David Louis Edelman, author of Geosynchron (March 8-21)

Please welcome David Louis Edelman, author of Geosynchron. David will be chatting on LibraryThing until March 21st.

Glad to be here! In case you haven't already figured this out, Geosynchron is the third book in the Jump 225 trilogy, of which the first two parts are Infoquake and MultiReal. People have called the trilogy "Dune meets the Wall Street Journal," "Boston Legal meets The Matrix," and "Neuromancer meets Wall Street."

As for Geosynchron itself, Locus magazine is calling it "a seminal work of 21st century SF," SFFWorld calls it "a must-read, an instant classic and a work of SF that will help define this first decade of the 21st century", and lots of other people seem to be saying embarrassingly nice things about it, which you can read if you go to my website.

So go ahead, question me. I can take it.

Good morning!

1) The final scene in Geosynchron is truly unforgettable. At what point in your writing process did you determine that would be the ending?

2) What is the number one thing you want your readers to "get" out of reading your trilogy?

- Sandy

David, your works have been on my wishlist (after seeing you & their titles here on LT!), but I've not yet read any. That said, I'm intrigued by how much your writing and your experiences in the business IT world intersect. Given the various descriptions quoted above, it would seem ... quite a bit! But I've noticed with interest that many authors will say, "Oh, my writing really has nothing to do with my other work", even though on the surface they seem to have a large overlap.

Sandy:

1. The entire last section of Geosynchron has mostly stayed the same since the very first draft of the trilogy, finished in late 2001. I did, however, change Natch's fate in the last draft. I don't want to give anything away for those who haven't finished the book, but originally the sections of the last chapter with Quell and Richard Taylor were not in the manuscript.

2. Hmm. Difficult question. "Eat more fruits and vegetables"...?

But seriously, I don't know if the trilogy has a message per se. As I say in the Afterword, these books really aren't polemics. I think of the trilogy sometimes as a naturalistic work, describing the state of a species in transition. Obviously you're supposed to cheer Natch's transformation through the series, but I think it's ultimately left open whether he made the right choice or not.

elenchus: Definitely the books were inspired by my experiences in the dot-com industry. In the Afterword for Geosynchron, I talk about some of the crazy things I saw that made me think of this world and the characters of Natch, Horvil and Jara in particular. But most authors will tell you that their characters take on a life of their own after you start putting them down on paper. Same with me. Any resemblance to actual people quickly faded as my characters reacted to their circumstances and grew and changed.

Thanks - Would you consider putting the FIRST draft of the LAST chapter on your website? That would be interesting to compare! - Sandy

My curiosity is piqued, time to bump up your trilogy in my queue.

Your reply to SandyMarshall about the books not being polemics isn't surprising, and for me at least, a point in your favour. I find novels most interesting from a political or social theory standpoint when they don't try to make a statement so much as reflect a situation. Though there are some notable exceptions: Frank Herbert, Ken McLeod, William Gibson, and Iain Banks come to mind in terms of SF.

Anyway! Now that your trilogy is come to a close -- next steps?

Also -- have you written any short fiction or essays? (Perhaps you've posted some excerpts on your blog, I'll check that out next.)

I'm in shock: just returned from your blog. You wrote an introduction to Titus Alone? Wow. Though I've read much praise of Peake and the Ghormenghast trilogy, I've never actually met anyone who's read it, let alone liked it.

(I s'pose in some sense, I still haven't.)

How did that come about? I assume you had some interest / connection to the work before the request came in!

Sandy: I'll certainly consider posting the first draft of the last chapter. I'm currently working on posting first drafts of the first chapter of Geosynchron.

elenchus: There are certainly great polemics around, but personally I get bored with works whose message can be summed up in a few sentences. The simplistic view of art is that it's either there solely to entertain, or it's supposed to have a "message." I don't mind being entertained or taking in messages from the literature I read, but it's going to be very two-dimensional if that's all the author has in mind.

