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A in-depth interview with Dr. Charles E. Gannon, bestselling Nebula and Dragon Award-nominee and Compton Crook winner, about his creative process, focusing on his Caine Riordan/Terran Republic hard science fiction novels, the fifth of which, Marque of Caine, just came out from Baen Books.

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www.charlesegannon.com

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The Introduction

Dr. Charles E. Gannon‘s Caine Riordan/Terran Republic hard science fiction novels, published by Baen Books, have all been national best-sellers, and include three finalists for the Nebula, two for the Dragon Award, and a Compton Crook winner. The fifth, Marque of Caine, came out in July 2019. His epic fantasy trilogy, The Broken World, launches in  2020.

He collaborates with Eric Flint in the New York Times– and Wall Street Journal– bestselling Ring of Fire series, and has worked in the Starfire, Black Tide Rising, Honor Harrington, and Man-Kzin universes. The rest of his bibliography includes many works of short fiction in venues such as Analog,  numerous game design/writing credits, and television productions from his past career as a scriptwriter/producer in New York City.  

Formerly a Distinguished Professor of English at St. Bonaventure University, and recipient of five Fulbright grants, his book Rumors of War & Infernal Machines won the 2006 ALA Choice Award for Outstanding Book. He is a frequent subject matter expert both for national media venues such as NPR and the Discovery Channel, as well as for various intelligence and defense agencies/contractors. 

The (Lightly Edited) Transcript

Welcome to The Worldshapers, Chuck. I guess I can call you Chuck. Can I?

Absolutely. Call me Chuck. And it’s great to be here.

Now, we’ve run into each other once in a while at conventions and we actually sat at an autograph table together at DragonCon last year. I can’t remember who was to my left. It was an urban fantasy author with a huge following who had a line out the door. I didn’t. But it was it was nice to have a talk with you while we were sitting there, anyway.

Absolutely. Mine was a humble and intermittent line.

So, we’re going to talk primarily about the Caine Riordan series, as an example of your creative process. But first, I always like to take the guests back into the dark recesses of history…when you were young…and find out how you…

Oh, you mean before electricity.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Back then, I was there, too…how you got, first of all, interested in science fiction and fantasy and then how, specifically, you got interested in writing it. And also, you know, where you grew up and that kind of thing.

So where I grew up is about…I’ll start with that first…is about thirty miles northwest of New York City. And I say that, and people envision a sort of endless domino structure of high-rises receding into the great distance, and in actuality, our biggest problem was keeping deer out of our tomatoes. Of course, that was a long time ago. But still, the New York metro sprawl is pretty much constrained a lot closer than that. So, I had a kind of…I had an upbringing which brought me in close contact with the city fairly frequently and yet was pushed right up against the state park, which was inviolate to development. So, it was a mix of two worlds. Not a city person, I learned that early, but in the city there was something that probably was one of the earliest sparkings in me towards what science fiction or just notions of alterity in general. Excuse me, and that was the Museum of Natural History in New York City. They had a, at that time, a really, really extensive, for that time, dinosaur exhibit, I think now that’s been massively passed by others that are much more invested in that. But I could spend an inordinate amount of time amongst the various reassembled fossils, and that was where I conceived of the notion that I wanted to be a paleontologist and write about it.

Well, as time went on, I wanted to be a zoologist and write about it. And then I wanted to be an astronomer and write about it. And then briefly I wanted to be an astronaut and write about it. But that was a little bit more dangerous than I was in line for. And at about eleven or twelve, I realized what the constant was, was wanting to write about it. The other constant was to be involved with cool things. But this was about also the age when you start getting enough of a sense of the way the world works, that at eleven and twelve I was starting to realize about ninety-five percent of the time spent in those jobs, if not more, is solitary, and to my mind, kind of dull, repetitive, and almost purely…for every for every ounce of creativity in it, there was a ton of essentially quantitative assessment, proving analysis, et cetera. Not that I don’t enjoy that to a degree, but my…obviously, I think, given my chosen career, my avocation, lucky enough now to be my occupation, was to move on the creative side of things, so I kind of realized, well, what I want to do is be and talk about all those things, but to write about them. And that’s really been the best of all worlds because literally I can go to all worlds. And that sense of alterity, that sense of, if you will, unlimited possibilities and a total lack of restriction…there are no no-fly zones. There are, you know, there are no construction barriers up when it comes to the human imagination. So. that’s how I got here.

I often say when I’m doing talks and, you know, sometimes people say, “Well, why do you write this stuff?” In fact, I’m going to ask you that question later on. But if it’s coming from people who look slightly askance at science fiction, all the alterity, as you called it, alternate-world kind of fiction is, my response is always, “Well, why don’t you write it? Because it’s such an unfettered place for the imagination to play.”

Yeah, and I think there’s a lot of…oh, there’s a lot of what I’ll call…if you’re really grown up, if you’re really an adult, I think there’s no reason to feel that you have to always act in a way that is socially coded as, if you will, adult action. And I think the notion of, if you spend a lot of time in alterity, in alternate places, in thinking about things that are not connected to what’s happening in the stock market right now and what’s coming across our feed from Reuters or whatever your chosen dubious news source is–and I say that, I’m not saying Reuters is dubious, I’m saying that right now I can’t figure out what isn’t–and in consequence to me, I think if you’re really secure with yourself, why, if you have the kind of mind which is naturally one that wants to go over the next hill, to see what hasn’t been seen yet, then, of course, do that. Which is an entirely adult activity anyhow. It’s just not always coded that way. And I think that, so for me, I understand exactly what you’re saying about that. 

But I always find it kind of interesting…it’s a useful endeavor…to encounter folks like that, simply because it sets up an opportunity to have a discourse, and a friendly discourse, and make people perhaps give them a sense of freedom to ask those same questions, just as you said, Ed. You know, it’s, “Well, why aren’t you writing it?” And I think that’s a really important question. I think that it’s probably highly tinctured by our media. What I mean by that is, for instance, I have four kids, and they are big fans of the various Marvel movies. And I have to say, they’re a great romp. But I think for a lot of folks, when they think of science fiction, when they think of alterity in general, they’re thinking of that. They’re thinking of Star Wars. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with these things. They’re great fun. But it’s not, that’s not the workshop in which I toil. As you said in your intro, hard science fiction is pretty much where I live. And even when I’m doing fantasy, the same sort of rigour in terms of the way the world works and the way the world has been built, not to sort of preview what obviously our main topic is, worldbuilding, but, you know, this is what they think of, and they think of escapist fare. And what I think, unfortunately, it tends to blind them to, or it gets in the way of them having, finding and creating a relationship with that part of our genre which is entertaining, but escapist would probably not be the best word to use to define its center of gravity.

Now, were there books that you were exposed to that made a big impact on you and kind of helped push you in this direction?

