Robert J. Sawyer

Robert J. Sawyer has been called “the dean of Canadian science fiction” by The Ottawa Citizen.

His new novel is Red Planet Blues.

From Sawyer's Q & A  with Shawn Speakman:

Speakman: [Red Planet Blues] is a fun combination of science fiction and crime/mystery noir. What made you want to meld those two sub-genres together?

Sawyer: All the things that have fascinated me in life involve picking up clues. In science fiction, the reader picks up clues from background details that help him or her understand the universe in which the story is set. In mystery fiction, which I’ve always loved, you pick up clues to solve the crime. And in science — especially my two favorite ones, paleontology and astronomy, which are observational as opposed to experimental — you pick up clues from nature that help you develop theories.

Speakman: You mention paleontology. Martian fossils are featured prominently in RED PLANET BLUES. Did you have to do research into paleontology? And, if so, what did that research comprise?

Sawyer: I’d intended to become a paleontologist professionally; I was accepted to major in that at the University of Toronto, and even had a residence room assignment, when I decided I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t at least try to make the crazy dream of being a science-fiction writer work. I’m friends with Phil Currie, one of the world’s great dinosaurian paleontologists — in fact, I hope to see him next week at my Edmonton book-tour stop. Well, Phil always wanted to be a science-fiction writer, and I always wanted to be a paleontologist, and it amuses us both that, in some alternate universe, he’s me, and I’m him.

I already knew all the terrestrial paleontology I needed for this book, but it did present interesting challenges. Even at its ancient wettest, Mars was never very wet — and most Earthly methods of fossilization require percolating groundwater. I had to work out a way...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Robert J. Sawyer's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Red Planet Blues.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond's latest book is The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?.

From his Q & A with JP O'Malley for The Spectator:

You describe in the book how deplorable acts of cruelty — such as the strangling of widows, and leaving old people to die — are part of the circumstances people in traditional societies have to deal with?

Yes, traditional societies do things that we disapprove of. Some of them abandon their elderly, and others kill their babies, if they happen to be weak. We in the West think that is terrible. These people do this not because they are evil, but due to particular circumstances. If you have a group of nomads who are going to shift camp every day, and then you have somebody who can no longer walk, the cruel reality is that you cannot carry old people with you. In our modern society we are not shifting camp every day — we are sedentary — so it is possible for us to retain our old people.

You say that 96 percent of the top psychology journals in the world are from Westernized industrial countries. Does that mean that our perceptions of human psychology are deeply flawed?

They are very skewed because they are only based on a narrow section of humanity. Most psychological studies, if they are done in the UK, or the US, are usually only carried out on subjects from that particular country. They are always done with societies that have a state government: where every single person in that state is used to dealing with strangers. You and I have been talking now for three and a half minutes. I can promise you that I have not made a move to kill you yet. I haven’t detected any move on your part to kill me. But in a traditional society, by now either one of us would have killed each other, or else we...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Hilary Davidson

Hilary Davidson's novels include The Damage Done, The Next One to Fall, and the newly released Evil In All Its Disguises.

From her Q & A with MysteryPeople:

MysteryPeople: How did you come to choose Acapulco for the setting [of Evil In All Its Disguises]?

Hilary Davidson: It was a long, strange process to find the right setting for Evil in All Its Disguises. That’s partly because the premise — a journalist going missing while on a press trip — was based on a real events. I worked for Frommer’s Travel Guides for a decade, and in May 2000, one of the editors, a woman named Claudia Kirschhoch, went missing on a press trip to Jamaica. It’s a heartbreaking story: legally, she’s been declared dead, but her body has never been found.

I didn’t want to set the book in Jamaica, because Evil is in no way a telling of Claudia Kirschhoch’s story. The book reflects certain things that happened in real life — such as the resort’s attempt to pretend there was nothing wrong, and then trying to defame the missing journalist by claiming she was using drugs and being sexually provocative — but it’s a work of fiction. I decided to move it to another Caribbean island, and chose Barbados because it’s such an amazing place, caught between the wild waters of the Atlantic and the serenity of the Caribbean Sea. Unfortunately, that location didn’t work at all. I love Barbados, and my affection for the place got in the way of the writing. It was turning the book into more of a travelogue, which was the opposite of the isolated, Gothic feel I wanted.

