Q: Can you tell us a bit about your debut novel Hope’s End?
A: At its most basic–I suppose thematic–level, Hope’s End is a book about growing up. The funny thing, for me, is that a lot of “growing up”/”coming of age” books tend to skip most of the nastier elements that are part of that process. I have read a lot of novels that involve a protagonist who finds him or herself on a quest and, lo and behold, at the end of the journey that protagonist suddenly realizes, more of less painlessly, his or her place in the world. Much of the time, I think, these stories that are about young people don’t involve the kind of real pain and real issues that young people have to deal with. Hope’s End, I think, is about that.
It’s difficult to talk about the book’s plot directly without giving too much away; suffice to say, it’s set on a world called Hera in a town called Hope, and people seem to be living at a fairly “medieval” technological level, and then–early in the book–someone draws a knife with “B. Mussolini” engraved on it. There are several layers to everything that is happening on Hope, and meanwhile, the protagonist, a teenager named Vel, finds himself in the middle of a large, very complicated situation that he wants no part of. Overall, it’s a dark, unsettling book that I think asks a lot of difficult questions and does not always come to the same conclusions people are accustomed to hearing.
Q: How did you come up with the idea for the book?
A: The concept for Hope’s End has evolved over the course of about three or four years. It began when I had a conversation with the man who is now my agent, and we brainstormed plot ideas. That was when the skeleton grew. Then, I sat down and wrote a very rough draft–this was in the December of my Junior year in high school–and I showed it to him, and this agent said, “Well, it’s not publishable, but in a few years it might be.” And he was right.
So I went to a freelance editor, then I went to the Odyssey Writing Conference in New Hampshire, and then, just before I graduated from high school, I managed to sell it to Tor via the same agent who had helped me out. After that, it still wasn’t finished changing. It even had around three different titles throughout all this time, and, usually in short, frantic bursts, I rewrote and rewrote and edited and rewrote the book some more, until it became the book that will be published in August. So, I suppose the muscles and the tissue and the skin and everything else that you see in the novel now, formed over those next few years, but the skeleton was there in a few hours over a long-distance phone call.
Q: What led up to the publication of the book? Not every author have their
debut novel published by Tor.
A: When I was in the sixth grade, I cranked out a lot of long, very awful books. Then, the summer after my sophomore year in high school, I decided to just grit my teeth and really try to write a good book. So that summer I wrote another long, fairly bad novel. Not as bad as the other things I had been turning out, but still not very readable beyond the first fifty pages. Being that that age is one of the “formative years” and that I was grappling with “what I wanted to be when I grow up”, I questioned writing. At the time, I was doing two things: acting and writing; so naturally I said, “I know, I’ll do one of those.” Acting and writing, of course, being two of the professions that are the most difficult to succeed in. I was well aware of this at the time.
I had been sending out short stories for awhile and getting rejection letters to “S. Michael Chambers”–a name I used because I thought it made me sound older–that said things like “Not bad, but not for us”. Some of these rejections even had little personalized notes from the editors, telling me that they were sorry they couldn’t print what I was sending them. At the time, I didn’t quite realize how rare it is to get notes like that; I just thought of them as rejections. And I was getting very frustrated with writing very quickly–I was ready to give it up and shoot for acting. Yes, I would keep writing things, because I couldn’t help it, but I was tired of sending them in and being told that they were not good enough. Then, at the end of that summer, right before my junior year in high school, that changed.
My mom picked up a flier for a writer’s conference at a Barnes and Noble, and I filled it out and sent it in. It started at 8:00 am on a Saturday, and that same day I had been planning to roam the town bothering people with a video camera with a friend of mine. Instead, I went to the conference. It was in the basement of a bank, across the street from the Barnes and Noble where my mom got the flier.
I loaded up on coffee, put the novel I had just written the summer before into a big binder and charged in. I was about twenty years younger than the other thirty or so people at the conference. The conference, it turns out, was a parade of speakers and then a one-on-one with either an agent or an editor. The first speaker was the agent. He had a nice British accent and was trying to get some audience participation. I sat out the first bit as he asked people questions about plot in various recent movies, and the people around me continually answered wrong.
Finally, when the audience had given up participating, deciding to wait out the remainder of his hour-long talk, I decided to join in. It turned into a kind of dialogue between the agent and me with the rest of the audience listening irritably to this little kid who obviously had stumbled into the conference from the beanie baby convention across the street. Beyond that, the rest of the conference is a gray blur in my memory, except for the one-on-one I had with this same agent, where I tried to offer him the novel I had brought with me. He smiled politely and said “No thank you.” Instead, he gave me his card, I called him the next week, sent him the first fifty pages of the book, and shortly thereafter he agreed to work with me to get what I was writing into a publishable form. A year and a half later, we sold two books to Tor. Hope’s End being the first.
Q: How much science and how much fiction do you think there should be in SF?
A: First, there are several different kinds of science fiction. People like to label them “hard” and “soft”, which makes me think not of SF per se, but of unrelated, not-fit-for-print subjects. That aside, I think the short answer here is: to each its own. What bothers me, are people who read a good piece of science fiction and they say things like “Well, that wasn’t science fiction, that must have been Kafkaesque literature“; because, obviously, science fiction is just rocket ships and robots. It’s the same philosophy as the people who label good comic books “graphic novels”. They aren’t graphic novels, they are comics, and just because Maus won the Pulitzer and Sandman won the World Fantasy, doesn’t make them any less comic books and any more graphic novels. There is a lot of literary pompousness, that maybe just comes from me being around college-types at the moment, but I think is more reflective somehow of what’s going on in the bigger picture of genres and national book reviews–or lack thereof–at the moment.
