Shaun Farrell: The first thing I noticed looking at your book is that you have praise from Chris Carter, Jack McDevitt, and several others. Being that this is your first novel, how does it make you feel having engendered the praise and the confidence of such big names?
Josh Conviser: It’s incredibly encouraging. I was excited enough they were willing to read it, let alone actually put their names on it and give it a nice blurb. It’s a funny thing asking people for blurbs. It’s a little tough to do, but I ended up meeting a whole bunch of writers I didn’t know before. I had a reason to introduce myself to them, and I’ve become friends with a lot of them, which is fantastic. As a young writer it’s an amazing experience to pick the brains of these guys who are so experienced and so effective as writers.
SF: That’s cool. [Getting praise] is kind of scary.
JC: It is. You feel very exposed because you’re forcing the book upon them, and you don’t want to pressure them too much. You don’t want them to feel uncomfortable, but you’re asking them to do something for nothing. But it ended up being great.
SF: And a plus for you is that their fans see their names on your book and could gain an interest they might not have had if those names weren’t on there.
JC: Of course. In the SF world Chris Carter really means a lot, and I do feel there is a link between Echelon and the X-Files. There are similarities between those two stories. I was thrilled that he enjoyed it.
SF: That sounds like a good segue, so why don’t you tell us about Echelon.
JC: Echelon is a spy thriller set in the future, and it’s about the NSA’s eavesdropping network. Basically, it looks at what we’ve started doing now, which is surveillance on billions of communications per day. The problem right now within the NSA and with echelon itself, which is a real part of the NSA, is that we can patrol the communications soup for interactions, but we can’t actually process the information. The conceit of the book is that we’ve (learned) to fully process this giant pool of data that we already get. (This) makes echelon a very powerful organization and allows it to start to control the shape of humanity’s future. For awhile that works out great. There’s this benevolent guide toward a more stable, peaceful existence. But, as with everything, it starts to breakdown. There’s a conspiracy that starts to rise up within echelon itself. My main character, Ryan Lang, who is an echelon agent, gets caught up in this conspiracy and ends up on the run, hunted by everybody, and trying to figure out why he’s been targeted.
SF: So there’s this idea that with all this information, you end up with a handful of people who are in control of everything in the known universe.
JC: Exactly. Echelon is about the creation of Big Brother, how that kind of world would come into existence, and how it might breakdown.
SF: Were you inspired by 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451?
JC: Totally. There’s a lot of Brave New World in there. There’s a good bit of 1984, and even a good bit of Island, which is one of Aldous Huxley’s other books.
SF: What else was the initial inspiration behind your book?
JC: It’s something I’ve been researching for a long time, and I’ve known that I wanted to write something on echelon and the NSA’s massive surveillance of communications. The problem writing a modern-day story about it is that (echelon) doesn’t work very well, as you can see in the nature of the world around us. The NSA has been in the news quite a bit recently with the wire-tapping and the eaves-dropping stuff. That said it’s not incredibly effective. So that led me to saying, what if it became as effective as it wants to be? And, because it has opened itself up to such a huge pool of data currently, when we’re all desperate to gain a little more control of our world, how then, when computing power is strong enough to really process this information, will the world look?
The theme of the book is about echelon’s attempt to control humanity. On a personal level with my character, Ryan Lang, has issues with control. He is basically the first person to become a true— cyborg sounds cheesy and I never used it in the book—but that’s the idea. He actually dies in the first sentence of the novel, and he is revived through an advanced form of nanotechnology. Internally, he has to learn to deal with the fact that he has lost some control within his own body and mind because of this presence within him. His smaller story is linked to the larger story of echelon’s loss of control of the shape of humanity. Both need to come to terms with that, but in the end— no, I won’t tell you that.
SF: No, don’t spoil the ending. That would be a bad thing.
JC: (Laughing devilishly)
SF: You were on a panel yesterday (at Comic Con International) and you called your book spy-fi, mixing SF and thriller. I must confess some ignorance here: is this a newly developing genre?
JC: I don’t know. I have never seen another one.
SF: You’re the founder.
JC: I doubt that! I think there’s a big place for it because the technology we have currently allows for great “what ifs” in the near future, and the shape of our political world allows for a lot of very juicy and emotional content as far as the standard, spy-thriller genre.
SF: I think there’s some precedence for it in television. Alias had a lot of science fiction and fantasy elements in it.