Partway through the first draft, I stopped writing and decided to find another setting. I chose Acapulco for two main reasons: it has a very glamorous Hollywood-connected history, which appeals to Lily; and it’s a place where crime is out of control at the moment. The news stories that are in the book, like the headless bodies that turn up on the beach, and the one about a drug cartel trying to extort money from the teachers’ union, are all true. They created such an atmosphere of...[read on]

Visit Hilary Davidson's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Damage Done.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kishore Mahbubani

Kishore Mahbubani's new book is The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World.

From his Q & A with Robert W. Merry for The National Interest:

RWM: Kishore Mahbubani, an underlying thesis of your book is that globalization and technology are transforming the world—the nation-state is in decline, the one world sensibility is on the rise, a kind of new global civilization, as you call it, is on the rise. This is powerful change, big change. What makes you so sure and confident that it won’t unleash major global disruption?

KM: Well I, as you know, this book is very optimistic and I give tremendous and many reasons for the optimism. But the fundamental changes I speak about, about how we have created a new world order—I describe through the use of something I call the boat metaphor.

I say that before the contemporary era of globalization, when humanity lived in a multitude of separate countries, it was as though we were living on separate boats with captains and crews taking care of each boat and rules to make sure that the boats didn’t collide in their passage. But today, as a result of the world having shrunk, we no longer live in separate boats—we live in separate cabins on the same boat. But the problem now is that you have captains and crews taking care of their own cabins, but no one taking care of the boat as a whole.

So the greatest challenge I see for humanity today is that this is why we need to strengthen institutions of global governance, and it can be done, as I explain in the book, quite easily. Of course, there will be challenges, there will be disruptions. History now moves in a strange line, there will be ups and downs and so on and so forth.

But at the end of the day, the reason why I am optimistic, as I say, is that we are creating a new civilized global order. Of course, the number of people who have been educated in the world, who have been exposed to modern science and technology and reason and logic, is the largest it has ever been. The global middle class is exploding. So this new, and in a sense more intelligent, global community will...[read on]

Watch the video of the interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor at Brown University and critic. He was best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), which is the most widely read book in modern African literature.

From his 1994 Q & A with Jerome Brooks in The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

Would you tell us something about the Achebe family and growing up in an Igbo village, your early education, and whether there was anything there that pointed you that early in the direction of writing?

CHINUA ACHEBE

I think the thing that clearly pointed me there was my interest in stories. Not necessarily writing stories, because at that point, writing stories was not really viable. So you didn’t think of it. But I knew I loved stories, stories told in our home, first by my mother, then by my elder sister—such as the story of the tortoise—whatever scraps of stories I could gather from conversations, just from hanging around, sitting around when my father had visitors. When I began going to school, I loved the stories I read. They were different, but I loved them too. My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel. I was the fifth of their six children. By the time I was growing up, my father had retired, and had returned with his family to his ancestral village.

When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. In one of my essays, I remember the kind of things that fascinated me. Weird things, even, about a wizard who lived in Africa and went to China to find a lamp . . . Fascinating to me because they were about things remote, and almost ethereal.

Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn’t know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not . . . they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Rawi Hage

Rawi Hage is the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award–winning author of Cockroach and De Niro’s Game.

His new novel is Carnival.

Ray Taras was Willy Brandt Professor at Sweden's Malmö University for 2010–11. He was director of Tulane University's world literature program before Hurricane Katrina forced its closure. He is the author of numerous scholarly books on nationalism and identities in Europe.

Taras interviewed Hage in Montreal this month (March 2013) about Carnival:

Taras: Was a “carnival city” necessary in order for you to narrate the stories you did in this novel? How indispensable is this location for the events you describe to take place?

Hage: Places are very conflicting to me, and my narrators often clash with the places they inhabit. I have an antagonistic relationship with cities. I maneuver better in cities and have always lived in them. And my characters are shaped by cities. Nature is not only foreign to them but even menacing. I criticize cities but I can’t get away from them.

