Transcript
Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I run the centre, but I'm also a novelist and a writer in many different fields, and today is one of my very favourite kind of episodes because I am joined by a fellow writer, but this particular writer is wandering in realms completely unknown to me, which is space. So welcome very much to David Levine. Hello, david is the winner of the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and author of many novels, but today we're particularly going to be thinking about his next book, which is called the Kuiper Belt Job, and we'll put the link to David's website in the show notes so you can go and look at everything David's been getting up to. So welcome David. First of all, your route into writing science fiction. Are you a scientist yourself? Is that where it comes from, or were there some writers that you read along the way that inspired you to go into this genre?
0:01:18 - Speaker 2
Well, my route into science fiction started when I was wee. My father was a science fiction reader. He read the pulp magazines in the 40s and 50s, and so they were. All those magazines and the novels were just around the house when I was growing up. So it's almost inevitable that I would have wound up as a science fiction reader, and so am I a scientist. I'm a technologist. I spent I'm retired now but I spent my career working for companies like Techtronics, intel and McAfee, first as a technical writer, then as a software engineer, then as a user interface designer and then finally, before retired, as user interface architect. So I've been working in the space between humans and machines for my whole career. And, by the way, I got that from my father as well. He was a professor of computer science, also specializing in what they used to call the man machine interface. Now we call the human machine or user interface.
0:02:20 - Speaker 1
Yeah, user interface. That just goes to show how the humans are getting a raise from the whole idea to be robotic users in the future.
0:02:29 - Speaker 2
Yeah, really, eventually we'll just have AI software talking to AI customers and there'll be no humans in the loop whatsoever. Yeah, oh, and by the way, the term user interface has been replaced by UX user experience. Yeah, that's a. It's a terminology change. That's happened in the last 20, 30 years and, like all trends of labeling things differently, it may not have a lot of actual impact on what people actually do, but you know there are. There are fads and trends in in human interface, as there aren't anything.
0:03:07 - Speaker 1
Yeah, and absolutely so. The Pulp Fiction world I've heard about mainly through, like second hand, through reading things like the Atwood. What is the book? The one the blind assassin, I think has a lot about Pulp Fiction in it. The Margaret Atwood book.
0:03:24 - Speaker 2
I haven't actually read it.
0:03:27 - Speaker 1
Yeah, I haven't read any Pulp Fiction myself. Are you aware of who the writers are? When you read the Pulp Fiction? Are there big names? Or was it more like a comic, where you'd have to sort of be in the know to know who the writers are?
0:03:38 - Speaker 2
Well, the big names in Pulp unfortunately some of the biggest names of the early Pulp era I'm talking about the 20s and 30s are people like HP, lovecraft and Elron Herbert.
Actually, was a very very important in the early Pulp era. Other other writers of Pulp adventure fiction not necessarily science fiction include Edgar Rice Burroughs and oh, what's his name? He did the Conan series Howard, no, not Ron Howard, anyway. Yeah. So the Conan books and also a lot of the Pulps. There was a lot of just sort of generic adventure and mystery. Leslie Charteris the saint was a Pulp mystery genre.
So the thing is is that the Pulp magazines. If you think about what the street was like, you know, go walking down the main street in 1920, 1930, and you would see magazines for sale all up and down the street that there would be like a newsstand on the corner that would be just just Florida ceiling of all of these magazine titles face out. And these were. This was the popular culture in the days before radio, that before radio, if you wanted cheap light entertainment you would buy a pulp magazine from from the magazine rack. And these things were called Pulps because they were made of incredibly cheap paper. We're talking about paper that literally had chunks of wood coming out of it. This was, this was paper with so much undigested wood and so much acid that even you know, even when it was just a couple of months old it would already be yellowing in, decaying, because it would be eating itself alive.
