Eliot Peper's Blog

Imagine you’re holding a laser pointer.

You can point it at anything you want: a potted cactus, the Diophantine Equation scrawled across a whiteboard, the steaming cross section of a fresh baked croissant, a malfunctioning karaoke machine, a whorled knob of lichen encrusted bark, a lopsided smile, the green flash of a Pacific sunset, a signed first edition copy of Dune, a rusty scalpel.

But this is a special laser pointer. You can point it through time as well as space: your first kiss, the pre-fame Beatles playing covers in dingy Hamburg nightclubs, knives piercing Caesar’s body at the Curia of Pompey, the sky raining fire in the way of Chicxulub’s impact, the formation of the first black hole.

You needn’t stop at was has happened, you can point at what might or might never happen: human civilization spreading out across the galaxy, a lone figure leaping off the roof of a skyscraper, performing slam poetry at the DMV, a world that has conquered death, no more push notifications, slaughtering a unicorn for its precious horn, the Golden State Warriors winning ten consecutive NBA championships.

In addition to the external world, you can aim your laser pointer at the internal world: the emotional hangover of a half-remembered nightmare, the loss of a loved one, the blank ecstasy of orgasm, the comfortable kinship of old friends, dreams of who you might become, the smell of home, a newfound sense of freedom, your longtime crush on that cute coworker, shame at never having been able to shake your childhood fear of spiders, burgeoning hope, the fading memory of your grandmother’s face, the shock of a well-laid plan shattering on first contact with reality, an irrational but unshakeable faith in humanity.

This is what writers do: They point laser pointers.

This is what writing is: Calling attention to something at the expense of everything else. Then calling attention to the next thing, and the next, and the next, and the next—a bead of light zipping across space and time and thought and feeling to draw a line called story.

*

Complement with How I Write Books, Stories Are Trojan Horses for Ideas, and How to Kill a Dragon.
Subscribe to my newsletter for monthly book recommendations and writing updates:

   
Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He publishes a blog, sends a newsletter, and tweets more than he probably should.

I interviewed Monica Byrne about writing The Actual Star , an epic tale of self-discovery that spans millennia and questions the very meaning of civilization. Born of extensive research into Maya history and culture, this wildly ambitious speculative adventure will challenge you to reframe the past, present, and future.

Monica is also the author of The Girl in the Road, as well as a prolific playwright and screenwriter—an artistic career supported by her patrons on Patreon. In the following conversation, we discuss her creative process, what she learned writing The Actual Star, some of the big ideas the story explores, and the power of speculative fiction.

Photo credit: Tiffany Anderson.

What is The Actual Star’s origin story? How did it grow from the first glimmer of an idea into the book I’m holding in my hands right now?

I visited Belize in 2012 to see the places my mother had taught in 1963 as a Papal Volunteer. I signed up for a day trip to the sacred cave Actun Tunichil Muknal, which… changed everything.

If you've read the chapter of Leah's first excursion into the cave, that was pretty much my experience. I felt all that euphoria. I came out and my first thought was "I have to go back," and my second thought was "I have to write a play about this!" I was revising my play What Every Girl Should Know just then, so I had playwriting on the brain. I called the new play The Cake or the Onion. I wanted to write something happening on three different levels of a stage, in three different time periods, that intersected like a symphony. But the more I thought about it, the less a play seemed to "fit" the enormity of the ideas that were coming up, and so I switched to it being a novel instead.

What surprised you most in your research on Maya history and culture? What are the most important ways in which many of us misunderstand the Maya? How did Maya thought influence how you approached telling this story?

What surprised me most was appreciating the logic of human sacrifice. It's a universal technology, not all that different from what we do today; it's just that today, the altar is capitalism, and the human bodies are on the other side of the world. At least the ancient Maya were upfront about it.

The most common misconception in the U.S., at least, is that the ancient Maya "disappeared." They didn't disappear at all—only some elite state apparatuses of the Maya fell, because they no longer served Maya people. Maya communities re-formed and thrived, and continue to, to this day. But the persistence of the "disappearance" story serves a convenient, racist narrative, that the American continents were somehow empty when Spanish invaders arrived; or even if there were people here, they were ignorable. That narrative has daily, disastrous consequences for modern Maya communities all over Central America, as in the Guatemalan genocide of the early 80s.

How did depicting past, present, and future civilizations change your personal definitions of “civilization” and “progress”?

