Robert J. Sawyer

Ernest Lilley recently interviewed Robert J. Sawyer about his new novel, Rollback, for SFRevu.

One exchange from the interview:

SFRevu: Long ago I interviewed you and we talked about character creation. You proclaimed that your characters did what you told them to, and there was no monkey business about telling their story involved. Moreover, anyone who thought their characters were speaking to them and begging to get their stories out seriously needed to get help. As I was dating a fantasy writer of exactly that ilk at the time, proudly playing said interview did not have the desired result. Have you softened over the intervening years?

Rob: Not in the least. Reviewers often say I write realistic characters -- and they often express surprise at finding such things in hard science-fiction books. But what that means is that I've got a decent enough grasp of psychology (which is what I studied as a sideline while I was doing my broadcasting degree). Actually, when I was studying psych, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we were just coming off the B.F. Skinner era, in which the human brain was treated as an unknowable black box, governed by inputs and outputs; I don't think the word "consciousness" was ever mentioned once in the psych courses I took. But I knew that was the wrong approach then -- and it's probably why so many of my novels, including Fossil Hunter, Factoring Humanity, and Mindscan, are about how the mind does work. If you think, as I do, that the human mind is comprehensible and mostly predictable, you understand what you're setting your characters up to do. When a writer is surprised by what a character does, it means the writer has been sloppy in designing the character.

Read the entire interview.

Rollback at "My Book, The Movie."

The Page 69 Test: Rollback.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Gribbin

Penguin conducted a Q & A with John Gribbin, a Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex who is best known for his book In Search of Schrodinger's Cat.

Part of the interview:

John, The Fellowship: The Story of a Revolution is your 100th book. 100 is a fantastic achievement. How do you feel about it?

I don't actually keep count, and when it was pointed out, I was particularly pleased that it should by chance be one of the books I'm most proud of. I'm not exactly ashamed of any of them, but you only get to a hundred by writing a lot of more ephemeral books (like The Little Book of Science, which was great fun but not one for posterity). The Fellowship, I hope, is not one of those. I don't really regard the number as an achievement - I used to be a journalist, and my friends on newspapers have written at least as many words as me in the past 30 years, it's just that their words don't get stuck between hard covers and put on bookshelves.

How did you originally start out as a science writer?

When I was a PhD student in Cambridge, and desperate for money to buy such luxuries as food. I started doing short items for New Scientist, and one thing led to another. I spent five years on the staff of the science journal Nature, and wrote my first couple of books during that time. But books only really took over from journalism in the mid-1980s.

Are there books that you have particularly enjoyed writing, or that you think have been the most significant in your output?

I have the fondest memories of In Search of Schrodinger's Cat, which was the first book I wrote for myself, without a contract before starting. It was turned down by eight publishers (including Penguin) before becoming my breakthrough title, and is still in print after 21 years. I enjoyed The Little Book of Science in a different way, as a chance to present science in an offbeat fashion. But like most writers, I usually think my current project is the best and most significant.

Read the entire Q & A.

See--The "Page 69 Test": The Fellowship.

--Marshal Zeringue

Debby Applegate

Debby Applegate is the author of The Most Famous Man in America, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

From a Q & A with Applegate:

Q: Was the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher really “the most famous man in America”? What made him so famous and why has he been forgotten?

A: One nineteenth century observer answered the question this way: "Abraham Lincoln emancipated men's bodies; Henry Ward Beecher emancipated their minds. The one delivered them from injustice; the other, from superstition.” Beecher, son of the last great Puritan minister, shocked and enthralled America by shedding his father’s Old-Testament style fire-and-brimstone theology and instead preaching a New-Testament based gospel of unconditional love and healing, becoming one of the founding fathers of modern American Christianity. He added to his infamy by mixing religion and politics, throwing himself into the antislavery crusade and preaching on behalf of the Republican Party. And he became one of the nation's most charismatic and profitable entertainers, lecturing to audiences across the country on the hot topics of the day.

