I’m so excited I could do a Snoopy dance, and I haven’t even caffeinated myself this morning! Let’s all welcome Robert Buettner to the site, shall we? (Round of applause backed by squeals from some leftover New Year’s Eve blowouts. I knew you dudes hadn’t thrown yours away!)
Robert has written three books in the Jason Wander series, Orphanage and Orphan’s Destiny, which have been out for a while, and Orphan’s Journey, which was just released this month. I gotta tell you, I’ve read Orphanage and thoroughly enjoyed it. Yah, I go for SciFi in a big way, though I’ve never written a word in that vein. If you’re anything like me, it doesn’t matter what world you take me to as a reader, as long as it’s not this one. And, my friends, Robert’s built one you just gotta see!
Lucky for us he gave me some time recently to answer a few burning (pun intended) questions. The interview follows. He’s also generously offered to give away a copy of his first novel, Orphanage, to one lucky commenter. So I’ll give you until midnight PDT on Monday, April 21 to put your two cents in. Then I’ll draw the lucky winner’s name at random.
Now here’s Robert!
Tell us a little about your terrific character, Jason Wander, and his adventures so far.
The first thing to know about Jason is that he would roll his eyes at being described as “terrific.” Jason was orphaned as an underachieving eighteen-year-old when an Alien attack on Earth in 2036 killed his mother. He took his anger out on the world, and a juvenile judge offered him a choice between the infantry and jail.
Since then, Jason has been pushed up the military ladder reluctantly, by doing the right thing when all goes to hell - which it always does in war. He doesn’t suffer fools, bureaucracy, mud, or GI meals gladly, but he suffers them. He irritates the Pentagon, but he irritates mankind’s intergalactic nemesis, the Slugs, even worse.
You and I have a lot in common. Same publisher. Same editor. Our characters are even smartass heroes with tragic pasts. But what a difference a world makes! Talk about the differences (and similarities?) you see between Science Fiction and Urban Fantasy.
Tight designer leather or Plasteel armor, the characters readers care about put it on one leg at a time, just like the reader does. If you believe - and I do - that engaging fiction is what characters will do next and why, the rest is detail. True, detail is where the devil is, but we’ll get to that when we talk about world building.
The biggest difference I see between UF (tellingly, it is often called Dark Urban Fantasy, not just Urban Fantasy) and SF is protagonists.
In SF, it’s still possible to write protagonists as heroes. Heroes being ordinary people who do the right thing even though it hurts. I said “possible.” La mode even in SF is superpowered freaks, psychotic loners, clones, cybernetic hybrids. But the genre is broad enough to sneak in a Jason Wander, an Elizabeth Moon heroine, or David Weber’s Honor Harrington, even if it’s standing room only.
On the other hand, DUF’s marquee characters, by definition, are immortals who drink blood and rip throats out.
In other words, contrary to what I wrote above, the front-and-center characters that are the raison d-etre of DUF don’t put their pants on one legs at a time. We mundanes can’t identify with them, so fiction centered on them becomes a stand-off portrait. One way that gifted writers (present company case-in-point) work around that is by choosing a human viewpoint protagonist who is vulnerable, although expressing that vulnerability with kick-ass bravado.
In sum, DUF must climb extra hurdles to engage a traditional reader, while SF easily avoids them.
Okay, so what characters have you read, or maybe watched onscreen, that really grabbed you, and why?
You mean besides Jaz, I presume. I’m a sucker for a girl with attitude and knives.
Point of clarification: A good and appropriate character, who just happens to be part of a story that comes together at many levels doesn’t count, because then I’d be ranking the story and not the character. King Kong reveals himself to be quite a guy, but without the plucky blonde, the shyster producer, and the Empire State Building, he’s just a bewildered monkey.
That narrows it down among books to those few where the character is the story. Which leaves me with the title character in Heinlein’s 1961 classic, Stranger in a Strange Land. Valentine Michael Smith, an orphan born to Earth astronauts, raised by Martians, comes home to an Earth he’s never seen, and suffers the fate of a prophet. Like all of those rare elements of fiction that stand the test of time, Mike transcended the mere book and became one with the zeitgeist, in ’sixties-speak.
Bear with me on the why Mike grabs me, because the reasons spill outside the book into obscure Heinleiniana. Heinlein’s skill with naive adolescent voice, honed in his “juveniles” that so many of today’s authors say inspired them, peaked in Mike’s observations about mankind’s lunacies. On Mike’s rather overtly Christlike shoulders, Cold Warrior Heinlein built an unintended bridge to the Peace-Thru-Dope Generation. Stranger is the only SF I know lionized in two pop songs - Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Triad, and Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire. Mike became as obsessed with sex as you would expect a theretofore-celibate twenty-something male to be. The remarkable thing about that was that Michael’s sudden sexual frankness paralleled that of his creator. Heinlein’s “juveniles” had to satisfy Boy’s Life Magazine censors. So Mike was the lovechild of Heinlein’s union with a new publisher, Putnam, after a messy divorce from prudish Scribners, over Heinlein’s tryst with testosterone in 1959’s Starship Troopers. Suddenly Heinlein could notice in print that men and women did it because it was fun, and from there on, did they ever. In fact, from there on, Heinlein’s characters spent most of their on-page time cracking wise while having sex with strangers, cousins, computers, with their mothers, and even with their older and younger selves. I think no other writer’s career has pinballed so completely off a single character into, uh, virgin territory.
