As James K. Decker, he is the author of The Burn Zone, its prequel novella Ember and the forthcomingFallout. As James Knapp, he is the author of The Revivors Trilogy (State of Decay, The Silent Army, andElement Zero). James took some time to chat via e-mail about these books, writing, and SF in general.
Tell us a bit about James K. Decker/James Knapp and The Burn Zone.
I grew up a latchkey kid in a rural town in New Hampshire, small town stuff, biking to the library and corner store, whole nine yards. I enjoyed writing even as a kid, but in high school it became an absolute obsession. Maybe it was all that I was good at (which isn’t true because I killed at badminton which, predictably, elevated my status immensely in the pack), but all I wanted to do was to write. I abandoned math as something I’d never excel at (I was right) and science as something that I found very interesting but would never excel at (again, right). I decided I would be a writer. I wrote all through high school, not so much trying to get published as trying to learn how to write well. I went to college where I wrote mostly plays, and even produced a few. I left college to a recession and floundered for a while before I realized that my aptitude for computers was actually a marketable skill. I started working in high tech, met my wife, bought a house, and in stabilizing my life I very nearly forgot my dream.
Eventually I realized that my dream of being a writer need not be lost. I got involved in an online writing contest that made me remember what I loved so much about it and from there I became determined to find an agent, and get my story out there (the Revivors Trilogy, at the time, originally called Rise).
Now I’m a coder-slash-author with a wonderful, patient wife, a great home, and an embarrassment of cats.
So your writing process, do you outline your plot and stick to it as the writing progresses or are what some folks call a “pantser” and just let the story progress as you write it?
I’m definitely in the plotter camp, though I do some pantsing here and there as the story requires…on the one hand I feel like I need a strong outline because I like to have multiple threads leading up to a very specific ending, but on the other hand I don’t want to be too rigid in the outline because there’s no point in sticking with something that doesn’t work in practice. A Director at my day job once said (and I realize this sounds a bit corporate-y) “That’s how things will be handled for now, though I reserve the right to be smarter tomorrow than I am today”. I thought that actually applied pretty well to outlines. Make the best choices you can, but don’t be a slave to them. Things change.
I found that with the character of Sam I am compelled to pants more than I usually do because her personality is quick-thinking and impulsive, so it pays to let things get a little looser with the narrative. That said, though, there are still ‘fixed points’ in the story line.
Did you have a group of confidants review your work, provide feedback before releasing it to the wild for publication and/or the writing contest?
My wife generally has a look, as well as my agent. Sometimes I’ll actually hire someone to have a look – basically a freelance editor. I’ve used one online resource twice, once for my first novel and once on a side project. Another time, for a collection of short stories, I hired a particularly talented friend I met through the ‘con circuit. All in all I find that I prefer the sort of distanced analysis of someone I hire (or my agent)…partly so I know there is zero outside interference and partly because it’s just my personality. I like my agent and my editor a lot, but neither of them is paid to tell me I’m awesome. With family and close friends there’s a temptation to sugar coat or for feelings to get bruised, with the anonymous internet you get a lot of trolls. When I’m able, I’ll go with someone for hire that I feel I can trust.
It’s been a few months since I read The Burn Zone, but a lot of it still sticks with me, and it is difficult for me to determine if it is the character of Sam Shao or the world itself. They’ve both left an indelible mark in my memory. Which came first to you with this story, Sam or the world in which she lives?
First off, thanks for that – I’m telling you, even though I was committed to telling the story the way I ultimately did, I was borderline terrified after it went out the door. I felt like I’d made enough weird choices that it would either really resonate with people or it would crash and burn, and I wasn’t quite sure which.
