Quick excerpt:

The political factions in the Jump 225 trilogy are divided between governmentalists and libertarians. If you were a character in the books, which would you be?

A lot of people who’ve read Infoquake assumed that my sympathies lie with the libertarians, because that’s where Natch’s sympathy lies. But I’m definitely more conflicted in my politics. I like to pick and choose among the different parties and philosophies. I have some definite liberal tendencies but a number of conservative ones as well.

You’ll discover in MultiReal that the political situation is much more nuanced than Natch makes it out to be in Infoquake. The central government, which really seems like the epitome of evil in Infoquake, is a conflicted organization itself with some do-gooders working in the fringes. And the libertarians are full of self-interested schemers who’ll stab you in the back.

Update July 8 @ 1:10 PM: SF author Mike Brotherton (Star Dragon, Spider Star) has posted the interview as well, and therefore deserves canonization.

Update July 11 @ 2:25 PM: And now my fellow Baltimore/Washington-area SF/F novelists Jeri Smith-Ready (Wicked Game, Eyes of Crow) and Mindy Klasky (Sorcery and the Single Girl, The Girl’s Guide to Witchcraft, the Glasswrights series) have posted the interview on their LiveJournals as well (link to Jeri’s LJ, link to Mindy’s LJ).

Update July 16 @ 8:35 PM: Also look for the interview at the Wyrdsmiths blog of Kelly McCullough (WebMage, Cybermancy) and the LiveJournal of David B. Coe (Rules of Ascension, Seeds of Betrayal).

Could Adolf Hitler ever have been the good guy?

The man was a warped, murderous bastard who ordered the slaughter of millions of people, started an unnecessary war of conquest, and permanently 86′d the dreams of an entire generation or three. But seriously — let’s say you hop in a time machine, track the dude down as a teenager, and put him through a serious reeducation program. And maybe give him a heavy dose of Prozac. Or better yet, hand him a Macintosh. Could he be redeemed?…

That was one of the Big Ideas behind my novels Infoquake and MultiReal. Create a character with Hitler-like strategic genius, with Gates-like business savvy, with Clinton-like personal magnetism, with Machiavelli-like disregard for ethics. Stick him on the fence between the ultimate selfishness and the ultimate selflessness, give him a technology that could revolutionize the world or destroy it, and see what he does.

I think it’s more useful to think of the art of characterization as something akin to the art of additive sculpture. When you build a character, you’re not describing an existing personality so much as building one from the ground up… Just like with sculpture, when building characters you’ll often throw in materials that you’ve got lying around the shop. And just like with sculpture, your characters don’t have anything that you don’t explicitly put there yourself…

4. A thematic purpose. Why did you decide to put this character in the story? You should have a reason for every character you’re going to put on paper. If you take the classic Star Wars trilogy, you’ll see that every major character serves a purpose vis-a-vis our protagonist, Luke Skywalker. Darth Vader represents what will happen to Luke if he continues down the path of anger and impetuosity; Leia stands for the home, family, and society he’s trying to defend; Han Solo represents the temptation to abandon community and responsibility; and so on.

Go read and comment on the DeepGenre blog, if you’re so inclined.

What is scientific accuracy anyway? Not only do scientists freely admit they don’t know everything, but they often speculate much the way that science fiction does. These days, talk of the metaverse, time travel, and alternate realities isn’t just geekspeak at an SF convention; it’s freely bandied about in respected scientific journals. I read a treatise not too long ago by a guy who put forth a rather convincing argument that we’re actually living in the Matrix…

So we have no obligation to be true to some static definition of scientific accuracy. That being said… black people have no obligation to avoid naming their kids Amos and Andy either. But it doesn’t hurt to have a little sensitivity about it, if only to avoid bringing up offensive and inaccurate stereotypes from the past.

Seeing it on the screen, I’m not so sure how confident I feel about the “Amos and Andy” portion of my response, or at least my wording of it. But it’s out there now, so nothing I can do about it. Go read my full answer on SF Signal.

Responses to the question of whether we have an obligation to scientific accuracy run from “no, absolutely not” (Bear) to “yes, if only to avoid pissing off your scientist reader” (Latner) to something I didn’t quite understand regarding Paul Feyerabend and anarchy in science (Roberts).

Step 10: Get your first readers’ feedback, and listen to it. This is the difficult part: you need to listen to your first readers. Really, really listen. You cannot argue with them. At all. They’re going to try to sugar-coat their criticisms, because they don’t want to make you angry or disappointed. And they’re going to be biased anyway, because they’re your friends and they probably share your worldview to a certain extent. So you need to very patiently coax the truth out of them, and let them do most of the talking….

Step 14: Make decisions, and stick to them. Just like you have to commit to writing your novel, you need to get serious about making tough decisions in the writing of it. Can’t decide if your characters should act a certain way, or if you should use a certain point-of-view, or if you should include a particular scene? You’ll need to make these tough decisions at some point, and you’ll need to stick to them…. When confronting tough decisions, it helps if you stop thinking of your choices as a shell game, where the “right” answer lies under one of your decisions. Every writing choice is the right choice, as long as you make it the right choice. There’s no Big English Professor in the Sky passing judgment on your work. Commit to a choice and make it work, and you’ll never go wrong.

Go ahead and make your comments, if any, on the DeepGenre blog.

Excerpts:

Step 2: Noodle around and figure out if your idea is novel-worthy.… Your first real challenge is to explore that idea to see if it’s worthy of spending a year or two of your life on. This is not a light decision to make. These characters are going to set up camp in your dreams, they’re going to pop out at you from the side of the road while you’re driving. You’re going to find yourself standing in a 7-11 wondering which flavor of Slurpee your protagonist would choose and how they would pay for it (corporate credit card? cash from wad in pocket? five finger discount?). You need to know if you can live with these people….

Step 5: Structure as you go. Some writers can zip through a draft of a novel by the seat of their pants. Others diligently outline every step their character’s going to take over the next hundred thousand words. It’s likely your process will fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Regardless, you need to have some idea of structure if you expect your novel to work. You might not know what that structure is when you start, and you might change it drastically as you go, but you can’t just expect Frodo and Sam to wander to Mount Doom by themselves. Either they’ll wander around aimlessly or they’ll wind up at the Cracks of Doom at the end of chapter 3, and then your novel will be in big trouble.

Make your comments over on DeepGenre if you’re so inclined.

So my question today is this: what do you find useful on an author’s website? I think we can all agree that excerpts help, and at the very least, having a blog doesn’t hurt. But what about the rest? Do you read additional material like chapter annotations, deleted scenes, and first drafts? Do you actually refer to online glossaries and the like? Does this stuff make you more likely to buy the author’s work? (And when you do buy her work, do you appreciate having lots of links to bookstores that carry it?)

Go ahead and join the discussion if you get a chance. Your input will be invaluable when it comes time to post the new websites for Infoquake and MultiReal. Really, people, I’m doing this all for you.

But even more important, the Internet has allowed me to keep in touch with readers during the (too long) break between novels. Before the prevalence of websites and blogs, the only way for newer SF authors to keep their name in the public eye was to write gobs of short stories and spend a lot of time on the con circuit. Now I can have an ongoing one-on-one dialog with readers through the blogosphere and social networking sites, and keep them posted on news of my next book.

In addition to my response, you can also read responses to the same question from fellow authors Matthew Jarpe and Tobias Buckell, my editor Lou Anders, and book marketing expert Andrew Wheeler.