Ficlets

1. Quick! Tell us a little about yourself and EMPYRE.

It was a long, weird road that brought me to writing books. As a kid, I knew that I wanted to be a spy. My parents didn’t want a TV in the house, so I lived on a staple of James Bond novels, with a little Frank Herbert thrown in there to spice it up.

I grew up in Aspen, Colorado, so I spent a lot of time in the mountains, climbing, skiing and the like. By the time I hit high school, I had abandoned espionage and knew that I wanted to be a mountaineer. I figured that mountaineering would be a great way to see the world.

Then I got to Princeton, where I majored in anthropology, and knew that I wanted to become a professor. So, after school, I backpacked my way through Southeast Asia for about a year, mulling my future in academia between climbing adventures.

While traveling through Thailand, my college roommate and I decided to write a screenplay. While it didn’t sell, it ended up getting us both work in Hollywood. That’s when my “career” as a writer found me. I ended up writing a bunch of movies and films, some of which saw the light of day – most notably the HBO series, Rome.

Then, the Hollywood craziness started to take its toll and career angst set in. As an adult, becoming James Bond seemed slightly less realistic. Professor was out, and a big fall at 21,000 feet on the side of a mountain in Nepal made it clear that mountaineering was not going to be a long term career path for me. So, I decided to sit down and write the novel I’d been thinking about for so long.

My wife and I moved to Santa Barbara, California and I started in. Six months later, I had Echelon, a sci-fi spy thriller with a rock climbing hero who gets pulled to the farthest reaches of the globe. What can I say? I’m all about wish fulfillment!

And that brings me to my new book, EMPYRE. While part of a series, Echelon and EMPYRE are stand alone novels. Like Echelon, EMPYRE falls into a new category – which I call spy-fi. I try to mesh the excitement and political intrigue of a spy thriller with the best “what if” aspects of sci-fi. Take Jason Bourne and throw him into an Orwellian future and you’ll get a sense of EMPYRE.

EMPYRE kicks off where most sci-fi and political conspiracy thrillers end: “Big Brother” is dead. Freedom reigns. I wanted to know what would happen the next day. How would society react to freedom regained? And what would life be like for my two heroes, Ryan Laing and Sarah Peters, the people who forced this massive shift on the world? With those questions in the background, EMPYRE paints a chaotic reality drawn heavily from what we see around us today.

My central characters, Ryan and Sarah, destroyed ECHELON – a total surveillance system – at the end of my last novel. So, they should be heroes, right? Hailed as the people who brought freedom to the world? Not so much. Just look at the breakup of the USSR, or what’s going on in Iraq, and it’s clear that the road to freedom is treacherous. EMPYRE puts this issue on a global scale.

Watching this new reality unfold rips Ryan and Sarah apart. She returns to the intelligence community, trying to regain some measure of stability. Ryan shuts down, retreating to the farthest reaches of the earth in an attempt to block out the reality he created.

But, when Sarah is blamed for a series of terrorist attacks, Ryan is forced back into action. With the help of a rogue CIA officer, he must find Sarah before it’s too late. That journey leads him to a new conspiracy at the center of the chaos whipping across the globe.

My books are all about relentless action. My goal with EMPYRE is to offer up a thrill ride that, while being fun and exciting, also sparks thought on what kind of future will rise from the actions we’re taking today.

2. One of the keys to EMPYRE (and to its predecessor Echelon) is that it gives some fantastical elements a solid grounding in reality – the “some of this could already be happening now!” vibe. Talk about what it takes to get reality and fantasy to mesh together.

Creating that sense is really important to me. I wanted the reader to feel like EMPYRE’s world lies down the path we’re walking right now.

For me, generating that world takes a combination of hard research and wild imagination. Everything in my books has been exhaustively researched. Yes, I take a couple flights of fancy, but 90% of what’s in EMPYRE is either in existence now, or in development.

I spend a lot of time pouring over every blog, magazine, and journal I can get my hands on, as well as interviewing those people working on the cutting edge—all to get a sense of what’s possible, what’s coming and when. Actually, you can hit my web site for the reality behind the technology, locations and architecture I use in EMPYRE.

With that info swimming around in my head, imagination kicks in. I’m fascinated by how the technology we’re developing today will affect the human condition. And I’m not talking about a far future where that next jump in technological progress has been accepted and integrated into daily life. I’m talking about that “betwixt and between” time where the technology exists and we’re not sure if it will save or doom us. I guess you could look at EMPYRE as a right of passage story on a global scale. Must be my anthropology roots coming through!

Anyway, EMPYRE speculates on a moment of uncertainty and fear, on a point of chaos. In that moment, the world wavers between heaven and hell, much as my hero, Ryan, stands at a precipice in his own life.

3. How did you feel about technology and surveillance before writing these books? How do you feel about them now? And in a larger sense, does writing on a subject (even in speculative fashion) change the way you think and feel about it?

Good question. I’m not sure my feelings toward technology and surveillance shifted in writing Echelon and EMPYRE, but they certainly broadened. Writing a book gives you plenty of time to mull on a topic and look at it from different angles.