Taras: One early review of Carnival speculates that the city described is New Orleans. Is that the case or is it somewhere else?

Hage: It is somewhere else. I never thought of New Orleans as a specific location for the novel when I was writing it. I’ve never been to New Orleans but I would like to.

Taras: Carnival city is not as concrete and tangible a place as Montreal in Cockroach or Beirut in De Niro’s Game.

Hage: I chose not to determine a specific location. It was the presence of a carnival, as a symbolic and metaphoric event, that was crucial to writing of the novel. Having said that, the story does take place in and around an actual Carnival. Through the ages, the Carnival as been a centre of historical, religious and highly ritualistic events, and also for liberation that goes beyond the corporeal constraints imposed by a state or the religious apparatus. In this novel, I touch upon these attempts to control the body by various mechanisms of power. Images of sexual, social and political bondage and constraints recur. Also, there is a nomadic spirit to the main characters, especially Fly.

Taras: Your writing has been associated with French author and enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq. Is he your fellow traveler or fellow spirit?

Hage: I’m not as extreme as Houellebecq. For example, with regard to Islam, I believe I have a broader understanding of that culture. I grew up in Lebanon, as part of an Arabic-speaking, minority community in a Muslim world. But, in terms of producing an uncompromising literature, Houellebecq and myself have some resemblance. I have always thought that literature is a space where all should be permissible. Literature -- unlike religion which, in its best cases, allows a margin for interpretation and some cultural adjustment -- has a wider approach to life, it is more elastic. Literature is not bound by the burdens of archaic scriptures and religious creeds.

Taras: Are you a secular writer? Your works consistently contain references – what you term dialogue – involving religion. Paradoxically, you flag the importance of religion while depicting very existentialist ways of coping with life.

Hage: Yes, I am secular writer. And yes, I confess that my work has many religious references and I might even add that I have a religious style. Incantations, a direct almost authoritative approach to language. Even my characters often behave like marginal, rebellious, sexually uninhibited prophets.

I grew up in a conservative Eastern Christian community and belonged to it. But one day I realized that religion doesn't have a monopoly on morality. As a matter of fact, I believe that most of the social advancements in society and the meaningful liberation movements were instigated by secularists with deep humanistic values and understandings.

So my work is often paradoxical, in the sense that a religious form is used to champion a secular tradition.

Read more about Carnival at the W.W. Norton website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peggy Hesketh

Peggy Hesketh's debut novel is Telling the Bees.

From her Q & A with Jasmine Elist for the Los Angeles Times:

The bees play a huge role in the novel, almost serving as a character on their own. But I read that you are actually highly allergic to bees!

A long time ago, somebody said to me, "The things you’re most afraid of is where you need to be." I’m also terrified of heights, so the book I’m working on now has to do with dinosaur paleontology of the 1870s, which meant I ended up having to climb mountains in Montana. And I was absolutely terrified of it, but it was great. I dug up dinosaur bones, I know now how that character that I’m writing about figured out where the dinosaur bones were—which I couldn’t have from simply reading books on it.

With "Telling the Bees," I did go out and interview all sorts of beekeepers and went to hives and all of that. But what I learned is that if you move slowly, if you don’t disrupt bees, they don’t sting you. So it was actually quite lovely. I have an herb garden in my backyard and I would sit and watch the bees and I literally could see the little pollen sacks getting filled as they went for the flowers, and basil, and rosemary and what have you. Even if they landed on me, I learned not to be terrified and instead to just be gentle and be slow.

What type of research did you do?

What was kind of sweet was I was working for a community newspaper when I first started writing the novel. And my editor knew I was working on this book so when the prize honey for the Orange County fair was going on, he said, "Do you want to go do that story?" And he would send me off. He sent me off on all these little stories about bees and beekeepers, so I would go and visit them.

I always remember this one—he was an investment banker who was this really high-powered guy. When I met him...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Hainey

Michael Hainey is the deputy editor of GQ and author of the 2013 memoir, After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story, about his father's mysterious death with the author as six years old.