JC: I’m a big fan of Alias. I come at this from having varied influences. I’m a big science fiction fan. I really like the larger, political SF stuff, like the Dune series, that creates this huge world and these interlacing struggles within it. I like a lot of Orson Scott Card’s stuff. Even William Gibson’s stuff, that is less political, but more social commentary. I’m really interested, on the Gibson side, in how technology effects individuals. And that’s what I looked at in how this nanotechnology effects Ryan Lang personally. What is it like to have this within you? Not so much how it works, because who can say how it ends up working, but what would it be like to have this experience?
I’m a big spy-thriller fan as well. Ludlum, Frederick Forsythe, John le Carre, are guys I read constantly. When it came time to write my own book, this is the idea that immediately came to mind. It will be interesting to see if people are willing to read a cross-genre piece. I can talk very comfortably here with all the SF guys, and I was just at Thrillerfest in Arizona, and I can talk comfortably there as well.
SF: There are more and more books now that are mixing genres. Maybe it’s a result of our postmodern culture where everything is mixed anyway, but I think there is less resistance to that than there used to be. Often time, people are reading science fiction without realizing they are reading science fiction.
JC: And it’s such a fine line now. Because of the speed at which our technology is advancing, who can say what’s science fiction and what is stuff that just hasn’t come out yet?
SF: Microsoft has something, they just haven’t released it.
JC: Right. It’s amazing the kind of things we are working on right now, in terms of hardware and software and larger theoretical ideas about the shape of the universe itself and our existence within it. But the reason I picked this story over other stories for my novel is I felt strongly that this was a great character and a fantastic, gripping story to force him through. It kept me up at nights thinking about, so I figured this was the one I should get down on paper.
SF: It’s that one that won’t let you go.
JC: And you’ve got to love it. I don’t think I had any idea how much time I would be spending with these characters, both with Ryan and there’s a very strong female character in the story, Sarah Peters. They are part of the family at this point, especially now that I’m writing the sequel, which they’re both in.
SF: We mentioned Alias earlier. I did notice that Sarah was recruited from college.
JC: All of that was developed before I had really seen Alias, but it is very similar. There were a couple mentions of echelon within Alias and I thought my book was going to be moot. But, they never did (go there). I think there are some similarities between Sarah and the Sydney Bristow character, and there are a lot of differences. (Sarah) is more of a data geek. She’s more on the quantitative side, or at least starts out more as a nerd than Sydney did. Sydney was much more active.
SF: She was a kick-ass chick.
JC: Exactly. Sarah becomes a kick-ass chick, and her character is very kick-ass. She is probably a stronger internal being than Ryan is, at least at the beginning. That said she’s not trained in field craft. Her deal is the analytical side of the echelon system.
SF: You were talking about this issue of self-identity and how the infusion of technology could change our perception of self. This is a little esoteric, but where do you see that going with spirituality, and sexuality, and who we are?
JC: Who can say? The fact is that we will soon be dealing with a lot more technology a lot closer to us. It’s not out of the realm of possibility. It’s not some far off thing. It’s coming and it’s coming quickly. Having our technology mesh more with our physical being, and with the way we think and interact with other people, will effect many people in different ways. I think there will be a lot of consternation about it, and there already is. You can see it in these online social networks like myspace. It’s a totally different means of communication which an older generation might not understand and certainly doesn’t feel comfortable with. Within myspace there are threats, and there are issues, and there are things to think about. That said it’s also the way millions of kids are communicating now. The evolution of communication is a very interesting thing.
Beyond that it’s very hard to say how we as humans are going to adapt in our physical being, in our mental state, based on the technology we have. But I do think we’ll adapt. I don’t think it’s going to be catastrophic. I think it will be fantastic and horrible and we will prevail somehow. I personally have a very optimistic view on that. I think that allowing people more freedom is inherently a good thing. It also offers people more distractions, which can be a way to not (see) the world around you so clearly. The thing I worry about is that technology comes with a price— literally a price tag. I’m hopeful we won’t end up creating two classes of people.
SF: The ultimate social division.
JC: Exactly, and I think we certainly will for a long time. There’s no way to get around it. We already do. We’re on computers all the time, we’re talking on cell phones, and that’s not feasible in many places of the world. So it does already exist. Hopefully as technology gets more advanced it will also get cheaper and cheaper. While everyone might not be on the cutting edge, the more involved everyone can be the better.
SF: So you would not necessarily say you are a believer in the technological singularity as prescribed by Vernor Vinge and others?
