Interview with sf author Karl Schroeder

John Scalzi has a fascinating interview with sf author Karl Schroeder up on his blog.

Today’s interview is a special treat: Canadian writer Karl Schroeder, who has won some of his country’s highest awards in science fiction, and whose most recent book, Sun of Suns, is a real mind-blower, an adventure story that is both high-tech (massive space-faring balloons thousands of miles in diameter) and low-tech (pirates! Swordfights!) and a whole lot of fun. Kirkus Reviews has labelled it “Outrageously brilliant and absolutely not to be missed,” which, well, seems fairly positive, doesn’t it? And now, without further ado: Here’s Karl Schroeder.

3. When creating a world that is physically manifestly so different than our own, what, if anything, do you have to do to make sure readers can connect to characters and their situations? Are people the same anywhere? Or this is there a sort of translation you as an author have to make to get us into the heads of Virgans?

The principle is simple: constants and variables. If you vary one aspect of your story so it’s wildly out of the norm (say, taking away gravity) you have to ensure that other aspects of the story are constant to our experience (human behaviour, passions etc., like Hayden Griffin’s thirst for revenge in Sun of Suns). I don’t actually know if people who lived in a gravity-free world would be anything like us, but it was necessary to have them be so for this story to work. If you have too many variables in science fiction (sentient gas-blobs and uploaded personalities and nonlinear narrative time etc.) then you’ll lose the reader. So when I write a consciously balance the wildly esoteric with the ordinary. The ordinary is a life preserver you throw the reader so they can ride the white water you’ve thrown them into.

Link (via BoingBoing)