Then, in 1870 at the peak of his fame, Beecher’s close friend and occasional ghost-writer, the journalist Theodore Tilton accused the pastor of seducing his wife Elizabeth. The ensuing public scandal created more newspaper headlines than the entire Civil War, and culminated in a six-month civil trial and media circus. When, after 8 days of deliberation the jury deadlocked, the case was dismissed. Beecher continued to preach until his death in 1887, but over time his reputation dimmed and by the mid-twentieth century he was dismissed as a sentimental buffoon and lecherous hypocrite. Nowadays he is remembered primarily as the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the blockbuster Uncle Tom's Cabin. My aim is to restore him to his rightful place in history, without whitewashing his sins.

Read the entire Q & A.

Forthcoming at the Page 99 Test: The Most Famous Man in America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daria Snadowsky

Daria Snadowsky's debut YA novel is Anatomy of a Boyfriend.

Girl Scene Magazine's interview with Snadowsky included the following:

What inspired you to write Anatomy of a Boyfriend?

Love. One of the things I've always resented is that all of the words associated with romantic love are so pejorative. When we like a boy, people call us "obsessed," or "infatuated," or "nuts," or "addicted." These are really negative words considering love is such a positive thing. So I wanted to write a story about an ordinary girl who experiences all these feelings for the first time, and she thinks she's acting crazily, when in reality she's just going through the most natural experience in the world. I'm not advocating waiting by the phone for a guy to call or daydreaming about guys during class--I'm just saying that these behaviors are totally normal and completely human, and even the brainiest, most rational girls are not above them. According to the emails I've received so far, readers are really identifying with Dominique's state of mind and feel a lot better about their own romantic experiences as a result.

Who has had the greatest impact on your writing career?

The author Judy Blume has always been my biggest inspiration, which is why I dedicated Anatomy of a Boyfriend to her. Judy Blume's style of writing about teenagers' emotions is sensitive, honest and non-judgmental, and that candor is something I tried very hard to instill in my book.

I actually mailed Judy Blume a mostly-edited version of the book nearly a year ago. I wasn't expecting her to read it since she's so busy, but she did! She emailed me that she enjoyed it so much she had trouble putting it down! Talk about a dream come true!

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patricia Vigderman

From an interview with Patricia Vigderman about her book, The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner:

What kind of research did this book require of you? And how long did it take to finish, beginning from the first time you had the idea to explore Isabella Gardner’s life and her collection?

The book has an associative structure, and that’s also the way I do research: one thing leads to the next. The beginning, of course, was the museum itself, a strange and beautiful place that I found very appealing and also frustrating. Isabella Gardner’s will required that nothing could be altered, no object moved or painting rehung, so its unchangeable idiosyncracies can make it seem frozen in time, as if she had no flexibility in imagining the future. Then when I began reading different biographies of her I noticed how much they, too, were products of their own time. So I began looking for things from her time, to lead me back into her world, to women’s place in it, and to a developing curiosity about the art and civic development in post-Civil War Boston. I was also lucky to have access to the Harvard University libraries, and I found myself hunting down documents and books that no one had looked at for decades—a guidebook to Japan from the 1880s, a collection of unpublished letters, memoirs of energetic but now forgotten women. So, my research was both serendipitous and purposeful, and I let it go on for several years, not knowing exactly how it was all going to fit together.

The Memory Palace doesn’t quite fit into any particular category. Described as “equal parts biography, memoir, philosophy, and detective story,” it crosses genre boundaries to make an entirely unique book. Could you talk about how you came to this blended form?