There are a lot of people who collect these old pulp magazines and just preserving them from their own self destructive tendencies is a big problem here. So I mean, and the thing is, is that these pulps? This is not quality literature? I mean we use pulp as a synonym for bad because they were very bad. They were written extremely quickly and and turned out they were. It was as I said. You know, this was popular entertainment in the days before radio, before television. So the pulp writers were grinding out, grinding out their, their products, own call literature, as quickly as they could and getting paid pennies a word. Now, admittedly, you know, five cents a word in 1920 was actually something that you could live on. Many magazines today are paying that same five, 10 cents a word.
0:06:15 - Speaker 1
Oh yeah, completely, it's not living with you. Yeah, so you started with this sort of rich like, like an earth or a prepared bed of all these things around the house, where you've got the pulp fiction with the many different story styles and a father's enthusiastic about it. What's their one particular story? Perhaps a novel or something which actually was like your gateway to thinking, oh yeah, I could do this. That led you to taking this path of actually writing your own stories.
0:06:48 - Speaker 2
I can name a couple of novels that that that struck me significantly when I was a teenager. One is called Hospital Station by James White. This is what we used to call a fix up novel, which is to say it's a bunch of short stories published in a single, in a single novel with some connecting material to make it feel more novel. Like on an hospital station is the story of a, of an interstellar multi species hospital, and the thing about Hospital Station that was kind of unique at the time and still makes it very memorable and significant to me is that it was all about people from different species coming together to solve problems.
This was not, you know, I mean the contemporary science fiction at the time that White invented the hospital station was typically on the cover of these cheap magazines. You'd have what they call the unholy trinity the boy, the babe and the BEM. You know the, the, the, the, the Jack Judd space hero, the, the, the sexy, the sexy space heroine with her, with her, you know, brass, brassier, and, and, and, and globe helmet, and the bug eyed monster, some court, some kind of horrible science fiction monster, and so there'd be the three of them together on the cover, and that's how you know, it was a science fiction publication. So into this comes James White and he says I want to write stories about people working together to solve problems. So he conceptualizes a hospital in space and the stories of hospital station are problem stories. It's an awful lot like a house. It's called House in the US I believe it's Dr House MD.
0:08:28 - Speaker 1
No, no, no, we call it House 2, the Hugh Laurie program. Yeah.
0:08:33 - Speaker 2
So the thing is, of course these are medical mysteries. You know, somebody comes in with a terrible medical problem and you have to try to fix it. So imagine then that it's a combination of a horrible medical problem and an alien first contact story, because in many of the hospital station stories they're making first contact with an alien species and they have, like a crashed spaceship or an extremely sick alien of a type that they have never encountered before. First you have to find out, well, how do we communicate with this being, what kind of? What kind of atmosphere and gravity doesn't need. And then there are of course always politics involved in these things.
In the universe of hospital station there is an entity called the Monitor Corps. They don't have armies but they do have monitors, and so this is kind of the interstellar police force that comes in and takes care of problems that can only be solved with guns. But this is a small subset of the problems in these stories. The stories are mostly medical. The problems are mostly medical, and I love the characters. Some of the main characters are non-human. There is an empathic bug called Prylisla, which is kind of a human sized damsel fly, very, very fragile being that can only exist in our gravity by using a gravity nullifier, and the Trentaur are a species of elephantine creatures that have a symbiote which has extremely fine manipulative tentacles, and so together the Trentaurians and their symbiotes are the best surgeons in the universe. And I mean all of these things are stuck in my head from 40 years ago. That's how significant that book was to me, and I distinctly remember that I had a cousin who came by and dropped off a box of science fiction books that he was done with, and Hospital Station was the one that jumped out to me.
And another book that was very significant to me at that time was Ringworld, larry Niven's classic science fiction travelogue, really about a group of people exploring a world, a structure which is a ring that surrounds a star, so the inner surface of the. This is a ring that is as big in diameter as the orbit of the Earth, so that it gets an Earth-like level of solar radiation at the surface, which means that the total surface area is enormous, millions and millions of Earths, and so you have many, many cultures that exist on this Ringworld. But the problem is is that, because a Ringworld is an artificial thing, that when civilization falls, it falls hard, and so civilization fell on the Ringworld tens of thousands of years ago and so now the whole thing has collapsed into barbarism. But there's no, you can't come back from it. There's no possibility of mining, because once you, if you dig too far, you hit vacuum. So it's an adventure story. It's an adventure story, it's a travelogue. There's politics, there's interspecies conflict, and Larry Niven's aliens are the best.
