Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Interview with Vidar Hokstad, author of Galaxy Bound (Sovereign Earth 2)



Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview Vidar Hokstad, whose latest novel, Galaxy Bound (Sovereign Earth 2) was published on June 29, 2021.

What formed the kernel of the idea for the Sovereign Earth series?

I’ll take one step back, actually, because Sovereign Earth is the first of what I hope to be about 8-10 series set in the Galaxy Bound universe that the second novel is named for. So I first started thinking about a setting that I could create a large meta-narrative in. I’ve always loved large-scale space adventure Sci-Fi, and I loved fast-paced pulp type adventures, and that combined to wanting a setting where I could place those kinds of stories. 

Pulp novels regardless of genre – I read a lot of both westerns and Sci-Fi as a child – generally need to be standalone in that there’s a fast payoff for the reader at the end of each book and you can pick up individual books. But the scope of a large series allows for a lot of extra world-building. I started planning out where I want that universe to go, and how to place smaller series and individual novels in it in a way that readers can jump in where they want. Sovereign Earth needed to be simultaneously a self-contained series but also to drive the overall setting forwards.

The large meta-arc of the Galaxy Bound universe is about humanity finding its way in a universe where we’re suddenly not alone and have to struggle with what our place in the larger scheme of things is. Sovereign Earth explores the first fumbling steps of a species that has a long history of xenophobia and imperialism trying to deal with civilisations much older and more powerful with which we’re not yet comfortable, while still not having put our own house in order.

English is not your first language. What challenges does that create for you as a writer?

The biggest challenge is for my proof reader… Judging from her feedback, the main problem is that growing up in Norway I picked up a lot of English from US movies and computer magazines and the like, but now I’ve lived 21 years in the UK, so my English is a total mish-mash of British English and US English, and it’s often hard for me to tell them apart because I wasn’t surrounded by one or the other in my formative years.

Second biggest is that when I get tired, the first thing that goes is my ability to keep homonyms apart for some reason – words I’d never confuse when I’m well-rested suddenly blur together if they sound similar. So at times I’ll read something back in the morning that I wrote the previous evening and be thoroughly embarrassed.

Your first book in the series, The Year Before the End, came out in November 2020. Where does the reader find themselves at the start of your latest book, Galaxy Bound?

The Year Before the End introduces us to the crew and the universe, and steals their innocence. They have no plans to do anything more than a job that seems important but also about the money, and they get thrust into political intrigue at a level they were not prepared for. I’m not spoiling anything by saying they get a win. But it’s a win with qualifications that leaves them personally in a worse spot than they were at the beginning.

So at the start of Galaxy Bound they’ve been battered and battle-hardened, and they get another chance to do something meaningful and set some things right, and this time they’re more certain who the villains are, but still end up blindsided. The real stakes are higher. They get to meet aliens for the first time, and travel to nearly all three stars in the Centauri trinary system, and be the first Earth crew to set foot on a planet around another star. But once again they end up having to escape to get information out.

You mention the importance to you of having strong female characters. Tell us about the main characters in Galaxy Bound, and what drives them.

I originally made the Captain of the Black Rain a white man. The first third or so of the novel was written with a straight white male Captain. But one of my biggest, enduring influences is Ursula Le Guin, and one of the things that has stuck with me for a long time was her writing on why she made her own characters more diverse. And it’s not about some big social justice crusade. It’s two simple considerations: “Why not?” and believability.

She made the very compelling argument that Sci-fi with predominantly white characters is wildly unrealistic. The same argument applies to gender and sexuality, given the societal trends we see. It was unrealistic when she started writing Sci-fi many decades ago, and it’s more obviously unrealistic today. As a white straight man, “my” group is a majority of powerful people in the part of the world where I live right now, but we’re a small minority in the world as a whole. To assume a setting more than a century into the future will retain that imbalance is alternatively unrealistic and/or depressing.

Any sci-fi writer who is remotely concerned about trying to write something realistic needs to consider both ethnicity and gender imbalances. And so I looked at the crew I had so far and decided I ought to rebalance it. I wasn’t about to change it that much for the first novel, but as the crew changes somewhat for book #2 anyway, I kept this in mind.

The most meaningful change I felt I could make was to make the Captain a woman – Zara Ortega, or “Zo” as she is nicknamed from her initials. When I made that change, I decided to change nothing else of what I’d already written because I realised there were nothing about her that doesn’t work irrespective of gender or sex. It made her gay, and I saw no reason to change that – I liked her love interest the way she was.

