First Saturday Sci-Fi - August 2018

Hot enough for you ?? Its hanging around 110 this week! Way to hot for me but then it's August in beautiful down town So. Cal.

This month we have Graham Storrs who is a former research scientist that now writes science fiction. He has published short stories and novels covering all the major sci-fi themes, including time travel, dystopian futures, trans-humanity, alien invasion and space opera. Within each theme, he likes to mix it up, writing thrillers, adventure and comedy. Keeping the science real is as important to him as keeping his characters plausible and his books and stories are heavily researched. He does most of his writing outdoors, in the mountains and gum forests that surround his home.

1. Tell us about your favorite work… what makes it special ?

I'm one of those irritating writers who loves their own work. I actually enjoy editing my books, partly because I like re-reading them! Also, I try to shake things up with each new book or series - different styles and sub-genres, for example - which makes them quite different. So it's really hard for me to pick a favourite. However, I've been deeply immersed in my time travel series, Timesplash, over the past few months, bringing out a new edition and repackaging it. Timesplash is a set of three books (Timesplash, True Path and Foresight) set in the near future. It's special to me for all kinds of reasons - it includes my first novel ever published, my first series to be published, my fist novel to be commissioned by a publisher, my first novel to be shortlisted for a major award (also, the second), my first Kindle best-seller, and so on. But it's also special because of the main characters - Jay and Sandra - for whom I developed a deep affection as the series unfolded. That may sound a bit crazy to some, but when I'm inside the heads of these fictitious people for hundreds of hours (it takes a lot longer to write them than to read them!) I do, sometimes, form close attachments.

2. What do you think makes for good Sci-Fi ?

There's a technical answer to this as well as an emotional one. I have a personal definition of sci-fi which emphasises adherence to physical and psychological reality and a strong implicit or explicit underlying assumption that there is nothing supernatural about the world, that it can all be understood (in principle) scientifically. On top of that, good stories and great characters, of course, but in a setting where technological change or a breakthrough in understanding has created new circumstances that are challenging to our protagonists.

I am saddened by how much modern science fiction is inward-looking and even backward-looking. It is as if some sci-fi writers have given up on the science -- even on the technology. They can't understand it, they no longer have a vision of where it is taking us, and the complexities have become too much for them. They write 'steampunk' or other types of tale where technologies are simpler and more magical. They write for 'young adult' readers instead of grown-ups. They blur the lines between sci-fi and fantasy, or they write the same kinds of stories that were being written 30 or 50 years ago, barely updating the science and technology at all.

As a boy, when I read science fiction, it filled me with awe and wonder. I wanted to stand on the bridge of a star ship and see the Milky Way spread out before me. I wanted to talk to intelligent robots. I wanted to meet alien explorers, find mysterious artifacts on the Moon, visit a ring world, or stand upon a Dyson sphere. I wanted, in short, to boldly go where no boy had gone before.

And I still want that!

Exploring ideas is fun. Exploring ideas at the same time as speculating about the future is a huge adventure. Science fiction should look towards the future, where our beliefs and our humanity will be challenged, but it should also look forward to the future, anticipating the magic of discovery and revelation with courage and an open mind.

Good sci-fi often engages with today's issues, moving them into future or alternative scenarios so that they can be examined and laid bare. I really would like to think that readers today could get the stimulation of confronting tricky ethical, philosophical, personal and social problems in a genre where nothing is taboo and everything is fair game. Yet I also want people to share my sheer, bloody wonder at the Universe in all its magnificence and complexity. Only science fiction can take us into the heart of the breathtaking miracle of this universe we inhabit, dazzling us with its enormity and splendor, while telling us marvelous tales about our own remarkable species and its struggles for existence, understanding, and a meaningful place in the cosmos.

Science fiction did all this and more for me, and I feel bound to pay this precious gift forward.

