[AOTM] - Interview with Robert Lee Wolfe

[Anna]

Greetings Space Opera Fans!

Each month Space Opera Fans attempts to contact the authors of the books we have up for Group Reads and pester them ask if they'll answer questions about what inspired them to write the book we are now reading. I don't know about you guys, but I'm like Kaylee Frye from Firefly, always wanting to take a peek under the hood and see whatzzzz up?

This month we're privileged to have the first alien abductee of our authors respond, Robert Lee Wolfe of An Invisible Thread: The War in the Orion Arm



So read along as we subject Robert to some nosy probing find out the inspirations behind An Invisible Thread, and then why not hop on over to the Book of the Month thread for this book and see who else is reading it.

HERE: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Remember … SOF brought it to you first!
Be epic!
Anna Erishkigal
SOF MOD2

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1. What books have most influenced your life?

Wow—books that have influenced my life, huh? That’s a deep one. I’ll start with science fiction books because that’s the point of the Space Opera Fans group.

The first books that really influenced me had to be all the Ben Bova books I found in my middle school library. Luckily, someone had a decent rack of Ben Bova put in there, and I read through them all. They were the only real sci fi stuff in there that I found, and I was truly enthralled. That kind of classic sci fi is where it all started for me, as far as being interested in hard science, space travel, alien species, and all the rest.

After that, I have a great affection for Terry Brooks’s first Shannara trilogy, The Wishsong and The Elfstones especially. They were the first novels that took me on those classic fantasy journeys with some supposed nobody across the invented world to the heart of danger itself while pulling the hero out of the nobody before you got there—and meeting a whole slew of interesting races and people along the way. They presented to me that concept that the average Joe is special and can even be a world-changer. Early on, I also found L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and there are certain scenes in there that have always stayed with me. Same with C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.

However, I have been influenced more heavily by a lot of nonfiction, and I may read more nonfiction than even science fiction or fantasy. I like the writers who the mainstream has declared anathema, though. I’m a Velikovsky fan. I think everyone should have to read Earth in Upheaval. And I really like stuff from Charles Hapgood like Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings and Path of the Pole. More recently, I think the works of Christopher Dunn on the Egyptian pyramids and temples are just fascinating. Anything about Kazimierz Dabrowski’s theories on psychology has also been quite influential. These are all works that force you to re-think what you were told to believe and can push you out of the box or boxes you might not even know you are being held within intellectually, factually, and philosophically. I also spent a lot of time in my youth studying all kinds of religious tomes and theology books. The Bible has undoubtedly been the biggest set of literature to put its mark on me as a person—though, again, I often find myself outside the mainstream in what smaller details I take away from it. And, I’ll spend all kinds of time reading stuff from the less mainstream writers like G.H. Pember or Clarence Larkin; that kind of stuff really pulls me in, though I may or may not be a true, card-carrying member of their respective theological camps in the end.


2. How do you develop your plots and characters?

I have a person living in my brain who comes out when I write him or her. They are kind of already in there, all complete and done, and then I put them into situations to allow them to do their thing. I pick a character that is residing up there and put them in a plot—but they might exist up there only for that plot, too. Plots are contrived to bring certain characters into encounters with other characters or to put them in specific situations, usually so that the whole thing could be used to make a philosophical point about reality, but just as often because I just had a thought that it would be a really cool or compelling image or situation. I map out the story paper-and-pencil on a timeline. The timeline extends way before and after the story is set, and this story is a chunk of that overarching timeline.

I remember recently reading or hearing George R. R. Martin talk about how some writers are more like gardeners and some are more like architects. I’m sure a lot of readers are familiar with the quote. I am a hybrid of those two where the story’s main plot points are mapped out carefully, but when the characters are dropped into the situations, they just bloom out of my head doing whatever they are going to do in that situation. In Doctor Who’s created universe, there are certain points in time that are fixed points that can’t be avoided or changed. In my created universe, I set those points, but the ride in between them that the characters follow is more spontaneously created.


3. Tell us about your Space Opera Fans book?

An Invisible Thread: The War in the Orion Arm is about a young girl on the edge of adulthood who takes a bold leap by signing up for a stint with the Earth’s Space Exploration and Expansion Fleet to do planetary cataloging of resources outside the solar system for a year, ostensibly to get a grant for higher education credits, and ends up being dragged instead into soldiering on the front lines of an especially dangerous and ugly interspecies war. It’s also about a slightly older guy who has lost everything he holds dear and has just signed on with the military to basically go die doing something other than living his broken life on Earth.

