Latest / Mythmakers / David D. Levine: The Kuiper Belt Job – Part 1

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David D. Levine: The Kuiper Belt Job – Part 1 · Mythmakers

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Hello and welcome to Mythbakers. Mythbakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
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creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for fantasy, my name is Julia Golding. I run
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the centre but I'm also a novelist and a writer in many different fields. And today is
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one of my very favourite kind of episodes because I am joined by a fellow writer but this
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particular writer is wandering in realms completely unknown to me which is space. So welcome very
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much to David Levine. Yeah David is the winner of the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and also
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of many novels but today we're particularly going to be thinking about his next book which is called
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The Kuiper Belt Job and we'll put the link to David's website in the show notes so you can go
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and look at everything David's been getting up to. So welcome David, first of all your route
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into writing science fiction. Are you a scientist yourself? Is that where it comes from or were
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there some writers that you read along the way that inspired you to go into this genre?
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Well my route into science fiction started when I was we. My father was a science fiction reader.
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He read the Paul magazines in the 40s and 50s and so they were all those those magazines and
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the novels were just around the house when I was growing up. So it's almost inevitable that I would
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have wound up as a science fiction reader. And so am I a scientist? I'm a technologist. I
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spent I'm retired now but I spent my career working for companies like Tectronics Intel and McAfee
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first as a technical writer then as a software engineer then as user interface designer and then
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finally before a retired is user user interface architect. So I've been working in the in in the
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space between humans and machines for my whole career and by the way I got that for my father as
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well he was a professor of computer science also specializing in what they used to call the man
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machine interface. Now we call the the human machine or user interface. Yeah use it interface that
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just goes to show how the humans are getting a raise from the whole idea to be robotic uses in the
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future. Yeah really eventually we'll just have we'll just have AI AI software talking to AI
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customers and there'll be no humans in the loop whatsoever. Yeah oh and by the way the term
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user interface has been replaced by UX user experience. Yeah that's it's a terminology change
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that's happened in the last 20-30 years and like all trends of labeling things differently it
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may not have a lot of actual impact on what people actually do but you know there there are there
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are feds and trends in in human interface as there aren't anything. Yeah and absolutely so
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the pulp fiction world I've heard about mainly through like second hand through reading things like
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the atwood. What is the book? The part one the blind assassin I think has a lot about pulp
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fiction in it the Margaret Atwood book. I haven't actually read any. Yeah I've read any pulp
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fiction myself. Are you aware of who the writers are when you read the pulp fiction? Are there big names
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or was it more like a comic where you'd have to sort of be in the know to know who the writers are?
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Well the big names in pulp unfortunately some of the biggest names of the early pulp era I'm
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talking about the 20s and 30s are people like HP Lovecraft and Elrond Herbert actually was a very
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in the in the early pulp era. Other other writers of pulp adventure fiction are not necessarily
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science fiction include Edgar Rice Burrows and what's his name? He did the Conan series Howard.
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No not Ron Howard. Anyway yeah so the the Conan the Conan books and also a lot of a lot of the
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pulps. There was a lot of just sort of generic adventure and mystery Leslie Charteris the
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Saint was a pulp mystery genre. So so the thing is is that the pulp magazines
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if you think about what the street was like you know go walking down the main street in 1929
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in 1930 and you would see magazines for sale all up and down the street that there would be like
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a new stand on the corner that would be just just florida ceiling of all of these magazine titles face
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out and these were this was the popular culture in the days before radio that before radio if you
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wanted cheap light entertainment you would buy a pulp magazine from from the magazine rack and
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these things were called pulps because they were made of incredibly cheap paper. We're talking about
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paper that literally had chunks of wood coming out of it. This was this was paper with so much
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undigested wood and so much acid that even you know even when it was just a couple of months old
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it would already be yellowing in decaying because it would be eating itself alive. There are a lot
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of people who collect these old pulp magazines and just preserving them from their own self-destructive
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tendencies is a big problem here. So I mean and the thing is is that these pulps this is not quality
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literature. I mean we use pulp as a synonym for bad because they were very bad. They were
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written extremely quickly and and and and turned out they were it was as I said you know this was
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popular entertainment in the days before radio before television. So the pulp writers were grinding
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out grinding out their their product. Don't call it literature as quickly as they could
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and getting paid pennies of word. Now admittedly you know five cents of word in 1920 was actually
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something that you could live on. Many magazines today are paying that same five ten cents.