In answer to your question, this is going to sound like a bit of a cop out but the two kind of arose independently. The world had been kicking around in my head for a while, along with the idea of an alien race stranded in it. I saw the aliens as a sort of First World presence amidst a race of (to them) underprivileged beings. It’s interesting to me the impact a more advanced people can have on a native population, even when their numbers are far fewer, and I wanted to explore how this alien race might eventually get from a point of just straight up survival to a much more advantageous position. I decided early on that, while much more advanced, the alien faction (for lack of a better word) would be just as divided as we ourselves are when it comes to picking the ‘right’ course of action. Just as the humans in the story aren’t all in agreement as to how to handle the haan, not all of the haan agree on the best way to handle us.
The character of Sam had also been kicking around in my head for a while, but not as part of that world, initially. I’d developed a lot of her character aspects, and knew that I saw her as a sort of everyman, unlikely heroine who kind of gets sucked into things she doesn’t feel quite qualified to handle. At the same time, once she’s in it she can’t just walk away, either. She’s forced to grow up, if she wants to succeed. I had a lot of ideas – who her friends were, how she started off from humble beginnings but went on to become an important historical figure, etc., but I couldn’t figure out her world.
Eventually, I realized the pieces were right in front of me – I put Sam in Hangfei, and once I did I got her full backstory. Things came together from there.
The Asian-flavor (for lack of a better term) of the novel is one of the standout elements. When this story was in the gestation process, did you want to explicitly set it outside the standard NY/London where a great many city-based genre stories are set?
It started off as a kind of futuristic Chinatown in a different city, and Hangfei was someplace Sam travelled to early on. Using the gate system there was some back and forth between the two locales, until I realized that I was using the Chinatown setting as a kind of safety net and what I really wanted to do was set the whole thing in Hangfei. I admit I debated that – I wasn’t sure what kind of reception that would get, but the story just felt right there. This might end up being career suicide but I tend to make decisions based on the idea that, well, if my books fail, at least they’ll fail on their own merits. I decided to go ahead and not only base the story in this alternate reality China-analogue but make Westerners a sort of boogeyman threat (or are they..?). As soon as I made the shift, Hangfei came alive in a way the original location hadn’t, and I think that’s when the book really found its legs.
For folks who are on the fence about reading The Burn Zone what would you tell them to push them over the edge to read the book?
As a science fiction fan, I feel like not enough science fiction attempts to go out a little bit on a limb. My editor informed me that The Burn Zone was totally different from anything they had in the works when release time came – I wasn’t sure if that was meant as a good thing or if they were nervous about it, but I am a science fiction fan, and I love works that make an effort to be different. There is violence in The Burn Zone to be sure, and yes, there are aircar chases and action sequences, but underneath all that is the story of real people with real world problems that matter. Come out and join me on the limb, it will totally hold us all.
What pulled you into the genre, made you a fan? Was it a film(s), TV show(s), and or book(s)?
Having been a kid in the 70’s I have to credit Star Wars with officially blowing my mind, but the thing I credit with really making me a lifelong fan of the genre are the trips to the library I made when I was young. I picked up a collection of Isaac Asimov’s robot stories, and they just sucked me in. They got me to read my first novel, and got me to keep going back to the library to dig up more and more science fiction. Isaac Asimov was totally my science fiction gateway drug – once I got a taste I started churning through everything he’d written, which in his case is more than enough to get someone hooked.
Don’t get me wrong – I was as obsessed with Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica as any other boy my age, and I grew up watching a lot of Star Trek and Doctor Who (the Tom Baker years). I still love science fiction films and TV shows (I loved the first couple seasons of the Battlestar Galactica reboot,Firefly, and seasons 2-3 of Farscape) I’m picky about my Sci Fi but when I fall in love I fall deeply in love. Still, growing up when I was at my most impressionable, reading was an escape I could make almost anytime, anywhere, in private, and it was my go-to fix.
You are positing some future technology and inter-species melding. How much science research did you have to do before you felt comfortable with some of the more technically flavored details?