What most folks see as “civilization” in the archaeological sense is actually a very narrow definition of it: those which leave behind stone monuments and/or written records. If you define “civilization” as a group of people living together, which I do, the vast majority of civilizations didn't do this. Does that make them any less civilizations? No—but it does make them less knowable via the Western toolbox and Western criteria we prioritize, which is frustrating. But what if we put far more emphasis on, for example, tracing oral histories than digging up stone? There are so many ways to illuminate the past that don't necessarily get equal funding or attention.

And yeah, progress is a myth. The ancient Maya knew that! They saw time as cyclical, not linear. They built collapse into their understanding of the universe, whereas we still labor under the delusion that time is a straight march into laser guns and starships.

What creative challenges did you encounter weaving so many disparate threads into a single story? How did you overcome them?

I can just say that it was very, very difficult; and that I used many, many colored index cards.

Photo credit: Monica Byrne.

What did writing The Actual Star teach you about craft? What advice can you offer other writers looking to develop and grow?

I would say to pay attention to whatever gives you butterflies in your stomach. This book took eight years—not just the research journey, but the publishing journey. It was a nightmare. It still is, in some ways. But do I regret writing and publishing the book? Not for a second. Because that feeling I got in the cave, that gave me butterflies in my stomach, is real and pure and good, and I'm honored to be its vessel. So my advice to writers is: find whatever is trying to find its expression in you, and become its loving servant.

What did writing The Actual Star teach you about life? How are you different for having written it?

That it's okay if things fall apart. That that, in fact, is the nature of the universe.

What does speculative fiction mean to you? What role does imaginative literature play in the culture?

It's a prism. Imaginative fiction—mythic, speculative, genre, fantastical, or science fiction, whatever you want to call it—is the prism through which we aim the white light of our current "reality" and see the full array of colorful possibilities projected on the wall, that are all contained within the original light. For me, this is a far, far more exciting endeavor than just writing the white light itself.

How has your relationship with your readers shifted since starting your Patreon? How is the feedback loop between authors and audience evolving, and how does that impact book publishing?

My patrons and my readers are my rock. They really are. They support me both financially and emotionally, especially when the publishing industry does not. Like all relationships, it takes work, but I base mine on transparency, accountability, care, and joy; and it's worked out really well so far. I just wish all writers were able to be directly supported like this—because for the most part, the publishing industry sets up all but the most wildly privileged writers to fail.

In the acknowledgements, you mention that Kim Stanley Robinson is a foundational writer for you. What do you love about Stan’s work, what have you learned from it, and how did it influence The Actual Star?

Oh, where to begin! I read Red Mars when I was sixteen, and have been reading him ever since. The most important thing is: I felt he treated science fiction as being as real as everyday life. I was raised on Star Wars, so I needed to see that science fiction could also be this—that technology wasn't just shiny metal parts, it was also the intimate work of human bodies. There's a LOT of Stan's influence in The Actual Star. Some of it is explicit and borrowed (for which I asked permission)—like the naming convention for reincarnated characters, and the concept of documented anarchy. But then there's just the messiness of human self-governance. I thought of the Mars trilogy symposiums when writing the tzoyna scene in Teakettle—just, around and around and around, and feeling like you're getting nowhere. We think everything will be sterile and efficient in the future? That's a masculine fantasy. It won't be.

What books have changed your life? What should fans of The Actual Star read next?

Go read Pleasure Activism by adrienne marie brown. Her writing and organizing are acts of science fiction, because she's imagining new paths into the future—even if her books are not shelved as such. And she (along with Walidah Imarisha) are the ones who taught me that.

*

Complement with Kim Stanley Robinson's lunar revolution, Annalee Newitz on who owns the future, and the best books I read in 2021.
Get new posts via email: #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */


Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers.

 Over in Future, I wrote about unlocking expertise through storytelling:

People have wandered the intellectual garden of forking paths for thousands of generations, but the internet is a profound accelerant for such cultural exploration. It is a shadow city with billions of residents. Everyone has a voice, even if nobody listens. Yes, there are assholes and authoritarians. But there are also good samaritans, beautiful nerds, brilliant poets, and every other kind of human you could possibly imagine. The more long-tail blog posts, niche newsletters, and scientific papers I read, the more I realize how desperately we need more stories that bridge important ideas into the larger culture. Humanity has so much profound understanding locked inside expert silos, and narrative is a crowbar that can pry them open for the rest of us.

Read the full story.

*

Complement with Literary Leverage, What My Secret Agent Grandmother Taught Me, and Stories Are Trojan Horses for Ideas.

