By The Way...

Wednesday, May 17, 2006
8:53:00 AM EDT
Hearing Heaven and Hell, Movement V: Vangelis
Today's author interview is a real treat for me to bring to you, because it's of a good friend of mine: Nick Sagan, whose third book Everfree is in bookstores tomorrow. Everfree pictures a world in which a terrible disease has wiped out humanity -- except for those fortunate enough to be put into a deep-freeze... and the specially-bred humans designed to be their caretakers. As the first group thaws, its members begin to clash with the second, and the question becomes: Will these fortunate few survivors survive this second chance? It's a great book that Kirkus Reviews says is "a powerful plea for sensible human cooperation delivered via a knockout story." Can't beat that.

1. Quick! Tell us a little bit about yourself and about Everfree.

You bet.  I’m an author and a screenwriter, currently living in “ten square miles surrounded by reality.”  That’s the motto of my hometown, Ithaca, New York, and maybe there’s something to it, as it’s proven to be a good place to write science fiction and fantasy.  When I’m not here, I’m in my other hometown of Los Angeles, California, which is even further removed from reality.  (Though in very different ways.) 

If you don’t know me yet, there’s a good chance you know my father, Carl Sagan, the Pulitzer prize-winning astronomer.  Perhaps you’ve watched the Cosmos TV series, seen the Jodie Foster film Contact, or read books like The Dragons of Eden or Pale Blue Dot.  He inspired millions to learn about science and skepticism, and to view the universe with a sense of wonder.  One of the reasons I write is to honor his memory, and my latest novel, Everfree, is dedicated to him.

The stories I write tend to fall under the category of “social science fiction,” and Everfree is no exception.  Humanity has been all but annihilated by a deadly pathogen.  The world is inherited not by the meek, but by those rich, powerful and well connected enough to afford cryonic suspension, freezing their infected bodies until a cure can be found.  With the plague now beaten, how do we reform society?  Where does the power lie? Who controls the future?

This is the third novel I’ve written, a conclusion to the trilogy that began with Idlewild and continued with Edenborn.  You can read the books in any order, but if you’re like me, you’ll want to start at the beginning.  Here are links to webpages dedicated to each of the books, where you can read excerpts, hear samples from the audiobooks, bask in the warmth of the glowing reviews, etc.  -- Idlewild--Edenborn--Everfree 

2. Everfree has humans dealing with a post-pandemic world. With the current sort-of panic about avian flu fresh in our minds, how prepared do you think we are as a society for the spread of a really nasty bug?

The good news: Threatslike avian flu are typically overhyped.  The media props up bird flu, SARS or mad cow disease as unstoppable microbial bogeymen, but they wind up causing comparatively few deaths. 

The bad news: It’s only a matter of time until one of these kinds of threats does materialize as a legitimate global pandemic, and because so many false alarms have been raised in the past, many people will be caught unawares. 

The really bad news: I think it’s reasonable to believe that we are as prepared to deal with a deadly plague as the federal government was prepared for the Katrina hurricane in August of last year.  Case in point: how flu vaccine distribution got bungled in 2004.  Now factor in how viruses are constantly mutating, sometimes into more virulent strains.  And that’s naturally occurring—pathogens can also be made more dangerous via human tampering.  Are we ready for biological warfare?  The CDC does a wonderful job keeping America safe, but they’re understaffed and underfunded.  Not to scare you, but I suspect we’re in for a bumpy ride.         

3. Before you were a novelist, you wrote screenplays and also served as Story Editor for Star Trek: Voyager. How does writing a novel differ from writing for movies or television?

Is one type of writing better, or all they all just different? They all use different muscles, and I’d say “better” is in the eye of the beholder.  

Here’s an overview:

Screenplays

Pros: You have a three-act structure to hang your story on, and that can be reassuring, a significant aid to reaching the “FADE OUT” on the final page.  Screenwriting is potentially quite lucrative, as you can make ungodly amounts of money.  And it’s glamorous.  It’s Hollywood, after all.  Of course, this is only glamorous to a point—everyone in L.A. has a screenplay to sell.  I remember a news crew ran an experiment where they stopped people coming out of a movie theater to ask, “How’s the screenplay going?”  The typical reply: “Great!  How’d you know I was writing one?”

Cons: You must think high concept.  An “A” concept and “F” writing can net you a sale.  Whereas, a “B” concept and “A” writing might only get you a meeting (and sometimes not even that.)  You don’t have endless freedom.  Because producers and studios typically believe in traditional three-act structure, you deviate from it at your own peril.   You’re likely never to see your screenplays reach the big screen.  Countless scripts and pitches go through Hollywood each year and only a couple hundred movies get made.

