Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview Thomas R. Weaver, whose novel Artificial Wisdom has its debut on April 5th, 2024.
You started out as a tech entrepreneur and successfully created a start-up that you sold to Just Eat Takeaway. What made you decide to write?
Writing has been a dream of mine since I was twelve years old. I never really allowed myself to consider it as a career choice, for the very simple reason that I knew most authors made very little money. I thought it was a luxury, to be able to write, and that all the time I wasn’t investing in my family, my friends and myself should be channelled into earning a living.
After selling my startup, I suddenly had “free time”, for the first time since childhood, and I realised I could choose how I wanted to spend that time. I’d had story ideas bubbling in my head for decades, and now I had no niggling voices telling me to ignore them and do something “more productive.”
What was the kernel of your idea for Artificial Wisdom and why did you choose to write it now?
One reviewer described Artificial Wisdom as full to the brim with ideas, so I think it’s fair to say it wasn’t just one kernel, but a whole bag of corn popping together. One of those was certainly the bubbling certainty, post-Brexit here in the UK and through observing US politics, that we were becoming more and more polarised as a society, and disinformation through social media was becoming very effective at encouraging large groups of people to vote against their own self-interest. I wondered what impact technology would have on that, particularly artificial intelligence, for better and for worse.
Then there was the climate aspect: the book takes place in 2050, in a world ravaged by shifts in the climate. This sprung from my own fears about the world my children would be inheriting and the lives they will lead when they are my age, and it absolutely seemed like it was timely to take on all of this from the lens of the near-future.
Why did you decide to combine the themes of AI and climate change (and arguably the threat of populist politicians?) What made you concerned about both AI and climate change and why was it important to use fiction to deal with your concerns?
I believe part of the role of speculative fiction is helping us see the greatest challenges of our time through the lens of tomorrow. I think humankind has a tendency to ignore daunting truths until they are too big to ignore, and sci-fi helps us confront them through stories. In 1984, for example, Orwell highlighted the dangers of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and the manipulation of language and truth, themes that have stayed incredibly relevant in the 75 years since he wrote it.
Climate change is arguably the most daunting existential threat humanity has ever confronted. What makes this challenge particularly formidable is the fact that a significant, powerful, and vocal segment of our population sees the threat as a matter of personal belief or political ideology. Populist politicians, and disinformation over social media, have made all this far, far worse, and seeing the division in the way we dealt with the pandemic, as a species, could not have made it more stark: this undermines our collective ability to take action.
Should we leave it too late to mitigate carbon emissions and rising temperatures of the air and sea through natural means – and arguable we already have – then technology will have to play a part whether we like it or not. That will come at a cost. Artificial Intelligence may prove hugely important in helping us navigate this, because the data and science may prove to be too complicated for us to handle unaided.
But some (not all) say Artificial Intelligence is also an existential risk to humanity. By opening the gateway to superintelligence, might we not find ourselves supplanted as the dominant species on the planet? Or, will we perhaps begin to augment ourselves, and become a new species in the process?
These are, therefore, the biggest issues of our time, in my view. It’s an issue with no black and white answers. What could be better for fiction to squint at?
Would you say the novel is post-apocalyptic science fiction?
I’d say it’s pre-apocalyptic, not post. Most of the great post-apocalyptic science fictions (for me: Day of the Triffids, Station Eleven, The Road, and arguably half of the fantasy genre) detail life after a collapse. Artificial Wisdom is about trying to avoid the collapse in the first place.
Is it science fiction? Yes, but I think that’s a broad label which sometimes conjured up aliens, lightsabers and space-schools. I’m here for all of that, but I see this as a near-future technothriller, more akin to Jurassic Park than Ender’s Game.
Who is your protagonist, Marcus Tully, and where is he at the start of the book?
Marcus Tully is an investigative journalist, arguably one of the most influential of the time, though it is a time where journalists work for themselves, not for media networks. He’s a man that fanatically believes in the importance of the truth in civic society, no matter what the consequences may be of revealing them. Ten years prior to the start of the novel, he lost his wife and unborn child in the greatest climate disaster to date. He never really got over it, and moreover, he doesn’t want to.
You’ve called that climate disaster the tabkhir: hundreds of millions in the Persian Gulf have been killed by a wet-bulb heatwave. How is Tully drawn into the most crucial piece of journalistic investigation of his life?
At the beginning of the novel, he is leaked information by a whistleblower implying that this disaster may have been caused by geo-engineering by the USA to avert their own disaster. The candidate who made that call is running in an election with crucial stakes: a dictatorship, the make-or-break mandate to steer all nations through the changes needed to save humanity from a climate apocalypse. His only opponent is the world’s first political AI. He has a huge conflict of interest, but there is no-one else he’d trust to investigate this instead.
What are the different challenges of being an entrepreneur and writing a novel?
One of the biggest differences is that being an entrepreneur, and especially CEO of a venture capital-backed startup, means getting very good at context switching. You can find yourself dealing with a huge range of things within an hour, from a disgruntled message from a board member to members of your executive team arguing to a customer threatening to pull the plug (can you tell how much I enjoyed that world?).
To write, you need to get into a cognitive state which you can’t easily get to if you’re being distracted. It’s like you are visualising something happening across an infinite number of parallel worlds, in slow motion, capturing the essence of it, but also moulding it as you write it down, choosing which world is the main one and which choices are just discounted possibilities. If you get distracted, you can still write, but you lose the thread.
At the same time, there’s a lot of similarities. You need a lot of self-belief, because you are putting something out there in the world, taking a risk people will judge you on. You face a lot of criticism and rejection. You need to be able to persevere and see things through to a conclusion, and to be very comfortable with uncertainty (in fact, the longer you are comfortable with not knowing the answer, the better the eventual answer may be).