JC: My own belief is that it’s hard to get to a point where (technology) just immediately flips over into something totally different. Technology and human advancement moves quickly and it’s been moving more quickly than it has in the past, or at least it feels that way. But I think we’re very malleable as far as the environment around us and that we can adapt to whatever comes our way.
Now, that said, I’m not sure we’ll adapt well to it. But I think we can. I don’t see a singularity in the near future where from that point on it’s a totally different universe. I could be wrong, but I’m more on the prevail side. Some people will embrace these things and some people won’t, and there will be conflict using all these technologies, and hopefully we’ll just keep meddling through.
SF: As much as I love Vernor Vinge’s (work), I hope you’re right and he’s wrong.
JC: (laughing) Me too!
SF: Let’s talk about you a little bit. I was reading Echelon last night and noticed some things about your style. You have a very compelling style. I felt like it was pulling me from sentence to sentence, and you didn’t have any unnecessary words in there— it reminded me of Nick Sagan in that. I was wondering how your script writing career impacted your novel writing career.
JC: There are two things that impacted the way I write prose, and script writing is definitely one of them. Writing a script is really writing a blueprint, so there is no room for anything extraneous. Even when I’m writing prose and I feel like I’m being flowery, it is still so much more (sparse) than a lot of other peoples’ writing. It’s actually something I’ve worried about, that I had gone too far in that direction.
The things I like to read are often very sparse, especially in the nature of putting words into a sentence.
SF: The less is more idea.
JC: Exactly. I’m a big Hemmingway fan. I read a lot of work by an author named James Salter, and it’s a similar experience. Very spare, trying to make each word have a punch and drive you forward. People like Nick Sagan do that very well.
I love that coming out of the screenwriting world has given me a voice I wouldn’t have had before. It’s a really neat thing for me. It’s fun to see that your past really does have an effect on how you put the words on the page. I think it’s given me a style that’s a little more my own than had I not been a screenwriter.
SF: Well, it gives you a set of tools that a lot of great novelists haven’t experienced or exercised.
JC: A screenplay is all about dialogue. There’s a difference between literature dialogue and the way we actually speak and the way you feel comfortable hearing someone speak in a film. I like the idea that I can bring that gritty “here’s how people actually talk” sense to literature. Again, that’s not across the board. (Many) people do fantastic dialogue, but it’s something I think about a lot.
I tried to make the way (the characters) talk very comfortable. There’s a lot of humor in Echelon as well. Just to pull (readers) in and to get them caring about these people, you’ve got to create a full character. Even in the worst of times people can be funny. Often that tells you more about what they’re like than their fear. How well I did all this, who can say?
Often I think about (shoving) a character into an event and what’s the most obvious thing they would do, and what’s the opposite of that? And how might they go about doing that opposite?
SF: Did it take you a long time to come to your final manuscript? How many times did you rewrite?
JC: I do a lot of rewriting. I bang out pages on the first draft. I try to get it all out there, because I’m inherently uncomfortable that I don’t have the whole story until the final page is written. At least then I feel comfortable that I’ve got the story from beginning to end, and then the real work starts of going back through and honing it down. I go through a lot of drafts. Having a professional editor is an amazing experience. Betsy Mitchell at Del Rey was fantastic at helping me further hone that work. And the copy editor was fantastic at catching little logic issues.
SF: Did you have a contract before you started doing revising, or did you do all that work first?
JC: I wrote Echelon on speck. And I was probably right in that I didn’t think anyone would take me seriously with anything else. I have some experience as a screenwriter, but that doesn’t mean much as far as being able to write a book. Once the book was finished, that’s when it went out, and Del Rey picked it up very quickly.
SF: You didn’t flounder in writer purgatory for years.
JC: I’ve done a lot of floundering in Hollywood. When I finished the book I got an agent within weeks, and sold it weeks after that. It’s incredibly lucky. I totally hit the jackpot. The only thing that beats that is actually having the book come out. It’s a weird thing to go into the bookstore and to say, “Oh my God, they weren’t kidding! They really published it!” You definitely feel a little exposed having it out there and having people read it who you don’t know. It’s also really neat to have all these people involved in your inner life, basically.
SF: Writing in Hollywood, you’re not nearly as in the spotlight as you are with a novel. People look at the director and the actors and the producer. For the most part, the average fan doesn’t pay attention to the writer.