3. Do you think your books can help shape the future and if so how?

Keith Oatley, a cognitive scientist from the University of Toronto, has been studying the effects of fiction on personality and emotion. His conclusion is that there is a strong effect. He and his collaborators found that people who read fiction actually become more like the characters in the stories. He likens fiction to a simulation of a social world, created by the author, which then runs in the minds of the readers. Reading involves exercising empathy to identify with the characters and, through a kind of social learning, the absorption of some of their traits. It's a powerful yet humbling finding since, if it is true, it gives the author a massive moral responsibility to keep it real and not to deceive anyone, even accidentally, about the nature of the world and the human condition. Perhaps it means writers should be at least intelligent and wise enough that what they write isn't stupid or plain wrong. For a sci-fi writer like me, I believe findings like Oatley's mean that whatever I might predict, or suggest about future technologies and how they might affect us, it is what I write about people and their relationships that are likely to be most influential. Of course technology and psychology overlap. In my novel Heaven is a Place on Earth, I look at a near future where the world is permeated with virtual and augmented reality technology. My focus is on the deceptions this tech permits because this is the worry I have about how people will use it. People who've read it describe the novel as "disturbing" or even "frightening" and I think that is good. Perhaps I've sown a few seeds of doubt and concern. I'd like everyone in politics and high tech corporations to read it and feel disturbed. Maybe that way it might make a difference to the future. However, when I consider the massive reach and popularity of a book like Orwell's 1984, I despair, since we are rushing pell-mell into exactly the kind of authoritarian surveillance society he wrote about. If a book as widely circulated as 1984 can have no effect, I doubt that anything I write ever will.

4. Do you have inside jokes or true events hidden in your writing?

Very few, actually. Sometimes I'm a little bitter or wry and slip in a comment from a character eighty years from now about the conning towers of JFK Airport poking up out of the waters of Jamaica Bay (as in The Credulity Nexus and the other Ryk Sylver novels, where a 4-metre sea-level rise is part of the barely-mentioned legacy of global warming). I also tend to name off-world places after famous sci-fi writers. (Lots of the action in The Credulity Nexus takes place in the Lunar city of Heinlein -- in fact, in a bar called The Harsh Mistress.) But I don't do inside jokes. I'm not really connected to sci-fi "fandom" and I doubt that many of my readers are, either. I do make jokes and play around with sci-fi tropes in my two comic novels, Cargo Cult and Time and Tyde. The first is a space opera romp that pokes fun at almost everything. The second is a black comedy that has some fun with time travel and the trappings of sci-fi TV and movies. So, that's where to look if you want to see my sense of humour.

5. Which do you prefer… model your characters after people you know or just make them up?

I make them up but some of my favourite characters contain elements of people I know. A reviewer complained once about all the powerful, intelligent, beautiful, self-confident women in my books and how unrealistic an image of womanhood I project. It set me back on my heels a bit but, when I thought it through, I realised that almost all the women in my life have been like that - my mother, my wife, my daughter, women I've worked with... So, yes, my critic was right but in my defence, I was only writing from experience! One of the worst maulings I've had from a critic was over a character called Sniper, who appears in Timesplash. This guy is literally a sociopath. He's about as evil as they come. The complaint was that he was two-dimensional, a comic-book baddie and not believable. And yet Sniper is probably the only character I ever based squarely on someone I knew - a manager in a company I worked for once and a complete b@stard. Nothing Sniper ever did or said would have been out of character for this person. I did what I thought was an accurate job of depicting him. Yet he came across as unbelievable because he was "too evil". I suppose, as is often the case, real stories and real people often do not translate well into fiction, they just seem too incredible. The character of mine who is most loved by my readers is actually a robot. It appears in half-a-dozen of my novels and is the narrator of the current trilogy I'm working on. Obviously, it is completely invented. It's the robot I always wanted to find in someone else's books. It doesn't want to be human, it isn't the least bit cute (in fact, it's quite scary) and its emotions -- such as they are -- are alien and complicated. I think it is one of my favourite characters and that probably comes through in the writing.