There absolutely were. I don’t remember some of them because they were simply Scholastic Books Service Book of the month sort of things, when you’re in grade school here in America. But I do remember a couple. There was a series, it was Dig Allen…Digby Allen Space Rangers, something like this (Ed’s note: Dig Allen, Space Explorer, by Joseph Green, creator of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.) And it was just as juvenile as it sounds, but it was fascinating, because what they did…the premise was a visit to every one of the worlds of the solar system, which even in the science of that time were deeply unlikely. But that didn’t matter to me at that age, and I devoured them and obviously remembered them. And I would say then, when I read…the next two things that really sort of drove home some of the possibilities in the genre to me was War of the Worlds reading the, you know, the original unexpurgated version of H.G. Wells. And, you know, the striking thing at the end of the book, when they say, when they finally crack into the walkers and they find some of the Martians who’ve perished from biology, from bacteria here on Earth, that a sort of backward assessment of their skeleton and everything else says suggests they weren’t too unlike us earlier in their evolution. And so that really, for some reason, that book really turned me on to two things. It’s an exciting book, but it’s also a big-idea book. You know, as you as you start to get into the notion of…which I only learned much later…the history of this is, you probably know this, he was walking out in his backyard with his brother, I believe it was, and they were talking about what was going on in Tasmania, the extermination, the clearing of species that didn’t exist any place else on the earth. It was his brother who said, “Wouldn’t it be something if, you know, if there were beings from another planet that came down here and started laying about themselves the way we are in Tasmania?” and, you know, all of what’s in there, in terms of really important questions and really important perspectives about, you know, the wages of empire, what does it mean to expand, the inability, in the case of the Martians, to speak with them, both because of a lack of common ground and also because they’re disinterested, and also the notion that we’re not on the top of the food chain. That to me was really, really interesting. So that book, as I guess my long, flowing, not to say disjointed, answer may suggest, is a…it really, really, I would say, if it didn’t set me on the track, it really was a lens that clarified the vision of where I wanted to go, and what I wanted to do.

So when did you actually start trying your hand at writing fiction?

Pretty much a few months after that? Actually, I’d been writing fiction beforehand and I started very, very soon thereafter and was fortunate enough to come across a great mentor and started publishing…you know, this can this can be taken by listeners as either a badge of honor or a badge of shame for me, but started writing in Star Trek fanzines back in the day before…there weren’t even photocopiers. It was that thump, thump, thump noise of a mimeo machine, which was how one got into amateur publications. And that’s what I did and went forth from there.

And that great smell of the ink.

Oh, that ink, you never get off your hands. Good Lord.

I remember that well. That and Gestetner machines, those were…with the wax stencils. I had to draw cartoons for my junior high newspaper on a Gestetner stencil, which was scraping it into the wax. That was an interesting one.

It’s a little bit like monk work in the medieval era, toiling away over these highly resistant substances of ink and vellum to leave some mark for the future. Yeah, I remember those wax papers as well. And boy, are we dating ourselves here. OK. So, on we go.

Yeah. So you…because you eventually became a distinguished professor of English. I’m assuming you were an English major at university. Is that a fair assumption?

Well, it would be, except for I went to Brown University, which had, and still has, an independent major opportunity. And while English and creative writing, they also had a distinct creative writing track, and to this day, a well-respected M.A. program in…MFA? M.A., I forget which…in creative writing. And so, I went there and I had three things that I found were sort of speaking to me, and they were theatre arts, they were semiotics, which is, you know, to use the fast rubric, the theory of signs and symbols, but actually, what it was for the most part were film courses, and English with the creative writing element in it. So, I decided I wanted to package all three, and had a…came up with a major called storytelling for creative media. And that’s what I did. That’s what my degree was in. I had a minor in English, but I always…it’s kind of interesting I went that way, because even in 1978, ’79, I felt we were moving towards cross-platform narratives, increasingly. So, whereas many people are sort of looking, I suppose, still at e-books and trying to get accustomed and acclimated to that, my question is, “So when do we start having more media start actually moving into e-books?”, which I think is something that’s coming certainly within the next fifteen years and possibly a lot sooner than that.

I always ask people who’ve had actual creative writing courses, the writers that I’ve talked to, how useful that was for them in the long run. Some have had disparaging things to say about their creative writing classes in university. What was your experience?

My experience was mixed. I would say that…so, I did it in two ways. I had some of the courses in a track, some of the courses as independent study. The independent studies were very rewarding and largely, I think, they’re because…I always knew, my motivation always was to write, but what I would call belle lettres was not ever at the center of my scope. It would be lovely if somebody noticed my writing and felt that it was meritorious from within that sort of, under that tent. But my notion was always that I wanted to do the highest quality possible fiction in speculative fiction, whatever that meant, whatever market I had to go to. And there was no small amount of pushback on that, in 1979, 1980, ’81. I mean, it’s pretty clear that not only did science fiction and fantasy come out of the ghetto, but you might say we won, in that…just given, you know, how much it’s proliferated in our media these days, I think that if you go and look at the top five grossing films of all time right now, you will find that not a one of them is anything other than alterity. They’re all, for the most part, science fiction or superhero films. What that says is probably fodder for an entirely different podcast. But, in…so, it’s a very different world for any listener who may not have been around back when, you know, as Kingsley Amis said, when he would read science fiction on the underground in London, he would always have a larger magazine, so that he could put the science fiction book inside it, so he’d read it without anybody actually seeing that he was shaming himself as a good, upstanding, serious Englishman.

And so, for me in creative writing courses, there was some pushback on my materials, but they were helpful in a lot of ways. They were not helpful in others. I think the thing about creative writing, most programs, is that the people teaching them are usually not people who have had a long-standing popular-market success. Most of them, many of them are not people who’ve had much success professionally at all. They have degrees. They have some publications. Their publications tend to be in academic journals. And if you look at a lot of the academic journals which are connected to MFA programs, you will notice that they’re primarily…or, at least they were up until fifteen years ago, the years ago…they were primarily publishing other people in this same circuit, if you will, of MFA programs. So, they were publishing each other. And so, the notion of, how do you write to entertain, how do you write to be commercially successful, how do you integrate the sort of things that you’re trying to do in an MFA or creative writing track program, are frequently just, they’re not addressed. They’re not addressed in terms of actually making a living at this or having a, whether you make a living or not, having a career of some sort in it.

When I was actually in charge of the creative writing track at St. Bonaventure, I very much focused it on, sort of, without throwing…I don’t believe that…the problem with going to either extreme of either belle lettresor just pure commercial capability is, either one, you’re throwing some baby out with the bathwater. So, I very purposely created a middle course. So that was…it offered both…people coming at it from either one of those ends of the spectrum or points in between, that it was still not making them feel unwelcome or that their issues and their ambitions were being thwarted by the presuppositions of the program.

I’m currently mentoring an MFA student from the University of Saskatchewan. It’s the first time I’ve done that. And he’s writing a young-adult fantasy. And so…I’m encouraged that apparently that particular program, at least, is letting students sort of do that, come at it from whatever direction they’re particular interests take them. I had one creative writing course in university and everything else was journalism. So, it’s always interesting to talk to people about their experiences with that. So how did you…when did you…start writing and getting published?

Well, I suppose if you mean getting published as in a check comes along with that, that would have been in the…actually, I was good at making money in television before I made money in dead-tree publication. I was writing scripts. I was writing documentaries, things like that, I was a script doctor in New York City back in the mid-’80s to the late ’80s. The first print publication I had for which some money came my way was actually in gaming, and that was in 1988 for a wonderful science-fiction roleplaying game called Traveler.

I played it!

