgers University getting a largely useless English degree (but damn I had fun) and then. . .well, like most people, there follows a long period spent at a white-collar job wherein nothing much happened.

I started publishing my own zine, The Inner Swine (www.innerswine.com), in 1995 and I'm closing in on the 50th issue. At its height TIS had a circulation of about 1000 and had national and international distribution, believe it or not. These days we're down to about 200 and almost all our distribution is out of business.

I'm happily married with three cats living in Hoboken, NJ, which means I made it about 5 minutes from the exact spot of my birth. I'm strangely proud of that.

2. The Electric Church is a very different book from your previous novel Lifers. Why did you decide to write a science fiction novel?

Sci Fi came first, actually. When I was a kid I read pretty much any mass market paperback with a Darryl K. Sweet cover Del Rey Books could push into the bookstore, and all my early work (meaning when I was 11-18 years old) was Fantasy or Sci Fi. The original version of The Electric Church was written in 1990 or so.

Then I started reading more broadly and my writing followed; Lifers was written in 1997 and eventually published in 2001. You can now buy a copy for a penny on Amazon. Go ahead! It might be fun.

3. The world of "The Electric Church" is interesting. There aren't any seperate countries. Everything is under one unified System. Can you give us a primer on this world and how it comes to be?

Hmmmn...I could, but I purposefully left that murky in the story. I hate it when stories have their characters lecturing on and on about how the world got to be the way it is--it's like Broadway Musicals: No One Behaves that Way. I mean, the USSR dissolved not so long ago and changed the world I live in, but I do not go around pondering it in any detail, if at all, and it never comes up in casual conversation. So why should my characters spend half the book teaching you what happened in the world?

And I *like* that. It leaves a lot of the pieces up to the reader. There'll be clues, snippets here and there, but it's up to the reader to figure out what happened, or invent what happened. Too much information or explanation works against the story.

But here's the short version: The world unified under a single government, theoretically via treaty and agreement in the sense that no war was fought, but it sparked worldwide resistance--riots, revolts, etc. Almost as soon as it was formed the unified world was on the verge of collapsing, and in desperation The System Security Force was formed, funded, and given a very loose and wide charter. The SSF--the System Cops--brutally restored order and have kept the System of Federated Nations secure ever since.

4. Obviously TEC is set in a dystopian future as others have mentioned. What is the allure of using a broken world as a setting?

I just posted about this on my blog, actually--the thing is, utopias or even balanced worlds are *dull*. Just as happy people are dull. Pain, suffering, rot and brokenness are *interesting*. Your characters have to have something to strive against, and with a broken world there's just endless opportunities to explore dark, rotten areas.

5. The hero of TEC is one Avery Cates. A Gunner, a muderer and an all around bad guy. Except he lives by a code that sometimes seems to get in the way of his chosen profession. He's also pretty funny. What can you say about Avery?

I love Avery. I love beating him up, smacking him into walls, shooting him, and breaking his heart. Avery would be an accountant or a mechanic in a sane, peaceful world, but to survive in his insane, unstable one he's learned the profession of violence, and learned to repress his gag reflex, but he still hates it on some level--and yet enjoys being a bully, on another. I think that's the allure of the character--he feels bad about being a bad man, but he glories in the power being a bad man grants him.

6. One thing I noticed early on is that you mention to certain major events, like the riots, but offer little detail. Why did you decide to go this route?

See my answer above--this was a conscious decision.

7. Did you intend for the book to be sort of a social commentary about the haves and have nots? I found Avery refering to himself as "old" at 27 and meaning it, to be pretty telling. To him someone in their 50's is ancient. Avery talks about the lack of healthcare for the poor throughout the book...

Not a commentary, really, as to have commentary you need a POV and a purpose. The world is envisioned as nightmare version of where the world might be heading--economic collapse on a global scale, with the world split between those who have power and money and the 99% of the world who don't. Of those 99%, a small number can aspire to be cops or elite service workers of some sort, but for the most part people are living grinding lives of desperation.

Avery's age and his obsession with it is one of the ways I introduced clues to the world's condition without going into info-dumps or soliloquies. He's 27, refers to himself as old, and whenever he encounters someone older than about 30 he's shocked and amazed. There're also some small references to children being as much of a threat as adults. The idea is definitely that lifespans have shortened, due to living conditions, starvation, lack of healthcare. But again, it's never stated explicitly.

8. You have created some terrifying villians in the Monks themselves. Particularly one that has a score to settle with Avery, Barnaby Dawson. What can you tell us about the Monks themselves?

They're happy fellows, for the most part, singing songs of fellowship in the streets and dancing a little soft-shoe...

The idea for a Monk stemmed from a bit in Douglas Adams' "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" wherein an Electric Monk, a labor-saving device that believed things for you, malfunctioned and started believing wild, crazy things. Like almost everything I read, I started to think immediately on how to steal this great idea, and after an evening spent drinking Peach Schnapps I decided that what the Monk needed was more murderous intent, crazy pseudo-religious babbling, and weaponry.

9. You have also created a wildly memorable character in "King Worm" Richard Marin, head of Internal Affairs. Marin shines through as someone not thrilled about the current system he's one of the top dogs in. Where did he come from?

That's a harder question. This was one of those times when your subconscious plays tricks on you. From the get-go Marin was odd, though I didn't decide on his actual nature until the story was close to completion, at which time it became perfectly obvious and, having been filtered through my booze-soaked brain, pure genius.

Marin's sort of the perfect bureaucrat in a way. Always smiling, always a little bit "off" so you can't feel comfortable with him, always holding the power of life and death in his cold, strangely dry hands. He actually may be my favorite character in the whole book, and someday we'll see more of him.

10. At the end of TEC, you note that Avery Cates will return in "The Digital Plague". What can you say about your next book?

The Digital Plague should be out in May/June of next year, actually. Let's just say that if you think Avery Cates gets his butt kicked in TEC, you will be weeping for him in TDP.

There's a background story about the universe Cates exists in, of course--I don't see it as a static world where it'll always be the same, things are shifting. Again, a lot of it is in the background and has to be sussed out, but big things are coming, and a lot of the transition is in this second book.

11. Your book was chosen as one of the launch titles for Orbit in the US. What's that been like?

Well, it's interesting to have so much publishing muscle behind you. My last book was published by the tiniest of tiny publishers and the marketing team was me, my wife, and my Mom. Things went about as well as you can imagine.

Everyone is so excited about Orbit entering the US market--I've literally have people go from Listening Politely to Rabidly Interested in my book just because they hear that Orbit's publishing it. To have that kind of clout behind you is intoxicating, and I've started walking about with a crown and a T-shirt that says KING OF ALL SPEC FIC. Is that wrong?

12. What's reaction to TEC been like so far? After reading it I was happy that someone had pointed it out to me. I think it's the kind of book that fans of writers like Richard Morgan and Jon Courtney Grimwood would enjoy.

Mainly it's been very positive--which is amazing. And the interaction with people who have read it is amazing. This new Internet world we live in is great--there was a time when if you wanted to contact an author you could either send a letter to their publisher and probably get a form letter in response, or you could do your detective work, track down their house, and get arrested. Nowadays you just send an email and BAM! You can actually get into a conversation. Having someone email me that they read my book and loved it--and that person not be my Mom--is absolutely amazing.

When I was a kid and I wanted to contact an author, it was just about impossible. This year, when Scott Turow picked my story "Ringing the Changes" for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories, I was able to glean his email from his web site and send him a thank you note, to which he responded. If that ain't progress, I don't know what is.

13. Aside from your next book what else can people expect from you Jeff?

Well, I have a short story appearing in the upcoming issue of GUD Magazine (www.gudmagazine.com) and a story appearing in the debut issue of the newly revived magazine The Whirligig (www.whirligigzine.com) which will be bowing at World Fantasy Con in November.

I'll also be attending World Fantasy Con, so if you're going, come by and buy me a drink. Or two.

And there's always a new issue of The Inner Swine on the horizon--our motto is "Misinformed Opinion. . .Bad poetry. . .STYLE."

Posted by YourMomsBasement at 12:00 PM

October 03, 2007

Baltimore, or the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire Review

by Mike Collins

If there is one think Mike Mignola is good at it's creating an atmosphere of gothic horror. With his new joint effort with novelist Christopher Golden he takes the dial and cranks it to eleven. "Baltimore, or the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire" is a dark book. It starts out with a British Army unit being ambushed in a German forest and only gets darker from there. Ancient vampires, demonic bears wearing human skinsuits and a monster in a lake are only some of the horrors present in Baltimore.

The story opens with Lord Henry Baltimore as he leads his Army unit across a German forest hoping to catch the Hessians unaware. Things go horribly wrong as you would expect and Baltimore and his unit are ambushed. Baltimore himself is shot in the leg and in a ditch of dead bodies. He winks in and out of consciousness seeing what he thinks are kites on the battlefield. He realizes with horror that these kites are actually bats which are now feasting on the dead.

Baltimore, in a panicked frenzy, attacks a bat with his bayonette and unleashes a series of events that spiral the world into darkness. As retribution for the wounds given to him by Baltimore the vampire breathes into Baltimore's wound poisioning him and sending a plauge known as the red death across the world.

From here we meet three people who were a friend to Baltimore through different periods in his life, a sea captain that brought him home from the war, the battlefield doctor who amputated his leg and a childhood friend. They are drawn to a pub in a walled in, fortress like London. The book changes it's narrative pace here in following these three men as each recounts a tale of a paranormal event in their lives. This is probably the only complaint I have about the book. I think it's a dangerous thing to leave your title character for the better part of the novel.

After we learn who these men are and why Baltimore has chosen them to come, we learn what has happened to Lord Baltimore. Told by journal entries, we get one of the big set pieces of the novel. Baltimore, carrying harpoon and by my count at least five or six different guns takes out a vampire horde in a Romanian church. It's like a more gothic version of the oepning scene from the first Blade movie and it is a dandy. Swords, harpoons, axes and all manner of guns are used as Baltimore shows that he himself has become something more than human.

I found the finale to be a bit of a letdown. There is anoter big action set piece but when Baltimore finally catches the vampire he has been pursuing the length of the novel it's anticlimatic to say the least. I do like that Mignola and Golden left themselves room for a sequel. Lord Henry Baltimore is a well thought out and written character. I wish he had more screen time in the book.

