Q: How did you come up with the idea for Starforge?

A: I read a great non-fiction book, Bryan Burrough’s Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir, about U.S. — Russian cooperation in space in the 1990s.  The book gave a brief history of the Soviet space program which isn’t well known because it was kept secret for a long time.  One episode the book relates is the story of Salyut 7, a Soviet space station in the 1980s which had to be abandoned by its crew because of electrical problems.  The station, empty and completely inoperable, continued to orbit Earth for a couple of years before a new crew launched to dock with the station and repair it.  The mission was a success and is considered one of the most impressive in-flight repairs ever.  I found the story fascinating and my imagination ran off on a tangent.  I imagined an empty space station orbiting Earth.  Why is it empty?  What happened?  Where did the crew go? Those are the questions that inspired Starforge.

Q: What are some of your favorite books?

A: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is the book that made me want to be a writer.  I love the interplay between short-stories and long-form fiction, and between a straightforward account of events and a wilful distortion of the facts.  You come away from it feeling like you know exactly what happened and, at the same time, like it doesn’t make any sense.  

I love Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible for the way the characters’ voices are so well developed.  Each chapter is told from a different perspective, and though she included the name of the narrator in each chapter heading, it’s redundant.  The voices are so distinct you only need to read the first few lines to know whose point of view you’re in.

And I admire all of Charles Frazier’s books, but particularly Thirteen Moons, for the immersive environment he creates.  He has researched every detail of the times and places of his stories and it seeps through on every page.  Subtle details bring the setting to life in exactly the way historical fiction is supposed to.  

Q: Hang on, none of those are sci-fi.  How did you end up writing
a sci-fi book?

A: Sci-fi is fun because it can speak to real world issues in a really creative way.  I’m thinking of Daniel Suarez’s Daemon which starts with the social implications of emerging technologies and lets the author’s imagination run with them.  Or Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War which alludes to some of the author’s experiences in the Vietnam War without the same constraints of a more representational account.  Or another one of my favorites, Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, which takes a critical look at how civilizations rise, evolve, and compete for survival.

Q: Does Starforge speak to a larger issue like that?

A: I’ll let readers decide.