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Oh yeah completely. It's not living but yeah. So you started with this sort of rich
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like an earth or a prepared bed of all these things around the house where you've got the
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pulp fiction with the many different story styles and a father's enthusiastic about it. What's
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there one particular story perhaps a novel or something which actually was like your gateway to
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thinking oh yeah I could do this that led you taking this path of actually writing your own
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stories. I can name a couple of novels that that that struck me significantly when I was a teenager.
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One is called hospital station by James White. This is what we used to call a fix up novel which
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is to say it's a bunch of short stories published in a single in a single novel with some connecting
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material to make it feel more novel like. And hospital station is the story of a of an interstellar
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multi species hospital. And the thing about hospital station that was kind of unique at the time
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and still makes it very memorable and significant to me is that it was all about people from different
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species coming together to solve problems. This was not you know I mean the the contemporary
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science fiction at the time that White invented hospital station was typically on the cover of
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these cheap magazines you'd have what they call the unholy trinity the boy the babe and the
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bam you know the the the the the the juke-jude space hero on the the the sexy the sexy space heroine
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with her with her you know brass brazier and and and and glow helmet on and the bug guide monster.
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Some court some kind of horrible science fiction monster. And so there'd be the three of them
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together on the cover and that's how you know it was a science fiction publication. So into this comes
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James White and he says I want to write stories about people working together to solve problems.
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So he he can sit he can sexualize as a hospital in space. And the stories of hospital station are
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problem stories. It's it's an awful lot like a house it's called house in the U.S. I believe it's
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Dr. House MD in no we call it house to the Hugh Laurie. So the thing is of course these are medical
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you know somebody comes in with a terrible medical problem and you have to try to fix it.
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So imagine then that it's a combination of a horrible medical problem and an alien first
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contact story because in many of the hospital station stories they're making first contact with
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an alien species and they have like a crashed spaceship or an extremely sick alien of a type that
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they have never encountered before. First you have to find out well how do we communicate with
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this being what kind of what kind of atmosphere and gravity doesn't need. And then there are of
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course always politics involved in these things. In the universe of hospital station there is a
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there's an entity called the monitor corps. They don't have armies but they do have monitors.
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And so this is kind of kind of the interstellar police force that comes in and and takes care of
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problems that can only be solved with guns. But this is a small subset of the problems in
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these stories. The stories are mostly medical. The problems are mostly medical and I love the
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characters. Some of the main characters are nonhuman. There are there is a an empathic bug called
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Pyllis Law which is which is kind of a human-sized damsel fly. Very very fragile being that can only
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exist in our gravity by using a gravity nullifier. And there's a there's a the trantor are a species
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of elephant team elephant team creatures that have a symbiot which has extremely fine manipulative
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tentacles. And so the together the trantorians and their symbiotes are the best surgeons in the
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universe. And I mean I mean you know all of these things are stuck in my head from 40 years ago.
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That's how significant that book was to me. And I distinctly remember that I had a cousin
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who came by and dropped off a box of science fiction books that he had that he was done with.
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And hospital station was the one that jumped out to me. And that another another book that was
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very significant to me at that time was Ring World. Larry Niven's classic science fiction
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travelogue really about a group of people exploring a a world a structure which is a ring that
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surrounds a star. So the inner surface of the this is a ring that is as big in diameter as the
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orbit of the earth so that it gets a it gets an earth-like level of solar radiation at the surface
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which means that the total surface area is enormous millions and millions of earths. And so you have
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many many cultures that exist on this ring world. But the problem is is that because a ring
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world is an artificial thing that when civilization falls it falls hard. And so civilization fell
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on the ring world tens of thousands of years ago. And so now the whole thing has has collapsed
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into barbarism. But there's no you know you can't come back from it. There's no there's no
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possibility of mining because you know once you if you dig down too far you hit back you.