Mike Mignola's illustrations that span the length of the book are beautiful. They are stark and expressive. The book itself is wonderfully oversized with rough pages and a cover that is as good as anything Mignola has done in recent memory. Despite my desire for a better ending I would still readily recomend this book to fans of horror fiction or fans of either writer. The book is strongly written and has some very memorable settings and character. It's well worth your time if you are a genre fan to give it a read.

Posted by YourMomsBasement at 12:00 PM

July 05, 2007

Interview with Josh Conviser

by Mike Collins

For people not familiar with your debut novel, Echelon, can you give a description of it? It's a hard book to classify. It's part near future thriller, part conspiracy and part Six Million Dollar Man...

I think you described it perfectly!

In one line, Echelon is a near-future spy thriller, dealing with the NSA's eavesdropping network. It's Jason Bourne meets cyberpunk.

I'd classify Echelon as spy-fi. I'm a big fan of spy fiction (Ludlum, Forsythe, Le Carre) and sci-fi (Card, Gibson, Stephenson, Morgan). Mash the two genres together, and you've got Echelon.

On the spy side, Echelon delves into a global conspiracy from the eyes of Ryan Laing, an operative who's suddenly being hunted by his own organization. Echelon deals with how a Big Brother could rise from our current actions – and how it might then unravel.

The Six Million Dollar Man aspect comes out of Laing's interface with technology. With our current advancements in genetics, robotics, info-tech and nanotechnology, we are quickly entering a world where our interaction with technology will happen on a more visceral, internal level. There's a lot of sci-fi about cyborgs and far future man-machine integration. I'm interested in what the experience would be like for that first guy in line. What would it really be like to have technology invading your body and mind?
My hero, Ryan Laing, is that guinea pig.

This being your first published novel, what was the process like for you?

Short answer – it was fantastic. I also write for Hollywood and while I love writing for the screen, my real passion lies in literature. For years, the idea of writing a book was just too intimidating. Then, I found an idea that captured my imagine enough to give it a shot. So, I sat down and started pounding away. On finishing, the book sold very quickly.

Working with my editor, Betsy Mitchell at Del Rey, was a ton of fun. Betsy really helped me find the driving story within my work. My copy editor, Deanna Hoak, then helped hone that story. It was a lot of work, but great, great fun.

Now, I've just finished Echelon's sequel, EMPYRE which comes out in October. Actually, this is the first time I've discussed EMPYRE publicly. I'm really happy with how it turned out.

Echelon revolves around intercepted electronic communication. What is "the flow"?

The flow is my conception of what the internet will look like in the near future. More and more, I think the internet can be seen as an ocean of information, with its own tides and pressures. The flow plays on that idea.

My characters live in a world where much of their interaction takes place in virtual. The flow has drawn their world together and opened new avenues for communication. It is also the vehicle Echelon uses to control and manipulate world affairs. By its clandestine control of the flow, Echelon controls the world.

Did you try and base the novel in some sort of reality or just let
your imagination run wild, particularly with things like "the flow"
and the sub Laing uses early in the book?

It's a combination, I guess. With larger concepts like the flow, I used my imagination to extrapolate a possible future from what we have today, but all the tech in Echelon is in existence or being developed today.

So, to take your example, the sub Ryan uses in the beginning of the book is based on fact. It uses supercavitation to attain incredibly high speeds underwater. Basically, a bubble of air is generated around the sub, reducing drag and allowing it to fly through the water. Russia and China currently have weapons utilizing this technology and DARPA is evaluating the technology for use in American weapons and subs.

Though I base my future technology on current work and trends, my real interest lies in how my characters will deal with these technologies – in what the on-ground experience of the future will be like.

Ryan Laing is an interesting character. Between being killed in the first chapter and then resurrected full of nanotechnology, he doesn't have an easy start. Did you know where his arc was going when you started writing the novel?

When I started writing, I knew that Ryan's issues would mirror the book's larger geopolitical crisis but wasn't sure how either would resolve.

I always knew that Ryan had to die in the first chapter. No better way to kick of a story, right? And I was interested in how Ryan deals with becoming the first true cyborg. He is a man intent on maintaining control. As an Echelon agent, he works to control humanity's violent tendencies. As a man, he's equally obsessed with maintaining total control of his emotional life. So what happens to a guy like that when Echelon begins to topple just as he's undergoing this massive internal shift?

Like a lot of lead characters Laing is damaged emotionally. Why do you think that's such a prevalent theme in fiction?

It's hard to start with a hero who's happy and well adjusted - to begin a story with 'happily ever after'.

There's no doubt Ryan is damaged goods, but I think that's what makes him interesting. I mean, we all have our issues, right? And when a man is willing to push the limits, to live on the razor's edge, his issues are usually more pronounced. Something has to drive him to that edge.

I guess there is another possibility though. Maybe the real reason
fictional heroes are so messed up is that most writers aren't exactly
running on an even keel – and we're just writing what we know.

Did you set out to create a hero in some ways similar to James Bond?

Totally. I'm a huge fan of Bond – both the books and the films. I was also influenced by Robert Ludlum's Bourne Identity. So there's certainly an aspect of wish fulfillment in my creation of Ryan Laing. He's bad ass – a guy who can handle any situation. But he's also a man that I can relate to – he has weaknesses. I guess I wanted to create a superhero with all the flaws and issues that a normal guy might have.

Ryan works for a secretive agency, is an agent who gets his hands bloody and has his own tech designer in Dave Madda?

Ryan works for Echelon – which is basically a clandestine Big Brother manipulating world affairs. He is part of the conspiracy and believes in it thoroughly. That is until Echelon turns its eye on him and Ryan finds himself running for his life.

In the process, he comes into contact with Sarah Peters, his handler, whom he has never met in the flesh. Her skill lies in pattern recognition, in tracking geopolitical trends. Laing also meets up with Echelon's tech guru – Dave Madda. It's only with Sarah and Dave's help that Ryan can prevail.

Can you talk a bit about Ryan's "drones"?

The drones are my conception of what nanotechnology will become. They revive Ryan at the beginning of the novel and are cutting edge, untested technology. They course through Ryan's body and even attempt to integrate with his mind. The drones give Ryan superhuman abilities – which come at a price. Through the book, Ryan both needs the drones to survive and fights the evolution they force upon him. I'm interested in how the drones affect Ryan on a personal level, and in what it means to be human if you're so
meshed with technology.

While all this might sound out there, I think there's a good chance this type of man-machine integration will happen in our lives. Cyborgs aren't that sci-fi anymore.

Ryan's handler, Sarah Peters, is pretty much the exact opposite of her agent. He's a man of action, she's a thinker. He's out in the physical world while she's constantly surfing the flow. Sarah also becomes a fish out of water as the story progresses. Can you talk a bit about her?

That's exactly right – Sarah is Ryan's counterpart – the thinker behind his action. The conspiracy within Echelon pulls her into the field and forces Ryan and Sarah together. While she's not a field operative, Sarah is certainly more stable than Ryan. As such, the two balance each other out. It's Ryan's relationship with Sarah that allows him to accept both the new world that develops through the story, and his new drone-enhanced experience of it.

Echelon is pretty packed with action scenes and interesting technology aside from the dense plot. Was there anything you weren't able to fit in?

Honestly – that's my main frustration. I have hundreds of pages on new technology, ideas, and storylines that I couldn't cram into Echelon. Doing the sequel has been great – but I just keep finding more topics. I think the fact that I'm constantly finding new stuff for Ryan and Sarah means that the two characters continue to draw my interest. Hopefully, my excitement will carry over to my readers, because the more stories they clamor for – the more I get to write.

You have sprinkled in some highly cinematic settings in Echelon. From Ryan's partially flooded Venice, CA home, to Madda's lab in the abandoned LA subways to Elysium, a hackers sanctuary, in the middle of a dead zone. Did you write this with an eye towards it becoming a movie?

Yes and no. I think that my experience in Hollywood gives me a visual writing style and keeps me connected to the location of each scene. As with the technology, all of the locations in Echelon are based on reality. I have spent time in each of the book's locales, from Venice Beach, to the Highlands of Scotland, to the far reaches of Nepal, to the beaches of Thailand.

All that said, the great thing about writing a book is that I don't have to worry about a production budget. I can let my imagination roam and throw my readers into any scene that comes to mind. That's a tremendously freeing experience.

So, yes, I've thought a lot about Echelon as a movie, but I wrote it to be a great book.

Speaking of movies, if Echelon were to be made into a movie who would you like to see cast as your characters?

I'm going to plead the fifth on that one. Echelon is getting a lot of interest in Hollywood right now and I don't want to play favorites.

What's your stance on surveillance of "private" electronic communication?

I'm conflicted. Though I write about surveillance run amuck, I understand the need for our government to keep track of those that threaten us. Finding a balance between privacy and security is no easy task.

My book takes an eavesdropping system in existence and looks at how it might evolve and grow as technology advances. While the real ECHELON and systems like it cast a wide net, our intelligence services can't fully analyze the catch - yet. But, processing power will catch up to systems like ECHELON and then we're in for interesting times.

So, the question becomes how much freedom are we willing to give up for our security? Finding a balance between privacy and security will be a central issue in the 21st Century. My hope is that Echelon will foster debate on the subject.

Your next novel, Empyre debuts this fall. What can you tell us about it?

As I said, this is the first time I've talked publicly about EMPYRE. It takes place about five years after Echelon ends and continues to follow Ryan and Sarah.

Basically, EMPYRE looks at a post Big Brother world. There are a lot of stories about bringing down an oppressive system. EMPYRE looks at the fallout of such an event. How would a world that has only known peace, react to real violence? To war? And how would my heroes deal with the fact that they threw the world into this mess?

Like Echelon, EMPYRE is a thrill ride. I'm not big on down time in my books.

You've also worked in television and film, most notably as the chief consultant on HBO's ROME. Can you talk a bit about what you did on that show?

For Rome, I co-wrote what's called the story bible. That's the 70-some page document outlining the series, characters, episodes and larger arcs.

I often get asked how I could go from ancient Rome to writing a sci-fi thriller. My response is that they're not that different. For any project, I try to come up with an interesting world and then populate it with characters and a storyline that's relevant and meaningful today.