Yeah, well then you may have seen some of my stuff along the way. I was…ultimately, that was part of my freelance gig, from 1988 to 1992. And I was, for a while, I was in charge of the Traveller segment of…the house organ at that time was called Challenge magazine, and I was made the mega-Traveller guru, which was a lot of fun and taught me a lot of good lessons in there. And at about, right at about the end of that was when I had my first fiction sale, which was to one of…the late Jerry Pournelle, who was a who was a good friend of mine. Many people, I suppose, have encountered stories of him being, at the very least, forceful and direct, and at the, probably the negative end of the spectrum, irascible, but he was always just a sort of big, nice uncle to me. And it was in one of those, in his anthologies, called War World, which was connected to the whole CoDominium series, that I got…I published two things at the same time. There was a short story called “Introduction,” which was exactly that, for that second or third installment, it was called Invasion, the third installment of the War Worldseries, and then another short story in there called “The Gift of the Magi.” And so that was the, that was the first, and then things kind of came to a crashing halt for quite a while. But I returned to writing full time in 2007…late.

You mentioned that there were some lessons you learned from both scriptwriting and gaming that then applied to your fiction. What were some of those lessons?

Well, one of the ones in film…there were lessons that were really valuable to learn and other lessons you had to unlearn. So, the lessons I learned. Writing action–cinema is a great place to cut your teeth because very quickly, you realize, I think faster than you do writing a book, that there are certain things which should happen as a narrative moves towards action that really you disregard at your peril. So, some specifics. If you think about film for a second, and you move from a conversation or a scene-setting moment, a medium or long shot, right? As we move to action, the shots get closer, the shots get faster. It is cut on action. And the pace of the shots, if you were going to put it to a metronome, the pace of the metronome is increasing. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not just intellectual or cognitive. It’s physical. Literally, when we get excited, what happens to our heart rate? It goes up. It speeds up. Well, that’s exactly what you’re seeing in terms of the pace of the cuts as you move into action. What don’t you see? You never have any item that’s going to be used in an action sequence explained during the middle of the action sequence. That would sort of be like, you know, dropping a bomb on a locomotive that’s just gaining steam and moving forward. So you don’t do that, unless you you’re writing a parody. You don’t have people talking with each other as they are trading blows. That might work, you know, for certain highly, I guess you could say posed or stylized events, but in general, when people are, the more…the higher the stakes are, let’s say your life, you don’t generally take time to say anything other than what absolutely needs to be said. This is not a moment for witty banter. This is not a moment for one adversary to sneer at the other as twirl their mustache with their free hand. That not what’s going on at urgent at urgent moments. And cinema teaches you that, because if you try to do that in cinema, there is no way, you will sit in front, you will sit at the editing table, back in the days that we were physically editing 16mm black and white, and you’ll realize, “Oh my God, this is ridiculous. This is utterly ridiculous.” And it teaches you that lesson for the rest of your life regarding narrative. And that translates very well into prose format, because as I move into action sequences, the paragraphs get shorter, the sentences get shorter, multisyllabic words get fewer, which I know anybody who listens to me talk for five minutes says, “Really? Can you even do that?” But the fact is, yes, I can, particularly when the action is very intense. And description is more, has now entered the realm of the verb almost exclusively. It really doesn’t want nouns at that point.

So those are all…but then then you have to unlearn a lesson. And one of the big lessons you have to unlearn from film is dialogue. Dialogue, for instance, in television you can have…and in films, we see this all the time…you know, somebody can be doing something, and they say, “Well, we’ve got to press the thingamabob before the clock hits 9.” “Why? Why do we have to do that?” And you get this explanation. That sort of pitching of a character asking why or how or what, which is the platform for the other character to explain, it really becomes a very, very tired mechanism in prose much more quickly. And the reason for that is because you can, if you plot it carefully, you can put it in…in television and put it in a car chase. You can put it in people as they’re trying to get from one subway car to another and they’re having to jostle through a crowd. In other words, it’s a little bit stylized, but there are less high-action moments, when the characters are still doing interesting things. The visuals are telling us they’re moving towards the objective, so we’re paying attention to that. But we’re getting this other track in terms of, that’s explaining what’s going to happen, foregrounding it, what needs to be done, what the objective is going to be. The lesson to learn when you’re in fiction, when you’re writing prose, is you have one track, you don’t have audio and visual, you don’t have information your eyes are gathering for you, plus listening to the dialogue. And if you try to do that same sort of thing in in prose, you will probably rue the day you thought that was a good idea.

And on the gaming side?

The gaming side teaches you a lot about collaboration. It teaches you a lot about being a good guest in somebody else’s sandbox. I actually think gaming is far better preparation for novels, novel writing, in some ways, than is filmmaking. And the reason I say that is connected to the reason why I have, you know, people will say, well, “Hope your books are going to be made into a film!” Maybe. I’d rather they were made into a game, and I’ll tell you why. If you, if, you know, you see what film directors do on set, they supposedly hold their fingers up to make a box so they can see what’s in the viewfinder, right? They say, “We’ll take this short of shot.” They’re framing things all the time. They have to. That’s their job. On film and television it is rarely important what is outside the frame. That’s just not that important. But when you’re designing a game or when you’re writing a novel, particularly if you think there’s a series there, it is very important what’s beyond the frame, because you’re going to come back to it. In the case of a game, particularly electronic games now, but also roleplaying games, the first thing that’s going to happen, any game design knows this, is that the players are going to wander away. They’re not going to follow the path that seems the most likely, and they actually…and these days, there’s largely an expectation that there should be things off the beaten path. If a game is too linear, it very often gets a black eye right now, and has probably for the last ten or fifteen years. So, understanding what worldbuilding means in a more totalized concept, that it’s not just…you don’t just develop the things that are gonna wind up in the viewfinder of your camera, because your readers or your game players’ interests are going to go off that beaten track. They’re going to want to sense that the world is real beyond the narrow confines of the of the screen or the scope through which they’re viewing things at that given moment. And so, it was great preparation for that, for worldbuilding. It’s a very orderly form of worldbuilding by definition, because in any game, whether it’s for a computer or whether it’s for something you’re playing at your home on tabletop, you know, papers and pencils as it is, and dice, the bottom line is, there’s quantities involved. There are relationships between what you attempt to do and whether you succeed. In most games, it still has some kind of simulational verity, that is at some level connected to the quantifiable elements that will either make it more or less likely that you succeed. And so, all of that is great preparation for worldbuilding that I believe readers…readers can tell if a world is fully fleshed out or not in a writer’s mind. And you will have done that work from that background.

So, when you brought all those lessons together, it was still a few years after the short story that you were talking about…that was a few years before your first novel came out, right?

Oh, more than a few years, but I was working on it. That may be another thing, which is…so in 1991, ’92, a pair of semi-braided short stories are my first publication. I have to leave the industry for…that’s a whole other story. But it had nothing to do with me. It had to do with changes of business, it had to do with broken contracts that resulted in some…lawsuits that ultimately happily only went to arbitrage, because people cancelled contracts, and in those days people in gaming didn’t understand that they couldn’t do that, not without paying a bit for the piper. And so, I had to look at Plan B, and Plan B was becoming a college professor, which I did. And the good news was I was pretty good at that, and the bad news was I was pretty good at that. But even so, what I mean by the bad news is that if you do something well, you basically get asked to do more. And that was certainly the case with me. And that was very, very gratifying. And I learned a lot through that, which found its way into my writing. But at the same time, how much time I was able to devote to actual writing slowed down. But throughout that entire time, from ’92 to 2007, although I published one or two things in that time, it was short fiction. But I kept on developing the world that would ultimately turn into the first novel.