6. Are there any messages in your novels that you want readers to take away?

Not all that many, actually. I have very strong views on all kinds of subjects but I don't let them intrude too much in my writing (I hope). My characters are who they are and the protagonists all broadly align with my general philosophy on life, I suppose, but I make an effort to be "true" to their individual personalities and backgrounds - even if it means they end up saying and doing things i don't always approve of! Of course, in my world-building, I try to be consistent with how i believe the future will probably unfold. In a couple of my novels, neoliberal capitalism causes a catastrophic collapse of global society and the environment before the end of the Twentieth Century. That just seems inevitable -- and any book set 100 years from now that doesn't have a world reeling from the damage caused by climate change is just not realistic. I've also written about the degeneration of the United States of America into, essentially, a third-world theocracy -- it's a major theme in the Timesplash series (especially the second book, True Path). It seems like a likely future to me but readers are very divided on the matter, with most saying I got it dead right while others objecting loudly that American society is just not like that. I wrote these books before the shock of the Trump presidency, so I'm feeling partially vindicated already! On the whole, however, I see my work more as entertainment and intellectual stimulation than as propaganda for the Cause. Probably my novel Heaven is a Place on Earth is the only one with a real message. I read my first scientific paper on augmented reality in 1985 and it shook me to the foundations. The potential of this technology to make the world really awful (as well as better) was obviously enormous. I worked in the field for a while after that and the more I learned, the worse my foreboding grew. Heaven, then, is a kind of warning, a label on that future direction saying, "Here be dragons".

7. What is your favorite review?

There are a number of things I value in good sci-fi -- original ideas, careful and meticulous world-building, gripping plots, good science, and fascinating characters. So the things I like in a good review are when a reader compliments me for one or more of these things. I've had quite a few great reviews of the "I couldn't put it down" variety -- especially for the Timesplash series. The best of these was a guy who complained he was in trouble with his wife for not doing his chores because he couldn't stop reading. Many of my Placid Point novels (see below) have been complimented on their world-building. Creating a deep and believable "world" for my stories is something I take huge pains over, so I really appreciate it when a reader says something nice about it. Timesplash in particular got lots of reviews remarking on how original my take on time travel is. Unless the story is Moby-Dick-brilliant, I can't see the point in feeding readers old, re-hashed ideas. I get so disappointed with so much modern space opera (for example) where the technology is basically warmed-over Star Trek. And it's the same with the plots. Books structured like Hollywood action movies bore me and I'm sure they'd bore my readers. So I love reviews that say the reader really did not see the ending coming. Heaven is a Place on Earth is one where I've had many compliments about this. One of my favourites was when a guy wrote about Loner's Deep, "... to a trained physicist, the underlying science is pretty plausible." I'm not a trained physicist so I do a lot of research and feel very insecure about it, which makes a comment like this honey to my ears. On the whole, I've been very lucky with reviews and I love that feeling when you read one and think, "Yes, this reader really gets what I was trying to do."

What comes next?

Like a fool, I began work, many, many years ago, on a massive epic I call Placid Point -- three trilogies, one set in the near future (the Ryk Sylver novels), one set 300 years later (the Canta Libre novels), and the last set 10,000 years after that (the Deep Fracture novels). It covers two main technical themes -- the rise of the first trans-humans, and the development of a new physics based on a "hidden variables" interpretation of quantum theory -- and two main sociological themes -- the friction between trans-humans and ordinary people, and the discovery of other intelligent species in the galaxy. I've completed two of these trilogies, interspersing the writing of these six novels with the writing of all the others. And it's very tempting to go on writing lots of different novels because I am always full of ideas and burning with impatience to get them down on paper. But I've made myself focus on getting the Placid Point novels finished. I've written the first of the final three, and almost finished the second. I hope I will have the third done by this time next year so my readers can stop asking me for it and I can get back to all the other projects I have on hold! Honestly, I can't understand how the likes of GRR Martin and JK Rowling stay sane. I feel crushing guilt when a handful of keen readers ask me for the next book in a series. What must it be like to face the entreaties of thousands?

Where can we learn more?

My website is http://www.grahamstorrs.com. There you can find a complete listing of my books and short story collections.

My author Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/GrahamStorrsAuthor/ where you can see new announcements and other "writerly" posts. If you'd just like to chat, my personal Facebook page is the place to go (https://www.facebook.com/graham.storrs),

or talk to me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/graywave).

Timesplash: http://getbook.at/Timesplash

True Path: http://getbook.at/Truepath

Foresight: http://getbook.at/Foresight

Heaven: http://getbook.at/Heaven

Mindrider: http://getbook.at/Mindrider

Cargo Cult: http://getbook.at/CargoCult