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So it's an adventure story. It's an adventure story. It's a travelogue. There's there's politics.
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There's interspecies conflict. And Larry Niven's aliens are the best.
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The thing is is that I still think of Larry Niven as one of the young Turks because he was an
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up-and-coming new writer in the 70s when I first started reading this stuff. And he was in reaction
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to the previous generation that the Heinlein and Clark and Asable of Generation. These days of
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course Larry Niven is is one of the Old Guard. So I'm I'm a little bit younger than Larry Niven,
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but I'm older than a lot of my science fiction writing peers who first first broke out in the
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I mean I sold my first professional I made my first professional sale in 2000, but I was
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49 in 2000 and most of the other writers who broke out at that time were in their 30s. So I
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I crossed generations on who I'm thinking if I'm hanging out with my science fiction fan friends
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I'm often the youngest one in in the group because I'm a I'm generally I'm I'm right halfway
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between generation X and the baby boom. So when I hang out with science fiction fans most of whom
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are boomers I'm younger than the average when I hang out with my science fiction writing peers
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most of whom are generation X had to be the oldest. So it's an interesting place to be.
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So imagine from what you've been saying is that science fiction often takes the long view,
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the very long view in some cases like the Ring World book. But looking at your own career in
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the same way one thing that struck me you saying that you had your first deal in 2000 more or less
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and that chart's the period of the growth of the internet and probably at the end of the 2000
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social media and I have noticed obviously there's a very tight correlation between science
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fiction readers and being an early adopter of all these technologies just because that you know
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they're savvy and they know what they're doing. Have you found that that's changed
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how you write or
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so you've gone from a world of pulp fiction which is read in the family home and now you're living
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in a space which is always open to the rest of the world always online always being molded by
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the conversation of the day. Have you found it's affected you as a writer and how you imagine
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the future in your books and the world? Absolutely I mean yeah science fiction science fiction
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is never about the future it's always about the present science fiction is a way of projecting
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our hopes and fears about the future and making them concrete because the primary tool of science
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fiction is the literalized metaphor that if you want to if what you want to talk about is if you
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can if you're you know if you're personally concerned about for example an unwanted pregnancy
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then you might wind up with something like alien where you you literalize the metaphor of having
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this horrible thing growing inside yourself there are there are lots and lots of science fictional
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stories that I mean you look at you look at the trends you know in the 1950s there was a lot of
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alien invasion fiction that's because Americans were afraid of the Russians in the in the 1980s
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there was a lot of biological horror and then you have the cyberpunk movement which is a response
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to the corporatization of of the world in general and and really you know the cyberpunk movement
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was kind of prescient because cyberpunk's corporatized future has actually kind of come true which
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is not a good thing well yes I think there is an element of science fiction creating a way of
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thinking about something which allows technology to move into the space as well you have to
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imagine it before you can design something so yes there are a lot of people who have who have hung
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out hung out a shingle with their name on it in the word futurist most people who call themselves
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futurists well most of the people I know who call themselves futurists are science fiction writers
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either some of the time or most of the time choredoctoral for example whereas both the hats of
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science fiction writer and person who is actually thinking about and influencing the future of
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technology uh John Shirley describes himself as a futurist um there are um and i think David
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Brynn would probably identify himself as a futurist there are some people who call themselves futurists
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who are not science fiction writers but if you look at what they're writing they're writing
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basically science fiction with only setting and no characters um because of course they're
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trying to envision a future um and write about it in such a way that the reader can
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can put themselves into that future and think gosh this might be what's coming what can I do to
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either make that happen or change it yeah yeah so let's talk a little bit about your latest
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book uh the Kuiper Belt job which i sort of briefly described to myself as a a kind of prison
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break story with a heist element with a crew of uh desparado sounds like a western but it has
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that feeling of a a crew of misfits put together to do the do the job um is that a fair description
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was anything that you'd like i love that description that is that is very much the way i would have
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described it if if if somebody asked me to describe it i described it as a caper novel in space um
