So I always like to ask other professional authors: how do you write? Do you have a pattern, a system, every day, or you just catch-as-catch-can, or what's your mode?
I get up, I do my first thing in the morning stuff, I do my Wordle, you know, a couple other rituals, and then I sit down. I try to, when I'm in production mode, I try to avoid what I call flying monkeys, which are things that come out of nowhere and stress me out and distract me, you know, like, oh my God, I have to pay my taxes, or you know, what have you. So if I can successfully avoid those, I sit down and I try to pick up where I left off the day before.
I write with a fountain pen on paper. I have a bunch of fountain pens, so I change each day from one pen to the next so I can see where the breaks are. I try to stop kind of in mid-paragraph or mid-sentence even, because it's easier then to get going the next day when I'm kind of right in the middle of something. And usually I'll go for an hour and a half, two hours, write a few pages.
And then when I stop, I typically will have some thoughts that'll continue kind of coming into my head for a few minutes afterwards. So I carry my phone around and I make little voice memos, you know, oh, here's an idea for a good line of dialogue or whatever. And then I try to do something completely unrelated for the remainder of the day.
Oh, interesting. So paper, pen, that is old school. Jared Diamond still writes like that, which I find interesting. He has a secretary at UCLA that transcribes it into typewritten pages for his publisher, because I don't think he even types. But why do you do it? Just to slow yourself down a little bit?
Oh, that's definitely part of it. I'm a very fast typist, so you know, it's easy to just bash things out on a keyboard before you've really thought them through, and it doesn't really gain you anything meaningful because, in general, just producing tons of material isn't really the hard part. So for me, it's better to go a little slower on each sentence so it sits up here in the buffer for a little bit longer, so I can kind of... it's easier to improve things up here than it is down there, you know, once it's been actually written out.
And then it's actually faster to edit with pen and paper. It's faster to just, you know, draw out, cross out a line than it is to, you know, get the mouse and double-click or whatever, drag and all that. So editing is fast. And then when I type the material in into a computer, which I do do myself, that's an opportunity to make another editing pass as I go. So by the time it gets typed into the machine, it's fairly close to the final published form.
Oh, nice, that's cool. All right, so I've never tried writing science fiction or any kind of fiction, well, at least that I know of. Maybe some of my non-fiction, some fiction creeps in there, who knows. So, you know, when I want to master a topic, like in The Moral Arc, I had a chapter on nuclear weapons and mutual assured destruction and all that. So I read a dozen or so books to kind of wrap my head around the whole thing, and then when ideas started repeating themselves, or the same references over and over, I thought, okay, I pretty much have the big picture here. Do you do something like that when you take on, I don't know, like climate change or cryptocurrency or something? Do you first sit down and read a dozen books or so?
Yeah, typically. I mean, it depends on the nature of the project. So some of the books I've written are just more pure speculative fiction that aren't really grounded in any researchable topic as such. Others are very research-intensive. So if it's a historical book, for example, that demands a lot of research, yeah, I'll kind of taper... I'll start, at the beginning of the project, I'm spending 90% of my time reading and 10% writing, and then that changes. And as you say, you do get to a point where you kind of get the sense of, okay, I've seen this mentioned a few times, I already know this. So it gives you kind of a warm feeling that you've covered the bases reasonably well, you're not missing anything huge. And so that's the point where I tend to taper off a little bit on research.
Because there is a little bit of a hazard of over-researching sometimes. And when you've done that, when you've put the effort in to visit a location or to read a bunch of books about something, you sort of feel this sunk cost fallacy, you know, like, well, I really need to find a way to work that material in because, you know, that plane ticket cost a lot of money, or, you know, I spent a whole week reading that book. And that may not actually be to the benefit of the finished work. It may be better to just leave that stuff out. But I've had to develop a little bit of self-awareness around, you know, when I'm kind of geeking out too much.
Yeah, and when you do speculative fiction or even non-science fiction going forward in the future, there's something of a counterfactual reasoning there, a what-if, and change the conditionals to see what might happen, almost like Einstein's thought experiments, Gedanken experiments, you know, riding on a beam of light, falling in an elevator shaft. I mean, these are never going to happen in real life. So much of science is doing kind of like what you're doing. So how do you go about doing that?