Now the first novel of mine, Fire with Fire, which is the first novel in the Caine Riordan series, was a 2013 publication. But my first novel actually was in a shared universe once again with one of the people you mentioned earlier that you’ve already had on the show, David Weber. He had left the series called Starfire, which is a space opera military science fiction series that actually predates Honor Harrington. So, he had been doing it with Steven White. He left because, as I think we know, David Weber is a pretty busy guy right now. And he’d done that, and he was moving on to two other projects. So, I had come to Baen Books’ attention, and the attention of the lead author on the series now, Steve White, who said, “Do you want to come play in this sandbox?” And I said, you know, “Is the pope Catholic?” And so, that was the first book. And through that was, I think, the demonstration that, in fact, I, you know, as I’m sure listeners may have heard already on this program or other places, since I know that this particular venue draws in a lot of writers, there’s a huge, huge difference between people who can write well and write a great story and complete a novel. It’s a little bit like, to use the academic equivalent, there are so many more ABDs, that’s “all but dissertation,” than there are ultimate Ph.Ds. conferred, because that’s where a lot of people stop. A lot of people can tell a good story, but they can’t wrap it up in a totality that a novel is, sustain it over that period of time, and not make it feel like a lot of it is just sort of wasted noise. And so, I had the good opportunity, therefore, to show my potential publisher that I could do that with my own stuff as well. And that’s what happened, and so it was between…it was fifteen years, if we count it out between when I had to stop writing fiction more or less in 1992 and before I could resume again, and then it was another six years. So I guess, as I think back on it, horrified at the notion, it was twenty-one years.

So, we’re going to talk about the Caine Riordan series. So, for people who…I’ve read, I haven’t read the entire series, I’ve read some books, I haven’t gotten too far into Marque of Caine, the latest one, but I’ve started it and I’ve read a couple of the previous books. Can you give us sort of overall synopsis of the series for someone who inexplicably hasn’t read any of the books?

There’s a lot of inexplicable people out there, I tell you that for sure. So, it’s set a hundred years in the future. It is a…the story begins before we have any inkling that there may have been other intelligences. And what the story…I guess you could say it’s written in, at a moment in a change of history. And the change in history it really looks at is, “What happens when we learn we’re not alone? And what does that mean?” And the main character, his story is that he he’s a defense analyst, he’s a think-tanker. He has worked with and around the government, but not for the government. And he actually runs…he’s the right guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. And for his troubles he is cryoslept. He’s put into cryogenic suspension, which is a fairly new technology at the time that that it occurs, and he is awakened about thirteen years later, to go and look, to explore if the report of alien intelligence or ruins on Delta Pavonis—which is an actual star, one of the hard-science aspects of the series—if it is in fact an accurate report, if the murmurings are true. And the and the reason they pull him out of cold sleep to do this is, they’re part of an agency which has been tasked to keep an eye out for this. And they know their own people are being watched. He’s been out of…he’s essentially missing, presumed dead, because when he is cold-slept during an investigation on the moon, he is not reported as being cold-slept, he is reported as being missing. So thirteen years later, he’s awakened, and the notion is, well, we’ll get you your life and we’ll tell you what happened in the 100 hours you can’t remember before you went into cold sleep. And that’s the setup.

And what flows, goes from there is essentially first contact, and first contact turns out to not be some sort of some sort of grand encounter with other intelligences, it turns out that we are already a playing piece in a variety of…there are only five other intelligences, or four, depending on how you count them, and they all have designs on us in one way or another. We’re already part of a game for which we don’t know who the players are, and we don’t know what the rules are. And so, the first book gets to the end of a sort of a first convocation of these groups that has clearly gone very awry and indicates that, rather than a bunch of lofty intelligent beings, this is just as fraught by differences and squabbles as, for instance, our own Balkanized world is. The second book is that this first contact goes terribly awry because it turns it into an invasion that isn’t an invasion. And what I mean by that is that there are certain forces on Earth which actually, or I guess you would say power centers on Earth, that actually invite an occupation of certain areas because they feel that they are not receiving proper representation on Earth. So this is one of these ways in which also I try to…the problems of our day are something that I try to carry forward into these books, here the basic notion being if your own house isn’t in order it makes you vulnerable in all sorts of ways. And while I don’t think that therefore we’re about to be visited by aliens anytime soon, or maybe we are, it, you know, we remain as contentious as we are about so many things at our own peril. And certainly I think that, you know, just whatever you think of climate science, whatever you think of asteroid interceptors as something that we should be looking to do for earth crossing, whatever the threat is to the human race, I can absolutely feel certain of this: we are stronger together than we are apart, and the wages of remaining apart become very, very manifest in the second book of the series.

That completes what I call the contact arc. The next three books in the series of which the fifth, the one you’ve just started on, Ed…I call the emissary or the envoy arc, because now it’s time to go and meet some of these other intelligences, both to try to strike up relationships and also to prevent incidents which could lead to a resumption of hostilities. And in the fifth book, we finally get the answer to some of what was in the first book regarding these ruins that were particularly interesting because there were two ruins, and one was clearly built either by or for humans, and the other was built by somebody else. And they date to about 20,000 years in the past. And in the first four books, which take place in over the space of only three years, there is a constant, you know, we are always jumping from one fire frying pan into the next or the fire. And just hopefully the reader apparently is caught up in that same flow of events that Earth itself is, just trying to adapt to what’s, what the new crisis in front of you. And in the fifth book, we finally wind up meeting the aliens, called the Dornaani, who do know what was going on 20,000 years ago. And that answers one set of mysteries, which has been cooking through the first five books in the series, but also opens up deeper mysteries for those which will follow.

What was the initial seed for this series, and also, in general, for a new book for you, what sorts of things spark your interest and get you started on the process of developing them?

So this is a…this is a question for which I assume I’m going to have some unfortunately boring answers. What I mean by that is that, in some ways the spark was lit…remember when I said I was, you know, you asked me, when did you start writing after reading this influential book, and I said pretty much a few months later. And while what I tried to write was essentially a fairly dreadful homage to Star Trek, the original series, you know, and a couple of other things that I was interested in thrown in for good measure, none executed particularly well, this notion of contact, of what contact means, of how diplomacy is going to be very akin to anthropology at some level for a, you know, xenoanthropology in order to…how do you talk? What values do you share?…This was always part of it. And then, you know, there’s the…the reason I gravitate towards, very often, conflict motifs is not because I am enamored of war for its, you know, for its own sake. One would hope not. But I do find that the one thing you can say about conflict is it’s where the stakes are highest. And that’s always good for drama, which is why I think we see so much of that as the organizing trope in movies and in games and in a variety of things.

But then in my twenties and thirties, particularly in my thirties, I would say, between reading and also what I was experiencing during my Fulbrights, this…the sense of intrigue, of layers within layers, wheels within wheels, was really growing for me. And that put in the third part of this, which is, yes, it is, it is conflict, yes, it is first contact, and yes, there isn’t a single book which doesn’t have an intrigue element to it as well. And nested under all of that, though, is this question about what came before us. What is our place in this universe? And so, I know you asked me, what is my idea for a book, but the thing is, the series and the books were, have been percolating in my mind, since I was twelve or thirteen, in one form or another.

I was gonna say, there’s certainly, what you said about War the Worlds, you can certainly see that in these books that…

Absolutely.

The alien intelligence that we don’t quite get.

Yeah.

