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Award-winning author David Brin's celebrated works of science fiction have been translated into more than 20 languages, but his prolific writing extends to technology, science, culture and politics. He also writes about writing: He's received so many requests for advice from would-be authors that he gathered his thoughts on writing in an excellent essay available on the Internet called the A Long Lonely Road. Trained as a scientist, David's worked as a physics professor and NASA consultant in addition to creating the acclaimed Uplift book series. We called up David for a -- tad contrarian -- conversation about writing:
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There's an anonymous Spanish folk song called "La hija de Juan Simon" about a gravedigger who has to bury his daughter. In the version I have, the song is sung by the legendary Juanito Valderrama. The song gave me goose bumps, and I told myself that one day I would write the story of that gravedigger. Since then, I've played the song over and over, probably a thousand times, and I still get goose bumps every time.
A few years later, while attending the low-residency MFA program at Bennington College, I was having coffee with my teacher, the writer Elizabeth Cox, and she asked me about my relationship with my three-year-old daughter, Elena, (my second being just a baby at the time). I began to tell her the story of how each night as I tucked Elena into bed I would tell her a story. Only before I finished nearly every line, Elena would interrupt me, saying, "No, Daddy, that's not how it goes. It goes like this." And then she would proceed to send the story in a new direction. Like a good father, I would adapt and attempt to take the story in that direction but after another line she would interrupt me again and do the same thing. I was in the process of telling Elizabeth that this would go on for as long as I told the story, when she looked at me and said, "I think you have a story in there."
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On the evolution of my most recent novel, The Pleasure Was Mine , which was recently read on Dick Estell's Radio Reader
and was a finalist for the SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) Award in Fiction 2006.
My father died of Alzheimer's seven years ago this past June. A couple of years before he died, I began keeping notes. At first we weren't sure he had Alzheimer's. He hadn't been to the doctor in 35 years, so we had no real frame of reference. My father was wonderful, smart, articulate, warm, very well read, obsessed with Eastern mysticism, a fine writer, and eccentric in a very charming way, and so it was hard to tell where any sort of illness like Alzheimer's started and where his personality left off. Looking back, we realized he had been a master at hiding what he didn't know or what he was forgetting.
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It goes by any number of rubrics: Science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy. Whatever you call it, a software developer here at the VT named Robert W. is a huge fan. When he's not busy fine-tuning our visualization technology, he's nose-deep in the genre. We asked Robert to tell us about his favorites:
The Uplift War by David Brin. What constitutes sentience? At what point does a species deserve rights?
A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. Honor, betrayal, sibling rivalry, Machiavellian machinations, lust, and completely unpredictable plot changes. Who could ask for anything more?
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. What would time travel do to the world of academics? Well, it would let historians work more like anthropologists.
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. A hilarious, heart-warming, enjoyable look at the apocalypse. No, really.
Snow Crash  by Neal Stephenson. A glimpse of the near future. Funny, entertaining, and disturbingly plausible.
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I am not an identical twin. Before writing TWINS, I had started another novel about a young woman in San Francisco and then I realized that the last thing I wanted to do was write a book about myself. Instead, I set out to amuse myself. I started with a new, outlandish voice (Sue) and then countered her voice with a quiet, controlled opposite (Chloe).
I have always been fascinated by twins. I'm also drawn to coming of age tales, stories of troubled teens, confused college students; the stories of disaffected, young women always pull me in. I made Chloe and Sue blond and beautiful because I could, and smart, too, because I'm only interested in intelligent, sensitive suffering characters.
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In 1998, when my husband announced that he'd been invited to Oxford University for a year, I made an announcement of my own. I was having a mid-life crisis, thank you very much. Therefore, I wished to stay in Arizona and write fiction.
Unlike most normal red-blooded American women of a certain age, I hate to travel, unless it's to a familiar place, to see people I already know. For me, travel is an opportunity to be reacquainted with my dearest anxieties: flying, packing, shipwreck, public toilets, nameless indigenous insects and being stranded without lunch by the thief in the American Express commercial.
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