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Your Wednesday Author Interview: David Louis Edelman
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Wednesday, June 28, 2006
9:17:00 AM EDT
Hearing Pink Moon -- Nick Drake
For this week's Author Interview, we head back to the future with David Louis Edelman and his science fiction thriller Infoquake, in which Edelman imagines a future where technology can change your body, and changing bodies is both immensely profitable and (sometimes) dangerous to the people in that line of work. It's future business, which is a neat twist, and Publishers Weekly agrees, describing Infoquake as "Bursting with invention and panache." Bursting! That's not bad.
Edelman's promoting the book with its own site that includes sample chapters, author-read podcasts and exclusive background articles. Today, we're talking about the book, the site, and how Adam Smith might write a SF business thriller.
1. Quick! Tell us a little about yourself and about Infoquake.
I'm a web programmer and high-tech marketing guy living near Washington, D.C. I got sucked into the dot-com vortex along with everyone else in the '90s, and spent the next decade working at a series of pretty meaningless high-tech jobs. Infoquake is the book I wrote about those experiences.
The main character of the book is an ethically challenged entrepreneur named Natch. He's an up-and-coming star in a business called bio/logics, which is essentially the programming of the human body through nanotechnology. In Infoquake, you see Natch engaging in all kinds of dirty business tactics to get ahead. He spreads terrorism rumors, he pushes people down stairs, there's even an episode where he sics a bear on one of his enemies.
Then, of course, Natch gets in over his head. He gets caught up in the fight over a dangerous new technology called MultiReal that nobody really understands. Suddenly he's being targeted by governments, journalists, terrorist groups, and Lord knows who else.
I wanted to write a book that seems realistic, even if it's set several hundred years in the future. So Infoquake takes you places that you really haven't seen in science fiction before. Corporate board meetings, business strategy sessions, new product launches, things like that. You won't find any bug-eyed aliens or spaceship battles or ninja chicks with mirrorshades. Not that there's anything wrongwith those things, I just didn't want them in my book.
A lot of Infoquake is based on what I saw in the dot-coms. I had a boss that insisted we steal electricity at tradeshows because he refused to pay the union dues. I worked for another company that stiffed me out of thousands of dollars in sales commissions and then fired me. There were never any bears involved, but there was a definite "no rules" mentality. Capitalism run amuck.
2. This book had its beginnings in another story you wrote in 2001. Talk a little about that and how you got from there to here with the material.
Infoquake is the first part of a trilogy called Jump 225. I originally wrote the whole trilogy as one book. The first draft of the book had a much lighter touch, it was very satiric and almost psychedelic in places. The working title for part one -- the part that turned into Infoquake -- was Randomly Generated Pleasurable Startle 37b. I kid you not.
If you've read Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, my first draft had that same kind of tone. I'm glad I changed directions, because it wasn't really my voice and Cory did it a million times better than I could have ever hoped to.
I finished the first draft of my book on September 10, 2001. And then the next day irony died. I just couldn't bear to look at Jump 225, it seemed too smarmy and self-important. So I started all over again, but this time I had a lot more weighty things on my mind than just my dot-com experiences. I wanted to write about the concept of selfishness, and the Darwinian nature of the universe, and whether capitalism is a viable system for the human race in the long term.
It's a much different book than it was when I started, and it's much better now.
3. When you build out tomorrow's world of tech, business and economics, how do you keep a balance between the cool stuff you want to show, and the need to make sure your readers can keep up?
It's really hard. I went a little overboard with the worldbuilding for Infoquake -- I wrote a huge timeline and all of these background articles about technology, politics, economics, and ethics. I wanted to cover every aspect of Natch's world, from the clothes he wears, to the food he eats, to the shipping network that gets the food to his kitchen table in the first place.
I quickly realized that all of the worldbuilding exposition was getting in the way of the story. But I didn't want to lose all of that background either. So I decided to pull out most of that stuff and put it in a series of appendices at the end of the book. I worked really hard to make sure that you could read Infoquake without delving into the appendices, that you could understand all the technology just by example. But anybody who wants to explore it in more detail can do that too.
Incidentally, [Infoquake publisher] Pyr gave me permission to post all of the appendices online. So it's all up there on the Infoquake website, properly cross-linked and everything, along with some original background material that's not in the book.
4. Share a piece of writing advice you've been given.
The best piece of writing advice I've ever gotten: rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. And when I say "rewrite," I mean literally start with a blank screen, set your last draft beside you, and retype the whole damn thing from scratch. The published version of Infoquake is probably the fifth complete draft of the book, and some sections were rewritten ten times or more.
