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Chris Moriarty: All in a Spin
The science fiction author behind the amazing novel Spin State
braves our interviewer's chair, while our own fantasy novelist Stephen
Hunt shines the light in her eyes.
Thanks to my wonderful agent, Jimmy Vines, I was able to go full-time as of last December. Before that I was writing on the side while practicing law full time. Which is how I wrote most of my first two novels. How has becoming a published author impacted your lifestyle? It hasn't. I'm a workaholic dweeb, to use Stephen King's phrase. So now that I don't have to hold down a non-writing job I get a little more sleep more and a little more exercise ... and that's about it.
Did you come up through the writing short-stories route, or did you get published in novel-form first? Also, do you use an agent, and how long did you spend in rejection letter hell before you were first published? I'm not a short story writer, so my first sale was of Spin State. I sent out a cold query letter asking agents if they wanted to read it. That letter went to about thirty agents, none of whom I knew from Adam. One of them was Jimmy Vines, who asked for the entire 180,000 word manuscript by e-mail, read it in something like 48 hours and had four offers on it by the end of the month. At that point I hadn't finished a short story, let alone submitted one. Frankly I'm not sure I would have kept writing if I'd had to deal with the kind of rejection many short story writers routinely face. I know a lot of people advise young writers to earn their stripes in the short story magazines before trying to sell a novel, and it's good advice in many cases. Still, short stories are a brutal way to break into the business. And there's a good argument to be made that a quality first novel has a better shot at publication than an equally strong first short story. Did you always want to be a writer?
I didn't know about writers' groups or creative writing courses or any of that stuff either, so I just read my favorite sf writers (people like C. J. Cherryh, Ursula LeGuin, David Brin, Charles Sheffield, James Alan Gardner and L. E. Modesitt, Jr., all of whom are still big favorites) and tried to do what they did. Most of the early stuff I wrote was pretty lame; like many young writers, I had the basic skills down but I didn't have a clue where I was going with them. Then someone handed me a copy of Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix and the proverbial light in the refrigerator door went on... Where, when, and how do you write? I write in the local coffee shop, starting as early as I can drag myself out of bed in the morning. Which is never as early as it should be. Do you tend to read the work of many other SF/F authors, and what are you reading now? The sf on my bedside table at the moment includes books by William Gibson, M. Shayne Bell, Kelly Eskridge, Iain Banks, Neal Stephenson, China Mieville, Anne Harris, Louise Marley. That's mixed in with non-sf by ... let's see .... John Le Carre, Toni Morrison, John Irving, Primo Levi, Wilton Barnhardt, Walter Mosley, and David Grossman. How would you quickly summarise your novel 'Spin State' for someone who hasn't read the book yet?
The main character is UN Peacekeeper Catherine Li, an illegal genetic construct who's hacking her own memory in order to pass as human. When she's sent back to her home planet to investigate the murder of a prominent physicist who happens to be her twin, she has to choose between loyalty to the establishment and loyalty to the family that she herself has deleted from her memory. Actually, the best summary of the book I've seen is the L.E. Modesitt, Jr. quote that appears on the inside cover: "An AI and a military officer face love, betrayal, and worse in a struggle over the shape of a future that already has full genetic engineering, bioengineered internal software, FTL communications and travel ... and the age-old human weaknesses of greed lust and the love of power." I thought that about covered it... If 'Spin State' was going to be made into a film, who would be your dream producers/actors for the movie? No Hollywood studio with a healthy survival instinct would ever cast a leading lady who was as butch or as pissy as Catherine Li. Still, I have always wanted to see Quentin Tarentino do an sf movie... Do you ever attend SF-cons, and what has your experience with them been? I attend them and I enjoy them. There's something really amazing about being able to spend three or four or five days doing nothing but talking to other people who read and write sf. I don't know of any other literary genre that has this kind of tradition, and I think the convention scene - that core community of die-hard fans and writers alike - is one of the things that makes it possible for sf writers to do the risky and interesting things that so many of them are doing these days. There are advantages to writing mainstream, broad appeal fiction (bigger sales for one thing), but there's nothing that tops writing for the kind of super-literate, sophisticated sf readers that the convention scene nurtures. There's a real pleasure in knowing you can give a subtle spin to a classic sf plot or a nod to some minor character in a Gibson or Asimov novel and your readers will Really Get It. Would you ever consider writing in a different genre, or are you content with science fiction? I already do write in a different genre. My second novel, which I finished earlier this year, is a literary novel, though one with strong contemporary fantasy elements. I'm also beginning research for a World War II-era spy thriller, which I'll start full-time work on after I finish Spin Control. I like to alternate between science fiction and "straight" fiction; it keeps me fresh and makes my writing in both genres stronger. What are your hobbies? I used to be a horse trainer, and I still ride, though I only train my own horses these days. I also like watching trashy movies. Is watching trashy movies a hobby? Do you still live in Wyoming? Sadly, no. Though writers can live anywhere, their spouses still have to hold down jobs in the real world. So right now I'm dividing my time between Salt Lake City, Utah and Lausanne, Switzerland. What advice would you give to budding SF writers? I actually have a long writing advice page on my website, in which I try to sum up all the boneheaded mistakes I made on the way to publication and help other people avoid them. Beyond that, my main advice is to write what you like, write every day no matter what, and join a good critique group. Did you get any input into the cover art for 'Spin State'? (and are you happy with the way it looks) Authors never get input on cover art. Probably because marketing departments have long known that when writers do get to pick their cover art they often do a piss poor job of it. On the other hand, when the art directors and marketing committees do their job properly, they come up with covers that accurately portray the basic nature of the story inside, thereby maximizing chances that the