It’s also about an alien from a hyper-advanced civilization who has been assigned to catalog this war and its final outcome, and an alien from another system who has shown up to fight with the humans against their new enemy for deeper reasons than education credits or even glory or mere survival. There’s really quite an ensemble cast to this story. It’s also a story that makes some fleeting commentary on things like politics, science, and even journalism. It’s also my attempt at some good old hard science fiction, so it’s all set in the year 3335 with lots of space ships, high tech gadgetry, and alien encounters. It’s eventually a story about the human need for companionship, the value of sacrifice, and the brutality of war. In the end, it also makes some statement about the spiritual realms, as well.


4. We all need a hero! Tell us about your protagonist(s)? Was there a real-life inspiration behind him or her?

The main protagonist is Erin Broctrup. She is 19 at the start of the story, and she is rather naïve in the way that most kids are when they finish high school and/or are just starting college. She’s trying to find her way in life, trying to do things on her own. Then she gets dropped into a warzone and decides she needs to try to emulate the soldiers around her just to survive, though there is a part of her that takes to it and helps her succeed. She is rather diminutive, though, and very few people look at her once she is out in deep space playing soldier and think she belongs there or has much chance of surviving the experience. It’s little girl, big gun.

I can’t say that I know anyone like Erin, though I don’t know anyone personally who has ever gone through something like what she goes through in the story. She’s got a lot of resiliency, but few people need to tap those reserves like she ends up needing to, especially since she’s been relatively comfortable most of her life.


5. A good villain is hard to write. How did you get in touch with your inner villain(s) to write this book. Was there a real-life inspiration for him/her/it?

The bad guys in this novel are the enemy forces of the Brakikeen-jhennen horde. They are a complex group of low-intellect scavengers through to highly intelligent, high-technology civilization builders—and destroyers. I wanted to write about what it would be like to meet something completely given over to only pride, its own race, and complete disregard, even hatred, for those not of its own seed. I wanted to build a race given over to what we would recognize as pure evil. They’re genocidal, they’re brutal, and they’re bizarre. Pure, self-motivational sin was the inspiration.

Then there are a few corrupt or opportunistic individuals within the systems of authority in the novel. Here, I recalled people in real-life positions of authority over the populace who are not motivated by addressing the public welfare but by pushing their own personal agenda for personal gain. These are not hard to find models for in this day and age, if you ask me. But they do make nice drivers for setting up conflict.


6. What real-life inspirations did you draw from for the worldbuilding within your book?

Worldbuilding in An Invisible Thread was all about extending today’s society into the future. I tried to extrapolate what would happen if things moved along certain lines geopolitically and technologically into a fairly distant future. Books like The Next 100 Years were probably pretty influential for the geopolitics, but that only got me so far. I tried to take a multilayered approach, though, so there’s commentary made about lots of things; how time in general or first contact in particular might impact Man’s thoughts on science or religion. What would a generation like this one do with the knowledge that life exists elsewhere—and it’s sentient, and it may even be armed? I drew from the current generation, but put them in a world with flying cars and space travel. Some things changed (like physical borders and the breaking down of cultural borders), but some things stayed the same (corruption in high places, the basic human condition). Then there was the actual future tech, which I drew from decades of reading every science magazine that speculated on future technology that I ever got my hands on since middle school.

[Anna]

7. Sci-fi fans love techno-porn! What real-life science (or pseudo-science) did you research for your book?

I have to have my characters moving at faster than light speed in order for things to happen in the novel, so they were going to do that no matter what. Luckily, NASA has commissioned some folks to do some pretty far-out math lately and Miguel Alcubierre’s work on a space-warping, faster than light travel system was gaining some steam. So, I went with something based on that. It’s not a big part of the story or anything, but it’s what I appealed to try to make FTL travel “real.”

I also then made it look like it was the low-tech offering in the book, as other races are way ahead of us and can do even cooler stuff. I left the “gravity” to spinning things and depending on centripetal force instead of giving the humans artificial gravity generators (we are really not close to understanding how gravity actually does what it does, even though we can work with it and around it so well). I really wanted to explore how keeping things spinning affects architecture and design, and I got to play around with that a lot with the battle platforms and carriers in the book. There are little techno Easter eggs all over the place in the novel, like 3D instead of TV; implanted wetware projecting holograms around a person or sounds in their heads; domestic, ambulatory robots; the future iteration of the Internet; and, of course, all the future weaponry the military folks are blasting away at the bad guys with. There’s a fair amount of “techno-porn” in there—so much, that I get the idea that if you are not a hard sci fi nut, you may find it a bit much. Sorry, and you’re welcome, whichever the case may be!