What else do you have coming up Josh?

Publicity wise, I'll be heading down to Comic Con in a few weeks to do some panels and signings – which should be a blast.

Book wise, I'm sifting through my vat of ideas for a new stand-alone novel.

I am also developing the next Ryan Laing book. Oh, and I've been toying with taking Ryan Laing into the comic book world. I think the character and his world would make a killer comic book.

On the film side, I just finished writing a thriller. It's a modern day
adaptation of Dante's Inferno set in Los Vegas.

So, I'm staying busy.

You can check out my website (www.joshconviser.com) for the full update and excepts of Echelon.

Discuss this article on our message board.

Posted by YourMomsBasement at 02:19 AM

June 21, 2007

Interview with Richard K. Morgan

by Mike Collins

Your new novel has different titles for the UK and American markets. "Black Man" in the UK and "TH1RTE3N" in the US. Why is that?

The obvious – Del Rey were unhappy with the title Black Man for reasons of racial sensitivity. Race is a far more spiky issue in the US than it is in Europe (which is not to say there isn’t plenty of racism in Europe, because there is) and everyone treads that much more carefully. I’m not too upset about the change, because Thirteen is a pretty solid thematic summary of the book in its own way, and Black Man wasn’t in any case the original title I had in mind – though I do think it’s very powerful in a way that Thirteen maybe isn’t. I think it’s a shame Del Rey have to worry that the title alone will spark an instant negative response, rather than trust that people will read the book and then judge – but then again, they’re at the sharp end, culturally, and I’m not, so it seems reasonable to be guided by their sense of things.

Carl Marsalis is quite the lead character. Tell us a little bit about him and where he came from.

Carl Marsalis, the black man and the thirteen of the title, is one of a series of engineered humans, in his case engineered for combat, who have been genetically modified not so much in any physical aspect as in the way they think and feel. It’s a specialism based on designed aptitude, and the book aims to show, among other things, that the aptitudes required or desired by our society are often very frightening things. Marsalis exemplifies all the fatally attractive aspects of empowered old school male behaviour – he’s confident and competent with violence, physically very tough and totally self-reliant. He’s also frighteningly likeable and very sexually attractive. These men, the thirteens, were designed to solve the problem of an increasingly soft and civilized western world having to fight enemies who were neither. Unfortunately, the experiment wasn’t a huge success because the same tendencies that gave the thirteens their combat survivability also made them very difficult to order around or place in co-operative groups. Eventually, there was a reckoning in which stock was taken of the genetic mess the human race had got itself into (the thirteens are far from the only engineered variants around) and anyone with thirteen tendency was either imprisoned or exiled. Marsalis found a loophole in the system and now makes a living of sorts hunting down his fellow thirteens when they jump the reservation, but he still exists on sufferance from standard human society, and that’s a very precarious existence indeed.

"TH1RTE3N" is a very different novel from what you've written previously. It's much more emotional for starters. Was that a conscious choice?

Possibly. I mean, I didn’t sit down and think “I must make this a more emotional book”, but I was concerned very early on to fully address a number of issues relating to what you might call heroic violence and its fallout, and there was no way to do that without taking a different approach. The Kovacs books and Market Forces all touch on the problematic nature of violent heroes, but they’re too fast and furious to really linger on that theme in particular, because there’s too much else to get done. So yes, I think I was aware right from the start that this was going to be a broader, more considered type of narrative than I’d tried before.

In Carl's world America is a very different place. Can you talk a bit about how and why you've separated the US into how it appears in the book?

I owe the initial inspiration to the “Jesusland” map that appeared on the internet just after the 2004 Presidential elections. That’s when I first started to give the idea any serious thought. But I think it’s become increasingly clear to everyone over the last couple of decades that there are – at least – two very different Americas out there, and in contrast to the European Union, which seems to be subsuming its cultural and political differences in a general (and somewhat smug, if I’m honest) general sense of modernity, these different aspects of America don’t seem to be reconciling at all. If anything, they’re more savagely at each other’s throats than ever. So I found myself wondering how it would play out if that savagery was ever genuinely set loose, and what the geo-political consequences would be.

Do you think America is likely headed towards a "Jesusland"?

Well, I think substantial areas of America, demographically, are already there. And that’s really emblematic of the problem. Just how is it possible to have numerous and influential members of the citizenry in the most advanced nation on Earth still arguing that a hundred and fifty years of Darwinian evolutionary theory is some kind of hoax? What kind of failure in rational thinking and education must that indicate? Of course, I don’t believe the splits I’ve imagined in Thirteen are likely to occur in political fact, but in cultural terms, I think the process is already moving smartly along. The west coast of America is undoubtedly becoming increasingly attuned to the economic and ethnic rhythms of the Pacific rim. Attitudes to the environment really are diverging as California’s supposedly Republican governor and various politicians in the north eastern states all begin to address the issue of global warming, while the heartland continues to kick against it. Secessionism is alive and well as a political idea across the Deep South. So-called red states receive more in federal aid than they contribute in tax dollars, and still go on cutting their own throats by supporting anti-government politics. New Orleans dies in the mud like any third world disaster area, New York bounces back from 9/11 as a rallying point for the modern western world. And last year I watched a frightening documentary about a college in the US founded by born again Christians for the expressed purpose of sending young fundamentalist men and women to Washington in a bid to capture the organs of government, and ultimately the Presidency, for their religion. So yes – there is Clear and Present Danger.

Carl is a Variant 13, a genetically modified super soldier that the world now shunts off to prisons or worse yet ships off to Mars. At the start of the book he is in the employ of the UNGLA where he hunts renegade 13's. Obviously this doesn't make him very popular with his "brothers"…

No. You can see their point.

One of the themes in the book is prejudice. We see it in how it's directed towards the variants as well as how the different sides of the fenceline in the former US react to each other. Why was this something you wanted to write about?

It seems to me that the biggest and most basic problems we face as a species now come from within us rather than without. Chief among these – along with short sighted greed – is a dynamic that can best be summarized as ignorance => xenophobic fear and hate => violence. Now there are very sound evolutionary reasons why that dynamic is so enduring. Fear and hate are powerful unifying tools, they weld members of an identified group together in response to a perceived threat from outside, from the Other. To that extent, like Gordon Gekko’s greed, xenophobia works. Unfortunately, as a global species, we can’t afford that dynamic any longer, and we need to recognize the fact. The Jesusland tendency stands squarely in the way of any progress we can make here because it actively promotes willful ignorance and, not surprisingly, acts as a breeding ground for exactly the kind of divisive fear and hate that go hand in hand with that ignorance. And what’s worse is that a culture with those attitudes in place is inevitably going to engender similar behaviour in those it’s faced off against as well. If someone hates you, it’s not long before you start hating them back. So it was important to me to show not just how fucked up Jesusland has become, but how its bigotry inevitably infects those opposing it as well.

Aside from Carl, you also have a pretty formidable lead in Sevgi Ertekin. She's a former NYPD cop and now a COLIN agent. Did you know in the beginning how big a part she would be in the story?

Absolutely It was very important that this novel should have both an inside and an outside view of Marsalis and the thirteens, and that both views should be taken seriously by the reader. So we get to see inside Marsalis’s head through his narrative, but we see him consistently from the outside through Sevgi as well. And the crucial point is that both Marsalis and Sevgi make mistakes in what they believe, you can’t rely on either of them to get it exactly right. So, if I’ve done my job properly, these two views will balance against each other, forcing the reader to build their own third perspective on what the truth might really be.

This is the first time I recall you using multiple pov's in one of your books, or at least in how frequently you shift perspectives. Is this something you plan to do more often?

Well, Market Forces had third person narrative and an occasional shift to other characters’ viewpoints, but you’re right that the shifting about was nowhere near as extensive as it is in Thirteen. It’s been an interesting experience working this way, but I can’t say I’ve fallen in love with it as a technique – it’s very hard work, for one thing, and requires an enormous amount of discipline to get right. And I do still have a soft spot for the immediacy of first person narrative – I think there’s an authenticity of tone to it that’s hard to beat. But the thing is, there just was no way to tell the story of Thirteen without multiple povs. First of all there was the issue of the inside/outside perspective on the thirteens that I mentioned earlier, and then there was the complexity of the plot and the broad terrain it covered, both of which meant I needed to be able to skip about all over the place. So the logistics of what I wanted to do really dictated the form. I’ll doubtless use the same techniques again at some point, but equally certainly I’ll also go back to first person when it suits the material.

"TH1RTE3N" is at heart a mystery unfolding in a near future setting. It's a story that could work set in our own present time for the most part. What is it about the reasonably near future settings that work for you?

Well, I’m not sure I could get away with genetically engineered human variants in a contemporary setting – not without it coming across like an episode of the X-files, anyway. Or maybe one of those rather irritating novels that masquerade as mainstream fiction by grafting their speculative concept onto an otherwise unaltered vision of now. Yes, you, Mr Ishiguro – please step forward and make yourself known. If you really want to write about the impact of future technology, I think you owe it to your readers to make some attempt at building a credible future in which to set it. Anything else starts to look suspiciously like laziness.

For me, the double benefit of near future settings is that they offer a helpful frame of reference and that alarming sense of coming-real-soon-so-fasten-your-fucking-seatbelt, while at the same time liberating you from any need to do long and tedious research into the exact details of, for example, contemporary organised crime in Peru or the NYPD’s current approach to data-theft. You can just borrow what you need and set it up as best suits your narrative and thematic purposes. And while I suppose it’s true that the narrative skeleton of Thirteen is pretty much the same as a contemporary mystery thriller, the themes I wanted to deal with couldn’t really have been laid out effectively in the here-and-now – not least because the book deals with the aftermath of the genetic technology rather than its advent.

A large portion of the book takes place on the altiplano and touches on some of their legends. Do you have a special interest in that part of the world?

I have an enduring interest in what for want of a better word you could call the Hispanic world. That’s largely because I’m married to a Spanish woman, I speak Spanish fluently and I have spent a lot of time in Spanish and Hispanic cultural contexts. The altiplano connection comes indirectly from that, in that my wife and I spent about a month and a half traveling around Peru and Bolivia, and much of the inspiration for the book came from those travels. I’d recommend a visit to anybody - it really is a remarkable part of the world.