Teleplays

Pros: Like screenplays, they’re highly structured, hinging on the act breaks where commercials go.  Writing for TV can be even more lucrative than writing for movies—get on a hit show for, say, five years, and once that show gets syndicated you’re in excellent financial shape.  And teleplays are by nature collaborative—you work with other writers to put on the best shows you can, and it can be a lot of fun to be part of a team, as writing can otherwise be a fairly lonely process.

Cons: You might have great stories to tell that simply aren’t right for the show you’re on.  TV writing is a “real job” in that you show up to an office five (and sometimes six or seven) days a week.  TV production is a hungry beast that has to be fed scripts constantly, or you have the cast and crew hemorrhaging money, standing around with nothing to shoot.  That means you have to write quickly, and sometimes on the fly.  And the collaborative nature of TV writing isn’t for everyone.  If you’re a lone wolf, this isn’t for you.

Novels

Pros: Tremendous freedom.  No particular structure to worry about—just write the story you want to tell, however you want to tell it, and keep it entertaining.  Because novels cost much less money to produce than TV shows or movies, you don’t have to worry about the cost of hiring a cast and crew or expensive special effects.  There’s prestige in writing novels.  You wind up in bookstores and libraries, and there’s something very cool about this.

Cons: That freedom can be dizzying.  You can get lost writing a novel in ways you can’t when writing for Hollywood.  And with rare exceptions, the money doesn’t compare with what you’re likely to find out west.  Many novelists have non-writing jobs to pay the bills.  Screenwriters and TV writers with regular gigs almost never have non-writing jobs.

Short stories

Pros: Lots of freedom, they’re fun to write, and they’re quick sprints as opposed to the marathon of effort it takes to crank out a novel, screenplay or teleplay.

Cons: Sadly, there’s very little money in short story writing, and most agents will encourage you to write for other formats instead. 

4. Share a useful piece of writing advice you were given.

I’m partial to Ray Bradbury’s “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you,” but he didn’t say that to me directly.  I’ll go with, “Get comfortable with being in two places at once.”

There’s a schizophrenic quality to writing, and it’s best to embrace it.  For example, as a writer you have to be inside your characters’ hearts and heads, feeling what they’re feeling, listening to what they want to do.  At the same time, you have to be outside your characters, cognizant of pacing, rhythm, and how your readers’ will react to the story as a whole.  Another example: It’s a good idea to understand what your protagonist wants and what he fears, and by extension what your readers want and fear.  Ideally, you should tap into both emotions at the very same time, and let them subtly infuse the creative choices you make.  And another: You want to write with unshakeable enthusiasm, and at the same time poke and prod your writing like a jaded critic, to find out where it’s flawed and how you can make it better. 

5. As a child, your voice was recorded for the phonograph discs that  were attached to the Voyager spacecraft, which feature the sounds of Earth, just in case the spacecraft ever wandered by an extraterrestrial civilization. Do you think they ever will? Also, if the Voyager craft were being made today, would we include an iPod  instead?

Yes, iPods to the stars!  Someone call Steve Jobs…  Well, it’s true that the phonograph technology is dated, but there’s something classy about a record.  Remember, this was the ‘70s, so it easily could have been an 8-track. 

Will an extraterrestrial civilization ever discover Voyager?  “Ever” is a long time, so I won’t rule it out.  I think the odds of it are slim.  Part of this has to do with the vast distances between the stars and the fact that Voyager isn’t even heading toward the nearest one.  And part of it has to do with my suspicion that intelligent civilizations invariably destroy themselves.  To survive and rise to power, a species has to be, on some level, aggressive—this is assured via natural selection over millions of years.  And as a species progresses technologically, that same aggression becomes a double-edged sword. Once you develop weapons to destroy your population many times over, how do you keep from using them?  Does the compassion encoded within your genes allow you to stop?  Possibly.  I have my doubts.

To quote my father, “There are not yet obvious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, and this makes us wonder whether civilizations like ours rush inevitably into self-destruction. I dream about it… and sometimes they are bad dreams.”

6. For your money, what is the one thing about the present day which seems the most science fictional? And what about today do you think people 100 years from now will look back on and not believe we had to deal with on a day to day basis? What’s the most science fictional part of living today? 

The way language is regularly perverted to conceal meaning.  “Friendly fire.”  “Downsizing.”  “Coercive interrogation.”  And so on.  There’s a concerted effort to euphemize anything unpleasant—the right does it, and so does the left—and this kind of doublespeak isn’t very far from the “Newspeak” used in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Misuse of language can make abhorrent ideas and acts seem palatable.  It’s a great way to stifle dissent.  It’s the precursor to a dystopia.  Now I don’t think we’re living in a dystopia yet—but the table is set for it, so to speak.