book will actually get into the hands of the readers most likely to enjoy it. I think, though you can never be sure, that Spin State got one of those covers. Certainly it seems to me to match what's on the inside pretty well. Which is all that any reasonable writer can ask for. How much milage do you think the cyberpunk genre has left in it? That depends. If cyberpunk means doing exactly what Gibson and Sterling were doing in 1985, then it's dead on arrival. In reality, however, cyberpunk has had such a tremendous influence on other writers that you could argue that most so-called mainstream sf today actually is cyberpunk. I wouldn't go quite that far; I think there are still significant differences between, say, Gregory Benford and Neal Stephenson. But let's just say that the news of cyberpunk's demise was slightly premature. Most notably, many of the cutting edge writers in sf today are what I'd call post-cyberpunk writers. I'm thinking of people like Ken McCleod, Susan R. Matthews, Nicola Griffith, Iain Banks, and Richard Paul Russo. Or, in the fantasy/steampunk arena, Sean Russell and China Mieville. All these writers work with the close extrapolation, slick tech, gritty politics and high literary production values that characterized classic cyberpunk, but do it in a way that breaks the classic cyberpunk mold. Where this trend is going remains to be seen. But anyone who still thinks cyberpunk is dead needs to get out and meet a few more good books. Are you from the 'writing tightly against a full outline school' or the 'make it up as you go along' school? I always promise myself that I'll outline my next book before I start writing and follow the outline ... and I always break that promise. At some point I'll probably have to make peace with the fact that I'm not the kind of writer who can write to an outline. Still, I keep hoping... How much do you base your characters against people you actually know? Er ... you don't really want me to answer that, do you? When it comes to your drafts, how much do you tend to re-write? I'm a compulsive rewriter. Not only do I rewrite books half a dozen times before putting them in the mail (Spin State went through 11 drafts), I also rewrite during the initial editing. And during the copyediting. And when I get the galleys. With Spin State I rewrote the whole back half of the book in galleys and actually had my editor send me the second run page proofs to make sure I'd gotten it right. Even when I do readings from the published book, I have to resist the urge to whip out a red pen and start "fixing" it right up there on the podium. There's no such thing as a finished book for me; only one that the suits won't let me mess with anymore. Of the work you've penned, what's your favourite novel to date been? My favorite novel is always the next one, of course. In this case that's Spin Control, a far-future spy thriller that takes place in Israel. Have you had much feedback from fans yet about 'Spin State'? Most of the feedback so far has been from other writers, since advance readers' copies go out to them long, long before the book ever hits the bookshelves. That's been great, of course. One of the coolest moments in the whole publishing process was opening up my e-mail to find notes from David Brin, Stephen Baxter, and L.E. Modesitt, Jr., all saying how much they liked my book. Because in some sense those writers - the ones you read when you're just starting out - are the ideal readers that you write your first novel for. Now that Spin State's in stores, I'm starting to get a different and wonderful kind of feedback. There's nothing better for a writer than getting an e-mail from someone you've never met saying that they picked your book up in the store and couldn't put it down, or that they identified with a particular character, or that you've changed the way they see the world. It's why we all do this crazy thing. What amount of research do you do for your books? Research is tremendously important, both in the later stages of a project and in that initial, pre-writing stage when I'm just trying to figure out what the book's about. I like SF where the science ideas really drive the plot as a whole, rather than being just window dressing. And if you want to write that kind of SF, then you'd better be ready to spend a whole lot of time in the library. Much of the research I do isn't all that closely related to any one book, however; plenty of it is just keeping up with the literature, reading enough of it so I have a basic awareness of what the interesting ideas of the moment are. When I start working on a book, I think a lot about that general reading and ask myself what's going on now that I think is really interesting enough to spend a year or two researching and writing about. In Spin State it was quantum information theory. In Spin Control it's Emergent AI. Though the main focus (it is science fiction, after all) is on the story and characters, I also like to give a non-scientific reader a general understanding of the science that drives the story. And I do bibliographies ... which I've gotten plenty of teasing about. So okay, I'm a geek. But I like to get to the end of a book and feel like I learned something. How long does it take you to write a novel? Longer than I'd like it to. Also it always takes longer than I think it will. My repeated claims that I'm "just about to put it in the mail" are now greeted with hoots of laughter by everyone who knows me. In practice I'd say it takes one or two years from start to finish. And which side of that range any given novel will be on isn't something I've had much luck at predicting. How much of your working day do you devote to SF/F fiction these days? It really varies, depending on my mood and the most urgent deadline of the moment. I work on one or two books at a time, and at the moment I'm only working on Spin Control ... which means that right now ALL my time is spent on SF. What new material are you working on at the moment? I'm working on a hard sf novel called Spin Control at the moment. It's a loose sequel to Spin State, and it's set in Israel ... which has been interesting, to say that least, given the current political climate in that part of the world. The main characters in Spin Control are Li, Cohen and a syndicate clone called Arkady who showed up as a minor character in Spin State. Like Spin State, it's also a spy thriller. But this time the story's told from the perspective of the Syndicate clones who are the "bad guys" in Spin State.
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OTHER CONTENT - November 2003
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Are
you currently writing full time now, or are you fitting in the odd
day-job for variety? 
No.
I always loved to read, but I never even imagined being a writer
until I was in my mid-twenties. 
I
like to think of Spin State as a post-human spy thriller. Other
people have described it as hard sf, cyberpunk, and Orwellian political
commentary ... and all three labels are fine by me. 
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