{"id":4278,"date":"2015-08-01T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2015-08-01T16:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.e357.net\/beingernest\/?p=4278"},"modified":"2015-06-29T21:34:01","modified_gmt":"2015-06-30T01:34:01","slug":"sfrevu-ted-kosmatka-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/sfrevu-ted-kosmatka-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"SFRevu Ted Kosmatka Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ted-Kosmatka\"<\/a>SFRevu:<\/strong> In The Flicker Men<\/strong>, physicist Eric Argus winds up turning the Feynman double slit experiment into the mother of all Turing tests. The idea of poking at a quantum effect to see where the limits of observation are is pretty compelling. How did you come up with it, and where does the science<\/em> taper off and the fiction kick in?<\/p>\n

Ted Kosmatka: <\/strong>The mother of all Turing tests.\u00a0\u00a0I love that.\u00a0 That’s an\u00a0great way to think of it, actually, though I’d never drawn than connection until you just mentioned it.\u00a0\u00a0I can certainly see how the experiment could be interpreted that way.\u00a0 Testing humans, not computers.\u00a0 But\u00a0what are humans, if not thinking computers?\u00a0 I originally came up with the idea years ago when doing research on quantum mechanics.\u00a0 I was reading on the wave-particle duality of light, and the way in\u00a0which probability wave functions can be collapsed into existence through force of conscious observation.\u00a0 It seemed so incredibly counterintuitive\u00a0to me.\u00a0 Why\u00a0would it matter if something was observed\u00a0or not?\u00a0 That\u00a0got me thinking about\u00a0what the definition of “observer” might be.\u00a0 Shortly after that, I was reading about the famous two-slit experiment and–without\u00a0giving too much away here–an addendum to that experiment occurred to me.\u00a0\u00a0A kind of secondary experiment.\u00a0 At first I assumed\u00a0that\u00a0somebody else must have thought of the same other experiment, but when I researched it, I couldn’t find any indication that that particular experiment had been done.\u00a0\u00a0This frustrated me, because I really wanted to know what would happen.\u00a0 I wrote the story\u00a0because I couldn’t perform the experiment in real life.<\/p>\n

SFRevu:<\/strong> Science fiction is a reliably white collar medium, but your work stands out because it’s so clearly informed by the blue collar you\u2019ve worn under your lab coat. Do you think about the amphibian nature of your world view and its effect on your writing?<\/p>\n

Ted:<\/strong> I’ve often said that I wouldn’t know what to write about if not for all the jobs that I’ve had through the years.\u00a0 Without a job, I’m\u00a0kind of rudderless,\u00a0so employment has\u00a0always given me a direction in life, and has been\u00a0a\u00a0path to connecting\u00a0with people.\u00a0 Work can also help you understand yourself.\u00a0\u00a0If you’ve spent 16 hours cleaning out the bottom of a raw material bin in a steel mill, you’ve learned a little something about yourself.\u00a0 I’ve been a zookeeper, and a truck stop dishwasher, and a house painter, and chem\u00a0tech.\u00a0 I’ve run electron microscopes and shoveled\u00a0sinter\u00a0onto conveyer belts.\u00a0 It’s been a fascinating ride, and I wouldn’t trade any of it.\u00a0 I was writing the whole time, but I’ve only been publishing these last ten years or so.\u00a0\u00a0Working lots of different jobs is a great way to learn about the world.\u00a0 Writing is a great way to figure out how you feel about it.<\/p>\n

SFRevu:<\/strong> If you were to escape from a writer\u2019s workshop or convention (probably by quantum tunneling with a spork) with a few of your closest friends, who would you take with you?<\/p>\n

Ted:\u00a0<\/strong>Well, if I was escaping from a place like that, I’d be escaping with my best writer buddies, and since\u00a0there’s a\u00a0whole crew of us up in Seattle who hang out and watch Game of Thrones together,\u00a0I’d bring all of them along:\u00a0Jack Skillingstead, Nancy Kress, Ted Chiang, Patrick Swenson,\u00a0Mark Teppo. It wouldn’t be complete without a few out of town friends like Daryl Gregory, Michael Poore, and Mary-Tina Vrehas.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