8. What was the hardest part of writing this book?

I think the hardest part was dealing with the things I wanted to insert that I was not any kind of expert on, like trying to give nods to navy and military terms and concepts while trying to extrapolate such things 1300+ years into the future. I just wanted to write about the pictures in my head, but I didn’t want to use any such terminology so incorrectly that it took someone out of the story, so to speak. I made a conscience decision early on that I wasn’t going to just take modern military terminology—even rank, etc.—and use it in 1300+ years in the future because I just don’t find that it would be likely to have not mutated to some degree, especially when it’s a multinational force in a completely new setting no military has ever worked in. So, I’d do a couple hours of research on something and then decide, yup, I’m gonna stick with that one, or, no, that term doesn’t fit what I am seeing in my head, so I need to change things up here or there. Sometimes, this affected one word used in like one or four sentences across the whole book; sometimes it was more far-reaching. Researching the stuff wasn’t hard—I like researching things. Stopping the flow of what was coming out of my brain to make such insertions more believable or at least not totally out of line was the hard part.

Trying to express what these futuristic things or non-human creatures looked like was challenging, as well. I decided to stick with metric units early on (because I just figured SI was all we’d use that far in the future and in a culture that was so multinational). But, being American, they aren’t really second nature, so I had to constantly convert units from what was in my brain to metric. Then, I wanted the aliens to be the kind of thing that, if they were to appear in a movie or something, you absolutely could not put a guy in makeup and a suit of any kind and be done with it. I don’t like the idea that life sprang up all over the place independently but somehow all we got was more humanoids with some cool colors or incidental features. But, then I couldn’t just say, “the so-and-so are a reptilian species with green scales and whip-like tails” and you’re all on board. I had very specific ideas of what these creatures looked like, and I really wanted to get them across. Same with the military vessels. Getting enough detail down that someone had a chance of seeing the same thing in their head, but not spending so much time on descriptions that folks got bogged down in it, was sometimes a struggle. If I erred, it was on the side of too much detail, in all likelihood. I like that in a sci fi book, though, so there it is in mine. For those who still might have not gotten it or felt compelled to skip over those descriptions, I included a few diagrams and illustrations. (I like illustration and artwork, so that was actually fun.)


9. What was your favorite chapter (or part) to write and why?

I like writing those pay-off scenes that you have been building to for the past couple hundred pages or more. They can be thrilling, though sometimes painful, to write. Even when they are painful (maybe because it’s the end of certain character’s arc . . .), I still always looked forward to writing them. Those scenes that I think are most likely to drag a tear (or maybe even some anger) from a reader are some of the ones I most want to set up, then get to and write out.


10. Did you learn anything from writing this book and what was it?

I learned how hard it is to write and polish up a fairly long story—and that it is really gratifying to see it finally come together and be read by someone else. I never wanted to know how to format a document so it could be printed out as a paperback book, but I learned that, too. Writing your first novel is a learning experience from beginning to end, especially as an indie writer (you do so much of it all by yourself). A lot of it is procedural, formatting, etc. A lot of it is in getting feedback from a beta reader, though, too. You learn that certain words may not convey what you hoped or that you think wacky and need to sort out how your most likely readers think in order to be able to communicate with them.


11. Is there a message in your novel that you hope readers will grasp?

Yes.


12. What are your future project(s)?

Well, ever since I finished An Invisible Thread up, I have been tossing around writing another story in the same universe, so to speak. Some ideas in this arena really excite me. The themes and messages I would like to convey are more complex and father “out there” in some ways, though some of them were hinted at in An Invisible Thread. Alternately, I wouldn’t mind writing something totally different, maybe even a fantasy. There are several ideas vying for attention in my head, though one of the possible stories in the Invisible Thread universe is the only one to get any paper and pencil spent on it so far . . .


13. If you couldn’t be an author, what would your ideal career be?

Well, I work for a living as something other than an author. I like being an educator, though it is a weird time in public education. If I couldn’t be an educator, I would love to be a full-time author. Both jobs require your full measure of creativity and energy.


14. What is your preferred method to have readers get in touch with or follow you (i.e., website, personal blog, Facebook page, here on Goodreads, etc.) and link(s)?

Contacting me through the novel's official website or through Goodreads is great. The website for this book is set up at aninvisiblethreadnovel.weebly.com; there’s a contact form there.


15. Do you have anything specific that you want to say to the Space Opera Fans community members?

Keep reading, keep your minds open, and support all the really good sci fi you can, whether it’s print, television, or big screen. We are a niche market, and sometimes we get forgotten (more often also misunderstood). If we stick together, though, we can sometimes get some great projects brought our way, even against all odds.

Interview granted 8/14/2014