Get new posts via email: #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */


Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers.

Emails like this are why I love my editor:

The sunrise/moonset early scene near Santa Barbara. I checked and had actually noted it in my Spring comments; since it was not repaired, I assume that maybe I was ambiguous or at least not forceful enough. So let me be clear: you will lose the confidence of some readers if you leave this impossible situation in. Please fix it!

And in case it’s not clear what I mean: when the sun is rising in the East, if the moon is setting in the west, it will be fully illuminated by the sun. That is, if the moon is setting at sunrise, it’s a full moon. It can’t be a crescent. 

So you can make it a full moon. 

Or, if you want the crescent, since the scene starts before sunrise, you can have the sliver of the moon in the EAST. In that case, the “horns” will point up and to the right, the bow pointing at the sun, fading as the dawn progresses. (Then, since the moon travels eastward relative to the sun, we’re seeing a “waning crescent.” It will be thinner, and closer to the sun, the next day. Eventually, it will pass the sun (“new moon”), after which point it will be visible as a crescent just after sunset, and it becomes a “waxing crescent.”)

There was another one more thing, but I now forget what it was! Not as vital, at any rate.

*

Complement with Quantity Is a Route to Quality, Not Its Opposite, Cultivating a Sense of Presence, and How I Write Books.

Get new posts via email: #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */


Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers.

When writing, the narrower your focus, the farther you can venture in its pursuit.

In “Authority and American Usage,” David Foster Wallace’s book review of a dictionary deconstructs the complex feedback loop between language and culture. In “watermelons,” Andrea Castillo uses the eponymous fruit to cross disciplines and millennia exploring humanity’s relationship with water. In Levels of the Game, John McPhee describes a single tennis match that implies the entire American experiment.

Any individual feature of the world is an aperture to its entirety. Derive generalities from specifics. Use the particular to reveal the universal.

*

Complement with Stories Are Trojan Horses for Ideas, Reassurance, and Loosen the Straps.

Get new posts via email: #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */


Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers.

I want to read a book.That particular book doesn’t exist.I write it.

Thankfully, most of the time I want to read a book, it already exists, so I read it.

*

Complement with A Recipe for Adventure, the story behind Borderless, and Five Lessons I Learned Writing Veil.
Get new posts via email: #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */


Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers.

I interviewed Stewart Brand about writing The Maintenance Race.

The Maintenance Race tells the thrilling story of a 1968 solo sailing race around the world, a feat that had never before been attempted. It follows three competitors—the man who won, the man who chose not to win, and the man who cheated—illuminating what their respective journeys reveal about the art of maintenance.

Yes, that’s right, maintenance: the critical but rarely celebrated work of keeping systems running smoothly. We all know we should maintain what we care about: our possessions, our relationships, ourselves—but it’s always tempting to skip to the hot new thing that captures our attention, letting our lives fall into disrepair in the process. The Maintenance Race will show you why maintenance matters and how bringing the full scope of your care and attention to bear on it can be transformative—the story sucked me in from the first sentence and inspired me to apply its ideas to my own projects.

Stewart has led a long and fascinating life that I can’t even begin to summarize here, but that I highly recommend you investigate further—this film and this podcast interview are great places to start. He is the president of the Long Now Foundation (I’m a proud member), the founder of Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL, and the author of many books, including How Buildings Learn.

In the following conversation, we discuss why maintenance matters and the creative process behind The Maintenance Race, which is the standalone opening chapter of Stewart's forthcoming book.

*

What is the origin story of The Maintenance Race and the book it may ultimately grow to become? What made you realize this is a story you need to tell? How has the project evolved since you first conceived it?

A friend named Garrett Gruener said “Why don’t you do a book about maintenance?” I replied politely “Yeah, I wish someone would do that, but it’s not me.  I have a book I’m working on.” By next morning the book I wanted to write had a title, Maintenance. That was two and a half years ago. The research keeps surprising me. I have to continue it until it doesn’t—until it begins to close on itself, and I know what my news can be.

My discovery of the Golden Globe race came from briefly knowing one the legendary competitors, Bernard Moitessier. Years ago I read his book The Long Way, so I knew about his exemplary maintenance stye. Hugh Howey suggested I compare him to Donald Crowhurst. I had read the book about him too.  Rereading them I discovered Robin Knox-Johnston. I had characters. I had saga. The rest was just research and writing.

