Talking with Tim

When researching a subject, sometimes I struggle for ground to cover in the course of the interview. In the case of writer Jack McDevitt I struggled to narrow down what to discuss, given the rich diversity of his life. The man is the definition of experiencing life to its fullest. Consider his bio (which can be found here), in which one learns McDevitt “is a former English teacher, naval officer, Philadelphia taxi driver, customs officer, and motivational trainer. With the nominations of Infinity Beach, Ancient Shores, Time Travelers Never Die, Moonfall, Good Intentions (cowritten with Stanley Schmidt), Nothing Ever Happens in Rock City, Chindi, Omega, Polaris, Henry James, This One’s for You, and Seeker, Odyssey, and Cauldron, his work has been on the final Nebula ballot twelve of the last thirteen years. His first novel, The Hercules Text, was published in the celebrated Ace Specials series, and won the Philip K. Dick Special Award. In 1991, he won the first $10,000 UPC International Prize for his novella Ships in the Night. The Engines of God was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and his novella Time Travelers Never Die was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula. Omega received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best SF novel, 2003. McDevitt lives in Georgia with his wife Maureen, where he plays chess, reads mysteries, and eats lunch regularly with his cronies.” My thanks to McDevitt for an enriching email interview, and to Kevin J. Anderson for his advice making this interview partially possible.

Tim O’Shea: Back in 2005, in excerpts from a Locus Online interview of you, you admitted: “I’m worried about what’s happening in the United States now with the right wing.” How much would you say the political climate of the world inspires some of your fiction (if at all)? Are you more or less worried about the United States these days?

Jack McDevitt: It’s four years ago. I suspect I was thinking about the tendency of the right to substitute flag-waving for thought. The primary responsibility of a citizen in a democracy is to keep informed, and to recognize that authority figures of whatever political stripe need to be watched. And controled. An extreme example came when the President took us to war without presenting any evidence. I will never forget JFK going on TV when he was getting ready to impose the Cuban missile blockade. Here are the photos. There are the missile sites. These are the capabilities that these missiles will have. Etc. We never saw any of that from Bush. Trust me. Let’s go get Saddam. The Republicans, who are now so concerned about waste, got in line. And the Democrats, with few exceptions, put political expediency before the nation’s welfare, and also climbed on board. Then, after we’d killed God knows how many innocent Arabs –Remember Shock and Awe?–, we re-elected the administration. Before the world, the American people showed their approval of what we’d done.

I don’t know to what degree current politics inspires my work. History is full of halfwits in power. Tom Paine points out that the British generals during the Revolution were killing people –and getting their own soldiers killed– because a moron had told them to do so. On the other hand, sometimes you get quality leaders. It happens. But not always. And it’s why we need to watch people in power. It’s why we shouldn’t claim we stand for freedom of speech while simultaneously demanding that a singing group be boycotted because they’ve taken a stand, whether we approve of the stand or not.

We live in a dangerous world. Loose nukes, runaway population growth, tribalism, climate change, crazy people who think it’s a good idea to kill unbelievers. Two years ago, I attended a NASA/SETI conference seeking to answer the question why SETI has, in fifty years, never heard a peep. It might be because civilization breeds technology and technology increases vulnerability while making lethal weaponry available to lunatics. I think the U.S., at present, especially needs an objective, talented, hard-driving media. Objectivity is especially hard to come by. I don’t even trust my own any more.

O’Shea: When you voice your political opinion on matters, do you ever fear alienating some aspect of your audience, or is that never a concern of yours?

McDevitt: I think my readers are adults. I don’t normally get into left-right politics. (At least, I think I don’t.) This is about as much as I’ve done in a public forum. And I suspect your readers are also willing to be tolerant.

O’Shea: In addition to your standalone novels, you have done series with characters like Priscilla Hutchins and Alex Benedict. What attracts you to working with these characters in more than one novel?

McDevitt: There’s a technical advantage: You become familiar with the furniture: The name of the space station. The name and character of the aliens (or the fact that they don’t seem to exist). The velocity of the starships. The protagonist’s favorite restaurant. The capital of Louie’s World. Whatever. If you get caught up doing novels in which the action occurs in a basically similar milieu, it helps not to have to reinvent everything all the time. But the real reason is that you develop a familiarity with, and an affection for, the characters. And I can imagine how that sounds. But it’s true. And it affects the readers as well. I’ve had, e.g., a number of queries as to whether Hutch, or Chase Kolpath, is available.

O’Shea: When you write a novel, what gives you more creative satisfaction, entertaining the reader or intellectually challenging the reader (in addition to yourself) with your writing?

McDevitt: I’m not sure there’s a clear division between the two. Often, when I ask aspiring writers what a writer does, they will say she tells a story. When people tell stories, though, everyone around them tends to go to sleep. A writer strives, not to tell a story, but to create an experience. The reader is expected to hang by his fingertips while the protagonist is lifted to safety by a cable a thousand feet over the sea; he will fall in love on a rainy night in Paris; he will glide through Saturn’s rings and gape at the spectacle; he will get tossed over the side by the woman of his dreams. When it rains in a novel, the reader should get wet.

So I can’t separate intellectual challenge from entertainment. It’s a ride, baby. Over the moon and on to the north star.

O’Shea: In mapping out a time travel story, how do you track the “timeline” of the tale as you write it? What is the biggest challenge to writing about time travel?