The thing is is that I still think of Larry Niven as one of the young Turks, because he was an up-and-coming new writer in the 70s when I first started reading this stuff, and he was in reaction to the previous generation, the Heinlein and Clark and Asimov generation. These days, of course, Larry Niven is one of the old guard. So I'm a little bit younger than Larry Niven, but I'm older than a lot of my science fiction writing peers who first broke out in the. I mean, I sold my first professional. I made my first professional sale in 2000,.
But I was 49 in 2000. And most of the other writers who broke out at that time were in their 30s. So I crossed generations. Depending on who I'm thinking, if I'm hanging out with my science fiction fan friends, I'm often the youngest one in the group because I'm a. I'm right halfway between Generation X and the Baby Boom, so when I hang out with science fiction fans, most of whom are boomers, I'm younger than the average. When I hang out with my science fiction writing peers, most of whom are Generation X, I tend to be the oldest, so it's an interesting place to be.
0:13:04 - Speaker 1
So emerging from what you've been saying is that science fiction often takes the long view, the very long view in some cases, like the Ringworld book. But looking at your own career in the same way, one thing that struck me you saying that you had your first deal in 2000, more or less, and that charts the period of the growth of the internet and, probably at the end of the 2000, social media. And I have noticed obviously there's a very tight correlation between science fiction readers and being an earlier doctor of all these technologies, just because they're savvy and they know what they're doing. Have you found that that's changed how you write? Or so you've gone from a world of pulp fiction which is read in the family home and now you're living in a space which is always open to the rest of the world, always online, always being molded by the conversation of the day. Have you found it's affected you as a writer and how you imagine the future in your books and the world?
0:14:16 - Speaker 2
Absolutely. I mean, science fiction is never about the future, it's always about the present. Science fiction is a way of projecting our hopes and fears about the future and making them concrete, because the primary tool of science fiction is the literalized metaphor that, if you want to, If what you want to talk about is, if you're personally concerned about, for example, an unwanted pregnancy, then you might wind up with something like alien, where you literalize the metaphor of having this horrible thing growing inside yourself. There are lots and lots of science fictional stories that I mean. You look at the trends In the 1950s there was a lot of alien invasion fiction. That's because Americans were afraid of the Russians. In the 1980s there was a lot of biological horror. And then you have the cyberpunk movement, which is a response to the corporatization of the world in general, and really the cyberpunk movement was kind of prescient because cyberpunk's corporatized future has actually kind of come true, which is not a good thing.
0:15:27 - Speaker 1
Yes, I think there is an element of science fiction, creating a way of thinking about something which allows technology to move into the space as well.
0:15:36 - Speaker 2
You have to imagine it before.
You can design something, so yes, and there are a lot of people who have hung out a shingle with their name on it and the word futurist. Most people who call themselves futurists Well, most of the people I know who call themselves futurists are science fiction writers, either some of the time or most of the time. Cory Doctorow, for example, wears both the hats of science fiction writer and person who is actually thinking about and influencing the future of technology. John Shirley describes himself as a futurist. There are I think David Brin would probably identify himself as a futurist. There are some people who call themselves futurists who are not science fiction writers, but if you look at what they're writing, they're writing basically science fiction with only setting and no characters, because, of course, they're trying to envision a future and write about it in such a way that the reader can put themselves into that future and think, gosh, this might be what's coming. What can I do to either make that happen or change it?