In my opinion this is far and away the best thing you've written. Was this one hard to write?

Thank you very much. Yes, it was. Unlike my other books, Thirteen has not been primarily narrative-driven. It came together, painfully slowly, out of a large number of disparate bits and pieces – the trip to the Andes, the recreational reading I’d been doing on genetics, my visits to North America and the changes in the political landscape there, memories of my time spent living and working in Turkey, gender politics, Islam and its current impact on modern life (and vice versa, of course), conversations about quantum maths, articles on nanotechnology….. I remember once reading an interview with William Gibson in which he commented that in the past SF books were very often written about one single technological or scientific development – a matter transmitter! intelligent machines! telepathic policing! - as if that development would take place in some sort of vacuum, as if the new thing, whatever it was, would be the sole important factor in this future society; whereas of course, our world is in fact stuffed full of new science and technology, any single aspect of which might once have served as the motor of an SF story, but none of which can be surgically removed from the wider context. His point, as I recall, was that writing science fiction now is far harder than it used to be because in order to create a credible future, you have to imagine not just a single development, but an entire pastiche of human and technological change. Well, I’ll certainly attest to the hard work element of that argument – bringing together all the stuff I’d been thinking about and wrapping it around the narrative has been very hard work indeed. So I’m very glad you like it.

One of the things that always pop up in your work is innovative technology that people use to main each other. Carl starts off with weblar body armor and uses a gun that fires viral ammunition. Later in the book we meet a character who has bio alloy in her hands for close combat. Do you just let your imagination run wild or do you try to have some basis in reality?

Well, a bit of both. Weapons like the sharkpunch and the Haag gun occurred to me on the fly, without having to do any actual research – though in the latter case I had used the idea of bioactive ammunition before, in Market Forces. In part, the whole thing was imagistic rather than technological – I wanted Marsalis to be a very frightening figure, and just as you give your epic fantasy heroes a magical sword to define their killing potential, it seemed appropriate to equip the Black Man with some really scary weaponry. The weblar, though, comes from a handful of articles I’ve read recently on the possible uses of spider silk in bullet proof fabric – it makes a lot of sense if you consider how incredibly resilient a spiderweb is for its size. Anyway, seems the main problem for the manufacturers right now is how to get enough non-unionised spiders working shifts to…….

Without spoiling the ending, do you think you might return to Carl's world or any of the characters featured in "TH1RTE3N"?

Definitely – I very deliberately left myself space for that. I think the issue of variant thirteen has probably been explored in about as much depth as I’m interested in, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use thirteens as characters in other stories. And the other variants that I came up with each suggested their own narrative trails as I was writing them, so there are elements there that I’m certainly not done with. Plus the world itself, the dynamics of Jesusland and the Rim, the colony on Mars and the nanotech are all freighted with potential. Expect at least one more novel in this setting, possibly several.

You've written two well received comic series for Marvel featuring the Black Widow. Is there any more comic book writing coming up? Any other characters you'd be interested in exploring?

The comic-book thing is certainly on hold at the moment, but that’s logistics rather than personal preference. I’ve got some nice ideas, and some sympathetic ears at Marvel and Vertigo/DC, and in fact my own US publishers, Del Rey, have talked about me doing a graphic novel for them – but right now I want to focus on getting my next novel up and running. My own personal genetic wiring is pretty classically male, in that I have a hard time concentrating on more than one thing at any given moment, so sidelines like the Black Widow tend to slow me down badly elsewhere.

As to other characters, I think the Black Widow experience has made me realise I’m probably not cut out for mainstream Marvel/DC properties – Black Widow: Homecoming was very well reviewed, and I certainly enjoyed doing it, but as far as mass appeal goes, well – there wasn’t any! The series didn’t sell very well, and it seems the overt politics and ambivalent attitudes to heroism, sex and violence weren’t that happily received by the core comic-book readership. And those elements are integral to the way I write. Let’s put it this way – Spiderman 2 and Sin City count among my worst ever movies, and both were box office smash hits. Now that’s a serious mis-match of target market and writer. And companies like Marvel and DC are in business to sell product to that market, not stroke the egos of difficult and unpopular auteurs. So while I’d love to write a third Black Widow – have the sketched plotlines in fact – there’s no reason on Earth why Marvel would pay me to do it. I think any future comic-book work I do is likely to be strictly marginal, own-character stuff.

You've mentioned working on a noir-ish fantasy series called "Land Fit for Heroes". Any updates on that?

Yeah, it’s rolling. We’re still at the early stages, a few chapters in with my characters wandering around not having much clear idea of what’s going on – which to some extent echoes my own situation as well! I’ve been talking a good fight about shipping Kovacs-style noir tendency into the fantasy arena for some time now, and now I finally get to do it, I feel like I’m standing on the rim of a vast unexplored land with this gang of grubby conquistadors and their siege engines at my back. What to grab and sully first? I mean, there’s nothing we can’t do to this place, right guys? So, uhm, yeah - there is an overarching narrative in there somewhere – just have to shake it out. Watch this space.

Richard Morgan will be touring along the west coast in the near future.

Here is a list of upcoming appearances:

ON TOUR WITH RICHARD K. MORGAN

SEATTLE, WA Monday, July 23
University Bookstore, 4326 University Way NE.─7:00pm
Talk, Q&A, Signing

PORTLAND, OR Tuesday, July 24
Powell’s Books, 1005 W. Burnside─7:30pm
Talk, Q&A, Signing

SAN FRANCISCO, CA Thursday, July 26
Booksmith, 1644 Haight Street ─7:00pm
Talk, Q&A, Signing

SAN DIEGO, CA Saturday, July 28
Comic Con International, San Diego Convention Center
Signing

Read 2005's Richard Morgan Week at YMB

Discus this interview in our forum

Posted by YourMomsBasement at 10:30 AM

May 10, 2007

REVIEW: Un Lun Dun

by Raj Khanna

China Mieville has made quite a name for himself in the fantasy world, creating intricate and imaginative universes, spelling them out with rich language and elegant prose. After novels, King Rat, and the Bas-Lag books, Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council, he has turned to a different audience with Un Lun Dun.

Un Lun Dun is his first "young adult" book, a book that he wrote specifically for young people, an attempt to join the world of such stories (for more on this, see my interview with him).

However, make no mistake - for those familiar with his other works, this is very much a China Mieville story, complete with the imaginative world, the attention to language, and the usual playfully subversive moments.

The story concerns two friends, Zanna and Deeba, who discover the existence of another world known as UnLondon. Zanna learns she is the Schwazzy, the Chosen One, and has been called upon to rid UnLondon of an entity known only as the Smog. This is how it has been written in UnLondon's prophecies. This is what its citizens expect.

Zanna and Deeba, however, are just two kids from London and they are more interested in returning home to their family and friends than getting involved in the strange occurrences in this other world. When Zanna is injured, and they are given a chance to go home, they take it.

I won't say any more about the plot as some of the fun to it is in the unexpected. As in Mieville's other works, things are not always as they seem, and he plays extensively with the tropes and trimmings of the "young adult" fantasy genre.

UnLondon is an imaginative place, a world where buses fly around suspended from balloons, where inanimate objects like umbrellas and even rubbish are alive, where rubbish bins are ninja-like defenders. In typical Mieville fashion, he is not content to pepper his world with such imaginative creations, instead he stuffs it full of them. Additionally, he has included his own sketches in the book. My advance review copy did not have the illustrations included, but they can be seen on the official website.

My only reservation with the book was that it almost seemed a little too "cute" in some places, with the worldplay, with the puns. However, I realize that I am not the audience this book was intended for. I fully believe that younger readers would be more kindly disposed towards a lot of these elements. Likewise, if you're a fan of books like Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, those elements might be right up your alley.

Ultimately, however, I think the books triumphs with its overall message. Its this which separates it from the other young adult fantasies on the market. It has real world resonance, and I would feel comfortable giving this book to anybody. Which is not to say that it's preachy - it doesn't talk at you. It is, in the end, an inclusive book, especially through Deeba's character. In books like Harry Potter, as enjoyable as they may be, the reader can only look upon that world - they will never be a wizard. In Un Lun Dun, there is far more accessibility. While the reader may not truly visit that world, they can certainly relate to Deeba's character.

Discuss this article in our forum.

See our interview with China Mieville at the 2007 NYCC.

Posted by YourMomsBasement at 09:00 AM

March 01, 2007

NYCC: China Miéville

Part 1

Part 2

Posted by YourMomsBasement at 09:30 AM

NYCC: Drew Bowling

Posted by YourMomsBasement at 09:15 AM

February 21, 2007

Interview with Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Acclaimed UK author Jon Courtenay Grimwood stops by the basement to talk about his previous works, changing styles and what's coming next.

Your novels straddle several genres, fantasy, alternate history, science fiction, hard-boiled crime thriller…how would you describe your work?

As a JCG novel… And I really try to write within one genre, but it always goes out of the window, although I’m getting better at only meshing two or three genres at one time. Thing is, I really like working across genres. It’s truer to life.

What is it about science fiction that attracts you?

As a writer, the fact you get to mess with reality, you can make up facts, no one can bang the table and say, but it’s not real. As a reader, ditto…

I’ve noticed quite a difference from your early novels to your current work. Was it a conscious decision to switch things up?

The first four novels were post-cyberpunk. The first, neoAddix was dreadful, Lucifer’s Dragon was better, reMix worked reasonably well, and I really like redRobe. In effect, I was learning to write in public and got it right after the first two.

The three Ashraf Bey mysteries are different. Each one is a stand-alone crime novel, set in an alternate Ottoman empire, and there’s a strong SF strand that doesn’t get revealed until the end… The slowing of the pace, the emphasis on character and the simpler narrative structure are entirely conscious.

Stamping Butterflies, 9tail Fox and End of the World Blues (which has just been shortlisted for the BSFA and Clarke awards) grew out of what I learned from the Raf books. They’re still mysteries, with a strong SF element, but they’re set in our world, more or less.

Out of all of the characters you’ve created who is your favorite?