What is your writing schedule?
I’d love to say I’m one of those professional writers with a strong sense of routine who locks themselves in their garden cabin between 5am and 10am and won’t come out until they’ve written 3,000 words. I’d love to be that person. I’m just not. I believe in managing mindset, not time. When I’m in the right mindset for writing, I’ll dedicate a lot of time to it, hours in a day. When I’m not, I might not write at all, or maybe I’ll get something done just to have moved my wordcount target a little. I’m better writing before I move into more “cognitively easier” parts of my to-do list, such as admin, marketing or literally anything else. The procrastination is the real battle - that and my addiction to Twitter/Threads.
With your experience in startups, how much thought have you devoted to marketing, a critical skill for any author today?
A lot, though there is still a huge amount to learn because it’s a very different product to market than any I’ve dealt with before – in particular, why someone that wants to read chooses your book over anyone else’s in the vast recorded library of stories told by other members of our species… It’s quite unlike anything else out there. Even films and music are chosen and consumed in very different ways.
One element I was adamant about was, to put a business term on it, packaging. In today’s social age, the look and feel of a product implies everything about the quality of the product itself. I wanted an incredible cover, and to produce a beautiful, stunning hardback edition first, because I wanted this book to be able to compete with the very best of traditionally published fiction.
Do you think humanity will rise to confront the twin threats of AI and climate change?
I do not believe humanity as a singular block will rise to confront anything. We are fragmented and have given the ability for everyone to shout over each other and amplify the very worst of our behaviours. I’m an optimist enough to believe that there will be some, enough, that we’ll get there. I have hope. I just wonder how much resistance there will be to the things we need to do to save ourselves, and what impact that resistance will ultimately have.
The
choice facing world citizens in 2050 is a stark one: between AI politician
Solomon, governor of New Carthage, a floating, domed city-state, protecting the
elite, and a ruthless American President. What do you feel about words like
“elite” which can be somewhat loaded?
Ultimately a lot of the words and ideas within Artificial Wisdom will feel loaded to a lot of people. I had to write it as the characters saw it. Nothing there is in my voice. Tully sees the world differently to, say, Haymaker, a former resident of New Orleans, a climate refugee who comes to work on his team after living on the streets of London, or Johan Pedersen, a venture capitalist who lives in New Carthage and is, in fact, one of its primary backers. It’s Tully who sees New Carthage as a dome to protect the elite while the world burns. Pedersen would view it as an essential refuge for humanity – it just so happens they couldn’t build enough floating cities for everyone, not yet of course. As for Haymaker, he’d probably argue Tully himself is part of the elite.
What would you like readers to take away from Artificial Wisdom?
I want readers to have hope for the future, and yet recognise there is no hope unless we act – as collectively as possible – to make changes.
But also, I want people to enjoy the read. This isn’t designed to be depressing read. I wanted my readers to be unable to put it down and to be debating it with friends and family when finished. I love hearing reviewers tell me how they’ve ended up talking about it for weeks afterward. That’s the highest praise you can have.
What can you tell us about the novel you’re working on now, Futilitytown?
Futilitytown is very different to Artificial Wisdom. I saw it as a bit more of a palette cleanser, if I’m honest, a really fun ride that is (a little) lighter on the themes. It’s a sci-fi thriller, but again I’m being very careful to avoid aliens, lightsabers and space-schools. I have a unique setting. One alpha reader described it as “like Zion in the Matrix,” someone else as “like a female Jack Reacher meets Philip Marlowe in a Silo-esque world (from the Wool series) with a 1930s New York / Tokyo noir vibe".
“Saga is a maintenance engineer on a vast intergenerational colony ship that left Earth on a five hundred year voyage, six hundred years ago. But to make ends meet for her and her daughter, she’s also a fixer, hired to discreetly resolve personal problems, if necessary with violence.
When Lola, a resident of Futilitytown, the most remote and rundown town on the deck, hires Saga to intervene with a neighbour preying on Lola’s daughter, she didn’t plan on getting a female fixer for her money.
Not every intervention goes smoothly, however. As Lola and her daughter disappear, what secrets are the residents of Futilitytown hiding? Why have so many children been taken out of school and sent away?
Saga will find herself trying to unpick a tangled web of plots and conspiracies that will threaten the lives of everyone on deck, the ship.”
There’s
a lot of work still to do on it, but I’m excited about this one, and I think it
has series potential that Artificial Wisdom doesn’t (though there will, in all
likeliness, be a sequel).
Amazon Kindle - Audiobook
About Thomas R. Weaver:
THOMAS R WEAVER writes stories about tomorrow to help make sense of today.
Aside from writing, Thomas is a UK-based tech entrepreneur. His last startup was acquired by Just Eat Takeaway; his new one is still in stealth but backed by a major Silicon Valley tech accelerator.
After successfully launching a tech startup in the restaurant hospitality space which transformed payment and ordering experiences he realized he had no more excuses not to do what he always wanted to do: write fiction. Despite swearing to friends and family (none of whom apparently believed him) that he’d never run another startup again, he recently started another one focussed on bringing some of the ideas in “Artificial Wisdom,” his debut novel, to life, specifically around communicating in augmented reality.
In Thomas’s spare time, he is an avid cook, and loves drawing, painting, and chess. He usually writes immediately after a workout and spa session down his local gym. Thomas collects more books than he has time to read, especially if they have beautiful covers, like Folio editions. He’s a sucker for great covers. Learn more about Thomas and his debut “Artificial Wisdom” at his website, here.
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