Interview w/ Paul Melko
Here you go! An interview with the author of Ten Sigmas, which I reviewed here. After an hour of formatting the text, since it was a little wonky for some unknown reason, it is ready for your viewing pleasure! Thanks again to Mr. Melko for his time and the great answers he gave to my questions! Thanks for doing this interview with me. First, could you tell us a little about yourself (your history as writer, etc.)? My fiction has been appearing in print since 1996. I’ve published dozens of stories and they’ve been translated into Spanish, Russian, Czech, Hungarian, and Romanian. My fiction has appeared in Asimov’s SF, Strange Horizons, Talebones, Realms of Fantasy, and other places. My novella “The Walls of the Universe” was nominated for Nebula, Hugo, and Sturgeon Awards — all in one year! — and it won the Asimov’s Readers Award for Best Novella. My first novel, Singularity’s Ring, appeared in February of this year from Tor Books. My second novel, The Walls of the Universe, will come out next winter.I’m trained as an engineer, with a masters in Nuclear Engineering, and this affects all my work. My characters are logical, thoughtful, and practical (I hope). They’re problem solvers. Recently, I started studying for my MBA. This education has colored my writing as well, and I find myself adding economic details that might otherwise have been ignored in my previous futures.I am an active member of SFWA, sitting on the board as the South-Central Regional Director. I also am chairman of the Grievance Committee.I live in Ohio with my wonderful wife and four fairly wonderful children. The older kids and I are studying Taekwondo. What is it about science fiction that appeals to you? What are some of your favorite authors of today and the past? My biggest influences were Heinlein, Farmer, and Harrison. I never read Clarke, and I never read Asimov except for some classics. My first books were the Heinlein juveniles, specifically Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and The Rolling Stones. Farmer is the most influential on me.Right, now I’m reading quite a bit of YA. My eldest daughter has started reading and I try to keep up with her books. It’s hopeless, as she reads a book a day. I am the proud papa. What are you currently reading, what have you just read, and what do you hope to read? I’ve been reading Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of Sidon, as well as various MBA texts and business cases. Of the recent business texts, the most interesting has been The Mystery of Capitalism by Hernando De Soto. It posulates why capitalism works so well in certain countries but fails miserably in others. His thesis is that the evolved rules of capital in some countries — land ownership and use of collateral to gain loans — allow easy creation of more capital with the capital on hand. Whereas inother countries, there is too much dead capital — land and material with no clear ownership –, and so there is no way to leverage that capital to make more. “Ten Sigmas”, being a book of short stories, explores a variety of different technological avenues (including one about superheroes) from the dangers of fiddling with the past to the dangers of traversing between universes/dimensions. What would you say is a strength of the short form and do you prefer the short form to the novel? How would you describe the works presented in “Ten Sigmas” (the pitch, basically)? “Ten Sigmas” is my collection of science fiction stories, and all of them are tainted by my training and history. I don’t write down endings, and there’s not a story in the collection in which the world is worse off at the end, except for perhaps one. I am an optimist, I am a problem solver, and most of my characters are too.I love the short story. I learned to write with the short story. The short story is the test vehicle for ideas in literature. You can get away with so much in 3000 words that a novel just can’t sustain. You can try new devices. You can take on an affectation and see where it goes. You can play games with the reader. The novel is larger, but not as free. The novel reader isn’t as forgiving of experimentation. On the subject of short stories, do you see the short form disappearing in the near future or do you feel that it will prevail and grow? (This is mostly addressing the concerns over the magazine market that seems to be losing ground, though perhaps it really isn’t in some ways) It is sad that most writers end up moving to novels for monetary reasons. Alas, the number of markets out there is small for short fiction, and declining. I hope the short story doesn’t go the way of the dinosaur; I doubt if it will. There will always be a place for a tightly constructed tale. Most likely e-zines and anthologies will take the place of the magazines as their subscription bases dwindle. The story notes say you wrote “Singletons In Love” for a Lou Anders anthology. What was the inspiration for creating these ‘pods’? What made you think of that as a future possibility where the Internet might not exist? If the human race were to give up computers and hardwired networking, there would still be a need for dense computation. In the world I posit, I assume that computation is taken over by human computers — plurals of humans that use the complexity of their networks to form higher thoughts. I love the idea of the pod: a pod is powerful yet fragile. Pods are hard to form and call fall apart if traumatized. Yet they can make intuitive leaps that normal humans can’t. Many of your stories deal with characters making either bad decisions or ill-informed decisions (“The Teosinthe War” and “Walls of the Universe” for example, one which results in people
Google Fool’s Day and Some Other Funnies
Google does it every year, and every year I’m amazing. This year they’ve propose a 100 year mission to establish a colony on mars called Virgle. How do they come up with these ideas? They’re geniuses, that’s how. It’s Google. You can’t go wrong with Google. The other funny is that apparently George W. Bush, our retarded President, and Tony Blair, who is at least only partially retarded, but clearly a genius in comparison to Bush, have been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, at least according to the BBC. Now, either this is the most brilliant April Fool’s joke EVER, or someone is really so stupid to think they deserve such a prestigious award. I’m hoping for the former, ’cause it’s funny as all hell. Regularly blogging, writing, reading, etc. will resume by tomorrow and an interview should go up later tonight. Just so you all know. Thanks! (Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)