Impossible to say… Really impossible… I’m currently writing a six-hundred year old hero who lives in Mexico City, and I love him. But also I’m really fond of Raf, and Jake Razor, and Bobby Zha, and also Kit from End of the World Blues, because that’s a fantastically personal book and I really like Tokyo. All my characters are my favourites as a write them, because they’re inside my head and I’m inside theirs.

I’ve read that you visit the locations featured in your novels as well as actually cook the meals that your characters eat; do you feel that you need this level of authenticity?

Yes… there’s a famous story about a UK novelist who had a characters walk along a river that ran round a city. Only, she based her description on a map, and her river turned out to be a road.

Unless you visit a city you don’t know what it smells like, what the air tastes like, what sounds you hear at night and what the streets feel like underfoot. You learn a lot about a culture from its cooking. Whether people eat on the run or sit down, eat alone or with their families, cook elaborate meals or eat take out…

I also buy music in a city and listen to what’s current. And I watch the television and go to see films, even if I don’t understand the language. I know all fiction is a lie, but we have a duty to get right what we can. And then we can make up the stuff that matters, like the back story and the characters’ emotions.

I’d like to talk to you about some of your books and characters specifically starting with redRobe. It’s a sad world where the only safe place for refugees is on a man-made refuge in orbit run by a pacifist AI. Do you think the powers that be would prefer to just shoot refugees into space?

Writing redRobe came out of what was happening in the Balkans, with its ethnic cleansing and camps and refugees. The situation is going to get worse because global warming is going to hit poor countries first. When the sea rises and floods become common place people are going to move.

I wanted a solution that gave people a new start. And yes, I did want to make a point about the powers that be wanting to sweep the problem out of sight. That said, I think we have to go into space. The only question is when we face up to the fact.

Axl Borja is an interesting character. An emotionally damaged assassin working for the Vatican, where did he come from?

Ah… years ago a man called Stanley J Weyman wrote a Victorian novel called Under the Red Robe about a disgraced duellist at the time of Cardinal Richeleau, who ruled France in the early 1600s. I read it as a child and retold it set in the future as redRobe. It began as a straight updating and quickly turned into something else. One of the things that survived was the link between Axl and the Cardinal.

Axl against the Immortals is a nastily fun short story. Any chance of going back to check in with Axl in the future?

I’d love to, but I also want to go back to Raf and the Ashraf Bey mysteries. Interestingly, redRobe has just sold in Japan. So we’ll see how it goes there. redRobe was also the only film on which I’ve had a serious bite from a film company. Although it fell apart on the costings. (That was back in the day when CGI was still relatively expensive.)

Moving on to what is your most well known work, the Arabesk trilogy, were you hesitant at all in setting a series in the Middle East with the current happenings in the world?

When I started writing the Raf books we hadn’t gone to war with Iraq…! Also, the novels take place in El Iskandryia, a city on the Mediterranean famous until the 1950s for its cosmopolitan mix of Greeks, and Leventines, its Jewish quarter, and its exiles from Western Europe. The culture in Raf books is Ottoman and North African, rather than Middle Eastern, and the world is not ours.

We think of Islam as homogeneous. It isn’t. I remember sitting in a café in Tunis a couple of years ago surrounded by elegant middle class North-African women, all drinking cappucino and reading novels or their papers. For them, the headscarf was something elegant from Hermes. Another memory has a beggar in full headscarf breast-feeding her baby on a bench in Marrakech. (No one seemed remotely troubled. But then the culture in North Africa is very different to the culture in, say, Saudi Arabia.)

Ashraf Bey is another damaged character. He may or may not be royalty, he may or may not have an AI in his head that he sees as a fox. Do you think it’s easier to have a lead that is in some way different?

My characters tend to come into my head fairly fully formed. It wasn’t until I read a critical review that I realised the ex-sniper on the run in Tokyo from End of the World Blues had traits in common with Prisoner Zero from Stamping Butterflies, or that Raf in many ways shared my own childhood. I’m not sure my lead characters are different. Because I’m not entirely convinced I know what is normal. But all are in need of redemption, and all find it to some extent.

I found that despite all of the alternate history and science fiction elements that the Arabesk series is about a young man coming of age and finding his place by coming to terms with who and what he is. Was this your intent all along?

Yes, the Ashraf Bey novels are about a man realising he has to grow up and take responsibility for a small girl who may or may not be his cousin. This, plus his love affair with Zara, was always the dominant theme. It’s also about learning to understand the culture of others. In rejecting his arranged marriage, Raf thinks he is doing Zara a favour. In fact, he’s disgracing her.

Of course, who and what he is are complicated for Raf than for most people. But that’s just a heightening of the feeling we all have when young that we’re the first people to rebel, the first people to discover sex, the first people to protest about whatever it is we need to protest about.

You plan on returning to Raf and his niece Hani. When do you expect to start writing those stories and what if anything can you tell us about the direction they might go?

My publisher in the UK is combining the first three Ashraf Bey novels into one volume and issuing it as a huge hardback! I’d love to write more Raf books, but I’ve had to put that idea on hold as I’m currently writing the first of a three-volume crime series set in heaven, hell and Mexico City.

It features Joan of Arc and Giles de Rays, sometimes known as Bluebeard, and means I’ve been spending time in Mexico and New York, because it also takes place there. It’s an updating of Paradise Lost, with crime reports, angels and a love affair across time.

Do you have a title in mind for the book your currently writing and when do you think it might see print?

The book is called Thrones and Powers, and I'll finish writing it this summer, so probably the summer afterwards...

9TailFox is another genre bender. This is likely the least science fiction of your novels. Do you plan to write any other novels that are more mystical/magical?

Writing 9tail was a reaction to writing Stamping Butterflies. Writing SB was incredibly complicated. There are nine narrative strands over three time lines, and it basically ties the birth of punk to a far future Chinese empire, by way of a Parisian tramp who wants to shoot the president of the United States. Since the president he wants to shoot is the best president the country has had in years no one quite understands this.

9tail Fox is the story of Bobby Zha, a sergeant with the SFPD. It’s a crime novel, tied to a Dr-Moreau backstory that sees bodies being dumped in the Marin Headlands, north of the Golden Gate bridge. (And yes, I had great fun going to San Francisco and researching the city.)

A few people have questioned whether or not it’s SF. But, so far as I’m concerned, a novel with at least two of the characters walking around with brain transplants counts as SF to me. Of course, it does have a magical element. But I grew up in the Far East and so did Bobby’s grandfather. So I’ve used bits of that.

Stamping Butterflies has a pretty stark look at the way the US holds non-Americans. Do you like adding in some political commentary to your work? Is there ever any fear that you might turn some people off?

Whether or not we travel by plane, what we eat, who we sleep with, where we live and the jobs we do… Maybe it’s because I grew up in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It just seems obvious that politics threads through everything we do. Even novels that carefully avoid politics are political. What’s more political than avoiding politics?

I don’t think there are many people left who feel Guantanamo Bay is a useful solution to the problems facing us. And I remember being attacked in a blog for being anti-American, and being really shocked. I’ve been visiting the US since the mid-1980s, I was married in New York. The America I grew up respecting was that of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the Marshall Plan of the post-War years. Events I was taught about in school. It’s still there, I know that from friends in the US. They say they’re just waiting for it to come out of hiding.

Moving on to End of the World Blues, Lady Neku’s world is a wonder. Floating palaces holding up a barrier that protects a largely dead world below with royalty living in a feudal existence. Where did the idea for the floating rope world come from?

It’s a play on ukiyo-e, the wood-block prints from Japan that are known as ‘pictures of the floating world’. I wanted to make it literal, to have a world bound round with ropes, and I also wanted to play on the idea of nawa shinbari or kinbaku, which is Japanese rope bondage, a ancient form that goes back centuries.

Hayato Kato, who I met .. when one of my short stories was about by a Japanese magazine, helped me come up with nawa-no-ukiyo - floating rope world - which caught the right combination of history and artistic subversion. The plan was to make Lady Neku’s rope world link to Kit’s wife, Yoshi’s, need to be bound (Yoshi is co-owner of their biker bar in Tokyo).

Are there any plans for you to make a bigger push in the US market? Your novels really are unlike anything else on the market.

The reviews have been great. All the right papers, New York Times, Washington Post, Locus, New York Review of Science Fiction, Scifi.com, and others. A shortlisting for the John W Campbell Memorial Award…

Things are picking up and one of the Raf books reprinted recently. End of the World Blues is to be published by Bantam Spectra this year (I’ve just seen the cover rough, it looks fantastic). Nightshade Books are publishing 9tail Fox in the US, also this year. We’ll see what happens. In the past, the fact my novels are unlike anything else in the US market has scared booksellers slightly. Now it seems to be turning into an advantage.

Thanks for taking the time to talk with us Jon!

Jon Courtenay Grimwood can be found online at his website http://j-cg.co.uk/ or at his myspace page http://www.myspace.com/joncg .

Posted by YourMomsBasement at 06:00 PM

January 03, 2007

Interview with Paul Malmont

by Daniel Harvey

Paul Malmont and his debut novel, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, made quite a splash in 2006. The work made the cut on many of the "must read" lists of the summer -- from the Village Voice to US News & World Report -- and its popularity shows little sign of slowing. It earned Malmont a spot on Kirkus Fiction Spotlight 35 Hot Debuts list. When he's not exploring American Mythmaking in prose Malmont works as a copy director at a leading interactive ad agency in New York City (he and I are coworkers). He lives with his wife and children in Brooklyn.

The work is part post-modern pastiche and part loving homage to pulp adventures of the 30s and 40s. Rather than featuring the characters often found in these sorts of guns-blazing, two-fisted romps Malmont turns the spotlight on their authors including Walter Gibson (aka Maxwell Grant creator of The Shadow), Lester Dent (aka Kenneth Robeson creator of Doc Savage), H. P. Lovecraft (mastermind behind the Cthulhu Mythos) and Ron Hubbard (yes that Ron Hubbard). In the story they contend with successes, failures, and betrayals both personal and professional all the while being inextricably drawn into a chaotic world of asian assassins, horrofic things that go bump in the night, lost treasures and curses and more.

DH: Hey there!

PM: Hey

DH: I've got a ton of questions and notes for you. Some less formed than others but I think good material for a conversation anywho.

PM: OK. Then let's get started.