So, how do you go about the actual process of plotting and worldbuilding? Do you start with your worldbuilding and then you develop your plot, then your characters come from matter? How does all of that initial preparation work for you. Are you a big outliner, or do you just make it all up as you go? Somehow I don’t think you make it all up as you go.

You’re absolutely right on the last conjecture. I do not make it…I couldn’t keep track of it if I made it up as I go. I think when you write intrigue particularly, and you write this sort of deep mystery, you know, if you’re going to write something that you’re only going to solve for reader, four books later, my suggestion would be to figure that out ahead of time. There will be things that you will discover in the act of writing anyhow. That’s always going to happen. But I think having a framework is really important. So for me, before I wrote the first book, I actually knew what the first seven or eight in the series were roughly going to be. So, it’s not like I sit down and say, what is the next book I want to write in this series? I kind of know what the next book I want to write is. But I don’t trouble myself with the specifics…if you troubled yourself with the specifics of each book, you’d never wind up writing any. You’d have a bunch of very interesting outlines. And what I tend to do when I outline is, when I know I’m moving towards writing a book and it starts creeping into my consciousness. I start accumulating notes. That means I have a thought when I’m on the road and I dictate something into my phone, or I am working on a story and I realize that this passage doesn’t fit here, but I know that it’s going to be needed in the next one, where I have a realization through what comes out of a character’s mouth as I’m writing, let’s say Book 1, and I realize, “Oh, my gosh, this I just realized from what this character said what must be driving X, Y and Z,” and I will simply open a new file, write that down until I’ve, it’s sort of all come out of me, and then go back to my original. So, what’s happening is I’m compiling all this other stuff.

Another thing that may happen is that I write things that I like or…so what I do is, by the time I’ve started a novel, I’ve got all these pieces, yeah? And they have to do with all sorts of things. And then I know…the story is kind of what I know. I know where we start in a story and where we end in a story. Well, beforehand, what happens, the exact course of events, that remains a little bit vague. Part of what happens is that then, as I start working with that and I know more about what the dramatic arc is, I start looking at all these notes and I wind up putting them in different places in the dramatic arc. It is not as organized as, I come up with a chapter outline. I don’t do that for a variety of reasons. Chapters for me are actually…they’re not…they are things that to me evolve spontaneously. What I mean by that is a chapter should have a really good sense of closure. I can know what sort of content I want to put at a certain point in the book, but that doesn’t necessarily tell me…I’m probably going to discover where that great closure moment, that great last line in each chapter is, as I write, because it will be characters in conversation, it will be a turning point in a battle, it will be the discovery of a new mystery or something like that, which is that great, which gives you that great tagline, which makes somebody absolutely have to turn the page to read to find out what happens as a result of this, what happens next.

So, I don’t work from an outline in chapters. What I do is, I kind of see the different dramatic blocks that the entire narrative is going to be in, and I start seeding, I start taking all those notes, all those recordings, and I start notionally putting them in the different blocks. That tells me what the topics of conversation are going to be. And very often what’s happened is, like I say, I will have a…a lot of these ideas that I have long before I start writing the book become really foundational elements in determining what the dramatic arc of the book is going to be. If this is going to be where this fact is revealed, then I kind of already have a scene in mind. And when I start having that scene in mind, I kind of get a sense of, is that the conclusion, is that the midpoint, is that the introductory part of it, and the book really kind of takes shape. So I’m very much an outliner, but not on the level of, here’s what happens in this chapter, here’s what happens in this chapter, because I actually want to leave myself to discover some of that, because I feel that an over-plotted book can sometimes feel a little bit stiff, like it’s hitting the marks, and I want to also have spontaneity. I want spontaneity as I write. That means that I have the freedom to deviate from what I thought I was going to be doing at this part because I keep on discovering as I write the book.

And when I say discovering, I mean discovering things about characters, I also mean discovering that what I thought was going to be the best dramatic driver for the book is evolving in a slightly different direction. Doesn’t mean I’m throwing it out, but I want to…I don’t want to…in the final analysis, remaining flexible saves me time, too, because if you spend a lot of time doing an outline and then you say, “Oh, my gosh, this is, I thought this was gonna work really well, but actually the primary interest is not where I thought it would be, it’s gonna be here, I need to refocus.” Well, that means, therefore, if you’ve invested all the way to the end of the book in a very tightly plotted outline based on that presumption, it means you have to go back, and you have to redo all that. So for me, I tend to remain…there’s a certain point where my outlining ends in order to retain flexibility. And for me, it makes the book more interesting to write, frankly.

What about characters? You’ve mentioned that you develop, you discover things about your characters as you’re writing. Do you do a lot of preparatory work on, you know, details of their childhood and all that sort of thing, character sheets, as some people do before you start?

I did that with a couple of major characters. These are through characters, these are characters who have through lines and whose backgrounds are very important. Of course, for me, one of the things that people will realize when they read my books is that a lot of the major characters are not even human. So the background there, obviously, is worldbuilding in terms of, their society is not like ours, so what does it mean? What is a consciousness like that comes from this very different set of evolutionary building blocks and the very different culture that will arise from that, and how do I understand that, and how are they received in that culture? One of the things that I’ve done, and it’s a…I do write on a bunch of different levels, and I do hope that that at some point maybe somebody will go back and say, “Look, he was doing this, or trying to do it, anyhow.” One of the things about the main character, as I said, who sort of winds up being the first-contact expert simply because there’s no way to really get a degree in first contact, they’re doing it for the first time, hence first contact, but it actually helps to be a little bit of an outsider. And what I mean by that is if you are, if you presume that the shibboleths and the truths, so to speak, maybe truisms is a better word, of your upbringing and your culture are absolute, they’re kissing cousins to physical law, you’re not going to probably have what I will call the freedom of intellect and the receptivity to actually meet something that is intelligent but shares almost none of that background. How do you find common points? How do you wind up seeing your…how is this a mirror held up to your own species? These sort of things are…they’re consistents, and what I…

The one commonality, for instance, and I discovered this later in the writing, is that all of the alien characters who ultimately are the opposite number in a first-contact scenario, either by chance or design, to some degree are the same way. They are…they’re not pariahs in their own society, but they don’t…they don’t rest comfortably inside it. It doesn’t answer all the questions for them. To some degree, to whatever extent…a person who is willing to question their own society is also considered a little bit dangerous by their own society. That’s what all have in common, regardless of where…because you have to have that freedom.

So, to go back to what I was mentioning earlier about through characters that actually do have that kind of initial development on the way in. Caine Riordan, the protagonist of the series, to the extent that it has one, is definitely an example of that. And my decisions regarding him were a little bit a little bit unusual, I suppose, in that I wanted a realistic character that was going to be a great lens for immediate encounters with the unknown, immediate encounters with problems. And that meant that, in addition to me wanting to break with tradition and not go with somebody who starts out as a soldier or a spy or something else like that, I wanted to choose somebody who was a little bit more reminiscent of what I’m gonna call a World War Two hero ethos, which was, World War Two was largely a war where you did not have professional militaries. You had, it was a sort of a come-as-you-are party. And so, citizen soldier and that entire idea was very important to me, and that’s one of the reasons I chose to make him an analyst and a think tanker more than anything else, because I wanted him to start out in a comfort zone.