You released the first chapter, The Maintenance Race, as a standalone Audible Original and asked listeners to share feedback to help inform whether and how you write subsequent chapters. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned from listeners so far?

I used to buy Buckminster Fuller’s admonition, “NEVER show half-finished work.” For some writers that means: "Don’t even tell anyone what you’re working on.” I’m now persuaded that the opposite works best, at least for me.

I think it’s worth knowing as soon as possible if the thing you want to build is going to take on a life of its own—if it’s going to “make circuit” with the world (in Gregory Bateson’s terminology). Software developers hasten to build an MVP—Minimum Viable Product—to connect with early users and get a sense of how to shape the product around real use. (Amazon developers prefer test launching of a “Minimum Loveable Product”—a more demanding exercise.)

I saw that the first chapter for my barely-started book Maintenance: Of Everything was working out surprisingly well and looked like it could stand alone. So I polished it up enough to send to some magazines; they weren’t interested. For fact checking I had sent an early draft to a friend, writer Hugh Howey, who was long a professional sailboat skipper. He loved it, critiqued it (overnight!), and sent it to his friend Don Katz, founder and executive chairman of Audible Inc.

Don liked it and sent it to David Blum, editor-in-chief of Audible Originals, who liked it and assigned it to pruducer Rachel Hamburg, who deftly guided me through the process of improving the story’s listenability. When I asked my friend Peter Coyote if he would consider narrating the story, he recommended his beloved acting teacher Richard Seyd (who was born with a British accent appropriate to a mostly-British story).

I specify all this to honor the extensive handing-around by supportive people that is involved in getting any piece of writing into the world. 

The most surprising feedback? Many wondered how I could possibly make the rest of the book as gripping as the first chapter. Now I wonder too.

The Maintenance Race is a thriller: it makes you want to find out what happens next even as it makes you think. How do you think about the relationship between stories and ideas? How are you going about weaving them together to create this book?

The start is where you lose or win the reader. My title might as well have been Maintenance: The World’s Most Boring Subject. For most of us, maintenance is only interesting when it is life-critical, like with airplanes. Sailing alone for half a year in the murderous Southern Ocean qualifies. Add competition. Add true-life legends at their mythic best.  With luck you might boil the reader’s blood a bit.

My medium is journalistic essays—lots of news, with enough argument to hold it together and maybe give it direction.  I try to give the reader sufficient information—all of it hopefully “new, true, important, and well written”—for them to find their own argument in it and disagree with mine if they choose.

Narrative is what our mind craves, but there is a problem. David Krakauer voiced it this month in Parallax—the newsletter of Santa Fe Institute, which studies complexity. He wrote that narrative is "a sequence of limited and dominant cause/effect relations required to explain the present in terms of a contingent past."

To make a story work, the past is adjusted to explain the present in a satisfying way. The punchline shapes how the joke develops. The moral determines the fable. Narrative is always a simplistic lie, compared with the boundlessly multi-causal-at-multiple-scales real world.

My Chapter 1 is a morality tale where the several outcomes in the infamous 1968 Golden Globe Sailboat Race are explained in terms of differing modes of boat maintenance. Dramatic!  Persuasive!  True too!—to the facts that are reported. The moral determined the fable. I can’t do that with the rest of the book.

In his Parallax essay, Krakauer goes on to write, "One way to apprehend this complexity is through methods or frameworks that can deal with irreducible complexity, either with coarse-graining observations and understanding how much information is being lost, or by working within methods that eschew easy explanations in terms of patterns and schemes that provide a means of classifying varieties of historical sequence.”

But don't we ultimately need to derive explanations that are sufficiently straightforward to inform action, and wouldn't any such explanation fall right back into the clockwork trap (and make for a great story)? If complexity is indeed irreducible, then what we can we learn from it beyond humility?

It’s good to regard narratives with suspicion always. Each is just one path through reality, not reality itself. For those interested in becoming liberated from the narrow-mindedness of stories, explorers of non-narrative understanding include Krakauer's Santa Fe Institute (where I was a board member for 14 years), Philip Tetlock (trainer of “superforecasters”), and Judea Pearl (author of The Book of Why).

Maintainers are massive scholars of causation. They routinely have to figure out why something stopped working, and it can be maddening. Each success is a compelling detective story. Once they understand the problem (or have a guess they’re willing to work with), they have to figure out what to do about it.  Each of those successes is a caper story. In The Maintenance Race an example is Bernard Moitessier figuring out how to fix his disastrously bent bowsprit, at sea, by himself.