To give a little background, both books deal with the theme of control—control of society and control of self. My first book looks at control through surveillance and manipulation. It takes an actual surveillance/eavesdropping system within the NSA (codenamed ECHELON) and postulates what might happen to it in the future. I wrote Echelon before all the domestic eavesdropping hubbub hit the news. When it did come to light, I realized that my fiction wasn’t quite as speculative as I thought! EMPYRE then looks at control through fear. In both novels, Ryan’s own struggles mirror those of the larger world. Working through these topics, I’ve had plenty of time to ponder the impact of technology and mass surveillance.

So, here are my thoughts on surveillance… We live in a world with real threats. My safety may well lean on the ability of the intelligence community to pull that crucial piece of data from the ether. Right now, organizations like the NSA are playing catch up. It’s a complicated issue to pick that golden needle of INTEL from the global data-stack. But, as progress continues its exponential rise, we will grow more and more capable of sifting through the vast pools of data. As that day nears, the actions we’re taking now, the allowances we’re making, will have a real impact on our privacy and freedom.

Am I concerned enough about this to go native? No. I’m not worried that the NSA is checking out my net habits. That said, I believe that to prosper through this century, we, as a country, will have to reach a balance between security and privacy – a way to find some measure of protection without destroying the freedom we hold dear.

Regarding technology, I knew from the start, that I didn’t want to write books that were black and white on the issue of progress. So much speculative fiction runs on the underlying premise that progress and technology are inherently dangerous and evil. This mentality drives me nuts. Yes, progress amps our ability to inflict harm, but it also holds the promise of great good. Echelon and EMPYRE cut at the future with both edges of progress’ blade.

4. Share a piece of writing advice you’ve been given.

The novelist, Allan Folsom, said something to me that really resonated. He said that to create tension and amplify the significance of a scene, always enter that scene at the last possible moment. I think about this every time I jump into a new scene. That discipline forces me to be clear on what’s critical to the story at that moment and to cut out everything else. Doing this gives the scene a driving intensity which, for a thriller, is crucial.

5. Both EMPYRE and Echelon have the same main character, Ryan Laing, in the center of all the intrigue. As an author, talk about what it takes to animate a character not once but twice: do you just haul him out of storage in your brain, or do the new events and world in EMPYRE require you to change the character as well?

Great question. This was my main struggling point in writing EMPYRE. I always knew that Ryan’s story would continue past Echelon. Actually, I really wrote Echelon to get to EMPYRE. The concept of writing a story about what happens the day after “Big Brother” falls has been in my mind for a long time.

In both books, I use Ryan’s personal struggle as a metaphor for the larger societal issues unfolding around him. But, as I got into EMPYRE, I realized that I hadn’t thought enough about what Ryan’s emotional arc would be. He had a big, well defined arc in Echelon, and I needed to develop something with equal force for EMPYRE. While I love James Bond, I didn’t want to have a character who never changes – who just goes from one mission to the next. So I started from scratch, rebuilding my idea of Ryan. I needed to find what made him tick at the outset of EMPYRE and go from there. When I found his arc, his evolution through the story, the writing really started to flow.

With all my struggles on Ryan, Sarah’s arc through EMPYRE came quickly. In Echelon, she is the keel holding Ryan on course. In EMPYRE, I flipped that, and in doing so, was able to get into some interesting psychological aspects of our interaction with technology.

6. In addition to writing novels, you’ve also worked in Hollywood, most notably on the HBO series Rome. Compare and contrast the solitary nature of novel writing with the collaborative nature of a television production.

I started in Hollywood and, over time, have worked in physical production, been a producer myself and then written for both film and television. That collaborative aspect of film and TV is addictive. There’s an energy to making a film or series that I love – when it works. When it doesn’t, collaboration becomes confrontation, creativity and the quality of the final product take a backseat to ego, greed and the general Hollywood craziness.

After Rome, I realized that, for my own sanity, I needed to sit down and create something that was all mine. I needed to know if I had the creative chops to fashion something on my own, without that collaborative energy. I’ve been a voracious reader all my life, so the idea of writing a book wasn’t totally out of left field.

And I do love the solitude of novel writing. I control every aspect of a book and can delve into exactly what interests me. I also really appreciate that, with a novel, I’m working on what will be a final product. What I get down on the page is what you pick up at the store. That’s a very empowering feeling.

But as I think about it, collaboration is also fundamental to literature – just on a different plane than film and TV. There’s an implicit cooperation between the reader and writer in the transformation of words on a page into a story. Novelists create triggers that, hopefully, evoke a world within the reader’s imagination. No book is “seen” in the same way by two readers. As a writer, that ability to develop a story in cooperation with a reader is magical. There’s an intimacy to that connection which film can’t offer.

At this point, I’m really into mixing both worlds. There’s a writers’ strike going on in Hollywood right now – but, once that winds down, I’ve got a bunch of projects for film and television that I’ll be working on.

I also think that we as writers will become more comfortable working in multiple mediums as we move into the future. I’ve started thinking more in terms of creating stories that can play across multiple platforms. Books, film, TV, comics and video games each have their drawbacks and advantages. Each hits the reader, audience or player in a different way. As someone obsessed with telling stories, I want to try them all!

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Visit Josh Conviser’s Web site. And read an excerpt from EMPYRE here.