Of course, you have to know where to stop. Eventually you reach the point where you've achieved 90 or 95 percent of what you were hoping to accomplish, and you can put the book down and say that's enough.
5. Many authors offer sample chapters of their work online (as you do on the Infoquake site), but you also offer "podcast" versions of you reading from the book. What are some of the differences between writing a book, and reading that book aloud for an audience? Does it teach you anything about the work that you didn't already know?
I've always been a firm believer that books shouldn't necessarily sound good when read aloud. Written prose is a completely different medium than recorded speech, and what works in one medium doesn't necessarily work in the other. I wrote Infoquake primarily to be read on the page, in silence. If it works on audio too, then that's just a happy coincidence.
6. You're writing a book of business and technology in the future. I want you to go back in the past and imagine you're Adam Smith, and you've decided to write a book about the future of business and technology. Knowing only what Smith knew in his 18th Century heyday, how close do you think he'd get to the world today? Do you think in time you will fare better or worse than Adam Smith might?
The thing to remember about predicting the future is that human nature doesn't change. We're still the same people that Adam Smith wrote about. We're still the same people that Shakespeare wrote about. In fact, as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke pointed out in 2001, we really haven't changed much since that first dude figured out how to hit the other dude on the head with a bone. In some ways, all of human history is just one long story about two groups squabbling over limited resources.
So when you're trying to predict the future, it's really the human motivations that matter. I spent a lot of time building a plausible future with Infoquake, but I don't really care how accurate the window dressing turns out to be. No matter which future we're looking at, there are going to be ambitious schemers like Natch. There are going to be rich autocrats like the lunar tycoons in the book, and a large stratus of society working their butts off just to make ends meet.
The big variable I see coming down the road is the end of scarcity. What happens when you don't have limited resources? What if you could make everyone happy? Wouldn't that be the end of selfishness as we know it? That, incidentally, is one of the big themes I'm exploring with MultiReal, book two of the Jump 225 Trilogy.
----
Remember to check out the Infoquake site, and also take a gander at both Edelman's personal blog (note: some harsh language there) and Deep Genre, the group literary blog to which he contributes. Lots of stuff to explore.
Written by johnmscalzi Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | 
digg this
9:17:00 AM EDT
Hearing Pink Moon -- Nick Drake
Your Wednesday Author Interview: David Louis Edelman
For this week's Author Interview, we head back to the future with David Louis Edelman and his science fiction thriller Infoquake, in which Edelman imagines a future where technology can change your body, and changing bodies is both immensely profitable and (sometimes) dangerous to the people in that line of work. It's future business, which is a neat twist, and Publishers Weekly agrees, describing Infoquake as "Bursting with invention and panache." Bursting! That's not bad.
Edelman's promoting the book with its own site that includes sample chapters, author-read podcasts and exclusive background articles. Today, we're talking about the book, the site, and how Adam Smith might write a SF business thriller.1. Quick! Tell us a little about yourself and about Infoquake.
I'm a web programmer and high-tech marketing guy living near Washington, D.C. I got sucked into the dot-com vortex along with everyone else in the '90s, and spent the next decade working at a series of pretty meaningless high-tech jobs. Infoquake is the book I wrote about those experiences.
The main character of the book is an ethically challenged entrepreneur named Natch. He's an up-and-coming star in a business called bio/logics, which is essentially the programming of the human body through nanotechnology. In Infoquake, you see Natch engaging in all kinds of dirty business tactics to get ahead. He spreads terrorism rumors, he pushes people down stairs, there's even an episode where he sics a bear on one of his enemies.
Then, of course, Natch gets in over his head. He gets caught up in the fight over a dangerous new technology called MultiReal that nobody really understands. Suddenly he's being targeted by governments, journalists, terrorist groups, and Lord knows who else.
I wanted to write a book that seems realistic, even if it's set several hundred years in the future. So Infoquake takes you places that you really haven't seen in science fiction before. Corporate board meetings, business strategy sessions, new product launches, things like that. You won't find any bug-eyed aliens or spaceship battles or ninja chicks with mirrorshades. Not that there's anything wrongwith those things, I just didn't want them in my book.
A lot of Infoquake is based on what I saw in the dot-coms. I had a boss that insisted we steal electricity at tradeshows because he refused to pay the union dues. I worked for another company that stiffed me out of thousands of dollars in sales commissions and then fired me. There were never any bears involved, but there was a definite "no rules" mentality. Capitalism run amuck.