DH: Do you see a synergy between the plight of the characters to breakthrough and your own struggles as a debut author?

PM: To some extent - I paralleled my characters' hopes and dreams to get into the slicks, or the top tier of pulps, to my hopes, as a working writer, to be able to write something more exciting than the things I get to write on a daily basis - concept docs, marketing pitches, ad copy, etc.

DH: You're a writer writing about writers. Do you see that as a post-modern device, perhaps even a necessary one for today’s audience?

PM: I think that level of Meta-ness is an essential element of the book that lifts it from a pulp museum piece to the level of some kind of literature. I think that the convention works particularly well in this case because it's satisfying both to fans of pulps/thrillers/genre, and those seeking something a little more thoughtful - but no less fun.

DH: Was Kavalier & Clay an influence on you? Have comparisons been drawn in reviews? If so, has does that make you feel?

PM: Well - I had actually been working on this before I read K&C. But I was thrilled at the reception Chabon's work received and it certainly encouraged me to keep going. I think what his book revealed (again) is that there is a broad audience out there that cares about the geek stuff and good writing. It showed how mainstream the fringe has become. Anytime anyone compares to me to a good writer it's a nice compliment. Several comparisons have been to Alan Moore which is great because I really love his work.

DH: That's an interesting comparison -- especially in regards to work like League of Extraordinary Gentleman

DH: How did you arrive at the big idea for your story?

PM: I had always wanted to tell a story about the pulps in an unconventional way. At one point I thought about writing an "autobiography" of a pulp hero. Anyway - I had made a short film about magicians and the subject of Walter Gibson, Orson Welles, and The Shadow came up and I started thinking about telling a story about the three of them. Once I started to think about that, well then I had to include Lester Dent. Then L. Ron Hubbard and so on... And all of a sudden it's not just a story about Walter Gibson - it's a top-to-bottom overview of the whole Pulp Era.

PM: Then the plot came in two ways...

(Lester Dent)

DH: Which were?

PM: It had to begin with the death of Lovecraft, and end with the Chinatown Unity Rally - both real events.

DH: Why those two events?

PM: Because they seemed ripe with dramatic possibilities. Trying to connect the two events - now that was work! The Unity Rally in particular represents the end of the Tong wars and the end of the Chinatown that was so prevalent in the pulps.

DH: Was there something more than a sense of the exotic or the shock of the new that made Chinatown and the broader culture so prevalent?

PM: In fact I think it was our very American fear-of-the-other that led to the racist portrayals in the pulps known as the Yellow Peril. There was explicit government policy, in the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act to prevent Chinese from assimilating more easily into American culture.

PM: I knew I had to address the Yellow Peril in the pulps - but I wanted to do it in a way that made sense to contemporary audiences and sensibilities.

DH: Zhang Mei was one of the more dynamic characters -- I'm assuming created from whole cloth by you -- in the story. At times depicted as hero, other times villain

DH: Did you ever feel that you were in danger of retreading that "fearful" ground?

PM: Yeah - in some ways I consider him not even an antagonist or villain - but the anti-protagonist. All I could do was try to create a character as real as possible and explain his motivations, and then hopefully people would understand that I was trying to subvert the whole Yellow Peril trope.

DH: You mentioned that bridging those two events together was a work... tell me about the role research played in the work

PM: Well - I had Lovecraft on one end, and the Chinatown Unity Rally on the other - and then there were things I knew I needed to get in in order to pay homage to the pulps - settings like broken-down waterfronts and warehouses, tramp steamers, lost islands, trains, etc. so I had to look for something to connect them all, and that became the lost gas from WWI. Now that was inspired by an article I had come across which hypothesized that a Dutch steamer, the Orang Medan, which had been found adrift in the 40's with the crew all dead in horrible positions, was the result of an accident during the black market trade in WWI chemicals.

PM: Research to me is great and is one of the reasons I think I love the web. Research to me is a very hypertextual experience. Each door opens two more interesting ones.

DH: Correct me if I'm wrong, but you've actually met Gibson?

(Walter Gibson)

PM: You're wrong and I'm correcting you. The only Gibson resource I had when I was writing the book was a magician by the name of Tony Spina who used to run Tannen's Magic Shop here in NY. He knew Gibson well and gave me some great help. Now that the book is out, most of the Gibson fan club - people who knew him, wrote the articles I used for research and such, have checked in to let me know what I got wrong and right... and wrong.

DH: Tell me about your relationship to the pulps. What first hooked you? What maintained your interest?

PM: I first found one of the Bantam reprints of Doc Savage - Man of Bronze in 1976 at a school book fair... those Bantam reprints had amazing covers by James Bama which are totally iconic and the depiction of Doc Savage. So I'm reading it, and it's about the 30's, and not at all what I expect, in fact it's even better. And my dad tells me there's a whole bunch more of them and tells me about the pulps. And he gets me the Orson Welles Shadow broadcasts. So I was sunk from then on.

DH: Does that mean you have a lot of pulp ephemera cluttering up your mom's basement?

PM: I don't really have a collection so-to-speak because I could never find or afford pulps out in Pennsylvania.

DH: "Never find or afford pulps" seems so painfully... antithetical to the whole point, right?

PM: I know - they cost 10 cents in 1937. Two months ago in Chicago at the Windy City Pulp Convention where we introduced the book - I paid $150 for a copy of The Shadow.

DH: Which issue?

PM: The Golden Vulture of course! A gift for my editor.

DH: well played.

DH: In the story the characters debate "what's real" and "what's pulp" -- what guidelines for creating a convincing reality did you put in place for yourself?

PM: Simple. To use as many facts as possible. The more realistic it was - then the more permission I could give myself to go pulp.

PM: Truthful is a better word than realistic...

PM: But, y'know, it's just a fun fiction with some facts sprinkled throughout.

DH: Are there moments where you felt the two impulses collided? Moments where you thought they complemented one another well?

PM: Well - the one time I didn't know whether or not it would work and if I was going too far was when one of the characters appears to come back from the dead.

PM: And I think it works really well with the Tale of the Sweet Flower War.

DH: Zombies are always fair game.

PM: Yeah - but it was hard and took a lot of work before I felt it really worked in a way that played fair with my own rules.

DH: Agreed. The earlier introduction of "The Watchman" helped that succeed I think.

PM: Yeah - that episode really shows the audience where the book is going. If they're still with me after that section then I think I've got 'em 'til the end.

DH: The characters talk about eras of pulp, the hierarchy of pulp, and most importantly "who is pulp." Who do you feel is pulp today?

PM: Chuck Palahniuk, the late Patrick O'Brian, Max Allan Collins, Charlie Hughes, Geoff Johns, Frank Miller.

DH: Geoff Johns? Some members of the community here are gonna get a kick out of that

PM: Yeah - I've read a couple of his Flash scripts and they're brilliant - even before they become comic books.

PM: Also -forgot to add J. J. Abrams (lost) and Joel Surnow (24)

PM: 24 is probably the biggest pulp in the culture right now.

PM: A direct descendant of G8-And His Battle Aces, or The Spider.

DH: I have to confess, as much as I had a geekgasm about The Avenger reference in the story (which I think was really just brilliant by the way), if you had managed to get The Spider in there...

PM: Well - the guy who created and wrote The Spider - Norvell Page - is a real colorful character in his own right. Maybe someday...

DH: What do you see in your future? Novels in a similar space? Moving this story into other media -- say film?

PM: Well, I'm still pursuing the roots of that type of masculine American mythmaking so I'm going back a little further in time for my next book. Then I'm hoping to return to visit some of these characters again during WW2. But not all of them. And some new ones.

DH: Sounds great. Just make sure you leave time to help me with those concept docs and marketing pitches.

Discuss this article in our forum.

Posted by YourMomsBasement at 12:00 PM

July 10, 2006

Interview with Nick Sagan

by Mike Collins

YMB: How are you feeling now, having just published the third book of your trilogy?

Nick Sagan: Thanks for asking. Now on the other side of this trilogy, I've got such a sense of accomplishment. For years I played in other people's settings (Star Trek, Zork, etc.), which was great fun, but not the same as building a mythology of your own. Here I got to take on challenges I'd never tackled before, and somehow it all came together. Now I see my books on peoples' lists of favorites and it's such a rewarding feeling, I don't know if I can even describe it. A long way from when I first started writing Idlewild, amusing the heck out of me, but wondering if it was something others could tap into and enjoy.

Let's start with Idlewild. It's hard to describe it. Part virtual reality thriller, part end of the world, part teenage angst…where did the idea come from?

Well, going through my teenage years felt like the end of the world. In a way it is; the kid in you is dying and the adult is taking his place. Death as transformation, like the tarot card description of death. That's a big part of where the idea came from. I also remember moments in my childhood that felt surreal enough for me to question whether they were actually happening. Could there be another layer of reality that I'd yet to discover? The virtual reality aspect stems from that. Finally, I remember thinking about the overlap between the various cliques in high school and the areas of influence for a pantheon of gods. Where is the intersection between a jock and a god of war? A "brain" and a goddess of wisdom? The class clown and a god of mischief? The intersection between a goth and the god of death led to my main character, Halloween, and when I tapped into his point of view, suddenly I was off and writing.

It's a pretty hair raising idea. A bunch of genetically built teens, taught in a virtual environment who are going to try and beat a plague that wiped out humanity and then bring civilization back. Why not aim a little bigger?

Heh! Yeah, I should have destroyed the universe or something. Maybe in my next series. I guess I don't like to make it easy on myself. Writing is about challenges. And ending the world is a subject that's dear to my heart. Well, make that preventing the end of the world. We live in dangerous times, and science fiction lets us raise a red flag at all the potential disasters we see around the corner. Hopefully, someone listens.

There is quite a bit of carnage in Idlewild. Not only does humanity go extinct, but several of our unknowing saviors also meet their end. Did you know from the beginning who was going to survive?

Not really. I knew Halloween would survive, and I knew some of the people he cared about wouldn't. Beyond that, it was all up for grabs. Very easily I could have, let's say, killed Isaac back in Idlewild. I had a sense of who he was back then, but it wasn't anything like what he would become. I'm glad I didn't kill him. He has a critical role to play in Edenborn (his ethos leads to Haji, who might be my favorite character after Halloween), and he gets his own voice in Everfree. I often think that the unconscious is several steps ahead of the conscious mind. Maybe I knew where I was going with all my characters from the get go, and it just took my consciousness a little longer to recognize it (and claim credit for it.)