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it's like a it's like a mashup of uh firefly leverage the expanse oceans 11 um it's a combination of
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i mean i think of it i think of it as being like uh leverage which is a us tv show about a group
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of uh con artists uh who get together to help um help to pour down trotten um it's is leverage set
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in the universe of the expanse uh it's also intended to echo the found family aspects of leverage
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and especially firefly i think i think if you if you love firefly i believe you will like this book
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that that's the that's the vibe that it's intended to capture well that makes me think of robin hood
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as well because that i mean in the going back further in these idea of a band of
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people who don't naturally go together ganging up to uh you know beyond the side of the pour is
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is a very strong thing so before we talk about the actual sort of method that you've got in your book
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what's your writing process people are always interested in how somebody sits down and starts
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writing a book and quite a lot of our listeners are people who are aspiring to do that do you have a
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what are your top tips in my writing community we often use the term plotter or pancer
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yeah are you plot everything out or do you fly by the seat of your pants um i am i'm on the plotter
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side of that equation but the more the more experience i get the more uh the more i do fly by the
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seat of my pants um i i still outline but there are much bigger bigger jumps from one outline point
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to another so i'm i'm pancing my way through bigger chunks of the book um i i believe that as they
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get more experienced most writers uh i mean a writer might start out as being a pure plotter
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or pure pancer but i think that as you gain experience you begin adopting aspects of the other
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philosophy that work for you um so i'm i'm my writing process is i start out uh i start out by
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opening a file um i have a my my system my system is is that every story uh starts off with a
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kind with a kind of a code name um you know a brief a brief file name uh and for the kind of
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build job it was called breakout because it because it is as it as it suggested structured
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or under prison break um so then i have breakout dot doc which is the which is the manuscript
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and breakout dash notes dot doc and that notes file is kind of my chronological diary of the writing
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of the book um it is a i mean i will just sit there and i will basically talk out loud on paper
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i'll type things like well okay so i want this to be a story about so and so and and so what does
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that mean that i need to do and if i do some research i'll put my notes in that file and if i do an
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outline i'll put the outline in that file and if i later modify the outline then i'll copy and paste
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the outline down into the into the current day because it's it's written as a as a diary basically
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every time i sit down and start writing i'll put the the date and and where i am um and then
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as the outline grows and changes i'll copy and paste it so you can so i can actually look back and see
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previous iterations of the outline in the same file um and i'll put character sketches and if i
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write something and then delete it i'll put the deleted piece in there so usually the notes file
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winds up being three or four times the size of the the size of the finished story um and and so
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my i spend a lot of time toward the beginning of the process doing what i call nude link which is just
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sitting and kind of kind of talking out loud on paper about well suppose we could do this well
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i could do it this way or i could do it that way oh that one's really interesting let's run with
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that and see how it goes um and so um and so i will noodle like that for on a novel i could do that
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for months before i actually begin drafting um and uh and so basically whenever i'm writing i have
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both the draft file and the notes file open and i will back and forth between them um what like
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like when i ran into something i'll go over there if i if i suppose i suppose i'm i'm drafting
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along and suddenly realize oh wait a minute i have no idea what i have no idea what this character
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looks like so then i'll pop over the notes file and go okay i just hit a place where i don't know
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what the character looks like so let me think about you know well i want this character to be visually
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distinct from the other characters so that means that it probably don't want to have just another
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white guy well actually i try not to have too many white guys in my work anymore um but anyway so
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so i will go back and forth between the draft file and the notes file um and then after the draft
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is finished then in the notes file i will you know i'll i'll record any critique comments that i
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receive uh if i need to go back and redo something i'll talk about the process of going back and
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redoing it so and the notes file you know starts before the draft begins and continues long after
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like right now my notes file for the kind of bell job is talking about marketing you know i've got
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i've got things about the podcast that i'm that i'm scheduled for and stuff like that
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that's a very complete record that's actually i don't think i've met someone who's done it quite
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like that um it's the great thing i don't diary but the great thing is is that if i need to know