0:16:41 - Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. So let's talk a little bit about your latest book, the Kuiper Belt Job, which I sort of briefly described to myself as a kind of prison break story with a heist element, with a crew of Desperado. Sounds like a Western, but it has that feeling of a crew of misfits put together to do the job. Is that a fair description? Is there anything that you'd like I love?
0:17:08 - Speaker 2
that description. That is very much the way I would have described it. If somebody asked me to describe it. I'd describe it as a Kuiper novel in space. It's like a mashup of Firefly, leverage, the Expanse, ocean's Eleven. It's a combination of. I think of it as being like Leverage, which is a US TV show about a group of con artists who get together to help the poor and downtrodden. It's Leverage set in the universe of the Expanse. It's also intended to echo the found family aspects of Leverage and especially Firefly. I think if you love Firefly, I believe you will like this book. That's the vibe that it's intended to capture.
0:17:54 - Speaker 1
Well, that makes me think of Robin Hood as well, because going back further in these idea of a band of people who don't actually go together and ganging up to be on the side of the poor is a very strong theme. So, before we talk about the actual method that you've got in your book, what's your writing process? People are always interested in how somebody sits down and starts writing a book. Quite a lot of our listeners are people who are aspiring to do that. Do you have a? What are your top tips?
0:18:27 - Speaker 2
In my writing community we often use the term plotter or pancer.
Are you person who plots everything out, or do you fly by the seat of your pants? I am. I'm on the plotter side of that equation, but the more experience I get, the more I do fly by the seat of my pants. I still outline, but there are much bigger jumps from one outline point to another. So I'm pantsing my way through bigger chunks of the book. I believe that as they get more experienced, most writers I mean a writer might start out as being a pure plotter or a pure pancer. But I think that as you gain experience you begin adopting aspects of the other philosophy that work for you. So I'm.
My writing process is I start out. I start out by opening a file. I have a. My system is that every story starts off with a kind of a code name. You know a brief file name, and for the Kuiper Belt job it was called Breakout because it is, as a suggested structure, to run a prison break. So then I have Breakoutdoc, which is the manuscript, and Breakout-notesdoc, and that notes file is kind of my chronological diary of the writing of the book.
It is a. I mean I will just sit there and I will basically talk out loud on paper. I'll type things like well, okay, so I want this to be a story about so and so and so. What does that mean that I need to do? And if I do some research, I'll put my notes in that file. And if I do an outline, I'll put the outline in that file. And if I later modify the outline, then I'll copy and paste the outline down into the, into the current day, because it's it's written as a, as a diary. Basically, every time I sit down and start writing I'll put the date and where I am, and then, as the outline grows and changes, I'll copy and paste it. So you can, so I can actually look back and see previous iterations of the outline in the same file. And I'll put character sketches and if I write something and then delete it, I'll put the deleted piece in there. So usually the notes file winds up being three or four times the size of the, the size of the finished story, and so my I spend a lot of time toward the beginning of the process doing what I call noodling, which is just sitting and kind of kind of talking out loud on paper about well, suppose we could do this.
Well, I could do it this way or I could do it that way. Oh, that one's really interesting, let's run with that and see how it goes and so. And so I will noodle like that, for on a novel I could do that for months before I actually begin drafting. And so basically whenever I'm writing I have both the draft file and the notes file open and I will bop back and forth between them. But, like, like when I ran into something, I'll go over the if I suppose.
I suppose I'm drafting along and suddenly realize, oh, wait, a minute, I have no idea what. I have no idea what this character looks like. So then I'll bop over the notes file and I go okay, I just hit a place where I don't know what the character looks like. So let me think about. You know, well, I want this character to be visually distinct from the other characters. So that means that I probably don't want to have just another white guy.
Well, actually I try not to have too many white guys in my work anymore, but anyway. So so I will go back and forth between the draft file and the notes file and then, after the draft is finished, then in the notes file I will, you know, I'll record any critique comments that I receive. If I need to go back and redo something, I'll talk about the process of going back and redoing it and the notes file, you know, starts before the draft begins and continues long after, like right now. My notes file for the Kuiper Bell job is talking about marketing. You know I've got things about the podcast that I'm scheduled for and stuff like that.
0:22:21 - Speaker 1
That's a very complete record. That's actually.
0:22:24 - Speaker 2
I don't think I've met someone who's done it quite like that Well, and the great thing I don't diary, but the great thing is is that if I need to know hey, where was I on this and such a date if I know which project I was working on, then I can usually find it in the notes file.
0:22:37 - Speaker 1
Yeah, oh, that's great. So I noticed when I was reading your book that you clearly really enjoyed working out the impact of the science of the world, the physics, I should say the physics of the world.
0:22:50 - Speaker 2
I do love it.
0:22:50 - Speaker 1
I do love it so yeah, for example, the different kinds of gravity, and that seems to me something you've inherited from the hospital hospital ship you mentioned because of the. I can see a definite correlation there. But I also was interested that you were bringing into the science fiction world some real identifiable illnesses like Parkinson's and disability and things like that. Is that something you felt was missing? That you make a conscious effort to mainstream issues that a lot of us have and live with?
0:23:28 - Speaker 2
Yes, that was deliberate, okay. So as a white guy, I am very conscious of my privilege and working hard to use my privilege to uplift those who don't have it. I can't in and of myself. There's nothing that I can do as a writer to get more writers of color and writers writers usually part of the expression, writers of gender, writers with disabilities. I do try to promote writers of color. Nk Jemisin and Temis Bradford and Nadia Kaurafor these are all people that I've met through the science fiction community and I do try to. Well like, when people say, hey, can you recommend a book, I will always try to recommend a book by a woman or a writer of color if at all possible. And so I am a white guy, but I can try to make my characters more diverse. So one of my goals for this particular book this is an ensemble. There are five viewpoint characters and a total main cast of something in the vicinity of 10. And one of my goals was no white guys. There is one white woman in the main cast, but she has Parkinson's, as you said, and the thing is my particular.
I recognize that we need to have more disabilities in our science fiction because almost all of us will become disabled to some extent at some point in our lives, and so acknowledging disability as part of the human experience is something that we have not done very well at in our fiction, and so I'm doing what I can. The particular case of a lot of One of the problems that people have that people run into when they try to include disabled characters in their work is that the disability is either like a, it's an inspirational thing where oh, look at this disabled character, they're so plucky, or the disabled character is an object of pity, or the disability is somehow magically eliminated at the end of the book. Oh look, the disabled character is rewarded by becoming not disabled anymore, and that's not how real life works. Disabled people, generally speaking, stay disabled, or I mean, you've probably heard the term temporarily able-bodied, that's the term that I use for myself, but there are plenty of disabilities that unfortunately do not go away. They can be worked around, they can be improved, but dealing with disability is a part of the disability experience, and so, you know, I gave this character, and the thing is, this character is a thief.
Her skill set, her reason to be, is that she fiddles things. You know that she is the person who picks the lock and clambers into tight spaces and crawls up walls, and so to give her a disability, a physical disability, is a way of challenging her self-image and forcing her to question what am I really, what is my identity? And so what I'm doing is I'm trying to take away some of the things that she thinks makes her her and force her to find out what is she really, because she's still a thief. She just, you know, her hands are not what they were, and so I gave her specifically a walker, because my wife who passed away about seven years ago, she had brain cancer and so it affected her mobility, so she was using a walker for the last two years of her life and we both hated the damn thing. It was so important because it made it possible for her to get out of the house and do things, and it was so much of a hassle to deal with the damn thing getting it in and out of the trunk and stuff and so I wanted to capture I wanted to specifically have a character with a walker to show that this is an assisted technology that makes things possible that would otherwise be impossible and is also just a royal pain and a terrible thing and a constant reminder of the fact that you are not physically what you had hoped to be, and so that's why that's why I gave her a walker and that's why I'm very pleased that the walker is on the cover, because that is an important part of who she is and who she becomes, because the novel has a there's a there's a flashback interstitial that occurs between sections, showing how the gang, how the gang they had a big, they had a big job that they thought was going to, that they thought was going to set them up for life, and it didn't go well.
Most of the book takes place 10 years later, and so in the flashback sequences, alicia is a confident, physically able thief. In the present day, she's dealing with disabilities and has to find a way to cope with this, and the way that I have her cope with it is to learn to be part of a community, to understand that, just because she is not physically able to do the things that she used to be able to do, she still has all of that knowledge and all of that learning, and she can pass this information along to other people within her community, and so it really is a found family.
Yeah, you mentioned all of the characters are dealing with things that have changed in the last 10 years.
0:29:15 - Speaker 1
You mentioned already that you've got multiple points of view. I think you said there were five and I was also interested. In fact, you start with a wee perspective which is enunciated by obviously one character, but clearly they've got this sort of gang name for themselves as the cannibal crew. But the, the wee sections are sort of giving a sense of they had a joint identity, which is fragmented and split apart. So obviously you begin to understand that even at that point, the sort of highlights and days of the past there were already tensions that were going to blow them apart because you know different characters. Do you find that quite hard as a writer, writing in the wee perspective or managing your five different points of view? Is there a feeling, that a refreshment, when you go to a different point of view, or do you think there's too many plates spinning? I'm not sure if I can keep more going.
0:30:11 - Speaker 2
I'm really glad to hear you say these things about the relationship of the wee point of view to the tensions that exist between the characters, even within that section. So you're really picking up what I'm putting down here. Doing first person plural point of view is a writing challenge that I set for myself. I would actually go so far as to call it a stunt. And also the five point the five first person points of view, first person singular points of view I chose to write each one as a single large chunk about 20,000 words from each one, rather than doing the usual thing that you find in novels with multiple points of view of switching back and forth between them.
And this was I honestly can't say where it came from. It's like I think I'm going to. I'm not sure this is going to work, but I think I'm going to try it and I think it did work. It was just. It was a way of, you know, kind of challenging myself and stretching my writing muscles. One nice thing about having a long chunk in a single point of view is you really get to know the character. And I really got to know the characters writing this book. I love them all in different ways.
0:31:25 - Speaker 1
And then you get that experience of actually seeing that character from the outside, through the lens of somebody else, which is great fun as well. Yeah, in a sense what they've, what they may have been misunderstanding, how other people see them. So it's like there's an element of could be comedy, could be surprise, could be portrayal all these sorts of things can go on if you flip your point of view.
0:31:51 - Speaker 2
I'm so glad to hear that you, to hear that that you, you came away from the book with that, because that is really what I was trying to do.
I find that when I read from this book, I love, I love reading my own work and I have a whole I have I have a whole, a whole self funded tour coming up that I tend to read the end of one POV section, skip over the intersectional and skip over the intersectional and then read. And so I read the end of one POV and then the switch and then the beginning of the next POV, because those are some of the most dramatic places in the in the book. My agent and I worked on moving, moving the, the transition points around in order to, in order to get the, you know, get the maximum, maximum tension release, and so, yeah, so there was, there's a section where where Kane the hitter is having a big fight in a zero gravity casino and Alicia the thief comes in and comes in and saves him at the last minute, and I actually wrote that whole fight entirely from his perspective and then later on I went back and recast the second half of it in her point of view.
0:33:07 - Speaker 1
And.
0:33:08 - Speaker 2
I was like, oh, that's so interesting, yeah, and that is. You know, that is a fascinating exercise. I would recommend that, almost I would recommend for any, any writer to write a scene and then go back and write that same scene from the point of view of a different character, because you change. You change your language, you change I mean you change your, your pacing, your sentence length, the vocabulary. There's so many things that should change when you change to a different point of view. It's an interesting exercise to force yourself to look at exactly what changes when you change to a different characters point of view. And so that that was a that was a really interesting exercise and I'm glad I did and I think I think the transition happens in the right place now.