So, he was…what I mean by that is, he’s a semi-Washington insider at the time that everything begins, and it’s…he starts, actually, in a place of strength, in his comfort zone, but as time goes on, he’s actually moving out of that that comfort zone, very much what had to happen with folks who were in World War Two, they had to learn things on the job. They hadn’t… his was not part of their plan. And I thought that was a more interesting story than the ones that…I think we’ve gone in a slightly more pre-professionalized sort of direction regarding a lot of our heroes in similar tales.

The other thing that I wanted to do about him, so I wanted to give him, what was he going to have instead of those skills? And so, I decided on a character that was a polymath, which is, of course, more than just knowing a lot of things. It is also having an ability to, if you will, employ and exploit knowledge from one field to another. To give you an example of that, the same thing that moderates, for instance, our…the principle of dynamic equilibrium is just one example. It’s at work in terms of a pendulum. It’s at work in terms of maintaining pressure between systems. It’s at work in maintaining body temperature in the human body. And a polymath will tend to see all these things as potentially informing different fields where a similar process of dynamic equilibrium might be at work. That’s the way a polymath tends to think. They tend to take concepts or paradigms from one area, apply them to another that would not necessarily be the place you would normally expect to see it applied.

So, I wanted to make him that because I wanted to give him a kind of an unusual facility that turns into, readily turns into a jack of all trades, master of none. I thought that would be interesting in a character. The other thing that I chose for him…so that is, if you will, his superpower, everybody of course, every character has to have a tragic flaw. And his tragic flaw is a sort of a virtue that can go to an extreme, which is, he really, really does not like to, and almost never does, tell a lie. And when he does “lie,” it’s a lie of omission. It’s like, well, if you presume something and I don’t, I’m not going to say any…I’m not going to correct your misperception there. And he’ll only do that with people he feels have proven themselves to be faithless.

Now, given how much, as is obvious, he obviously works with or for the government on occasion, that desire never tell a lie, never to, you know, never to spout a party line, for anybody who’s had any sort of experience with large organizations, you can understand just how costly that can be. 

So, I wanted him also, with those skills, I felt that I wanted a character that readers, particularly readers, long-time readers of this, of science fiction and fantasy, would relate to. And I felt they would relate to this because, frankly, there are two places where I’ve met a lot of people who have these sort of traits, who have these desires not to march…they’re going to march to the beat of a different drum. They’re extremely intelligent. They are, they’re intelligent, their intelligence is spread across and frequently integrates a variety of different disciplines, and the two places I found that, in my experience, have been in that that big building at Langley, and as you walk past those cubicles, you’ll see the science-fictional books and all of the, if you will, the devotion again to alterity, because those are minds forever voyaging also. That’s why they’re analysts, for a large part. And also, science fiction fans themselves.

And so, in a sense, this was sort of a love letter, I guess you could say, to fans. I don’t come from fandom, but I found fandom to be exactly like this: well-read, competent in a bunch of areas, ferociously intelligent, really don’t care if they fit anybody else’s preconceived mold. So, that was who I chose him to be, and he’s evolved to the point as a character that…fans often describe my characters better than I do, and one fan, I was trying to explain who he was to somebody who didn’t read much science fiction at all, and the person with this less-exposed individual said, he sort of broke in and said, “Okay, let me put it in terms you understand. This character is a cool guy who has to sort of solve problems almost like a MacGyver, and he’s got sort of…although he’s got the head of Batman, he’s kind of got the heart of Captain America, although he doesn’t have any of their powers.” And I sat there, and I said, “Yep, that’s good. That works. I’ll take that. That’s a nice description. That’ll hook people.” So, that’s kind of who the main character is, and as you can see, this was very much a planned character for the other reason, the last thing I’ll say is, the other reason I did not want him to be a specialist at anything, why I did not want him to be in a military or rank situation, is that I frequently find it that a lot of these series, military series particularly, have this apparent driver in them to show the character from private to general and then still somehow involved in the action. And to my mind, that was never a good model because it becomes increasingly implausible as you go, as a character becomes higher and higher and higher in the command structure, that they would actually be on the sharp end of things, that they would be where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. And I did not want to take that away from the character. So I wanted…so although first contact frequently goes wrong or can put him in places where conflict arises, I didn’t want him to ever promote out of having to be in the field. So those were some things that are very much structured the character’s background and also the character’s temperament and abilities.

So, with your plan in mind and your characters, what does your actual writing process look like? Do you sit and work a certain number of hours a day? Do you write in longhand in an old notebook under a tree? How does it work for you?

So, no Thoreau for me, and…so, my work habit is not the one that I, unfortunately, that I work best on. And what I mean by that is I write toward immersion, because I think that’s one of the absolute requirements in a good piece of fiction, that…if a reader falls into your book, no matter why they’re doing it, you’re doing your job. You know, unless they’re there…and I don’t mean stick with the book, when I say fall into it, I mean, they get lost in the world, I mean, when they finally close the book, they feel like they’re re-emerging from that other world into this world. That is my objective. And so, my…I write from the same process, if you will, which is I, in a perfect world, I would get to my desk at nine or ten in the morning and I would write as long as it was in me. And there were times when I used to be able to do that. And there are one or two days of the week where I’ve got it structured that I can, but when you have four kids, two and a half of whom are still at home, that’s not quite the way it works out. So, the bottom line is, I try to get a start on every day.

I’m fortunate, very blessed, in that I never have what I would call writer’s block. And as a hint or as a possible function to other writers, I would say if I don’t know where I want to start the day or my energy isn’t ready, one of the things I’ll simply do—normally I do not start my day this way—Is I’ll go back to what I wrote the previous day or the last day that I was writing, and I’ll look at the last four pages of it, just to get myself up to speed. What I’m also winding up doing, of course, is I say, “Oh, my God, there’s a typo,” or “Oh, that’s clumsy,” or “Oops, that’s repetitive,” and by the time I’m done with those four pages, I’m ready to rock. As a matter of fact, I’m impatient to get going, because I’ve sort of put myself on the runway, I’ve backed myself up on the runway a little bit so by the time I’m hitting the blank page, so to speak, I already have a head of steam going. And that’s pretty much how I write. And if I can write for three or four hours straight such that I only stop when I suddenly realize, “Wow, my bladder is really full,” that is the way I like to write. That’s the most productive for me too, because the longer I do that, the more immersed I get in my own world. I don’t even feel like I’m writing at that point, I feel like I’m channeling and that’s, to me, the way it should feel.

When you get to the end, what does your revision process look like to you? Do you revise—you mentioned some revision as you go, when you’re doing this backing up, but do you do a complete start-to-finish rewrite at the end or are you pretty much done when you reach the end?

So, what I find that I wind up doing is…and I think this is very likely if you discover and if you…one of the reasons I don’t go back and revise as I’m writing is I find that it really slows down forward progress, because I do tend to be a perfectionist, particularly about prose and about character and about leanness. I want…whether or not you’re in an action scene, it’s very important to me that the book moves along with that kind of pacing. So, the thing I’m most likely to do in revisions is simply cut. And here’s where, here’s where part of that stuff for later novels comes in, because I’ll cut stuff that I thought was necessary in the book I’m writing, let’s say, and I realized it wasn’t. I didn’t get to that ultimately. I thought I would, but I didn’t, and it didn’t become important to the plot or the story arc in this book. But I can see where it’s going to become important down the line. So I’ll take all that stuff and I’ll move it into a file that is for later books. And that’s kind of a way of…I find that it makes it makes these, it makes the cut easier, to think that I’m not consigning all of it to a garbage bin, but that actually all I’m doing is kicking it…it’s part of the can that I’m kicking down the road.