The answer changes a little bit depending on whether we're talking about a historical book like Polan or The Baroque Cycle versus science fiction per se. So in science fiction per se, the important thing is to have it be internally consistent and believable. So there's a certain set of rules that you need to follow, and those rules can be very non-scientifically based. So, you know, Star Trek, people are traveling faster than the speed of light all the time. Well, you can't actually do that. So on that level, it's totally non-scientific.
However, you know, once they've established certain rules of the game, you know, you use the warp drive instead of the impulse drive when you want to go fast, within the speed of light, and it uses dilithium, you know, whatever, then you have to follow those rules, or your readers sense that you're just being undisciplined and not being serious about it. But my science fiction tends to be more in the kind of hard science fiction realm, where, you know, as much as possible, I'm trying to observe... I'm trying to have some knowledge of the actual physics entailed and to kind of follow the constraints of that, which I did a lot of in Seveneves.
And then for historical fiction, my usual approach is to try to learn what really did happen as best I can from reading historical sources, and then create fictitious characters that interact with real historical figures. So that gives me the leeway to tell the story I wanted to tell and to develop these fictional characters at some level of detail without feeling like I'm kind of tampering with the historical truth as we know it.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And then how do you develop or how do you think about plot development and character development? You know, how many people are you going to give us to learn about, and how much information do we need to know about each one to care about them? Do you like outline it ahead of time, these are my main characters and this is the arc of the narrative and that sort of thing?
I tend not to. It's good to have some sense of where it's going, but you know, an outline seems like something that you write on day one of a two-year project, you know, and over the two years you're probably going to come up with better ideas than you had on day one. And if you've created this outline in advance, it takes on a kind of undeserved permanence that might cause you to reject better ideas that come along as you go.
And a lot of those ideas are the ones that really stick. The ones that sort of come to you are the ones that really stick and end up being the ones that you're proud of. So, you know, the classic example is that, you know, some secondary character will enter the story to play some role, and they end up being more interesting than the main character. And when that kind of thing happens, you have to go with it. You have to just accept that this has happened and start following that character or make them a more important character, even if that's not how you outlined it, you know, a year ago.
Yeah, yeah. So there's a kind of an organic development to the process itself. Maybe you don't even know where you're going to go with this plot or this character until you actually start putting pen onto paper, literally here, and then all of a sudden something happens in your brain, you go, oh, well, okay, let's see where this goes.
It's a little of both, you know. You do have to have some discipline to follow a path to the end, and at the same time, like I said, you have to recognize when the Muse has downloaded something into your brain and respect that.
The Muse coming into your brain from on high. Yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah, I mean, all right, I don't actually believe in Muses, but I think that when the ancient Greeks wrote about Muses, they were describing a thing that happens, you know, that was their interpretation of brain processes that happen when creative people are creating. So it's a great shorthand.
Well, it does appear to be. I mean, the research on this, the neuroscience is interesting, where a lot of these creative ideas pop into your brain, like when you're out on a hike or in the shower, when you're not thinking about the problem, but the process is going on subliminally, it's underneath, or, you know, subconsciously. I mean, it's being processed, you're just not aware of it.
And that's exactly why I make a practice of spending the rest of the day doing completely unrelated things.
Yeah. Okay, last question on kind of the meta part of all this is your propeller-head family, and what led to your development to get into the sciences and then history and then science fiction and historical fiction and so on.
Yeah, well, one of my grandfathers was a physicist, the other was a biochemist. They were both on faculty at universities. My dad was an electrical engineering professor for 35 years at Iowa State. My mom was a chemist who worked in labs. And I grew up in Ames, Iowa, which is home of, you know, Iowa State University, which is a university that is literally called the Iowa State University of Science and Technology. And, you know, it was a minor outpost of the Manhattan Project.