Indeed, the real labor was finding the form for the book — how to shape the material to reflect the way it had entered and affected my writing life. I would say that the book is personal in that it is my voice that carries the research. It’s not about me, but I wanted very much to share my pleasure with readers—my pleasure not just in the art, but in creating my own nineteenth-century world, my own relationship with the historical characters I was discovering. I realized early on that what I had was a quest narrative: I was looking for Isabella. But in coming at her from many angles I was also creating an Isabella who suited my own purposes. In a way, I was trying to find a biographical form that felt honest rather than authoritative.

Read the entire interview.

The Page 69 Test: The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Armitage

Some time ago, David Armitage, Professor of History at Harvard University and author of The Declaration of Independence: A Global History -- the current feature in the Page 69 Test series -- talked to the Harvard Gazette about his work.

Part of the interview covered one of his earlier books:

Armitage, a graduate of Cambridge University, gained wide recognition in his field for his 2000 opus The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, which won the History Today book prize. The book aims to put British history into its widest intellectual context, taking into its sweep ideological notions from ancient Rome as well as neighboring empire-builders such as Spain.

At its heart, the work ponders why Britain's empire building lagged behind that of other European nations. Armitage's approach pointed to ideas, rather than military might or wealth, as delaying Britain's foray into conquest.

"One reason that struck me ... was the importance of classical models of history, which show that for example the Roman Empire led to corruption and decline," he says. When Britons overcame those fears of empire and expansion, they became an imperial power.

One of the book's most groundbreaking concepts, Armitage says, was how it combined imperial history with domestic British history, helping to launch an intellectual movement that is now very important. "Why did there seem to be two different histories?" he says, noting that historians had previously dealt with either state and nation or expansion and empire. "I believed that it was essential to break down that entirely artificial barrier between those two histories."

Read the entire interview.

Learn more about Armitage's The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, and see how the Page 69 Test fared with the book.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Bacevich

A year ago, Tomdispatch interviewed Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism (2005).

The interview opens:

Tomdispatch: In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, you said the revolt of the retired generals against Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld represented the beginning of a search for a scapegoat for the Iraq War. I wondered whether you also considered it a preemptive strike against the Bush administration's future Iran policy.

Andrew Bacevich: The answer is yes. It's both really. Certainly, it's become incontrovertible that the Iraq War is not going to end happily. Even if we manage to extricate ourselves and some sort of stable Iraq emerges from the present chaos, arguing that the war lived up to the expectations of the Bush administration is going to be very difficult. My own sense is that the officer corps -- and this probably reflects my personal experience to a great degree -- is fixated on Vietnam and still believes the military was hung out to dry there. The officer corps came out of the Vietnam War determined never to repeat that experience and some officers are now angry to discover that the Army is once again stuck in a quagmire. So we are in the early stages of a long argument about who is to be blamed for the Iraq debacle. I think, to some degree, the revolt of the generals reflects an effort on the part of senior military officers to weigh in, to lay out the military's case. And the military's case is: We're not at fault. They are; and, more specifically, he is -- with Rumsfeld being the stand-in for [Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense] Robert McNamara.

Having said that, with all the speculation about Bush administration interest in expanding the Global War on Terror to include Iran, I suspect the officer corps, already seeing the military badly overstretched, doesn't want to have any part of such a war. Going public with attacks on Rumsfeld is one way of trying to slow whatever momentum there is toward an Iran war.

I must say, I don't really think we're on a track to have a war with Iran any time soon -- maybe I'm too optimistic here [he laughs] -- but I suspect even the civilian hawks understand that the United States is already overcommitted, that to expand the war on terror to a new theater, the Iranian theater, would in all likelihood have the most dire consequences, globally and in Iraq.

Read the entire interview.

See-- The Page 99 Test: The New American Militarism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dani Shapiro

Some time back, Barnes & Noble interviewed Dani Shapiro, author of a bestselling memoir and five acclaimed novels including Black & White, new this month from Knopf.

Part of the Q & A:

What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer?

