1. When did you first begin reading SF? Was
there a particular instance that triggered your interest?
No time in particular. I spent much of childhood hospitalized
due to surgery required to correct foot deformities that I was born with,
so I tended to read a lot. SF was just part of a pretty omnivorous diet.
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2. What authors do you read? Who has influenced you most?
None immediately spring to mind. As a teenager, about
the only SF authors I was familiar with were Asimov and Arthur Clarke.
These days most of my reading tends to be nonfiction, and when I do relax
with a novel it's usually to get away from SF. The last novel I read, for
example, was "Education before Verdun," by Arnold Zweig, a 1936
story set in World War I, which most people have probably never heard of.
The one before that, Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon," and
before that, "War and Peace." (Yes, I actually got through it
and enjoyed it. Woody Allen was partly right--it is about Russia, but more
too.)
I'm not conscious of having been influenced by any authors particularly,
although it's no secret that my mystification over the ending to "2001"
was a prime motivator in writing "Inherit the Stars."
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3. You wrote your first novel as "an office bet" and gradually
became a full time writer. Do you miss your old career? How has your former
career influenced your writing?
Prior to writing I was an electronics engineer until
my mid-to-late twenties, and after that a sales exec with several computer
companies, specializing in realtime systems for scientific and industrial
applications.
The short answer is no, I don't miss my old career at all, although
I do sometimes miss many of the people, both colleagues and customers,
that I used to work with. However, that's compensated for to a large degree
by finding a new mix of acquaintances among publishing people, writers,
and readers--especially, of course, among the SF community. That's one
of the big reasons why writers attend SF conventions. The hard-work, thinking-
and-key-tapping part of the job is a solitary business.
The thing I'm aware of the most is release from the corporation mindset
and its values. For as long as we're inside the system, we have no idea
of the degree to which our socializing and "education" conditions
us to pursue a notion of success that involves advancing what are essentially
other people's interests, not our own. Because it would be too painful
to confront the reality of being trapped in such an existence, we learn
to play the game of pretending that we care: whether this company ships
the current quarter's quota of rubber ducks; that its stupid commercial
gets into a high-rating slot--when the truth is we really don't care if
it never sells another rubber duck in the rest of history. I'd say it took
me about ten years to adjust to the idea of reading, thinking, and spending
my time as I please, devoting my energies to things that are important
to _me_.
And the strange thing is that when I occasionally do encounter once
more people that I used to work with, more often than not I find I can't
talk to them anymore. They talk about their job, sometimes with an update
bulletin on the family. And that's it. Attempts to solicit comment on anything
else simply evokes replays of canned opinions as dispensed by the media.
And that's more than a little scary--realizing the extent to which public
opinion--the key to political power in a democracy--can be manipulated
and programmed. It's not just that so many people never question what they're
told; the very notion that it might be questionable seems all but nonexistent.
Of my former careers, engineering and my involvement with specialists
in just about all disciplines obviously helped provide realistic subject
matter and backgrounds for scientific settings. But for the actual writing
aspect, I'd say that the most beneficial was the experience of having worked
in sales. An essential skill the ability not to be preoccupied with your
own motives and viewpoint, but to empathize with the needs and interests
of the person on the receiving end: the customer. This is true of any profession
where the object is to convey information in such a way that it will be
well received--teaching, presenting, vote-getting, speaking. And writing.
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4. What is your process of writing? Do you outline extensively, then
flesh it out? Do you start with an idea or concept, and build the story
around it? How much do you rewrite?
I outline and flesh it out, but I don't know if I'd call
it extensive. As in driving from New York to somewhere in California or
setting out to climb a mountain, there's not a lot of point in planning
beyond the sequence of main landmarks that will get you to the destination.
Details will fill themselves in as appropriate when you reach the places
they pertain to.
There is definitely truth in what hear many writers repeat about
characters taking over the story. Just as with real people--which they
ought to be--characters in a story will develop perceptions and motives
of their own, which can result in their doing things that literally take
the writer by surprise. Since one of the prime measures of vivid, "alive"
writing is that the characters should act naturally and plausibly (which
does not necessarily mean rationally) within their own environment, not
puppets being worked by strings that you can see leading up to the writer,
the thing to do when this happens is sit back, let them get on with it,
and wait with interest to see what results.
As captain of the ship the author is responsible for maintaining
course to the desired destination; but competent officers and crew function
better if left to perform their roles in their own way without undue interference.
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5. How is BUG PARK different from your earlier work? How close to reality
is the micro-robotics in the book?
Two of the principal characters are juveniles, which
is something I haven't done before. There was no particular message in
this. It was simply that the right measure of suspense and unfolding of
information in such a way as to give the best story came together when
viewed from Kevin's (the fifteen-year-old son of a scientist who figured
prominently) perspective. A key rule of fiction writing is that you never
try to create phony suspense by withholding information from the reader
that is available to the characters. By following Kevin as the viewpoint
character in certain parts of the book, the reader is kept guessing in
a permissible way about things that would have spoiled the story if revealed
too soon. Conan Doyle tells the Sherlock Holmes stories from Watson's viewpoint
for the same reason.
Another way it was different from most others was in not having a
political or Big Government aspect, and the problem involved a family's
affairs and a potential murder rather than a mystery to do with science.
Maybe I just felt like trying something a bit different.
Microengineering technology today is indeed making some spectacular
progress. Three years ago, for example, the Nippondenso Co. of Japan published
a report of a 1/1000 scale model of a car, including tires, axles, bumpers,
and even a license plate--smaller than a rice grain--that actually works
(using an electrostatic motor). Of course, it doesn't have anything like
the mechanical complexity of a real car or some of the things described
in BUG PARK. Also, the method of direct neural coupling into the microrobots
as depicted in BUG PARK was my own invention--still a long way from anything
in the real world.