From Hainey's Q & A with Randy Dotinga for the Christian Science Monitor:

Q: Why is it so important to understand the lives of our parents?

A: We forget that our identities, our narrative stories that we used to tell ourselves who they are, are bound up in our parents' identities and their stories.

To know our own identify, to know our own stories, I've learned that you have to go into that past, into your parents' past. If you don't know their story, you don't know your story.

Q: What was going through your mind as you launched this detective story, not knowing whether it would hurt you, your mother and brother, or other people?

A: As I say in the book, we all say we want the truth, but that doesn't mean everyone else wants it. I had a lot of fear, and it held me back in different ways and different times.

Q: Did you feel like you were bearing witness to lives lived?

A: I wanted to bear witness to everyone in the book.

I tried very hard to honor everyone living and not living. I wanted to treat anyone I encountered with compassion and humanity: this is a life lived.

Q: You interviewed people who vividly remembered personalities and conversations from more than four decades ago. Were you surprised how they remembered so much?

A: I wasn't...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Tim Lott

Under the Same Stars is Tim Lott's sixth novel. His memoir, The Scent of Dried Roses won the PEN/J.R. Ackerley award and White City Blue won the Whitbread First Novel award. His YA novel Fearless was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Book award.

From Lott's Q & A at the Independent:

Choose a favourite author and say why you admire her/him

George Orwell, because he was a truth teller.

* * *

Which fictional character most resembles you?

Salinger Nash in ‘Under the Same Stars’ He’s depressive and cynical at one level, but optimistic and hopeful at another. And he wants someone, somewhere, to say ‘sorry’ to him.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Nasaw

David Nasaw's latest book is The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.

From the transcript of the author's Q & A with Dave Davies on Fresh Air:

DAVIES: Now, of course, the other thing that was happening in the late '30s here in addition to Hitler's aggression and territorial demands was the increasingly well-known persecution of Jews in Germany and other areas occupied by the Reich. And Joe Kennedy [U.S. ambassador to Great Britain] doesn't come out too well on this, as history has written, either. I mean what were his views about the role and influence of Jews in the United States in these events and their persecution in Europe?

NASAW: Well, there are two parts to this story and they contradict one another. In part one or the first aspect of Kennedy's relationship to the Holocaust and to the Jews of Europe in the United States is that he wants to get the Jews out of Germany. After Hitler moves into Austria and then soon after at Kristallnacht, it becomes abundantly clear not that the Jews are going to end up killed in concentration camps, nobody knows that, but they're being reduced to the most inhumane and brutal of conditions. And Kennedy believes that he's got to get the Jews out because as long as the Jews are being persecuted no Western power is going to feel that they can negotiate with Hitler. Right? So once you remove the Jews, then it'll be easier to reach a modus vivendi with Hitler.

DAVIES: So it was as much a pragmatic as a humanitarian approach?

NASAW: Exactly. But you can't discount the humanitarian. Kennedy knows what's going on over there and no one except the most vicious and brutal anti-Semites - and he's not one of those - wants to see human beings, who happened to be Jewish , suffer the way the Jews of Germany and Austria and then Czechoslovakia and Poland were suffering. So again, Kennedy is a realist. That's part one of this story. Part two is very different and very disturbing.

Kennedy believes that there is a Jewish conspiracy to go to war with Hitler. He believes that the Jews - to get revenge against Hitler and in the mistaken belief that they can defeat him and save their European Jewry - he believes the Jews are doing everything they possibly can to push the United States into war, into a war it should not, he believes, fight. And he indulges in every kind of anti-Semitic scapegoating and conspiracy myth. He writes and he tells his friends that the Jews control the media and the media is making it impossible to make a deal with Hitler because they're demonizing Hitler. He knows well that the Jews don't control the American media. William Randolph Hearst and Colonel McCormick are his friends, the two most important newspaper men in the country. And he believes and he says over and over again that the Jews have...[read on]

Listen to the inteview.

See Nasaw's five best books about the Kennedys.

The Page 69 Test: David Nasaw's Andrew Carnegie.

--Marshal Zeringue