Where did Halloween come from? I really like the character arc he goes through across the trilogy. Hal seems to come so far from waking up with amnesia to searching for kangaroos down under.

Paralyzed in a pumpkin patch to chasing kangaroos. From rebel to authority figure, loner to family man, amnesiac to someone who knows himself, lost soul to more or less at peace with all he's been through. It's been a long, strange trip for Hal, and I'm happy you like his arc. Like most main characters, he's a distorted version of the author. When I create I tend to take aspects of myself that I like and aspects I don't like, then fuse them together and distort the mix into a new point of view. Hal's got my anger and my sense of humor. Also my cynicism, that first sense of betrayal you feel as a teenager when you discover the world isn't the idyllic place you'd been led to believe. As a kid, you get lied to a lot, and here Hal's been lied to about the world. There's a sense of existential horror that fits nicely with the depopulated earth. And upon surviving all the deception and artifice, you want to stay true to yourself and to what's real. That's a big part of who he is.

Idlewild ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. Did you know that you would be writing a trilogy?

Actually, I wrote Idlewild as a standalone, and while I wanted the option to continue it, I didn't know for certain that I would. My agent said, "So you have ideas where the story might go from here? Why don't you write up a proposal for it?" I did, and the next thing I knew: "We're selling it as a trilogy."

Moving on to Edenborn, the kids have grown up a bit. The idea of our world largely intact, though uninhabited is fascinating. Is this why you spread the cast out a bit?

It's a lonely world for lonely characters. I spread them out to show the ideological conflicts between them. Distances for the differences, so to speak. One group goes to Germany's technological center to look forward, while another goes to Egypt to tap into humanity's past. Meanwhile, Halloween stays in Michigan, isolated and embittered, until someone can bring him back.

The focus shifts a bit in your second novel as Pandora and Malachi take center stage. Did you plan to have Halloween remain in the background for most of the first half of the novel?

Yes, I wanted to open the story up and put us in the heads of the other characters. It started with Pandora; Halloween has been in love with Simone throughout the first book, and here's Pandora who's in love with Halloween. Let's make him (apparently) unattainable, just as Simone was. So the first part of the story becomes, "What will it take to get Hal back?" From a writer's standpoint, I was torn. I'm a fan of Hal's point of view, and always get something out of spending time with him. On the other hand, I have to keep challenging myself, and wanted to find brand new perspectives. That's what led to Haji, Penny, Deuce, Pandora and Malachi.

Edenborn deals with some equally difficult issues. Had you figured that your trilogy was going to have more tough moments?

I like tragedies. I like consequences. I like watching characters go through crucibles, so they can evolve from innocence to experience, caterpillar to moth, child to adult. A few months ago, I discovered a message board where readers were talking about their favorite authors. Someone recommended me, and another said I was a great writer but something of a sadistic bastard to my characters. To me, that's a huge compliment. There are so many books and movies where you just know that everything is going to work out by the end, and so you never really worry about the characters. It only has the power to touch you so far. The stories I like are the ones where I really don't know how things will resolve, so I wind up truly caring about the characters. Now happy endings can be great, and I think there's something beautiful about bringing characters up to heaven after putting them through hell. But it's not the only way to go. I'm thrilled that people can read my books and not know what they're getting at the end: it could be dark, happy or bittersweet.

In Everfree humanity has slowly started to come back thanks to the efforts of Halloween and company. But things don't stay great for long. Do you think humanity perpetually looks to shoot itself in the foot?

We've elevated foot shooting to an art form. The foot, the kneecap, the groin. Maybe shooting is too strong; let's just say that humanity is destined to continually kick itself in the nuts. That's just the nature of who we are, short sighted thinking, unintended consequences, millions of years of fight-or-flight evolutionary instinct up against just thousands of years of culture. We are very likely effed. But it doesn't have to be that way. We're also a resourceful, compassionate, forward-thinking species with a powerful drive for survival, and the ability to make this world a wonderland. Which will triumph over the other? We seem driven to form groups (social, racial, cultural, national, etc.) with which to persecute those not in the group that we happen to be in. Factor in technological advances in weaponry that makes it easier and easier to kill large numbers of people, and it appears that we're in for a very bumpy ride.

Are there any plans to visit with these characters somewhere down the road?

Halloween will always have a special place in my heart. I'm sure I'll write another entry in this series eventually. But I have other stories I want to tell, and I have so many characters clamoring for attention in my head, that the trilogy characters are going to have to wait their turn.

You've also worked as a screenplay writer. What are the big differences with that and writing a novel?

I enjoy both formats and I don't think one's better than the other. For differences, mostly it's a conflict between freedom and reach.

Freedom: There's much more freedom in novels. You don't have three act structure to worry about, and you don't have to worry about how expensive what you're writing will be to film. Movies take millions of dollars to produce, and because they're so expensive, producers and studio execs often tend to be conservative, unlikely to devote vast sums of money to a project unless it feels like other projects. That's why so many movies look the same, and why it's so great to see one that breaks out of the mold in a fun and interesting way. By contrast, books can take more chances. All you have to do is tell a good story.

Reach: Hollywood has better reach. If a million people buy your book, that's a huge best seller, but if a million people watch a TV show, those are disappointing numbers and the show might get cancelled. So you can reach more people in Hollywood, but it may be harder to tell the story you want to tell with the kind of depth you want to give it. On the other hand, that massive Hollywood reach depends on whether or not your work gets produced. You can spend years in that town making a very nice living on projects that get stuck in development hell, never seeing the light of day.

I think I'm happiest splitting my time between the two. It's fun to come up with ideas and then try to figure out whether they're better suited for books, movies, TV shows, videogames, etc.

What can fans expect to see next from you, Nick?

Many projects in the works: I have an idea for a fairly twisted novel that I'm piecing together; I'm working on a new script that's lighter in tone than anything I've written before; I'm also working up a graphic novel pitch; a videogame development company is looking for financing for a story of mine; I'm contributing to a non-fiction book about future technologies. Oh, and my first published short story is now available from Subterranean Press. It's their issue #4 about tweaking science fiction clichés. Had a lot of fun with it, and I hope you check it out.

Thanks for taking some time to talk to us!

It's been a pleasure. And if your readers have questions of their own, they can reach me through my contact page, my MySpace page or my blog. Love to hear from everyone.

Discuss this article in our forum.

Posted by YourMomsBasement at 08:00 AM

April 26, 2006

Interview with Neal Asher

by Mike Collins

How would you describe the type of science fiction that you write Neal? I don't think it's easy to classify.

Others describe it as hard science fiction or space opera, or both. That sort of covers it, though I tend to be a bit more ‘biological’ and also lean more towards fantasy than what is usually accepted in those subgenres. Basically I’ve taken just about everything I love about SF, expanded it and put my own spin on it. Nothing is out of bounds since I’m not limiting myself to predicting the future but aiming to entertain.

It seems like many of the strongest voices in the genre are coming form your part of the world. Why do you think that is?

I keep hearing this, but I’m not entirely sure I believe it to be true since I’ve read some excellent stuff from elsewhere recently. If it is happening then I would say it is purely coincidental that some good writers have all hit the big time all at around about the same time. I would read into it no more than that.

I'd like to talk about Cowl first. How did you come up with the concept for the novel? It combines time travel, enhanced government killers, dinosaurs, spaceships and futuristic races. It's kind of a mind bender...

Cowl was originally written as a novella and then expanded into the book. I’ve always liked time-travel books that actually deal with the scale of prehistory rather than confine themselves to mere human history. I also have a fascination with all the life this planet has seen. How did I come up with the concept? The same way as I come up with them in all my books – the same way a builder comes up with a house starting out with a stack of bricks.

One of the main characters is a fifteen year old prostitute. Any reservations with how people might react to her initially?

Well, very often my main characters are very capable alpha males, so I thought I’d try something different. How people might react to her didn’t even come into my consideration.

How much research did you have to do for the various historic periods the characters visit?

I did quite a lot of reading on the subject. For the human history periods I read a book on Henry VIII, and for the Claudius episode I relied on Robert Graves’ I Claudius the book and the TV series with Derek Jacobi, and my other reading about the Roman eras. There’s plenty available about prehistoric life, which has been an ongoing interest of mine anyway (ever since finding ammonite and belemnite fossils when I was a kid). It was enlightening to discover how theories are ever evolving. Tyrannosaurus was a terrible predator, then merely a scavenger – a change in attitude I put down to political/green influence rather than fact. Reading about prehistoric environments was also very interesting – definitely stuff like that should be read by those predicting ecological catastrophe now. Though I felt I’d understood it for a long time, it was only when I started to work out an exponential formula for the length of the jumps back into the past that I truly understood just what four billion years means.

You introduce a character who could be about as vicious as any villain in recent memory. How did you come up with Cowl and his pet?

I guess that question is equivalent to the ‘where do you get your ideas from’? I wanted him to be extreme, so I took the Umbrathane/Heliothane idea of humans evolving and living in a society strictly adhering to the ‘survival of the fittest’ rule, then had Cowl’s mother – a member of that society – genetically altering her son to be what she believed the ideal of her society. She was wrong, since the fittest to survive, though they should be strong, should also be able to cooperate.

Any chance that there may be further adventures set in this universe?

There’s a short story called The Torbeast’s Prison in my collection from Cosmos Books The Engineer ReConditioned, but I haven’t considered doing anything else yet. I may, but I’ve enough on my plate right now without speculating about future books.

Let's talk about some of your other works. Gridlinked, Brass Man and Line of Polity all inhabit the same universe. How would you describe this world and some of the recurring characters such as Cormac and Mr. Crane?

When writing Gridlinked I wanted a setting in which I could tell any number of stories, so yes, you’ve got FTL, matter transmission, aliens, superior (and some not so superior) AIs, heroes and villains, ancient civilizations, weird and wonderful technologies and the kitchen sink too. Cormac is generic hero material who is slowly taking shape – often described as a far-future James Bond. Mr Crane was an aberration – one of those characters that grew with the telling and seems to have taken on a life of his own.