The tech falls into two different categories – human tech, the stuff we came up with on our own, and haan tech, the stuff that got gifted to us. For the human tech, a lot of it is already being dabbled in. The kind of bio-internet plugin a lot of the characters have (called a ‘3i’ in the book) is a hybrid of what I called the JZ Interface in the Revivors series, and I felt comfortable using a version of it in both worlds because I believe such a device will exist, perhaps even in my lifetime. Other things like the internal ‘wet drives’ would be almost a necessity for such a device. We’re already blurring the line – a recent experiment had two rats share information via brainwaves over the internet, and we’ve already had early successes with using brainwaves to operate mechanical devices. These things are on their way, in one form or another. That the haan would simply be better at it (in the case of say, the ‘brain-band mites’ that allow the empathic bond between human and haan infants) seemed to follow. That particular bit came about when I read an article (and I apologize but any link I might have had for it is long gone) about how the brain activity in mice were recorded while they navigated a maze. They did this over and over, until the pattern of activity became predictable – the scientists could look at the brain activity and say ‘the mouse is working out the maze’. Then, they observed the brain activity of the mice while they slept, and here and there they’d see the pattern emerge – the mice were dreaming of the maze. I thought if a human could manage that insight into the mind of a mouse, the haan could work up some way for human and haan to share much, much more.
As far as the wilder tech, the haan tech, goes I had already done a ton of string theory research for another project that’s on the back burner right now so I had that in my pocket already. It explains (well, sort of) some of the crazier things we learn late in The Burn Zone. The technologies that are the most up front in the story – the jumpspace gates, the graviton emitters and the force fields – fall a little more into the ‘hand-wave’ column but that said, I didn’t pull them completely out of thin air. While my idea of how the gate system works (which hasn’t been revealed yet) can’t exactly be proven, given what smarter people than me at least think they know, it can’t be disproven either. We know now that gravitons exist – in theory if we can learn to manipulate them, then we should be able to produce some if not all of the effects you’ll see in the novel. Force fields are a science fiction staple – I tend to think that left to our own devices a lower-tech solution will always be easier and cheaper, but if the haan figured out a way and just gave it to us, I think we’d take it. Well, I would, anyway.
What other types of stories will you be telling, outside of those set in the world of The Burn Zone?
I’ve got a few things going on – right now I’m working on the first book in another series that is kind of an episodic globe-hopping affair. Tone-wise it’s a little like The Burn Zone and State of Decay’s love child, but with more (albeit dark) humor thrown in. I’ve got a YA near-future sci-fi book written, but I just haven’t been able to get the dialogue where I want it. An ongoing labor of love for me is a very offbeat sci-fi horror novel that is so strange, so grim, and so graphic that I don’t know if even my extremely talented agent will ever be able to sell it to a major house, but I’ll find a home for it eventually.
Did writing The Burn Zone as “James K. Decker” versus writing the Revivors Trilogy as “James Knapp” present you with different challenges or did you approach the two works with a different mindset?
The two were very different to write. With the Revivors Trilogy, I’d been planning the story for years. The first spark for that series popped into my head – and I remember the exact moment – just after I’d finished college and I’m 43 now, so, yeah. I knew how the third book would end more or less before I started the first, in that case. In my mind, it was one huge novel. With The Burn Zone, the story is more open ended, but not only that, the character of Sam, the singular protagonist, is a lot harder to pin down – part of her character is that she’s good at thinking on the fly, so I find myself making structural story changes based on whatever decision it makes the most sense for her to make at any given moment. She tends to buck my outlines more than I’m used to, which makes planning a bit more difficult. They’re very different stories, and so I’ve found myself in totally different places writing them.
What was more challenging to engender plausibility, the undead/zombies of the Revivors trilogy or the haan in The Burn Zone?
The haan were much more difficult. With the revivors I took the basic idea that once they were reanimated they would behave like the humans they’d been before, only stripped of their brain chemistry. So, if your wife, say, were revived and you were still able to see her (in the world of the Revivors trilogy you wouldn’t be) then in one respect she would still be your wife, she would remember every moment you ever spent together, how you met, your wedding, etc., but all of the affection, and emotional ties would be gone. Memories would no longer be able to trigger warmth, love, anger or sadness. She might still feel a loyalty toward you, and maybe the sum of all those memories might amount to a certain sense that you are a person she could trust, a person worth preserving, but she’d be very different than before. What makes us who we are is a big question in Revivors, but I saw it all through that lens.