If people can’t see that science fiction and comic books can be well-written without changing the names, then those people do not understand science fiction and comic books.
So. How much science and how much fiction? Again, there is a place for both. I tend to write more fiction than science, I think. Mainly, just because a lot of authors I grew up with–like Card, Zelazny and Gaiman–wrote that way. It’s more fun for me if everything isn’t explained, and if you don’t spend all of your time analyzing molecular bonds and thermodynamics you can get on with what I think matters in storytelling: characters and plot. A lot of people might argue with me about the second point, saying that plot is secondary to characters. That’s true, and that’s why I listed it second, but at the same time, there are good stories where plot takes precedence. Look at Asimov’s Foundation series, for instance. I think the plot of that huge endeavor is more significant that the characters–and, yes, a lot of people criticize Asimov for exactly that–but, for me, it still works. And that’s what matters: whether a piece succeeds on its own terms or not. At the same time that I champion soft SF, I understand the people who prefer science-science fiction. For the most part, I’m just not one of them.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: I plan to keep writing. Honestly, though, that’s not so much a plan as something that I don’t have any control over. I write compulsively, and when I am not writing–no matter what else I might be doing–I feel guilty, as if I should be writing. Right now, the big debate for me, which is probably not nearly so fascinating for someone reading this, is the debate over whether or not to go to grad school. I will be finishing up a BA in modern European history at the University of Chicago this year, after three years. The question is whether or not it is possible to actually survive on the money that a freelance writer makes. The answer, at the moment, for–I suspect–at least ninety percent of the professional writers in the U.S. is “no”. So, it might be helpful to have a degree, though I’m not terribly sure that a Ph D. in history will do anything more than give me a snotty title.
I want to write, and when I was still involved in acting, as a kind of subgroup of that, I was also considering politics, which is still interesting to me to some extent. So, in career terms, I would like to make a living as a freelance writer, though that may still be a good ways off.
Q: As a child what kind of literature, movies, SF, fantasy were you exposed
to? What were your favourites?
A: I remember the book that got me started: in the sixth grade a friend of mine handed me a book he had just finished reading, called “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card. I read it and, without really knowing it at the time, my mind was made up. I read everything I could find that said “Hugo or Nebula award winner” on the cover. Then, I got into a lot of comic books: Sandman, Cerebus, Sin City, all of that. Music was very influential too. For a long time in grammar school, Pearl Jam’s “Ten” was one of those “soundtracks for my life”. Nine Inch Nails, a lot of the darker, more angry stuff–I still enjoy a good unintelligible trip down the spiral with “Rammstein”. Yes, I was the kind of kid that they would be pointing at today and saying “empty your backpack” so they can search it for handguns. I remember the kind of miserably depressing things I used to write in English classes, and now they send kids to the guidance counselor if they see anything that smells of angst.
Moviewise–if that is a word–Star Wars was probably my biggest influence. I saw Return of the Jedi–so I have been told by my parents–in the theater when I was three years old, and when that big monster comes out in Jabba’s palace toward the beginning of the film to eat Luke, I shrieked and got under my seat. So George Lucas scarred me for life. Star Wars really is a kind of James Campbell myth for people of my demographic: young adult–late teens or twenty-something–males. That’s exactly what it is intended to be, and it worked. Whenever I would get sick as a kid, I would stay home and watch the Star Wars trilogy, as if it could help me get better. Never thought of it in those terms before, but it’s probably true. I am part of a generation of latchkey-afterschool-daycare kids growing up with the television, so it’s only natural, isn’t it, that Obiwan and Yoda should be our mentors?
Q: What has the Internet meant for you as an author?
A: So far the internet hasn’t meant a whole heck of a lot, honestly. I was never as good with computers as a lot of the people I hung around with, because I didn’t really care about learning how to program. “Can I write on it?” and “Can I play games on it?” were about as far as I usually got with computers. Though, that’s beginning to change. I have made a point of getting a website, because I am told that authors should have a website, and at the same time, I am trying to make this stupid website work with about as much success as somehow trying to juggle a plate of jello: maybe it is possible, but it’s darned difficult, and there doesn’t seem to be much point to it. That’s not to say there isn’t much point to the internet; instead, it is to imply that I am very inept at using said internet, thus far–and I am frustrated with web design. I think it’s only in the past few years that the internet has really started to be used for anything other than pornography anyway–and that is still its primary function for most people online. Though, that’s changing too.
When I was in high school I remember having a conversation with people about the internet, etc., and somebody asked “Have any of you ever bought anything on it?” None of us had, nor did we know anyone who had. Today, every other upper-middle class household is using Amazon.com or Ebay. So it is obviously changing, and it is obviously terribly crucial socially. “Technology: does it bring us together or tear us apart?” Etcetera. All kinds of writers are using the internet for all kinds of great and ambitious things, and that movie–which people like to make fun of now, but which was a definite cultural phenomenon–“Blair Witch”, owed its success almost wholly, I think, to the internet. It’s an extension of the media which I haven’t quite figure out yet, because even though the internet is supposed to be bypassing all kinds of structures and is supposed to make conventional book publishing, and so on, obsolete–it hasn’t.
I haven’t personally started down the e-publishing road, and that may well be the path things are going to take, but for the moment the internet seems to be behaving like most science fictional projections. Science fiction had tourists in space decades ago, but did they spot the end of the cold war and the rapid desire for funds by a poverty-stricken Russian space program as the impetus for the first space tourist? And an American in a Russian shuttle, no less? Of course not. So, the internet is, for the most part, casually ignoring everything that it is supposed to be doing, and evolving at its own pace. Undoubtedly, it will be even more important in the future, but for the time being, I am more concerned with catching that plate of plummeting proverbial jello.