Because when you’re writing a series, and if the series is not just, you know, “Here’s the universe and here’s this week’s adventure,” which is the model of most television series, or has been, like, for instance, in the Star Trek days and even the Babylon 5 days, although we’ve been moving more towards what I would call sustained character arcs as viewing and media options have changed. But in the original Star Trek universe, the thing that hung it together was, you knew something of the relationships of the character. But each show was essentially a self-contained experience, an adventure. Obviously not so mine, so when…so, there’s always reason, there’s…kicking stuff down the road is a very real advantage for me. And it gives me a sense of where I’m going and actually helps me pre-shape novels.

So editing, very important. And I’ll make several editing passes. The first thing I’ll do is, I will skim it and I will just highlight the text in one of three ways, not highlighted at all, yellow, or red. Red means I know I absolutely can and will get rid of this. Yellow is, “I don’t know, you know, have I said this someplace else, is gonna be repetitive, is it really necessary?” Because for whatever reason at that particular moment reading I haven’t got the whole, I haven’t got the project, the whole project, in my head at this point, ’cause this is probably my first read-through. So, after I’ve gotten to the end, then I’ll know which of those things…the red will almost always come out, the yellow, a lot of the yellow comes out, and then I’m left with what I’ll call the Ur-text at that point. And then I start doing the line edits, and the line edits are for clarity and just not to have extra stuff in there.

And I think sometimes, when I write from immersion, and like I say, I’m channeling, I’m very uncritical of what I’m writing as I write it. And so, this is the moment when the critical eye comes in, and a word…I’m not going to stop if I can’t think of precisely the word I want, because I don’t want that to jam up my writing day. But this is the point at which I’ll come back and say, eh, you know, because I put asterisks. You know, I’ll use a word, let’s say I was thinking of, you know, of a term having to do with, you know, when are you’re going to arrive, you know, and I’m thinking, “There’s a word for in military parlance, what is that? I can’t remember it, dammit.” I’m not going to stop, so I’ll write, “When are you going to arrive?”, snd I put three asterisks. I hit that when I go back and I say, “Oh, of course, insertion.” So then that comes out and insertion goes in and that edit is done.

So, there are probably two main passes. Sometimes there’s more. Interestingly, in Marque of Caine, this is the most heavily edited novel of all. It originally went in at 240,000 words, and Toni said, “You know, I think this is, for what it’s doing, I don’t think it wants to be this long.” She was absolutely right. Toni Weisskopf, by the way, owner and my editor at Baen Books. And I really looked at that, and…to give you an idea of how much I take editing and editor’s suggestions to heart is that one, that 240,000-word book ultimately came in at 158,000 words, thirty or 40,000 of which I can actually use, possibly in a standalone, or something later on, and a lot of the other things or bits. But yeah, a lot of editing and at almost every level, multiple passes.

Now I’ve got to get to the…well, you actually sort of answered this right off the top when you were talking about what drew you into science fiction and fantasy. But the big philosophical question is always, why do you write and why do you think any of us write this stuff? So, why do you why did you write it? Why do you think any of us write it?

Well. I think there are…I think people have overlap on one topic. If you were completely satisfied with the way things are in the real world in terms of all it contains in the way of experience and all of your ability to experience it, my guess is that possibly imagination would go in different directions. I think there is something about this focus on alterity, whether it is what I will call for the purposes of entertainment, and it might be self-entertainment as much as anything else, or whether it’s to ponder the imponderables, if you will, that at some level what’s in this particular mortal veil is not is not sufficient. Some…the people who write this, and I think the people who read it, want more. They want to see how else it could be. They are…there’s something that’s in them that is what I would call a positive restlessness of wanting to see what’s over the next hill. Not all human beings are like that. As a matter of fact, from having worked in advertising, I can tell you that that science fiction and fantasy sells to actually one of the rarest demographics, it’s a demographic that advertisers almost don’t go for, which is people who actually, you know, love and revel in the notion of alterity. Most people, it feels like, “That’s disorienting. You moved my cheese. Don’t do that to me.” It’s kind of hard to advertise for people who are focused on alterity and also tend to be a little bit skeptical. One of the reasons obviously they’re interested in alterity is because they have the mind reflex to essentially say, “If I’m not happy here, where else can I go? If it doesn’t fulfill, if it doesn’t check all my boxes, where do I go to get those boxes checked?” Well, science fiction, fantasy, those are great places, and this is where you find folks. So, I think all the readers and all the writers probably have that in common at some level.

Then I think there are a variety of different reasons for it. In my place, I am very much motivated by that. I’m also motivated by…I guess you could say some…first of all, it’s fun to do. If I…writing is work. It’s work I love to do. But worldbuilding, actually, if I am…I can be half asleep. I can be terribly distracted. I can…for instance, if I…some people can write in a crowded, somewhat noisy Starbucks. God love them, don’t know how they do it, but I can world-build wherever I am. For whatever reason, that exercise is such that…it’s like such a playground for me. I can be in the noisiest environment, and the only thing that will annoy me is if I don’t have a way to record my thoughts, because I’ll forget a bunch of them. And I can do that. So, that gives it… some of it from me, I think, is cognitive temperament, if I can say that? I know those sound like inherently different things, but I’m gonna put it that way.

And the other thing is that I do think that there are important questions to ponder. And I think one of them is, you know, the entire question of our future. By which I mean to say that I don’t write things–I want to be very clear about this–I am certainly not interested in predicting the future. I think it’s a fool’s errand, and as a friend of mine and fellow SIGMA member said, Steven Gould, he said, “Science fiction predicts the future the way a shotgun kills a duck.” And I think that that’s an absolutely on-target metaphor, if you will, or simile.

I haven’t heard that one before.

It’s a good one. And what I like about it is that there’s another level to it, I’m not sure Stephen intended this, which is, yes, a shotgun is firing across a broad span. But at the same time, it’s not without focused purpose. You’re aiming at the duck. You are trying to put, you’re trying to overlap, if you will, a cone of intent on an object at a distance. And I feel that’s exactly what the science fiction writer is doing. We’re trying to find what…we’re trying to project rather than predict. And we’re trying to, we’re not saying it’s likely. We don’t want it to be wholly implausible, but someplace between the realm of it’s possible, maybe even plausible, is, I think, sort of an important thing to do.

One of the things that makes human beings human beings is that we, as far as we can tell amongst all the creatures, are the ones who essentially create planning scenarios. We run through possibilities and potential scenarios in our mind, and we come up with ways of dealing with that. And this notion of forward-looking…science fiction and fantasy to some degree is just a more extreme version of that.

And I would say probably, the other component in this, which I suppose sounds a little bit goofy, but to go back to something I said before, I think there are challenges before us as a species, no matter whether it involves things from outside our own solar system or not, we have a bunch of challenges in front of us. I mean, a biosphere does not last forever. A star does not lasts forever. We are doing things to this planet, which I think anybody can say, forget the current sensitivity issues regarding climate, I’ll simply say carcinogens. We’re making a dirty environment. And what are we going to do about that?

And so, all of this is going to the notion of, there is a necessity for us to work together. There is a necessity for us to leave no one behind. Poverty and lack of education are not merely a crime against a compassionate approach to other human beings, they are wasted resources. By which I mean there are challenges before us that I really feel we will do our best if we have every human being on deck bringing their best game to the game. And we are not doing that right now. And I do believe that a movement in that direction is kind of one of the things that I’m trying to get at in my fiction, the costs potentially of not doing so.