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hey where was i on thus and such a date if i know which subject i was working on then i can usually
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find it in the notes file yeah oh that's great so i noticed and when i was reading your book that
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um you clearly it really enjoyed working out the impact of the science of the world the physics
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i should say the physics of the world i do love it i do love it so yeah um for example the different
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kinds of gravity and that seems to me something you've inherited from the hospital uh hospital ship
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you mentioned um because of the that i can see a definite correlation there but i also was
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interested that you were bringing into the science fiction world some real
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identifiable illnesses like Parkinson's and disability and things like that is that something
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you felt was missing that you make your conscious effort to mainstream issues that a lot of us have
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and live with yes that is that was that was deliberate okay so as a as a white guy i am very conscious
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of my privilege and working hard to use my privilege to uplift those who don't have it um you know i
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can't in and of myself there's nothing that i there's nothing that i can do as a writer to um you
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know to to get more writers of color and and and and you know and writers writers you should part
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in the expression writers of gender uh writers with disabilities there's there i i do try i do try
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to promote um to promote writers of color uh nk jemisin um and and tempest Bradford and um
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netiakara for you know you know i mean these are all these are all people that i that i've met
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through the science fiction community and i do try i do try to well like when people say hey can
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you recommend a book i will always try to recommend a book by a woman or a writer of color
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if it all possible um and so i am a white guy but i can try to make my characters more diverse um so
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one of my goals for this particular book this is this is an ensemble you know you know there
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there are five viewpoint characters and a total total main cast of something in the vicinity of
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ten um and uh i and one of my goals was no white guys um there is there is one white woman in the
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main cast um but she has that she has Parkinson's as you said um and and the thing is my particular
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i recognize that we need to have more disabilities in our science fiction uh because almost all of us
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will become disabled to some extent at some point in our lives um and and so acknowledging
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disability as part of the human experience is something that we have not done very well at
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in our fiction uh and so i'm i'm doing what i can the particular uh the particular case of
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a lot of one of the problems that people have that people run into when they try to include
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and try to include disabled characters in their work is that the disability is either like a
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um it's an inspirational thing where where oh look at this disabled character they're so plucky um or
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or the disabled character is an object of pity um or the disability is somehow magically eliminated
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uh at the end of the book oh look the disabled characters are rewarded by becoming not disabled
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and that's now and that's not how real life works you know disabled people generally speaking
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stay disabled um or or i mean or i mean you've probably heard the term temporarily able body that's
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the term that i use for myself you know but there are plenty of disabilities that unfortunately do not
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go away uh they can be worked around um they can be improved um but dealing with disability is a part
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of the disability experience and so i you know i gave i gave this character and the thing is this
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character is a thief um her her skill set her reason to be is that she she fiddles things you know
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that she she is the person who picks the lock and clambers into tight spaces and crawls up walls
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okay so to give her a disability a physical disability is a way of challenging her self image
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and forcing her to question what am i really you know what is what is my what is my identity
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and so and so what i'm what i'm doing is i'm i'm trying to take away some of the things that she
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thinks makes her her and force her to find out what what is she really because she's still a thief
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she just you know her hands or not are not what they were and so i gave her specifically a walker
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because my wife who passed away about seven years ago um she had brain cancer and so she was
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it affected her mobility so she was using a walker for the last two years of her life
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and we both hated the damn thing it was it was so important because it made it possible for her to
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get out of the house and do things and it was so much of a hassle to deal with the damn thing
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getting it in out of the trunk and stuff and so i wanted to capture i wanted to specifically have
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a character with a walker to show that this is an assisted technology that makes things possible
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that would otherwise be pot be impossible and is also just a royal pain and a terrible thing
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and a constant reminder of the fact that you are not physically what you've had hope to be
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and so that's why that's why i gave her a walker and that's why i'm very pleased that the walker
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is on the cover because that is an important part of who she is and who she becomes because the the
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novel has a there's a there's a flashback interstitial that occurs between sections showing how