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6. In BUG PARK, one of the driving forces behind technological advance
is entertainment. Obviously, that has a lot of truth behind it. Do you
see entertainment as a major driving force for future technology as a whole,
or just for some specialized parts?
There's no question that entertainment and leisure are
huge markets today, and growing rapidly. Anything that commands that kind
of income revenues is bound to become a significant source of funding for
the development of new technologies that will help in the competition.
In 1979, the year I left Digital to become a full-time writer, classical
"Adventure" and "Zork" had recently appeared and caused
a sensation throughout the computer world, for before then the idea of
playing games on computers was unheard of. That isn't really so long ago.
It's hard to believe that the Tandy TRS-80s came and went during that time,
the PC was born, and price-performance soared to the levels we take for
granted today. Much of the technical and financial motivation for those
developments came from the game and simulation markets.
At the same time, I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with all of the
effects that I see. The promise of technology was seen, in times gone by,
as the release of human beings from 80-hour weeks of toil drudgery to have
more of their lives available for true leisure, socializing, appreciation
of philosophy, classics, and the arts--in short, the benefits of what used
to be called a liberal education available to all. It seems to me that
instead people are making as much hard work and incurring as much labor-making
expense out of "leisure" as they every did from the obsessive
pursuit to acquire property. That's their prerogative, I suppose, but I
can't help feeling something's a bit odd when I watch a room full of men
in their 20s spending a whole weekend playing "Doom." I get the
feeling that we've become so dependent on external factors for stimulation
that our internal faculties for imagination and reflection are left to
atrophy. (Personally, I haven't owned a TV for at least 15 years, and doubt
if I'd find time to turn it on if I did.)
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7. If you had to put yourself in one camp, would it be with the "embrace
technology" or "fear technology" group?
Oh, definitely the first. I think that before being allowed
to exercise the political power that they currently do, the antitechnology
faction that we keep hearing so much from should learn a little more history
to learn just how brutal and nasty life in their romanticized primitive
societies really was. Perhaps they should be required to spend a year with
others of their persuasion in some desolate part of the world-- an area
of jungle, swamp, or desert, say, set aside for the purpose--with nothing
but their wits and a few simple tools to survive with, before they came
back to inflict their rhetoric on the rest of us.
Having said that, I'd modify the question from the dichotomy as stated
by expressing a preference for a society in which technology plays the
role it's good for, which is the creation of wealth and release of humans
from lives of hard labor and tedium, and as such is "employed"
rather than "embraced."
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8. What role does and what role can technology play in solving non-technological
problems?
I can't really be specific without knowing what kind
of non-technological problems you have in mind. In general I'd submit that
through technology, humanity has, in effect, solved it material problems.
We have the knowledge and the ability to feed, clothe, house, etc. every
person on the planet up to many times the current world population (which,
in any case, will level out far faster than most people are led to think)
at a quality better than that enjoyed by today's average American. Whether
we have the will or the desire to is another matter.
Our real problems today are social and political, and I'm not sure
that technology of itself can offer much as to solving them. The ability
to do that, I suspect, lies in such traditional areas as philosophy, ethics,
political science, and religion, which are currently sadly neglected. The
big risk is that if these problems aren't alleviated by the means more
appropriate to them, technology is likely to worsen things by producing
even more hideous methods of eventually having to fight over issues that
should never have arisen.
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9. Is there a type of story you haven't written that you'd like >
to do?
Yes--one that makes several million dollars.
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10. In this day of electronic media, what changes do you see happening
in the SF field? Do you foresee a time when electronic books will replace
paper ones?
Maybe. But I don't think it would be something like the
pad with a screen as described in the SF stories. For me, scrolling through
a long document loses too much of the cues we get from a book as to the
relative location of pieces of material (how many pages forward or back,
judged unconsciously by their thickness; position on the page; left page
or right). On the other hand, an electronic medium gives invaluable features
such as string searching and updating. Maybe we'll eventually come up with
something that combines the texture and physical convenience of one with
the versatility of the other--say some kind of page with electronically
activated grains that can configure any pattern of text and graphics: "floppy
screens."
Richard Feynman calculated that encoding at the atomic scale would
enable not merely the Lord's Prayer but all twenty-odd volumes of the Encyclopedia
Britannica to be written on a pinhead, with a matrix of 30x30 atoms for
each character. Moreover, encoding in three dimensions would make it possible
to store _all_ of the books ever written in a cube 1/200th of an inch on
a side. Hence, all the world's libraries, book repositories, and bookstores
become redundant. You can store everything ever printed in a chip in the
spine of your electronic book. (With a jack for monthly updates, maybe,
from a phone jack; or maybe by that time it has its own cellular modem.)
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11. Are you a SF collector of any kind?
No.
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12. Are you involved in SF fandom?
As a guest of SF conventions, and a friend of some groups
that I've gotten to know socially.
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12. +1. What advice would you give to aspiring SF writers?
-- Cultivate the attitude that the reader doesn't owe
it to you to be interested. The onus is on the writer to be interesting.
-- Develop the honesty necessary to be your own most ruthless critic.
-- Be wary of the praise of relatives and friends. Find two or three
(at most) professionals whose judgment you can rely on for worthwhile appraisal
of your work (editor and agent are first candidates, obviously), and forget
the rest. Writers make poor critics. They know what's involved in producing
a book, and tend to be too sympathetic (at least, I think I do).
-- If in doubt, leave it out.
-- Sell five books before you consider quitting your regular job.
If, by this time, your writing income equals your regular income, don't
imagine that you can now quit without feeling any difference. You will
take a fifty percent drop. Elementary, really--but a delusion that one
hears all the time.
-- If, on the other hand, your first book made a million, it's unlikely
that you'll profit from any advice from me.
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