Her love interest is Clarice Morgan. Clarice is a much younger woman. An electrical engineer and hacker type with artificial eyes. In addition to giving her superior sight, those eyes also serves to provide emotional signalling – she can change the colour of them and pulse them in various ways. You don’t want to run into an angry Clarice in the dark with her eyes pulsing a fiery red… 

I promise there’s not going to be a lot of romance, but there’s going to be a “slow burn” going well past Sovereign Earth and into future series. It wouldn’t be space opera without some interpersonal drama.

How do you go about creating believable technology for a far future, the year 2144?

So this is a big problem. The Galaxy Bound universe represents a setting where humanity has essentially hit major technological road blocks. Artificial intelligence, for example, has hit the wall sometime not long after “today” in our universe.

I’m writing that into the series because currently AI is advancing at a rate that if it keeps going will make it nearly impossible for us to make meaningful predictions. So I’m “cheating”.

On the upside, faster than light travel exists in the Galaxy Bound universe. It’s the one major concession I’ve made about technology that I’m increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of.

Other than that, I’ve largely followed Jules Verne’s approach. A lot of the technology that seemed futuristic in his books were things that existed, but that people were unaware of, or that was just extrapolated a little bit. For example in his Paris in the XXth Century, he described something fax-like. But the precursor to the fax – the Pantelegraph – came into commercial operation in the 1860’s, before he wrote the story. Nautilus – the famous submarine in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – is named after the Nautilus submarine of Robert Fulton, built with funding from Emperor Napoleon around 1800.

To go back to my books, Clarice’s augmented eyes are inspired pretty directly by a decade-old cover from Wired magazine, and the associated article about a man getting experimental brain implants to let him see again. In his case with external cameras not fake eyes, but the fundamental principle exists. Similarly the contact lens displays are “just” an extrapolation from smaller and smaller glasses-based augmented reality displays.

There’s a famous quote by William Gibson I love: “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” The best way of creating believable future technology is to take bits of the future that are already here, and just distribute it and extrapolate. 

Do you find that your day-job influences or stimulates your imagination in writing the books?

My day job involves designing software systems for a venture capital fund as well as evaluating new start-ups, so yes, I spend a lot of my time thinking about how technology will evolve, and how that will impact society. The space part is more me dreaming...

Would you describe your novels as “hard Sci-fi” or “soft Sci-fi”, and does this distinction matter?

I think superficially they’re hard Sci-fi, in that I take very deliberate and very limited detours from real physics, and spend a lot of time describing why things are the way they are. I spent hours toying with SpinCalc – a tool for calculating perceived artificial gravity from spin – to make the sizes of space stations etc plausible, for example.

But “soft Sci-fi” to me is unfortunately very ill defined. It’s used both about Sci-fi that explores the “soft” sciences – e.g. sociology, anthropology – and it’s used about “implausible” Sci-fi. I prefer the former sense (and prefer to refer to the latter as “science fantasy”), and I love that kind of Sci-fi.

Again I’ll evoke Ursula Le Guin, who was a master of this genre with works like Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. The meta-narrative in the Galaxy Bound universe is soft Sci-fi in that sense, and also perhaps inspired by Asimov’s Foundation series in terms of scope and scale of trying to envisage social development on a galaxy-spanning scale.

The “hard” bits provides the “how” things are accomplished, but the main thrust of the story that is lurking underneath the individual adventures is about politics and anthropology and sociology – it’s civilisations clashing in multiple dimensions.

Who are the antagonists in your stories? Are there alien civilisations, or do humans face the vastness of space alone?

There are aliens. Though in the first book we only get to hear about them, not meet them. But in Galaxy Bound we do get to meet them, and an alien becomes a crew member on the Black Rain, and is a central character, and the crew gets to meet other alien species too. In book 3, which I’m writing now (in fact, I’m pretty sure these answers have got so long because I’m procrastinating), additional alien civilisations are introduced more explicitly.

As for antagonists, at various point in the first two books the crew is forced to see both the Earth and possibly Mars government, the political group Sovereign Earth that the series is named after, and the Centauri government, as antagonists. Part of the problem they face is that it’s not clear at first who the bad guys are, and sometimes it’s not only the bad guys who are shooting at them.

I’m a firm believer that bad guys must believe they’re doing the right thing most of the time, and that makes many characters more ambiguous. But there is one unambiguously bad guy (though he too sees himself as a hero) who will be obvious to the reader not that far into book 1.

When you were growing up, what films and TV series did you watch and did they include Sci-fi? How about books?

When I was little we didn’t have many TV channels. Mostly Norwegian and Swedish public TV. In ‘85 or ‘86 we got cable, and with it I got to see things like Lost in Space, and later with the British “Super Channel” from 1987 I could watch Dr Who and Blakes 7. Later things like Red Dwarf. In term of movies, when I was maybe 7-8 I snuck into the living room when my parents had gone to bed to watch one of the Star Wars movies.  So I did watch some Sci-Fi, but it was relatively limited back then. I read a lot, though, from the moment I learnt. My dad had a collection of about 2,000 books at home, and at least a few hundred of them were Sci-Fi.