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the gang how the gang they had a big they had a big job that they thought was going to that they
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thought was going to set them up for life and it didn't go well most of the book takes place ten
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years later and so in the flashback sequences alicia is a confident physically able thief in the
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present day she's dealing with disabilities and has to find a way to cope with this and the
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way that i have her cope with it is to learn to be part of a community to understand that
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just because she is not physically able to do the things that she used to be able to do she still
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has all of that knowledge and all of that learning and she can pass this information along to other
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people within her community and so it really is a found family yeah all of the characters are
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dealing with things that have changed in the last ten years you mentioned already that you've got
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multiple points of view i think you said there were five and i was also interested in fact you start
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with a wee perspective which is enunciated by obviously one character but clearly they've got this
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sort of gang name for themselves that they cannibal crew but the the wee sections are
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are sort of giving a sense of they had a joint identity which has fragmented and split apart
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so obviously you begin to understand that even at that point to the sort of
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highlights and days of the past there were already tensions that were going to blow them apart
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because of that you know different characters do you find that quite hard as a writer writing
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in the wee perspective um or managing your five different points of view is there a feeling that
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of refreshment when you go to a different point of view or do you think oh there's too many
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plates spinning i'm not sure if i can keep them all going um i'm really glad to hear you say these
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things about the relationship of the wee point of view to the to the tension that exists between
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the characters even and even within that section um so i'm you're really you're really picking up
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what i'm putting down here doing doing first person plural um point of view is is a writing
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challenge that i set for myself i would actually go as far as to call it a stunt um and and also
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the the five point the five first person points of view first person singular points of view
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i chose to write each one as a single large chunk about 20,000 words from each one
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rather than doing the usual thing that you find in novels with multiple points of view
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of switching back and forth between them um and this was i honestly can't say where it came from
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it's like i think i'm gonna i i'm not sure this is going to work but i think i'm gonna try it
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and i think it did work it was just it was a way of you know kind of challenging myself and stretching
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my writing muscles one nice thing about having a long chunk in a single point of view is you really
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get to know the character and i really got to know the characters writing this book i love i love
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them all in different ways and then you get that experience of actually seeing that character from
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the outside um through the lens of somebody else which is great fun as well
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yeah in a sense what they've what they may have been misunderstanding how other people see them
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so it's like there's that you can element of could be comedy could be surprise could be portrayal
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all these sorts of things can go on if you flip your point of view i am so glad to hear the truth
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to hear that that you you came away from the book with with that because that is really what i was
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trying to do i find that when i read from this book i love i love reading my own work and i have a
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whole i have i have a whole self-funded book tour coming up that i tend to read the end of one
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POV section skip over the intersectional and skip over the intersectional and then read and so i
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read the end of one POV and then the switch and then the beginning of the next POV because those
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are some of the most dramatic places in the in the book my agent and i worked on moving moving the
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the transition points around in order to in order to get the you know get get the maximum maximum
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tension released um and so yeah so um there was uh there's a section where uh where a cane
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uh the hitter um is uh having a big fight in Missouri gravity casino um and uh Alicia the thief
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um comes in and comes in and saves him at the last minute and i actually wrote that whole
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fight uh entirely from his perspective and then later on i went back and recast the second half of it
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in her point of view oh interesting yeah and and that is you know that is a fascinating exercise i
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would recommend that almost i would recommend for any any writer uh to write a scene and then go
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back and write that same scene from the point of view of a different character um because
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you change you change your language uh you change yeah i mean you change your your your pacing your
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sentence length um the vocabulary there's so many things that should change when you change to a
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different point of view and it's a very interesting exercise to force yourself to look at exactly
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what changes when you change to a different character's point of view and so that um that was a
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really interesting exercise and i'm glad i did and i think i think the transition happens in the
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