Why is it so easy to underinvest in maintenance, whether it’s of physical infrastructure, personal relationships, software, public institutions, or anything else? What can we learn about ourselves and our blindspots from observing maintenance failures?

The short answer is mismanaged priority lists.  We tend to let our lists be dominated by things that are urgent, that require immediate action.  Things that are profoundly important but don’t require immediate action—like maintenance—go so far down the list they seldom get dealt with, or they get only half-hearted, feeble attention.

What differentiates masters of maintenance?  How do maintenance and long-term thinking relate to each other? How is your work at the Long Now Foundation influencing the book, and vice versa?

Maintainers are habitual long-term thinkers. At The Long Now Foundation we’re treating my research on maintenance as an informal Long Now project. A related formal project, led by our executive director Alexander Rose, is the Organizational Continuity Project examining how really long-lived and long-valuable institutions manage to keep themselves useful for centuries. Institutional maintenance.

What’s the most unexpected thing you’ve discovered researching the book? What’s taken you by surprise, and how has it changed what maintenance means to you?

The most news for me keeps coming from software engineers. Yeah, software eats the world, and maintenance eats software developers. The fixing and adjusting never stops. It is so complex and tedious the developers are always trying out better designs to minimize it. When stuck with it they try to automate around it. And still it eats them. The clever results of their inventiveness can help any other maintenance domain that chooses to pay attention.

How are you planning to maintain a book about maintenance? What strategies are you employing in researching, writing, and publishing this book to help it survive and thrive for the long run?

The book will be similar to my How Buildings Learn in some ways. I expect it to be richly illustrated throughout. I was once a photojournalist and still prefer to communicate that way. But a major difference is that this book can’t attemp to be comprehensive the way my buildings book was. (A measure of success with that is that How Buildings Learn continues to sell well 18 years later without revisions, and no other book has tried to replace it. Of course that success may also be a measure of how static the building trades are. Nobody is growing bio-buildings yet.)

Like my buildings-in-time book, this one is introducing a broad topic—maintenance-in-general. But it can only be introductory. Each of its chapter (on vehicles, aerospace, cities, Japan, civilization, planet, etc.) could be, with vast research, an entire book. And to stay relevant each such “book” would have to live online and be updated continuously by a large team. So, forget that. All I can do is introduce. That will make it a short-lived book.

What might last, if I’m successful, is interest in the subject as a general one. I’ve scanned and read hundreds of books so far in my research. In very few of them is “maintenance” even an item in the index. An indication of success for my book would be if “maintenance” starts showing up as an index item in a wide variety of books, the way “infrastructure” now does, for example.

So. The range of my chapters is so wide, I need all the help I can find to fact-check, correct, improve, and comment on what I write. I plan to pre-publish chapter drafts online and sometimes elsewhere—as I did with The Maintenance Race—and invite assistance. Will that help or hurt eventual book sales?  Who cares? I just want text and imagery that has been de-bugged by a lot of eyeballs.

What should fans of The Maintenance Race read while they wait for the next chapter? What books have shaped your thinking on this subject in unexpected ways?

The four wonderful Golden Globe books are: 

A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier A World of My Own by Robin Knox-Johnston The Strange Last Voyage of Donal Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall

Some books that have surprised me and shaped where I might go with the book are: 

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 by David Edgerton The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop by Douglas Harper Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag KhannaCan you share anything about the next chapter?
My second chapter is titled “Vehicle,” starting of course with motorcycles. And of course I draw on Robert Persig’s celebrated Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . Since my book will be illustrated in color, I looked for imagery.
Most people know that Persig's brilliant philosophy book is based on a real motorcycle road trip that he and his son took, across the American west. What most don’t know is that their trip companions took a few photos. This is one:

In the summer of 1968 Robert Persig was photographed at a roadside stop (I think in South Dakota) by Sylvia Sutherland. His troubled 11-year-old son Chris is on the back with the camp gear and motorcycle tools. Maintenance of the motorcycle was described in detail throughout the book, but its make and model were never mentioned. It was a 1966 Honda CB77F “Super Hawk”—Honda’s first sport bike.  Persig kept it the rest of his life. It is now in the Smithsonian.
*

Complement with Kevin Kelly on the Technology Trends that Will Shape the Next 30 Years, How Richard Feynman Made Sense of Complex Ideas, and Kim Stanley Robinson on Inventing Plausible Utopias.
Get new posts via email: #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */


Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers.