As for next steps... I really don't know yet. I think I'm going to write a fantasy novel, but I definitely want to make sure that I'm committed to it before I jump in.

As for short fiction... two published short stories to my name in the past 20 years, one of them not science fiction at all. They're called "Mathralon" and "The Bus Ride." You can find them both on my website.

As for Titus Alone... I'd heard of the works, but I'd never really sought them out until recently. I read the trilogy for the first time in 2006, after stumbling on a gorgeous edition of the trilogy in Paris, and found them utterly fascinating. Completely not what I was expecting. I blogged extensively about the books, and those blogs caught the attention of Overlook Press. They wanted an up-and-coming SF author to write the intro for Titus Alone -- the intros for the first two were written by Anthony Burgess and Tad Williams -- and the rest is history. (You can read the intro on my website too.)

I was intrigued throughout the trilogy by the "Towards Perfection" concept. Do you think humans (or anything else) can/should be perfect and that is the only thing worth achieving, or is it the journey towards self-improvement that is important?

Perfection is always over the horizon, no matter how "perfect" we get. I don't think it's in human beings' nature to ever be satisfied with our circumstances for very long.

(You might want to read my Big Idea piece on John Scalzi's blog, where I talk a lot about how humanity is powered by dissatisfaction: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/24/the-big-idea-david-louis-edelman-2/)

David, thanks for the backstory on the Peake intro, I ended up reading both the published intro (as listed on your blog), as well as the Paris blog entries they stemmed from. Quite fun, I think you got down to the nub of what is fun and fascinating about Ghormenghast.

Interesting, too, that it's Overlook Press: I own the first 2 titles in hardbound editions, have never located Titus Alone. As much as I'd like the new editions with intro, I'm enough of a trainspotter that I don't think I can give up my search for the original edition.

And closer to your own writing: I've found it's the mutual interest in topics and trends outside "proper" SF that ultimately makes an author's SF really compelling. With someone intrigued by financial trends, Peake, Kafka ... how could I not like your work?! Guess I'll have to read a novel and prove it to myself.

The true test is if you read all three of my novels. ;-)

Do you think your writing style changed over the course of the three books? If so, how?

My writing style definitely did change a little bit -- it would be surprising if it didn't change over the 10 years it took me to write all three books. But I tried to keep the tone and prose style consistent over all three so it would be a seamless reading experience.

Probably the biggest differences were caused by the different circumstances the books were written in. With Infoquake, I was taking my time and finding my feet, given that I'd never finished anything longer than 20 or 30 pages before. With MultiReal, I was a bit more confident in my writing decisions, but since that one is a bridging novel, it was tremendously difficult to keep things moving. Geosynchron should have been the easiest to write, but it was by far the most rushed since I had twin babies at home and very little time to write.

And with the novel, that'd make it triplets. Yow.

Thanks for answering all my questions!!!!

Your work shows an imagination about what the future really could be, which is sorely lacking in today's sf. Do you set out to create a plausible future or take a shotgun approach? Thanks for your efforts.

I actually think that creating a "plausible future" isn't something that science fiction needs to, or does, aspire to. SF is about the present, not the future, and given that so much of the course of history involves luck or elements that are completely unpredictable, accurate futurism is really more of a fetish than anything else.

That said, definitely having a well-thought-out future helps with the appearance of plausibility. And having the appearance of plausibility can certainly help readers identify with your work. It's really just a matter of trying to predict readers' objections ahead of time and coming up with consistent answers.

Thanks for your well thought out response. Your description of a novel's future as "plausible" is critical, as while I agree that accurate predictions are not necessary (who knows which of many possible paths the future will take), the lack of plausibility is a killer when asking for suspension of disbelief. While there is no need for strict definitions, a novel without a plausible future is fantasy (not that there's anything wrong with that!). Congratulations on your success, and I look forward to whatever you do next.