Since the haan aren’t human and never were, they were a little trickier. I knew I wanted to give a sense (which so far is mostly hinted at) that the haan we are exposed to in the series are being seen in ‘human mode’ – meaning they behave much more humanly than they otherwise would because they are making a big effort to interact with us in ways we understand and find acceptable. When they are alone, they communicate very differently and have very different sensibilities and attitudes than we do, which they’re then able to express freely. That’s a side of them that (so far) we don’t get to see, at least not very much.
It took a long time for me to settle on the morphology of them, which is hard to talk about without giving too much away (it comes more to the forefront in the sequel Fallout). I knew I wanted them to be different, very different from us – that their evolutionary path went down a much different branch than ours, and that at some point down the road they grew technologically advanced enough to take control of that evolution themselves. They consider themselves to be perfect, now – I wanted that to play into how they viewed us, and the world they now find themselves stranded in. If you think you’re already perfect, you don’t have much incentive to desire change, especially if it’s being forced on you, but as I mentioned in an earlier question Mileage May Vary for the haan tasked with solving these issues.
So, yeah, in the end the haan were quite a bit harder to pin down. I feel strange admitting this, but as a Science Fiction author I’ve never written a novel that had an alien race in it so this was my first attempt. Maybe they get easier?
What (and when) can we expect in the sequel to The Burn Zone?
Things heat up in Fallout – a big cat got out of its bag in The Burn Zoneand everyone, Sam, her family and friends, the rulers of Hangfei, the haan, and even the Reunification Church (the gonzos) have to make some big decisions as said cat rampages merrily through the city. The palate gets a little broader in Fallout, so expect to learn a little more about the different powers that be inside Hangfei (including that one new demographic I can’t mention without spoiling things).
That said, one of the main themes of the series is the evolution of Sam – in a lot of ways part of the story is her growing up, finding herself, and becoming the woman she absolutely has the potential to be. In The Burn Zone she starts as kind of a victim, but ends up in a position where if she wants to save the ones she loves, she has to step up and be more. The sequel Fallout continues that trend. I won’t spoil it, but she learns some key pieces of information at the end of The Burn Zone that very few people know (the aforementioned cat). In Fallout, more so than any of the other characters she has to decide what to do with that information and how to act on it. InThe Burn Zone she is reacting to an emergency much of the time. In Fallout she takes action, which also means the responsibility for those actions.
As far as the when, I believe it’s scheduled for early next year, probably a similar time frame to when The Burn Zone was released (early Feb) though I don’t have an exact date yet.
In the meantime, feel free to check out the e-novella Ember, which tells the story of how Sam and her surrogate father Dragan met. It’s absolutely not a requirement before reading The Burn Zone, and can be enjoyed even if you read it second (more so, I think, in some ways).
In both of the milieus you’ve created, it seems you’ve mashed up a few familiar tropes. With Revivors, the tropes are Zombies and Noir, in The Burn Zone, a little bit of Noir with Alien Invasion. Does this parallel an intersection of ideas that many writers point to as a spark for their stories?
I’ve always loved Noir, so it’s not surprising that it comes through in my work. I think as writers we’re kind of like sponges in that regard – not just in what we read but in what we watch and play, too. All of it colors what we write and how we write it. In the case of both the Revivors Trilogy and The Burn Zone I was very aware that I was working with well-established tropes. With the Revivors Trilogy, I purposely created an almost deconstructed zombie apocalypse as a backdrop for the main story. With The Burn Zone, I knew I would essentially be telling an Alien Invasion story, but I didn’t want it to be like many of the other invasion stories where we’re either already at war or going to war. I wanted the invasion to be a lot more insidious, to the point where maybe it’s not even really an invasion at all.
Or is it? I feel like at the moment, neither side is entirely sure themselves.