Welcome to my life/world which is stable until……something disrupts it, launching me on……a journey into the unknown where I’m beset by……progressive complications that ultimately threaten what I care about most until……all is lost and I must……transform my life/world……welcome to my new life/world.*
Complement with A Brief Anatomy of Story, The Path, and Advice for Authors.
Get new posts via email: #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */


Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers.

I interviewed Andy Weir about writing Project Hail Mary.

Project Hail Mary follows an unlikely astronaut on a desperate mission to save the solar system from a spacefaring bacteria that eats sunlight. It’s an immensely entertaining adventure that will teach you more real science than you learned in high school. Never has a novel so deserved the moniker science fiction.

Andy is a software engineer turned novelist who's been obsessed with space since childhood. Ridley Scott adapted his bestselling novel The Martian into a blockbuster film starring Matt Damon. Andy is also the author of Artemis and Chesire Crossing, and is a John W. Campbell Award winner.

In the following conversation, we discuss Andy’s creative process and the story behind Project Hail Mary.

*

What is Project Hail Mary’s origin story? How did it grow from the first glimmer of an idea into the book I’m holding in my hands right now?

It was actually a collection of unrelated story ideas I had been brewing. I was working on an idea where a guy wakes up aboard a spaceship with amnesia, another idea about a maximum efficiency rocket fuel, an idea where a single person has more authority than any human being has ever had in history, and a few other concepts I don't want to say because it would spoil the book. But basically, I was working each one as a potential book and none of them were enough meat to be a story. But when I put them all together, it worked out great!

What does it mean to become a hero? What did you discover about living your own life by inventing the journey at the heart of this novel?

I think the best quote about heroism is, "Heroes are whoever's left when everyone else runs away." Sometimes it's just what you have to do because the alternative is unthinkable.

So much of Project Hail Mary is about solving problems, many of which appear intractable. How do you approach solving problems, and what did you learn from the protagonists about problem-solving?

I like to break them up into small, bite-sized pieces. Fix all these little problems and you'll be able to fix the big problem.

In researching Project Hail Mary, what surprised you most about advances in space technologies? What do the headlines miss? What key implications are under-appreciated?

There's been a lot of advances in zero-g 3D printing. They haven't been talked about much in the news, but it's an exciting field of study. Imagine putting all the mass for a space station up as a liquid slurry—taking the minimum possible volume, then having a 3D printer in space slowly make your station out of it. No more having to fit chunks into a rocket. Just send more 3D juice.

What are the most interesting aspects of the relationship between science and engineering? Why are they—and the feedback loop between them—so important?

Well, science is speculative and engineering is hands-on. You need both to accomplish anything.

What did choosing to make the protagonist a science teacher teach you about science education? How can science education and communication be improved?

Well I didn't go at it with the idea of focusing on teachers. I just wanted some explanation for his personality and that seemed to suit well.

What does science fiction mean to you? What role does it play in the culture?

To me, sci-fi is a setting, not a genre. It's more like saying "Chicago" than saying "Comedy.” Because you can have a sci-fi comedy. Or a sci-fi drama. Or sci-fi action. Romance. You name it. It's a background for your story.

As for culture—I don't think much along those lines. I just write to entertain. I don't delude myself into thinking I'm doing any great service for culture.

What did writing Project Hail Mary teach you about craft? What creative challenges did you grapple with that were different than your previous books?

My biggest challenge was figuring out how to exposition all the stuff that lead to the ship being built and launched. The flashback approach worked well.

How has your relationship with your readers evolved since The Martian?

I don't think it's changed much. I still answer all fan mail and reply to all Facebook DMs.

What books have changed your life? What should fans of Project Hail Mary read next?

I don't know if a book has ever changed my life. Though if you like hard science fiction, I recommend The Expanse series. Book one is Leviathan Wakes.

 *

Complement with Cory Doctorow on writing Attack Surface, Daniel Suarez on writing Change Agent, and five lessons I learned writing Veil.
Get new posts via email: #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */


Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers.

To whomever needs to hear this: I just took a big swing, gave it my all, and missed.

I'm not gonna lie, it sucks.

The details don’t matter, but this does: If I had known it would work at the outset, it wouldn't have been worth doing. Making art requires taking real risks. Courage isn’t the absence of fear, but its answer. You can’t get somewhere new without venturing into the unknown.

Now, please excuse me while I go eat a burrito... and get back to work.

*

Complement with Creativity is a Choice, Lasting Value, and Reassurance.
Get new posts via email: #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */


Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers.