Today SFFWorld.com interviews Patrick S. Tomlinson. His newly published book, The Ark, is available through Angry Robot Books.
Patrick S. Tomlinson is the son of an ex-hippie psychologist and an ex-cowboy electrician. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with a menagerie of houseplants in varying levels of health, a Ford Mustang, and a Triumph motorcycle bought specifically to embarrass and infuriate Harley riders.
When not writing sci-fi and fantasy novels and short stories, Patrick is busy developing his other passion for performing stand-up comedy.
Welcome to SFFWorld.com, Patrick.
Hello. Thanks for having me on.
To get us started, tell us a bit about The Ark?
The Ark is, to coin a phrase, a “Sealed Airlock” murder mystery set onboard a ten mile long generation ship one month away from its destination.
A murder mystery in a Science Fiction setting? That sounds interesting, but your main character is a sports hero. What made you decide to write about a character who plays a sport?
There were a number of thoughts that went into Bryan Benson’s backstory. First of all, I’m personally a big sports fan, especially of the Green Bay Packers. That type of fandom is something I’ve been around for my entire life, but it’s not something I often see portrayed in sci-fi and fantasy. Harry Potter had Quidditch, and the new Battlestar Galactica had Pyramid, but that’s about it. I thought having a sports hero might be a good way to blend my different kinds of fandom and appeal to a more mainstream audience who hasn’t tried a lot of sci-fi before.
Secondly, I wanted the main character to feel accessible. Bryan isn’t a genius detective. He’s actually kind of bumbling, if still tenacious. He was given the job as almost an honorary title because of his popularity upon retiring from Zero. Things need to be explained to him. He has to think through his challenges carefully. This makes him a perfect stand-in for the reader.
The science fiction genre hosts a lot of spaceship-as-a-human-colony stories (i.e. Interstellar). What would you say is unique about The Ark?
Most colony ship stories either deal with disaster or its immediate aftermath.
Interstellar, for example, is essentially a post-apocalyptic setting. The Ark, by contrast, presses the fast forward button. It’s more than two centuries after the end of the Earth.
Eleven generations of people have lived their entire lives onboard ship. It’s become its own world, and it’s that new world, culture, and society that I try to explore in the book as their journey comes to a close.
Since The Ark is a murder mystery, do you anticipate more stories with Bryan Benson saving the world (or ship)?
Bryan returns with a bang in the sequel, Trident’s Forge, but the feel of the book is different. It still has murder mystery elements, but it’s written more as an action adventure novel, dealing with the unknown dangers of a new frontier sort of thing. And Bryan isn’t alone, he’s joined by two new POV characters. If the series continues, I expect the focus to be less and less on Bryan. I want to avoid the narrative trap of using the same hero and always having to raise the stakes in ever more contrived ways.
The universe that will spin out of The Ark is vast and intricate. The story I want to tell in the long run will be generational. Much too big to fit into one man’s viable adventuring lifetime.
What made you decide to write a science fiction mystery?
Much like Bryan’s backstory, it was a deliberate ploy to try and attract readers from outside of the sci-fi genre. The Ark was written as a mystery thriller with a sci-fi background. Fans of the mystery genre, (which sells a LOT more books than sci-fi) won’t feel out of place or intimidated by the setting. My hope is those readers will pick up a copy, read it, and then only belatedly realized they’d been tricked into enjoying a sci-fi book. Call it a gateway book, or a Trojan horse. That planning extended even to the cover art, which has a much more mainstream thriller feel to it than a traditional sci-fi cover. It does exactly what I and my publisher wanted it to do.
As someone who does stand-up comedy, did you find that performance experience help or hinder when you attempted to sell The Ark to prospective publishers?
Well my agent is the one who did all the selling, so I don’t know what his experience was there. However, performing comedy has made me a better writer, there’s no doubt. Writing jokes forces one to be concise. The best setups and punchlines have all the fat trimmed off of them. Anything that doesn’t directly contribute has to go. Good jokes are quick, and the shorter they are, the more of them you can pack into your allotted time, giving the audience more laughs. The same is true of editing novels. Whatever isn’t advancing plot, building the world, or developing characters is just interrupting the story and slowing down its flow.
Performing comedy has also made me better at writing snappy dialogue and weaving humor into my stories. Not to mention learning to recognize the difference between constructive criticism you should follow and the heckling you should ignore.
What is your favorite and least favorite part of the writing process?
My favorite part is the surprises while writing a rough draft. The times characters rebel and take on their own personalities. A sudden insight into how to link previously unconnected plot lines or story elements. The flashes of creativity that can’t be outlined ahead of time. My least favorite part is the waiting. Waiting for beta reader feedback. Waiting for editor notes. Waiting for the pub date to roll around. With stand-up, there’s very little waiting. Feedback comes in real time. Adjustments to different crowds can be done on the fly. It’s left me impatient.
What’s on your to-be-read pile right now? Any favorite authors?
My bedside stack at the moment includes Apex, the conclusion to Ramez Naam’s excellent Nexus trilogy, Ancillary Mercy, the final volume of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch cycle, and an impulse buy of Luna: New Moon, from Ian McDonald. Really lookingforward to that one.
My favorite authors span people like the late Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, Walter John Williams, James SA Corey, David Weber, Vernor Vinge, there are a lot of them actually, and the list is ever changing.
Other that stand-up comedy, what do you do when not writing?
I like to run. Let me rephrase that. I like the results of running, so I try to train up for one or two half-marathons a year. I ride motorcycle in the spring and summer. I build sci-fi models and figures. I enjoy shooting handgun and rifle. Oh, and I love tearing apart bad arguments and false claims on the internet.
What are you writing now or what are you working on?
I have a couple of projects going at any given time. Right now, I’m working on the final draft of the sequel to The Ark, titled Trident’s Forge. It’s due next month. Angry Robot Books expects to release it next April. It’s very cool, and loaded up with some great action scenes and character interplay. It’s a very different book from The Ark, but I personally think it’s a step up. You can preorder it now at Amazon.
But it’s my other project that I’m really excited about. After a four year hiatus, I recently returned to the first novel I ever wrote and gave it a top-down rewrite. It’s a sci-fi comedy titled A Hole in the Fence, and I absolutely love it. And fortunately, so did my agent. It’s going on submission to the major publishers this week or next, and if someone picks it up, things are going to get crazy. It’s been my long-term goal to blend my passions and try to break into the comedic and satirical niche that’s been largely empty since the unfortunate and untimely deaths of Sirs Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. Fingers crossed.
That sounds like a great project. Good luck with it!
You can find Patrick online at his website: www.patrickstomlinson.
© 2015 N. E. White / Patrick S. Tomlinson / SFFWorld.com