JC: Exactly. It’s a big difference. I won’t lie, it’s kind of fun to be the center of attention, not in the very back of the room. It’s also a little uncomfortable. There’s a lot of marketing that takes place, and you have to get used to the fact that it’s your name and your face going out there to the world. I don’t dislike it, but it’s a big switch. The cool thing is that it connects you with a whole bunch of people with similar interests. It’s fun to find people from around the world who have similar ideas or like what you like, or don’t like what you like but want to connect.
SF: We’ve talked about Hollywood a little bit, so why don’t you tell us exactly what you do in Hollywood.
JC: I’ve been a screenwriter and producer for almost ten years. I am the executive consultant on HBO’s series Rome, which is now in production of its second season. I also have a film in development at Fox, and a couple other projects around town. I’ve made my living as a screenwriter and producer, though not (many) of my projects have actually made it to the screen other than Rome.
SF: That’s the normal way of things.
JC: It is. It takes so long to get through the studio system that there are many writers like that. Not to say it’s a bad life. It’s a very nice life. But I got frustrated that all these projects I had written and put so much time into, even though they had financed my lifestyle, hadn’t come to fruition in any material way. I really wanted to see something from beginning to end that I could push. I became a producer to push my own writing because I was fed up with sitting around and waiting. Even that wasn’t enough control for me, I guess. That’s why I decided I wanted to write a book. I wanted to do something that was totally mine so when it’s done I can have some idea as to whether or not I really have talent in this creative endeavor. It’s been incredibly satisfying to do. I still do write screenplays, but novel writing is really my passion.
At this point my preference would be, if I could get someone to pay me to write a book on almost any topic, I’m in. I’ve got the sequel to Echelon coming up.
SF: When will that be out?
JC: I believe next summer. And from there I have a couple other books on deck, ready to go.
SF: What about the chances of Echelon being adapted?
JC: I don’t want to speak too soon, but there is a good chance. Things are moving along briskly, and we have some very big names interested. We’ll see what happens. The people who have reacted to it in L.A. are big shots, and people who can really make quality, great films. Hopefully the studio will bite.
SF: What writers have inspired you the most?
JC: As far as science fiction, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Orson Scott Card, Frank Herbert. The Dune series really inspired me as a kid. I still think it’s one of the most incredible creations in all of literature, creating that world and a very complex series of events.
And a lot of spy-thriller stuff. Ludlum, LeCarre, Forsythe, Robert Littell. As far as literature, Hemmingway, James Salter. I’ve been obsessed for awhile with a series of books about Africa by Bartle Bowl, about a safari guy who gets caught up in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia at the beginning of World War II. As you can see, I read a lot of different stuff from (many) genres. Maybe that’s why I didn’t think so much about a specific genre when I started writing (Echelon).
SF: Which is advantageous for you because you won’t be pigeonholed into a specific genre.
JC: I hope not, but anytime I can get paid to write I’m a happy man. I do have a lot of ideas in different arenas, and there’s not a huge difference from creating the Rome project to creating Echelon. They’re both the creation of a world, and you have to figure out a way to describe it so people can immediately fall into it and care about what goes on there. If it’s the past, the future, or the present you always have to do that.
SF: This is a question I ask everyone. I don’t know why I’m fascinated by this—
JC: My favorite cuss words? (laughing)
SF: No! We are not inside the actor’s studio. It’s about collaboration. If you could collaborate with anyone on a novel, who would it be?
JC: Wow. This is a tough one, because I have done a lot of collaboration in screenplays. It is a very tricky, difficult thing. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine collaborating on a book because it’s such a private event. It’s one thing to write a screenplay together. You’re writing a lot of dialogue, the description is small, it’s all about the plotting.
As far as a writer whom I would love to see how he comes up with stuff, I’d go with Hemmingway. Why not? But I don’t think he’d be that much fun to collaborate with. I think I would end up shooting him at the end of it! As far as people alive, someone like Orson Scott Card would be incredible. I’m a huge fan of his work. I love the way he combines these large political ideas into very personal stories. That’s something I try to do, and I hope I succeed in Echelon. It’s something I need to keep working on and I think he’s the master.
SF: Josh is there anything else you’d like to tell us?
JC: I don’t think so, other than I hope readers enjoy Echelon. I fashioned it to be a page-turning, exciting summer read. There are some larger ideas in there, but I think the character’s fun, the world is exciting, and I hope it’s a gripping story.