What do you like to read now and are there any significant influences?

I read mostly technical literature and Sci-Fi, though some fantasy as well. In terms of Sci-Fi, I’m a massive fan of the late Iain Banks. It’s probably an inspiration, though I’m far away from writing as well. His Culture novels in particular are among very few that provides a really upbeat vision of the future. So many others. Douglas Adams is one I can re-read over and over. Two of my all time favourite trilogies are Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy and Three Californias.

How do you foresee the Sovereign Earth series developing and does it cover a long time span?

Sovereign Earth itself is fully mapped out at a high level. Books 3 and 4 cover a major technological breakthrough that has a dramatic impact on Earth and the nearby civilisations, and escalates tensions dramatically. Books 5 and 6 are set back in the solar system, and lead to a dramatic final showdown that takes one villain off the table. In-universe Sovereign Earth will span maybe 3-4 years. But that sets the scene for the next 6-book cycle, which is as yet unnamed (because every name I’ve decided on turns out to already be taken…) where the technological breakthrough from Book 3 coupled with background political upheaval from throughout the series leads to far worse conflicts.

The full set of series I plan to write in the Galaxy Bound universe will span maybe 30 years in-universe, and will escalate to conflicts involving hundreds of star systems and dozens of civilisations (though only a handful of them will be at the core of any of the novels). 

Do you have a writing routine and if so, how does it work?

Mostly it involves trying to force myself to stop procrastinating. When I write, I just write. I start a scene, write it straight through and move on to the next. I try to avoid taking breaks because then I have to fight with myself to get myself to sit back down.

Is there a soundtrack to your writing and are there any music tracks or composers that you love to listen to?

A lot of electronic music. Lately I’ve listened to a lot synthwave. Also, I feel a lot of the music of the French electronic musician Solar Phasing fits very well with the feel of what I’m writing, to the point where I licensed one of his tracks to accompany a simulation I wrote of the gate network for my books – you can find that, and listen to his music, here: https://galaxybound.com/starchart/

You mention your fondness for a 1960's Norwegian Western pulp series. Is the heroism and adventure found in contemporary Sci-fi a reflection of old series set in the American West, and even earlier legends?

Western pulp and early Sci-Fi pulp set in space have a couple of significant similarities. They tend to follow a singular hero or small ensemble that goes off on adventures in a desolate setting punctuated by outposts of various degrees of lawlessness, often set in eras of expansion where the frontier is not yet under government control.

You see that in Star Wars, which regularly includes elements of a western in space. You also have Firefly, which takes the “Western in Space” trope literally, down to costumes. And more recently of course The Mandalorian, which amplifies the western elements of Star Wars until it is only slightly more subtle in its references to westerns than Firefly.

In my case Morgan Kane, the pulp series in question was noteworthy for me initially because I read it when I was young – probably too young for the content – and came to love that stylised format, which is straightforward and unpretentious entertainment, but also because while each story is simple. While this was absolutely not planned from the beginning, that series ended up having a meta-narrative in the form of the social and political backdrop of the transformation of the West from lawless frontier to settled civilisation  – the series spans the 1870’s to the 1910’s.

There’s an element of that in the Galaxy Bound universe as well – with our solar system and the nearby systems seen by the “Centauri” as the frontier that to them is lawless and chaotic and something to tame.

How close are we to true space travel? Will you yourself travel into space if a chance becomes available? 

Depends what we consider “true”. With the recent Virgin Galactic launch, we have the start of space tourism. To me that one is not exciting enough for the price (not that I could afford it at the current price either). But we’re just years away from full orbital missions or even moon missions – at that point it becomes a trade-off for me with respect to how long to wait for prices to come down. I’d be prepared to spend a fairly unreasonable amount of money on it. I do hope they come down fast enough to get a chance one day.

Interstellar travel is another matter, and I worry there may not be a way to make faster-than-light travel work. That’s part of the appeal of writing about it – it might well be the closest we’ll get.

Amazon


About Vidar Hokstad:


Vidar Hokstad grew up near Oslo, Norway. He started writing at an early age, but put it aside to focus on technology - his other passion. He has co-founded a number of technology companies, and moved to London with one of them in 2000.

Ca. 2016 he started thinking about an expansive series of sci-fi novels that became Galaxy Bound, but put aside for other commitments. In 2020 he picked it up again, and wrote and published the first Galaxy Bound novel.

Vidar lives in London with his son.


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