And it's somewhat isolated, like a lot of these Midwest college towns. You know, it's not glommed onto a big city, it's just sitting there. And so, you know, it's this little island where the proportion of people with PhDs or who are working on PhDs is just absurdly high, higher than anything around it. And so that was, you know, when I was growing up, my friends, the people in my Boy Scout troop and so on, you know, tended to be kids of hard science PhDs. And wherever you grow up in the world, you sort of think that's normal until you move away, right? And so I wasn't aware, you know, of what an unusual milieu that was until I went to other places.
So that's just kind of the air that I breathed when I was growing up. We did model rockets, and my dad assembled all of our household appliances from Heathkit. And we had all these... I mean, we had a... this is a slightly digressive story, but to give you an idea, we had a thing in our Boy Scout troop where one of the dads was a plant sciences professor and another of the dads was an ex-Manhattan Project guy.
So the first dad took some corn seeds that were basically all the same genetically and handed them off to the second dad, who took them down into the hot room several stories beneath the ground, you know, with the big leaded glass wall and the manipulators where they would work with incredibly radioactive things. And these seeds were exposed to radioactive sources at different dosages, and then lifted back out and then handed out to us at the next Boy Scout meeting. And so our job, you know, was to plant these seeds, and then, you know, there was a prize that was going to be handed out for the tallest, healthiest corn plant, and another prize for the most exotic mutation.
That's crazy, right? And so you're doing that when you're, you know, a nine-year-old kid, you know, watering your mutant corn plant, you just think that's kind of a normal thing that, you know, Boy Scouts do. But then, you know, a few years later, you look back on it and like, okay, you know, I came out of a really odd background in some ways.
Yeah, I'll say. Imagine that, conversations around the campfire. So what's your dad's PhD?
Yeah, that's really funny. So were there expectations that you'd go into one of the sciences, and were they supportive when you became a successful science fiction writer?
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to make it sound like there was pressure. Expectations is probably a fair word. I mean, you know, the academic world, the academic lifestyle was kind of the default thing that people had been doing in my family for a few generations. And, you know, back then it seemed like a pretty good gig. You know, you have to put in your time, get your PhD, and then it was fairly normal from there to move on to a, you know, a tenure-track job. And once you get tenure, you know, that's, you know, you move to some university town and you live out your life. And it doesn't pay a lot of money, but in terms of benefits and, you know, quality of life, it's a good gig.
So of course, during my lifetime, that has changed a lot. So it's no longer as attractive a career path as it was, you know, for my parents' generation, let's say. But I sort of looked at that after college. I took some time off. I did some writing. I'd written a novel during college. I wrote another one after I graduated, and I was kind of banging around, a little directionless. And I moved from Ames to Iowa City, the other big college town in Iowa, and worked a day job there and wrote a third book.
But at the same time as I was doing that, I was taking the... I can't remember the tests that are like, just like the SAT except for grad school.
So I was kind of prepping for that to be my next, you know, path. But as it happened, I was able to sell that third book. And so at that point, the decision was kind of made that I would pursue that for a while. And, you know, I think it was unexpected, but there was never any sense from my family that I heard of disappointment or, you know, 'what are you doing' kind of thing. So, you know, there wasn't like pressure or weird family dynamics around it.
Yeah, but at some point you could at least hold up your contract to your dad and go, 'Look at this advance I got on my third book.'
Well, that's the thing. I mean, to have gotten one contract under one's belt, you know, even if it was a small amount of money and not a hugely successful book, is sort of evidence that this isn't a complete pipe dream.
Yeah, yeah. How lives turn out: genes, environment, and luck is how I think about it. So obviously your parents are smart, and you can recall all the things they did environmentally, books in the home and this kind of stuff, your Boy Scout story. But of course you're also inheriting from them their genetics for intelligence and creativity and whatever else, that's harder to see. But then there's contingency, as I prefer to call it, than luck. But just, you did this instead of that, you went left instead of right, you wrote this instead of writing that.
And then I got enormously lucky in selling the book. So there was an enormous element of luck there for sure. But I think much of life turns like that, particularly at points where you could go left or right. You know, things could... the Garden of Forking Branches, as it's called. And, you know, once you go down one path, then you've cut off the other pathway, and you end up in a new kind of future that you've carved out for yourself.