Of course, if you want to be a stickler and call Nineteen Eighty-Four speculative fiction instead of science fiction, that’s your prerogative.  In that case, I’d say the internet.  The immediacy of information, the ability for anyone with a computer and a phone/DSL to reach out to people they’ve never met—there was nothing like it growing up, and it still feels like science fiction to me.

To the second question, assuming we make it to 2106, I imagine our descendants will be amazed at our aging and mortality.  We appear to be on the cusp of some phenomenal scientific breakthroughs.  With the human genome mapped, a means of retarding the aging process should follow.  I believe our descendants will look at our longevity much the way we look at the longevity of cavemen.  Seventy or eighty years is a considerable length of time to us, but it’ll seem awfully short to humans that can live two hundred years or more.  Beyond even this, we may be able to “upload” our consciences, mapping the human brain and transferring it to a computer.  In theory, that could be a virtual immortality.  Emotionally, it may seem like the wildest, most far off technology, the province of pure science fiction, but within the next two decades, we’ll have computers powerful enough to “run” the equivalent of a human mind.  Where will we be in ten decades?

One of the things I love about science fiction is its reciprocal relationship with science.  Science fiction writers are inspired by advances in science and craft their stories; scientists in turn read those stories and take inspiration from the ideas.  It’s a privilege to be able to play a small part in this dialogue, just as it is to spot potential dangers in our future and point them out via cautionary tales.  Above all else, I like entertaining readers, taking them somewhere they’ve never been.   There’s nothing I’d rather do.

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If you've enjoyed this chat with Nick, you'll be happy to know he has his own blog. Drop over and say hello to him there. Also, check out this other great interview of Nick at SCIFI Weekly (which also has a very enthusiastic review of Everfree).

Next week: We step away from science fiction and get a little mysterious for our next author interview, with Julia Spencer-Fleming, author of the multi-award-winning mystery In The Bleak Midwinter and her latest, To Darkness and To Death, which has received a coveted starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Want to ask Julia Spencer-Fleming a question about writing, her books or other topics? Drop that question into the comment thread here by Friday noon; I'll be looking to add one or two reader questions to the interview mix, and the question I add may just be yours!


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This entry has 5 comments: (Add your own)

• #5 Comment from mavarin 
  5/18/06 2:20 AM | Permalink

  Great stuff--again!  I love the way you take advantage of the blog's capabilities for the interview (i.e., with links).  This particular novel doesn't sound like my cup of meat, but your friend is an interesting guy, and I wish him all success. - Karen
• #4 Comment from lurkynat 
  5/17/06 12:37 PM | Permalink

  Hey John! Thanks! :):) Big Congrats to Nick Sagan! I adored Carl Sagan so I will be one who is super charged to read this book! Thanks so much!
  natalie
  (elbowing Smurfette.."Smurfette..do yuo think that he looks alot like his dad?"
  :):) Kudoes John!
• #3 Comment from monponsett 
  5/17/06 10:04 AM | Permalink

  I'm glad that you mentioned the F/NF thing. That kind of slid in under my goalie pads. Sorry about Carl, Nick... my bad.
  
  Sadly, I taught science in a high school for a year without knowing not only that, but all the other stuff that people who don't know stuff like that don't know.
  
  The only thing I can say in my defense is that I was an emergency fill-in for the real science teacher, who quit suddenly after one of the students hit her in the face with a football. I was the only staff who had that period off. "You'll know more than they will, dear..." my boss said.
  
  It didn't go that badly, other than the time they stole my triple beam balance, or the time that I unwittingly let them handle mercury.
• #2 Comment from johnmscalziEntry Author 
  5/17/06 9:47 AM | Permalink

  "His books will most liekly be will be right next to his father's in the bookshop."
  
  Well, yes, if the bookstore carries "Contact." Otherwise, Carl's books are largely non-fiction and Nick's are fiction, so they're not likely to be shelved together, any more than my non-fiction books are shelved next to my own novels. In any event, I expect Nick would be pleased to be shelved next to his dad.
  
  Also, as an FYI, Carl Sagan passed away 10 years ago.
• #1 Comment from monponsett 
  5/17/06 9:37 AM | Permalink

  This dude needs a name change like yesterday.
  
  His books will most liekly be will be right next to his father's in the bookshop. Offhand, I'd guess that the people who buy his books will also be the type who'd buy his father's books. I'd imagine- and I could be wrong- that Nick is sort of a B level Carl, and people will go for the works of the more famous Dad before picking up Sonny Boy's books.
  
  This will lead to irrational hostility on Son's part, and he will bash in his dad's head someday with a plaster model of Jupiter at Thanksgiving someday. Oh, if Carl had only had a daughter.... she could have married out of this problem.
  
  I hear Evil Knievel's son hates his dad, and went around breaking all of Dad's jumping-stuff records, just to spite him. Ya hate to see a family go bad like that.