McDevitt: The only long time travel work I’ve done is the forthcoming Time Travelers Never Die. It’s based on a novella from the 90′s. I had to make charts in some cases. E.g., a character who doesn’t realize he is playing with a time device is transported a few hours ahead and into some woods 200 miles away from where he started. It’s suddenly morning. He calls into work to tell his boss he won’t make it. But she keeps hanging up on him. Won’t believe he is who he says he is. He gets a ride home that night, and accidentally triggers the device, which returns him to the moment at which he’d left the night before. But he doesn’t know it. Next day, he goes to work and discovers that everyone insists he had in fact been there the day before. While he’s there, someone calls, claiming to be him. The boss hangs up on the guy. And if this is giving anyone a headache, I understand.

The problem for a time traveler protagonist is that he can always go back and repair the situation. Time travelers never wait in line. The biggest challenge is sorting things out so they can’t do that. What usually happens is that the writer invents a rule. E.g., you can’t be in two places at once, so you can’t go into any time period where you already exist. But that takes all the fun out of it. If you have a time travel device, really have one, you can play all nine positions simultaneously on your baseball team. You can come to your own assistance. And you never have to say goodbye.

O’Shea: Am I correct in thinking some of your older novels are being re-released for Kindle? By getting them on Kindle is it your hope to expose your work to young readership or what is your thinking on that?

McDevitt: Don’t know. I don’t pay much attention to any of that. I leave it to my agent. I have my hands full just getting the writing assignments done.

O’Shea: Why do you think you’re so successful at writing strong female characters, like Priscilla Hutchins? What is the key to writing engaging characters, no matter their gender?

McDevitt: Second question first: Make them human. They mean well, but they don’t know everything, and they’re flawed. One of the most common mistakes aspiring writers make is that they make their characters too heroic, too skilled, too good. The guy is never simply a skier; he’s the best on the planet. Characters who don’t get scared when they look up and see that a train is about to run them down. Characters whose problems are always black and white, who never have to make a morally ambiguous decision. The interesting character is the person who’s like the vast majority of us: Means well, would prefer to avoid confrontation, would hesitate before running into a burning building to attempt a rescue, gets a bit nervous when he’s about to make a play for an attractive woman (or guy), and so on. These are the characters we enjoy reading about.

I grew up in an era when the female characters were there simply to be rescued by the hero. Things got bad for Flash, you could always count on Dale to faint. I did management seminars for the Customs Service, and we used to break the participants into groups of five and present them with a situation that required them to talk with each other, and come up with a smart strategy. Failure to do that usually got them killed. (Virtually, of course.) For example, they’d be in a plane, and we’d crash the plane in the desert. Temperatures at 130. Do they set out for the settlement they saw sixty miles away? Do they wait for help?

We divided them sometimes by job description, inspectors in one group, agents in another, and so on. We divided them by type of assignment, airport, land border, seaport; we divided them by gender, all-male, all female, mixed. Our experience was that there was never any difference in the results. They lived and died at about the same rates in all the types of groups except one: gender.

The all-female groups usually survived. They’re better at talking things out. And at listening. The groups that almost always died? Not the all-male groups, which is what I bet you were thinking. In fact, it was the mixed group that went down constantly. Why? Because the males, in the company of women, became more masculine, and were willing to take chances they wouldn’t otherwise have taken. And, to make matters worse, the women became more passive. They let the guys, with their testosterone at full flood, make the decisions.

I started with Hutch because of what I’d seen so many times in those exercises. I wanted a woman who could go toe to toe with the males. She’s not always right, and she’s occasionally given in when she shouldn’t, but she’s learned from her experiences. I discovered I simply enjoyed writing about her, and about Chase Kolpath.

O’Shea: Your writing has been nominated and/or received several awards, after a number of years full of nominations and awards do you ever get jaded aboit winning or being nominated?

McDevitt: No. It’s always an honor. And a confirmation that I’m at least partially successful at what I’m trying to do.

O’Shea: Would you agree that writing fiction for an audience, on a certain level is an act of trust? You as the writer are trusting that the audience will be able to use their imagination to tap into the ideas you’re exploring–or am I wrong with this thinking?

McDevitt: Sure. One of the advantages of writing SF, and of living in an email world, is that I get to meet, or hear from, a lot of readers. I think we all share a sense of wonder about the place we live in. We have a lot in common. I never even think about whether I can trust them. I know too many of them. But they probably have to make some decisions on whether they can trust me.

O’Shea: Are there certain science fiction concepts you developed in your earlier novels that closely resemble any present day new or current technology?

McDevitt: My biggest breakthrough was a novel I planned back in 1963, before my writing career started. It predicted a moon landing with extensive media coverage. Unfortunately I never wrote the book. (Or, considering where I was in 1964, it probably isn’t so unfortunate.)

There’s a book around somewhere that addresses this subject, and I got credit for something, but I don’t recall what it was.

O’Shea: Are there certain kinds of scientific concepts/constructs that you think are overused in fiction?

McDevitt: We probably write too many interstellar war novels. I suspect that would never happen, for a number of reasons. One of them is Charles Pellegrino‘s idea that all you need is one ship approaching the speed of light. Ram it into someone’s home world and it’s lights out.

I suppose starships going out and doing exploration is overused. And I’d have to be among the first to plead guilty to that one. But it’s so much fun….

O’Shea: Is there anything you’d like to discuss that I neglected to ask you about?

McDevitt: Just that over the years, a number of people, including some established writers in other fields, have asked me “why do you write this stuff”? Why not write something serious? I had a relative who couldn’t understand why I didn’t write history novels. The answer to that, I suppose, is that I love the horizons provided by SF. I’m not much interested in doing a Civil War novel, where the only solution for the infection in your leg is to take off the leg, and they have all that slavery to deal with. Nor have I any interest in writing about serial killers or professors who are looking to seduce one of their students. Or about another marriage gone bad in the suburbs. It all just flat out bores me. No, put me on the Centauri express.