Yeah, I still think it's a great gig. I mean, academia, they, you know, I mean, they complain a lot, but, you know, I remember when being in college thinking, wow, these professors, they get summers off, they have all this autonomy, two weeks for Christmas, semester break, Easter break. It's like, what a great job.
Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't know. I just, I hear people now talking about the adjunct faculty life and, you know, going from one gig to another and never getting tenure.
Well, that's what the universities have discovered. They could save a lot of money that way. So you could hire, instead of paying a fifty-year-old, you know, two hundred thousand dollars a year, you could hire three twenty-five-year-old new PhDs at, you know, six thousand dollars a course, I think it is now, which is just nothing, no health care and so on. And they've been able to get away with that. There's no unionization of adjunct professors.
Right. But yeah, that's... well, that kind of happened with me. You know, I was just on a typical track to be a professor, but I wasn't on a tenure track. This was at Occidental College, and then they had like a financial crisis, and I could see this wasn't going to turn into a tenure track. And we had already started Skeptic magazine, and then my first book, 'Why People Believe Weird Things', did really well. So my agent got me an advance for the second book, and then Skeptic got a little bit bigger, and I was able to move it out of my garage into an actual office. I thought, you know what, I think I'll just make a go of it and just, you know, put academia on the back burner for a while and see how it goes. And I really never looked back.
I think it often turns out like that. Yeah, and you can still interact with academia. It's not like...
Yeah, of course I do. Yeah, yeah, I just don't like committee meetings.
Yeah, so us authors, you know, like you, I don't mind being alone and just in my head with my thoughts and just out, you know, just I think that's fine. All right, before we get there, there's so many big ideas you've covered that I want to cover, but let's make sure we cover for your publisher the new book, 'Polostan', and it's the first in your Bomb Light series. So already I'm getting the hint that there's two or three more to come. And how do you know? Did you already write them?
I don't exactly, but I have a... just like I was saying before, I have a general schema, you know, in my head that's been there for quite a while, because I started this project more than ten years ago.
But again, you know, you have to keep it fluid because you don't know what the Muse is going to supply along the way. So yeah, there's a general plan, but...
Okay, and what's the rough plot outline here, and where is it going? What's the subject?
Well, this actually started, I think, in 2013, when I got a text message from Seamus Blackley, who I think you know.
I do know Seamus, yes, yeah.
So I've known him for a while, and he had gotten interested... I'll keep things vague, but he had gotten interested in the topic of certain developments that happened during the 1930s that were lesser known, let's say, lesser written about, precursors to the development of the bomb. And so both he and I have been exchanging notes and kind of talking about that for a long time now.
And the general theme is that, strangely, the neutron wasn't discovered until 1932. So, you know, there are probably people alive today, like really old people, but nonetheless alive, who when they were in elementary school were taught that there's electrons and protons and that's it. So the neutron, they figure out the neutron, I think that's Chadwick, but a lot of people were on the scent of it, they just couldn't make sense of the data.
And when that gets figured out, it sets in motion a chain reaction, as it were, that leads eventually to nuclear physics and the bomb. And so there's this ferment that I'm trying to capture in the early thirties, let's say 1932 to 1935, where they know something big is up. They know that neutrons can cause transmutation of elements, that they can enter into the nucleus and change one nucleus into another, and that there are all these isotopes that can get generated that way and can be characterized.
And they don't have particle accelerators yet, really. But what they can do is send balloons up to the outer reaches of the stratosphere and do experiments using cosmic rays. And at first they don't even know that they're cosmic, but if you go up high, you do see more of them, and you see the same number of them even when the moon is in the way, like during a solar eclipse. So they must be coming from all over the universe, not from the sun.
So there's this sense that something really fundamental, really important is happening, that there's huge new frontiers of science that are being opened up, and no one, of course, knows that there's going to be a bomb, or that bombs and, you know, controlled or uncontrolled fission is going to be possible. But there's kind of this ferment, and only a few people in the world really understand it.