On the film side, has there ever been a grabbier suite of charadters than the original Star Wars group? Sure, they are characters by committee, the sum of casting, costumes, dubbed voices and actor interpretation. But beat Sir Alec Guinness cast as a gray, dignified mentor. Hollywood royalty Carrie Fisher cast as a plucky Princess. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern recast as a whistling trash can and a tin butler. Can omnipotent evil ever have another face after Darth? Or a more ominous baritone than James Earl Jones? And dialogue so unspeakable that it could have come off flickering Rudolph Valentino quote panels before talkies. Yet who can imagine the characters speaking any other way? “Darth Vader! Only you could be so bold!”
You’ve had quite an interesting life up to this point. What led you to choose writing?
No, I’ve led a routine life, set in what the Chinese call “interesting times.” Specifically, I survived the demi-century from the Dawn of the Atomic Age through the discovery on 9/11 that “The End of History” may have been, ah, oversold. I’ve been soldier, Spook, paleontologist and lawyer just enough to fictionalize about it, but not enough to brag about it.
When I was young enough that the special effects in Attack of the Crab Monsters scared me, everybody’s dad and nobody’s mom had “been in The War.” When I was old enough to read Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but still young enough to swallow it whole, every American male (Hillary didn’t have to dodge the draft) expected that, eventually, he would serve (even Elvis did) and everybody knew that one day the nukes would fry us all. Then the Berlin Wall came down, and I was left a corporate natural resources lawyer, often stranded in airports and hotel rooms from Bogota to Cairo to Robinson, Illinois.
I couldn’t find enough satisfying commercial fiction to fill the downtime, so I decided to create my own. I sat down at Starbucks with my laptop, emerged thirty-six hours later with my debut novel, and sold it immediately for an advance bigger than Bulgaria’s GNP. Well, not exactly. In only twelve short years, after seven rejected or too-awful-to-submit manuscripts and a million unpublished words, Orphanage sold for an advance large enough to host lunch at McDonalds for twelve, if nobody supersized. But Orphanage made B&N’s paperback top 50 within two weeks.
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers, especially those who are trying to build fiction based in brand new worlds?
First, write well. That will jump your stuff ahead of eighty percent of contemporary commercial fiction, and a surprising percentage of contemporary “serious,” i.e., largely unread, fiction. How to write well? Learn and live by Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, and/or the more contemporary and conversational On Writing, by Stephen King.
Second, write lots. Margaret Mitchell spent ten years writing one book. Acknowledge that your first effort isn’t Gone With the Wind, then reinvent your writing over and over until it’s so good that they can’t ignore it. But be prepared to persevere, because they will ignore it anyway.
As for world building:
One reason readers read fiction is to escape the world they live in, because it sucks, or because it doesn’t suck enough. You can take that last as a vampire joke, or as my bewilderment that readers ache to bathe in post-apocalyptic misery like the world Cormac McCarthy built in The Road.
All fiction requires world building of some kind, whether the antebellum South of Gone With the Wind, or an alternate present where the CIA employs vampires, or a near future where Drill Sergeants are still Drill Sergeants, even beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
Fiction is lying with impunity, but it still has one rule, which is that the lie must persuade the reader. As they taught us in Spook school, persuasive lies are grounded in truth.
“Truth” in genre fiction takes form as “rules” within the genre.
In historicals, like Gone With the Wind, the rule is to hew to historical fact. A Civil War soldier’s rifle must emit an obscuring cloud of smoke, because smokeless powder came into use for rifles only after that war. Readers of historicals hunger for those details, which allow them to suspend their disbelief and escape into a world that has, uh, gone with the wind. They will put down a book that breaks the rules of historical fact in even the smallest way, because they then know the story is a lie.
In Urban Fantasy, the rules readers weigh are “established truths” of paranormal legend. Stuff like you can only kill a werewolf with a silver bullet. Of course, you can kill a werewolf with a bullet made of a new alloy that the CIA invents, as long as you explain that to the reader as you go, in apparently authentic detail.
In SF, the rules are physical laws, like no-exceeding-lightspeed. Again, it’s okay to change the rules, as long as you explain the Hyperdrive Button just enough that the reader buys it.
Does that mean that a world-building writer must learn all there is to know about smokeless powder, or Non-Newtonian physics? Or worse, dump all that learning onto the story like five pounds of sugar on a french fry? No.
Quoth the aforementioned Stephen King:
“What I’m looking for is a touch of verisimilitude, like the handful of spices you chuck into a good spaghetti sauce to really finish her off. That . . . is particularly important in a story dealing with the abnormal or paranormal. Also, enough details-if they are the correct ones-can stem the tide of letters from picky-ass readers who apparently live to tell writers that they messed up.”
Okay, how much is a “handful?” More than “Zorg pressed the Hyperdrive button/Buffy turned the McNuggium bullet in her hand.” But less than the amount that overwhelms the story. Good luck, chef.
Miscellaneous observations about world building:
One reason cited for the demise of “Hard Science Fiction” is that HSF so emphasizes extrapolated fact over character and story that projections and simulations of science fact have mooted it. NASA’s CGI cartoons have eliminated the SF-author middleman, as far as seeing accurately what it will look like when a spacesuited man walks on Mars. So if the man in the suit is cardboard with his story pasted-on, what’s left to care about?
One practical tip: never miss an opportunity to convert a mundane detail into a detail that emphasizes the different world through which your characters and your story move.
When the near-future Drill Sergeant has the Trainee scrub the latrines, the Trainee should be puzzled until he recognizes that tool he is given is an antique, manual toothbrush.
When the five-star restaurant waiter asks the suave CIA vampire how he wants his steak cooked, the vampire should shudder. “Cooked?”
Thanks, Robert! That was freaking fabulous! I’m so inspired I’m going to run to the office and click off a thousand words right now! But you guys go ahead and comment. I’ll be checking the PC from time to time to make sure your attempt to win Orphanage gets recorded. Good luck!
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