Do you find it more rewarding to continue the stories of characters or begin new with a clean slate?

They both have their pros and cons. Beginning something new you don’t have to research back-story and you don’t have the occasional albatross hanging around your neck that you created in a previous book. Also there are fewer constraints on your imagination, since in a series most of the world you are writing in you have already imagined. However, continuing a story, writing the next book in a series, can also be easier because you don’t have to work out all the details: you know the peopled, you know how they get from A to B, you know the weaponry etc.

You seem to like to create fantastic weaponry for your characters. Cormac has Shuriken and Tack has his seeker gun. Where do your ideas come from for these things?

The seeker gun is, I think, a fairly standard sfnal idea. Shuriken got its inception from by interest in martial arts and another old sfnal idea – that of intelligent weapons.

I'd like to ask you some general questions about writing. When you are working on a novel, what's a typical day like for you?

Is there any such thing as a typical day? After my wife, Caroline, heads off to work at about eight, I sit down at the computer and check my emails and various message boards I visit. I then turn off the computer and go for a cycle ride over to my parent’s house (about four miles away), have a cup of tea with them, maybe do some work on my vegetable patch there, then cycle back – this is basically so I don’t turn into a fat slob. Back home and with the computer back on I read through and make corrections to whatever I wrote the day before, then just continue. I aim for 2,000 words a day (this includes everything I write i.e. this interview will be included). If I do say 1,500 words, the 500 goes on my ‘word debt’, if I do more, then that amount comes off it. I’m currently about 20,000 in the red. But as anyone who has been professionally published will know, it’s not all about new writing since a great deal of time is spent editing. Those days I just call 2,000 worders.

Do you generally plot out the entire book? Or do you have a general idea of where you want to go and then let the story come to you as you write it?

I just have a very general and vague idea where I’m going. I know many writers have to produce synopses and plans and scatter their vicinity with linked post-it notes. I just can’t do it like that, since planning where a book is going to go takes the joy out of it for me. When I started The Line of Polity I had a synopsis and 30,000 words written. I threw away the synopsis and about 28,000 words.

Can you describe the process for how your novels written in the UK are picked up for distribution in the US?

That’s all down to my publisher. Macmillan holds the rights to my books and their excellent rights department sells my books on. Thus far they’ve got me into eight different countries so I’ve no complaints.

We have several readers who are aspiring writers. What advice would you give them about getting published?

I think the key is never give up, never stop and understand that though you may be published tomorrow it is also possible you won’t be published for twenty years. Write to the best of your abilities and forever try to become more able – if you ever think you’ve nothing more to learn then you’re an idiot. If you send in stuff to a big publisher, also send in copies of any reviews you’ve garnered. Be professional and adhere to the submission rules. I would advise getting an agent as publishers use them as a filter – no agent is going to put himself behind absolute drivel (which publishers receive by the shed load). I haven’t got an agent but, then again, I was one of those who had to wait twenty years. And every time you send something off, don’t hang about with your thumb up your arse, get on and write something more.

How do you think science fiction as a genre is doing? What does the future hold?

I think science fiction is doing fine and will continue to do fine so long as there is a future. Outside of book publishing it is doing better than fine what with the films, games and TV stuff being produced. Many have predicted its demise but it refuses to lie down in the coffin.

Are there any authors you enjoy?

Like I say in the foreword of The Skinner: ‘Thanks to all those excellent people whose names stretch through the alphabet from Aldiss to Zelazny, and who have kept me spell bound for most of my life.’ Presently the authors on my to-read list are Iain M Banks, Terry Pratchett, Bill Bryson, Richard Morgan, Sheri Tepper, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, C. J. Cherryh, Tanith Lee, Minette Walters, Richard Dawkins, Peter Watts (look out for Blindsight when it comes out) … but I’ll stop there before this list becomes to unwieldy.

What can we expect from Neal Asher in the future?

The present state of play is that The Voyage of the Sable Keech (follows The Skinner) is just out from Macmillan, Night Shade Books is about to publish Prador Moon (a sort of prequel to The Skinner), and Cosmos Books have released The Engineer ReConditioned. In about eight months time the next in the Cormac sequence comes out – Polity Agent– and I’m presently working on a standalone in the Polity universe called Hilldiggers. Just expect more books, lots more books… oh, and if I get the time I’ll be aiming some short stories at magazines like Asimov’s and Interzone.

Thanks for taking some time to talk to us Neal!

Posted by YourMomsBasement at 09:00 AM

September 14, 2005

Review: Anansi Boys

by Rajan Khanna

Sometimes I hate Neil Gaiman. As a writer, what bothers me the most is the seeming ease with which he tells stories. It's obvious that he's a natural storyteller, with what feels like the perfect authorial voice. That natural ease and fitting voice are showcased very nicely in his latest novel, Anansi Boys.

Anansi Boys is the story of a man called Fat Charlie, and yet it is also the story of Anansi, because as Gaiman tells us, all stories are Anansi stories*. Some people have been calling this book a sequel to American Gods, but to paraphrase Gaiman, it's a story that has a character who also appeared in American Gods. So they share the same world but they aren't necessarily connected.

That character is the aforementioned Anansi, the Spider God, the trickster, introduced in American Gods as Mr. Nancy. The book opens with Fat Charlie Nancy, his son - an average guy with a crappy job, a mundane life, a fear of being noticed, and a fiancée who won't sleep with him. Fat Charlie has had a troubled relationship with his father, but after much agonizing decides to invite him to the upcoming wedding only to find out that his father is dead. As the story unfolds, Charlie starts to realize that there is more to his life than he knew, and learns of the unique peculiarities of his family.

I won't say anymore so as not to spoil it for anyone, but Gaiman calls on the rich tradition of African myths and weaves them seamlessly into Charlie's story. Again, he modifies his voice as he tells these stories so they feel more authentic and natural. While these myths and stories could seem jarring, they integrate well into the story, helping to illuminate parts of it, helping to give it more background.

This is Neil Gaiman by way of Kurt Vonnegut. That's not a comparison that I've made before, but the humorous tone of the book, the aggregation of coincidence, they all gave the book a Vonnegut vibe. I suppose it's not surprising. Both authors have such unique voices. You generally know when you're reading a Vonnegut book. Gaiman's voice is a different one, but similarly unique and present. That's not to say that all of his books sound the same, but they all have a certain Gaiman-ness to them that adapts to fit the tone of the book.

It's such an easy read that I found myself unable to put it down. It was one of those books where I kept telling myself, "Just one more chapter, one more..." It's light reading, not because it's lacking substance or content, but because it's so damn entertaining. And part of that is due to the humor in the book. This is a funny book - not in the same vein as, say, Terry Pratchett - but there are some parts that may make you laugh out loud. I have a sometimes difficult relationship with 'funny' books - they have a tendency to leave me cold. This one worked; the humor was natural, coming from the situations which, while including gods and strange animals and magic, are often those that we can relate to.

And yet it's not all humor. There's some mystery in the book, a touch of creepy horror. There's romance and crime. And of course, magic. We are talking about Neil Gaiman here. He somehow manages to keep the magic understated while still maintaining a sense of wonder with it. He is, essentially, remaking myths for a modern tale.

My only criticism of the book, if pressed, would be that I never really felt a true sense of menace, and much of the ending of the book was telegraphed earlier on. However, this never really bothered me. The story never bogs down and I kept on reading, wanting to get to the end, wanting to see if it was what I was expecting.

I loved American Gods, and it might be my favorite of Neil Gaiman's prose works, but I had much more fun reading Anansi Boys. I get the feeling that Gaiman had more fun writing it, too.

Anansi Boys is scheduled for release on Tuesday, September 20 at a bookseller near you.

* The stories used to belong to someone else, but you'll have to find out who in the book.

Discuss this article on our message board.

Posted by YourMomsBasement at 11:12 AM

August 18, 2005

Richard Morgan Week at YMB!

This week Your Mom's Basement brings you an entire week centering on science fiction novelist and comic book writer Richard Morgan!

We start the week with an interview with the man himself.
See what he has to say about writing for Marvel and his latest novel Woken Furies.

Richard Morgan week continues with a review of Black Widow: Homecoming.
See what makes this such a great series.

Richard Morgan week rolls on with a look at the Takeshi Kovacs novels..
Read about this look at the future and why you should check it out.

Richard Morgan Week concludes with a review of Market Forces.
Mike Collins takes us on a brief tour of Richard Morgan's stand alone novel.

Posted by YourMomsBasement at 12:00 AM

August 17, 2005

Review: Market Forces

by Mike Collins

Corporations financing insurgencies. Businessmen dueling on abandoned highways in jacked up cars for contracts. A young man spiraling downward into a system he has no chance of beating. Market Forces has it all and then some. As Faulkner is told on his first day “You come to work with blood on your wheels or you don’t come at all.”

Richard K. Morgan, Locus and Phillip K. Dick Award winning author for Altered Carbon, writes a compelling near future novel in a world that doesn’t seem all that far off from our own. Huge corporations have begun a practice called Conflict Investment, in which they finance whomever seems likely to prevail in small wars around the globe.

Young Chris Faulkner, a man from humble beginnings finds himself on the fast track with Conflict Investment giant Shorn Associates. Hotheaded and impulsive, Faulkner slowly starts to become a player and a moneymaker for Shorn. All the while he makes one morally conflicted choice after another and watches his marriage crumble as a spectator.

Once all the players are introduced the novel takes off into a world filled with political wrangling, explosive gunfights, personal betrayals and corporate misbehavior. The show stoppers are certainly the auto duels. In the first major one of the novel, Faulkner and Bryant face off against a rival corporation for a contract that involves six cars, rocket launchers and a media blitz. The duels are covered in a style that would fit ESPN.
The Drivers as they are known are worldwide celebrities, on television and magazine covers.

While certainly different than any of Morgan’s three Takeshi Kovacs novels, he employs a similar fast paced style that draws the reader in. Quick glimpses of locations and technology that could become the starting point for entire novels, he uses them effectively to make a believable world for his characters to inhabit. The real strength of Morgan’s writing is his characters. Having a cast of that are so ethically compromised must have been a tall task. Aside from their shortcomings, the major players in Market Forces are likeable and come across on the page as fully realized.

Market Forces sh