So there's kind of this small circle of people, you know, Fermi's group in Italy and the Curies in Paris, Chadwick and Rutherford, and so on, Millikan and Compton in the United States, and they're all kind of on the scent of this. And so I'm trying to capture some of that, but to have it integrated with everything else that's happening in the world historically and politically during that era, which, you know, is the height of the Great Depression.
It's the beginning of essentially the Cold War between these different systems of how the world should work. You've got communism, you've got American capitalism, and you've got fascism. They're all vying with each other to show which is the superior system, who's going to control the future. And of course, we know in retrospect that it leads eventually to the Second World War, which concludes with the atomic bomb.
So this is the first... 'Polostan' is the first volume in this series, and there'll be others to follow. But it takes place in 1932, 1933, early 1934, and it introduces one of the main characters of the series, who's a young woman who's both American and Russian. Her American name is Dawn and her Russian name is Aurora, and it kind of sets her up and tells her story.
Nice, yeah. I presume the other volumes will go into the late thirties and early forties.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they'll focus on other characters, but the previous characters, you know, will continue through into the subsequent books.
Yeah, nice touch, half, you know, part Russian, part American. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, just of the books I read on nuclear weapons, I think probably what you were just talking about, Richard Rhodes' 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' is probably the best I read on that. Yeah, really, really nicely develops all that.
Still probably the best history of that around. It's an amazing document.
Yeah, yeah, it's a great read. But, you know, I've been thinking about... so let's do one of your counterfactuals and talk about contingency. And I'll start with this, you know, line: no Hitler, no Holocaust. Why? Because the Germans, while they were anti-Semitic, they were not extermination anti-Semitic. That was really the doing of one man and then his underlings who carried it out, his willing executioners, as they're called.
But then you can go from there to say, you know, no Hitler, no World War II. Even his own generals didn't think as late as 1938 at Munich, you know, there was that assassination plot to kill Hitler. Had the Allies not conceded at Munich to let Hitler take more land peacefully, and so, you know, without that, there probably wouldn't have been any reason to invade Poland and trigger the French and the British to declare war on Germany, and off we go.
And then so if none of that happens, there's no reason to develop atomic weapons. I mean, you can have the science there, but the technology is so massively expensive, why would any government bother to do it, like the United States, if there was no reason to do it politically, militarily, existentially, and so on? And therefore, you know, we wouldn't have any nuclear weapons today. There'd be no reason for it. What do you think about that kind of line of reasoning?
At one level, this is an old kind of really interesting question about history, you know, so the great man theory versus is it all just inevitable, you know, social forces. I've been listening to 'The Rest Is History' podcast, which is a great series of podcasts by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. And last week I was listening to their series about Martin Luther, and a similar question comes up: was the Reformation inevitable, or did it take this one guy who was really weird and really literally nailed his thesis to the door to make it happen?
And so when you look at the expense of the Manhattan Project, it is very difficult to see that happening without, you know, unless the government in the United States, you know, had a metaphorical gun to its head. The sort of classic story, which I think is in the Rhodes book and you've probably heard, is that when they're building the separation plant at Oak Ridge, they need to make all these magnets, these electromagnets, which is going to require an absurd amount of copper to do the windings of all these magnets.
And then there's no way they can get it during the war. Someone comes up with the idea, well, silver is also a really good conductor of electricity, and there's tons of that just sitting in vaults, you know, it's not being used for anything. And so they actually got permission from the Treasury Department to just melt down tons of silver and make it into wire and use it as magnet windings. So kind of an illustration of just the degree of trouble and expense that the government was willing to go to. You never could have pushed that proposal through, you know, during peacetime.
So I do think that, you know, it probably doesn't happen absent some kind of hot war in which one side is convinced, rightly or wrongly, that the other side is actively developing this weapon. And we kind of have this today with countries like Iran, you know, are they doing it? You know, how close are they? We know they're working on it. How close are they to actually building, you know, a functional bomb?
So, you know, I think probably it would have happened at some point, maybe fifty years later, you know, if there was a North Korea-type rogue state and we started to develop the suspicion that they were building one of these, then that might trigger, that might trigger an effort for us to make one ourselves. But I definitely agree that World War II was a really exceptional circumstance that led not only to the development of atomic bombs, but to the development of rockets.
