Interview with Kirkus Reviews
I Steered the Boat, But I Did Not Make the Ocean
1. What does SFF1 allow you to do that other genres don’t?
Science Fiction lets me and my characters move freely though time and space, into other dimensions, and anywhere else where we want to go.
The Way Beyond (originally called The Life and Times of Halycon Sage) was barely Sci-Fi at all. That element came in with slightly mad scientist Alexander Preisczech and his Nanobots, designed to save the world from nuclear destruction and other technological disasters.
Republishing allowed the brief introduction of two extraterrestrial characters, an alien Squid and the Adequately Magnificent Presence he reports to.
The second book is explicitly Sci-Fi. The Squidren are active, the Nanobots become conscious and self-determined with absurd consequences, and our time travel adventures begin.
2. How did you develop your cast and the tools or technology they use?
Once the door was opened, the characters came in and collaborated with me. Protagonist Halycon Sage has no interest in technology except to get rid of it, but his best friend Preisczech is all about tech, creating first the Nanobots and later the elegant formula SUX2BU and the world-changing innovation, SwitchingUptm.
The Squidren have their own technologies for time and space travel, also the shapeshifting SquidShip, the SquidPool where the gender-fluid Zi hang out, and a translation machine that supplements their own psychic powers but sometimes needs a swift kick with a tentacle to get it working. Author Rupert Griffin has replaced boring old time travel—"You can see there but never be there"— with "UnVirtual Time Travel: We take you there!"
3. Was your storyline something that you envisioned from the beginning, or did you build/change it as you wrote your SFF novel?
This character-based story evolved organically with myself as a fascinated watcher and collaborator. I steered the boat, but I did not make the ocean. After Sage became real, there followed the supercilious horse No-Name Stupid, the Dirty Dog Gang, the Apocalypse Zombie, and many others.
It all started when I woke one morning hearing the words, "One-hundred-and-one cows: a novel," which became a tiny mini-novel about preventing the discovery of America.
A Shakespeare professor in my family responded, "This may be a caprice, a whimsy, or possibly a lowland fling, but it is definitely not a novel." His comment was duly incorporated into the novel, which grew into The Way Beyond.
4. What are you working on now?
The Way Beyond begins with relatively ordinary events and opens out in many directions into multiple meanings, multiple possibilities, and multiple points of view. The Book of Squidly Light continues and accelerates this process.
Now, there's a thing in geometry called a tesseract, a hyper-dimensional super-cube which is to a cube as a cube is to a square and which can't be pictured in three-dimensional reality. And I've always felt that, if The Way Beyond is a square and The Book of Squidly Light is a cube, then Book Three, if there ever were one, would have to be a tesseract.
Frankly, I didn't know if I could pull this off, but to my eternal wonder and gratitude, it has happened. So Book Three is entitled The Tesseract2, and is due out on June 18th3. Booyah!
Science Fiction & Fantasy
This title hasn’t been officially revealed yet, so please just keep it between us. Shhhhh . . .
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Absolutely love the title "I steered the Boat, But I Did Not Make the Ocean"