When I was in graduate school, I took a course in 19th Century literature that changed my life as a writer. I had a gifted professor who taught me to read very differently than I had before. Until then, I had read novels as a reader, with a somewhat academic bent. But in this course, the professor (whose name was Ilja Wachs, and to whom I eventually dedicated my second novel) taught us to read as writers. It was as if a light bulb had gone off in my head. For the first time, I began to understand that metaphor, similie, foreshadowing and such were part of the creative process -- that the writer wasn't necessarily maneuvering and making decisions as much as following unconscious motivations. The book I was reading at the time the light bulb went off was Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. I read it three or four times, and it also led me to read about 19th Century French history in order to understand the political and social factors that might have been influencing Flaubert -- since writers cannot help but be affected by the times in which they live.

Read the entire interview and visit Dani Shapiro's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

L.C. and R.L. Hayden

Earlier this year Julia Buckley interviewed the writers L.C. and R.L. Hayden. Part of the exchange:

L. C., you’ve written many books, and the latest is called Why Casey Had to Die. That’s a catchy title. Why DID Casey have to die? Is it because he came to bat and struck out?

Cute! I like your answer — so much more original than mine. I’m taking the fifth in here. The answer to that is an integral part of the story and the answer is revealed at the very end. All I can say is, read and find out.

How did you get started in the mystery-writing biz?
Writing is something I’ve always enjoyed doing. I feel life is a mystery, so I’m fascinated with the concept of mysteries. Naturally, when it came time to write the novel, I chose the mystery genre — haven’t regretted it at all. But before I wrote mysteries, I freelanced for magazines. There’s an interesting story as to how that came about.

While in college, I had two term papers to do. One was for a professor who was known for his strict rules. I spent all my time doing the paper for him. I finished the paper four days before it was due. It was then that I remembered I had another term paper to write. I grabbed my finished paper, along with its note cards and bibliography cards. I dashed off to the library. I began by re-reading the paper. I found two typing errors (days before computers, sigh.) I made a mental note to retype those two pages.

I set everything to the side and began the research for the second paper. At 2:00 AM when the library closed, I grabbed everything and headed home. The next morning I reached for the finished term paper so I could retype those two pages. It was then I remembered I had set the paper to the side and left it there. I ran to the library, but it was gone: the paper, the outline, the thesis statement, the note cards, the bibliography cards. Everything. Just like that. Gone.

I knew if I approached the professor and told him what happened, he’d say “Tough luck. Paper is due Friday.” I had no choice but to redo it. Somehow in the next three days I redid the entire paper and finished the other paper.

When I got the papers back, on the paper I had to redo I got a C and it only had one comment: And you want to be a writer -- ha! On the other term paper, I got an A+ with the comment that this was publishable if I took off the footnotes and revised it. I went to the professor and he showed me the ins and outs of magazine writing. That was my first published work -- and I got to be a writer -- ha!

Read the entire interview.

Read the Page 69 Test: Why Casey Had to Die.

--Marshal Zeringue

Noria Jablonski

Daedalus Howell interviewed Noria Jablonski, author of Human Oddities, for the San Francisco Chronicle. The resulting article opens:

Writers are drawn to their craft for a variety of reasons -- some have a story that must be told, others do it for a buck. For Petaluma's Noria Jablonski, it was a nagging feeling.

"I had been teaching high school English in San Francisco for three years and I realized that I was a hypocrite. I was helping these students find their voices and tell their stories, but I had never done that for myself," reflects Jablonski, whose first collection of short stories, "Human Oddities," ($15) was released in October by Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group in Emeryville.

"I really hadn't had a chance to live my own life yet," says Jablonski, 35. "I had no ambitions to be a writer. I just wanted to teach. I knew that when I was 15 years old. ... And I did, I'm very goal-oriented."

When her goal became to be a writer, a determined Jablonski set her sights on graduate programs in writing. In her estimation, however, there was one stumbling block.

Read on to learn more about that "stumbling block."

The Page 69 Test: Human Oddities.

--Marshal Zeringue