2. This book had its beginnings in another story you wrote in 2001. Talk a little about that and how you got from there to here with the material.
Infoquake is the first part of a trilogy called Jump 225. I originally wrote the whole trilogy as one book. The first draft of the book had a much lighter touch, it was very satiric and almost psychedelic in places. The working title for part one -- the part that turned into Infoquake -- was Randomly Generated Pleasurable Startle 37b. I kid you not.
If you've read Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, my first draft had that same kind of tone. I'm glad I changed directions, because it wasn't really my voice and Cory did it a million times better than I could have ever hoped to.
I finished the first draft of my book on September 10, 2001. And then the next day irony died. I just couldn't bear to look at Jump 225, it seemed too smarmy and self-important. So I started all over again, but this time I had a lot more weighty things on my mind than just my dot-com experiences. I wanted to write about the concept of selfishness, and the Darwinian nature of the universe, and whether capitalism is a viable system for the human race in the long term.
It's a much different book than it was when I started, and it's much better now.
3. When you build out tomorrow's world of tech, business and economics, how do you keep a balance between the cool stuff you want to show, and the need to make sure your readers can keep up?
It's really hard. I went a little overboard with the worldbuilding for Infoquake -- I wrote a huge timeline and all of these background articles about technology, politics, economics, and ethics. I wanted to cover every aspect of Natch's world, from the clothes he wears, to the food he eats, to the shipping network that gets the food to his kitchen table in the first place.
I quickly realized that all of the worldbuilding exposition was getting in the way of the story. But I didn't want to lose all of that background either. So I decided to pull out most of that stuff and put it in a series of appendices at the end of the book. I worked really hard to make sure that you could read Infoquake without delving into the appendices, that you could understand all the technology just by example. But anybody who wants to explore it in more detail can do that too.
Incidentally, [Infoquake publisher] Pyr gave me permission to post all of the appendices online. So it's all up there on the Infoquake website, properly cross-linked and everything, along with some original background material that's not in the book.
4. Share a piece of writing advice you've been given.
The best piece of writing advice I've ever gotten: rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. And when I say "rewrite," I mean literally start with a blank screen, set your last draft beside you, and retype the whole damn thing from scratch. The published version of Infoquake is probably the fifth complete draft of the book, and some sections were rewritten ten times or more.
Of course, you have to know where to stop. Eventually you reach the point where you've achieved 90 or 95 percent of what you were hoping to accomplish, and you can put the book down and say that's enough.
5. Many authors offer sample chapters of their work online (as you do on the Infoquake site), but you also offer "podcast" versions of you reading from the book. What are some of the differences between writing a book, and reading that book aloud for an audience? Does it teach you anything about the work that you didn't already know?I've always been a firm believer that books shouldn't necessarily sound good when read aloud. Written prose is a completely different medium than recorded speech, and what works in one medium doesn't necessarily work in the other. I wrote Infoquake primarily to be read on the page, in silence. If it works on audio too, then that's just a happy coincidence.
6. You're writing a book of business and technology in the future. I want you to go back in the past and imagine you're Adam Smith, and you've decided to write a book about the future of business and technology. Knowing only what Smith knew in his 18th Century heyday, how close do you think he'd get to the world today? Do you think in time you will fare better or worse than Adam Smith might?
The thing to remember about predicting the future is that human nature doesn't change. We're still the same people that Adam Smith wrote about. We're still the same people that Shakespeare wrote about. In fact, as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke pointed out in 2001, we really haven't changed much since that first dude figured out how to hit the other dude on the head with a bone. In some ways, all of human history is just one long story about two groups squabbling over limited resources.
So when you're trying to predict the future, it's really the human motivations that matter. I spent a lot of time building a plausible future with Infoquake, but I don't really care how accurate the window dressing turns out to be. No matter which future we're looking at, there are going to be ambitious schemers like Natch. There are going to be rich autocrats like the lunar tycoons in the book, and a large stratus of society working their butts off just to make ends meet.
The big variable I see coming down the road is the end of scarcity. What happens when you don't have limited resources? What if you could make everyone happy? Wouldn't that be the end of selfishness as we know it? That, incidentally, is one of the big themes I'm exploring with MultiReal, book two of the Jump 225 Trilogy.
----
Remember to check out the Infoquake site, and also take a gander at both Edelman's personal blog (note: some harsh language there) and Deep Genre, the group literary blog to which he contributes. Lots of stuff to explore.
Written by johnmscalzi Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | digg this
6/28/06 9:34 AM