And connected to that is that there is an interest in a different intelligence. I’m gonna say, I’m gonna use something that, as far as I know, is kind of coming from me, which is when people say, “Well, why would you think that would be any other intelligence in the universe?” And my attitude is, if you’re approach to this is deistic, well, you know, I don’t know that we can talk to begin with, not because I don’t want to talk with you, but when cosmology is the same thing as theology, essentially, you have your answers. There’s a teleology in place in the notion that, of course, we may be the only one, because that’s what we were told. OK, fine. But if that’s not what’s motivating somebody, if science and empiricism is, then my simple response to why would I think there’s other intelligence in the universe would be, “Tell me something else that nature has ever done once.” It just doesn’t. And I mean, they can say, oh, “Big Bang.” But there’s a lot that’s suggests that Big Bang itself is part of…there’s, I think, it was a scientific, or a sort of model that came out of, I think India, originally, going way back now, like twenty, thirty years, the hypersphere model, that if everything does, you know, if the universe is saddle shaped and everything goes far apart, when it goes far enough apart, it will ultimately begin to re collapse. It will recombine. And what happens? You get impossible density in a small point and “Bang!”, it starts all over again. So, I’m really wedded to that idea.

And if we are not alone, then my question is, what else is out there now or what else has been out there and what would that mean? What does it mean as we…and do we really want to say, therefore, in our own block? I think it was Tsiolkovsky, the sort of the father of Russian space technology and aeronautics and in some ways, for probably more than just Russia, said, you know, “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but you can’t remain in the cradle forever.” And indeed, you can’t. You won’t fit. Eventually it’ll rot. You know, your choices to…either we stay and die, or we move and exist and change. And my attitude is, the second is full of uncertainties. It is full of alternates that we certainly don’t see today. And that is certainly the direction in which I would want to head. So all those things kind of make me feel like, because they’re all so innate to me, I feel they’re like part of how I define myself that I kind of don’t feel that I chose science fiction. I feel science fiction chose me.

Well, now projecting your personal future. What are you working on right now? What’s coming up?

Giving shorter interviews and thereby sparing everybody’s listening audience.

I can’t wait to do the transcript for this one.

Oh, God Almighty. I’m so sorry, Ed. So, what I turn my hand to next is, I am doing a solo novel in John Ringo’s Black Tide Rising universe. Known inaccurately as his zombie apocalypse universe, which kind of was a complete surprise to me. The way it came up, I was asked to give an eight-to-ten-thousand-word short story for an anthology for that. And I certainly said, “Oh, that’d be fun.” So I did that and 35,000 words later, I turned in my piece, and there was great silence on the end of the line, so to speak, the email link. And many months later, I got an e-mail coming back saying, as I expected, “Obviously this doesn’t fit in the anthology, but if you could write as much again, we’d love to publish it as a novel.” So this was one of those moments where you break the rules and get a contract. And as Toni Weisskopf said at DragonCon, don’t any of you use this as a success model. So that’s what I’m in the midst of working on. After that, I do another 1632 novel, which I think Eric probably plugged the time he was on here. We’re doing something called 1637: No Peace Beyond the Line.

Yes, he did.

Right. A follow on to Commander Cantrell in the West Indies, and is another New World-setting novel, which at the end is going to start actually bringing some of the disparate character arcs back into contact. I won’t say more than that. And finally, after that, after working my way through the rota, because I have the wonderful quote, “problem,” I use that word very, very ironically and facetiously, is that I have a lot of books already under contract, which is the dream job. You know, I almost don’t say that because it is truly the thing I know I envied, and I feel honored and humbled by having that. So, I say all that to leaven any sense that I could at all be complaining about having more work to do than I have time to do it. That is exactly what every writer wants to have as their daily existence. But finally, I do get to write the first novel in the epic-fantasy slipstream sort of sort of trilogy that Baen contracted me to do called The Broken World.And I’m really lookin g forward to that because that’s worldbuilding again. It’s set in…it’s a different discipline in some ways than the worldbuilding for science fiction? But because rigour and consistency of worlds and everything you put in it is very important to me, there’s a lot in it that is actually reminiscent. The worldbuilding is the same. And once again, I had this world built in, in its main, long ago.

What I’ll say about it is again, the character is not the average character you would expect. Again, this character is a little bit at…not exactly at odds, but was hoping for a different life path than he got, but because of the skills he has, he doesn’t get that. He…you know, he’d hoped he was going to be a great figure in the armies of this state of which he is a part. But instead, he sort of is put in…he’s made a kind of a rolling individual scout-courier, which is hugely disappointing to him, but puts him in contact with things that suggests that there’s something wrong with this world. Things don’t add up. And that’s where I say it’s slipstream, because to some degree I am working against genre types. By the end of the novel, I hope to have largely stood a lot of the conventions of the fantasy novel straight on their heads, not the least of which a reader is quickly going to see that there are some things in this novel which certainly do draw from some of the imagery and shapes that we know of from our own history of this world and some that are not merely…they go beyond being not merely a sort of northwest tinctured, northwest European tinctured fantasy, but they become a sort of almost alien, if you will, tinctured fantasy. And that they are existing side by side is not is not a failure in artistic or aesthetic consideration, but bloodymindedly purposeful. That juxtaposition.

Sounds intriguing. And where can readers find you online?

All the usual places. My website is terribly hard to remember. It is—get a pen ready—www.charlesegannon.com. So what, the title you see on the books, the name on the books, is exactly the website, with the exception of there’s no period after my middle initial. It’s just www on one end, com on the other, and you’ll find me easily enough. I am probably…the best place to look for me is on Facebook. I’m there a lot. That makes it sound like I post a lot. I don’t, but it’s the thing I look at. I do have a mailing list that’s easy to find through the website. It’s easy to find through Facebook pretty much. If you can’t find it just let me know and I will be happy to direct you towards it. And I do have a Twitter account. I, as a matter of fact, did a Twitter interview just yesterday. No, on Friday. So I’m there. And, of course, you can find my books at Amazon. You can find them at baen.com, and they are, of course, frequently littering the shelves at Barnes and Noble and other, you know, bricks and mortar venues.

Oh, that’s great. So, thanks so much for being on The Worldshapers. It’s been a fascinating conversation. I think—I’m sure—that listeners will enjoy it.

Well, thank you very much. It’s great being here. And I’m sorry I gave you so much for your transcription efforts to untangle and present. But it’s a lot of fun. These were great questions. And you have a whole bunch of great things going on in your career right now. I see wonderful stuff with DAW Books and recently named a fellow in residence at one of Saskatchewan’s libraries. Am I right about that?

Yeah. I’ll be writer in residence at the Saskatoon Public Library from September through April, working with local writers and then also getting a chance to get paid for working on stuff before the publisher pays me for the stuff I’m working on, which is kind of weird, but I’ll take it.

You know, I think if you can make two dollars for every one you should make for the publication of a story. That’s a good thing. And it also sounds like I should have been interviewing you, not the other way around.

Well, I interviewed myself for a previous episode.

Oh, did you? Well, that must have sounded wonderful, if pathological.

Well, it was my Masks of Aygrima pseudonym, E.C. Blake, who interviewed me. So, anyway, thanks, Charles…Chuck.

Thank you so much.