SFRevu:<\/strong> We already know, thanks to your Locus interview, that you got hooked on sf because you were stuck in a hospital as a child. Where did your reading lead you after that, and what do you read now? (I expect you\u2019re going to say that you read scientific journals, which is fine, but what do you read for fun. Not that science isn\u2019t fun.)<\/p>\n

Ted: In all honesty, <\/strong>I read Bova’s Orion<\/strong> and Orson Scott Card’s A Planet Called Treason<\/strong> back to back, and I’m sometimes not sure which one I read first and which one I read second.\u00a0 That whole time period is a bit of a blur.\u00a0 But it’s really those two books that stand out in my mind.<\/p>\n

My childhood was filled with a lot of the\u00a0most popular science fiction novels of the 1980’s, but if I had to name my biggest influence, I’d say it came in the form of twin subscriptions to Asimov’s Magazine<\/em> and F&SF<\/em>.\u00a0 I devoured those magazines as fast as they came in, and they are what made me fall in love with short stories.\u00a0\u00a0I also read a lot of the Year’s Best collections.\u00a0 Certain stories really stayed with me, and I wasn’t particularly good at keeping track of the\u00a0title of the stories, or the names of the author, so it’s been a nice treat over the last two decades\u00a0to stumble across some of those same stories again and realize that they were written by\u00a0well-known\u00a0authors in the field.\u00a0\u00a0James Tiptree Jr. was one of those great rediscoveries.\u00a0 It was only about 8 years ago that I realized that some of my favorite childhood stories were written by that famous author.\u00a0\u00a0In high school,\u00a0I started reading a lot of Stephen King, and\u00a0Michal Crichton.\u00a0 I’m also a big fan of Barbara Kingsolver.<\/p>\n

SFRevu:<\/strong> For the past five years you\u2019ve worked as a \u201cvideo game writer\u201d at Valve Games, which sounds like a cross between script-writer and choose-your-own adventure novelist and a lot of fun. How did that happen, and what does a day of work look like? What are some of the projects you\u2019re proudest of?<\/p>\n

Ted:<\/strong> \u00a0I moved on from Valve recently, but working in the video game industry is a both challenging and a lot of fun.\u00a0 The best part of it is that you spend your days working in collaboration with smart, creative people who share a passion for storytelling.\u00a0 You\u00a0hit the nail on the head in a lot of ways when you called it a cross between script writer and choose-you-own-adventure.\u00a0 There\u00a0is definitely a little of both\u00a0of those things thrown in there.\u00a0 As a\u00a0video game writer, part of\u00a0your job is to be\u00a0flexible.\u00a0 I’d have to say the thing I’m proudest of at Valve\u00a0is my work on Dota 2.\u00a0 It’s a great game with something like 11 million monthly unique players right now, so it’s been a great privilege to be a part of that and watch it grow.<\/p>\n

SFRevu:<\/strong> Do you get enough of gaming at work, or do you play for fun?<\/p>\n

Ted:<\/strong> \u00a0I definitely play for fun.\u00a0 There have been many, many times where I’d work all day writing for Dota 2<\/strong>, and then come home at night, and then end up playing Dota 2<\/strong> before going to bed.<\/p>\n

SFRevu:<\/strong> I know you\u2019ve written a play from your experiences working in a steel mill, and I\u2019d d hate to drag your focus from sf, but have you ever considered writing a novel based in you work there? I\u2019d be interested in reading about anyone who went from sintering to scanning electron microscopes.<\/p>\n

Ted:<\/strong> \u00a0I’ve written a fair share of straight up literary fiction, mostly centered around my time at the mills, but those stories always seemed to want to be short fiction, rather than anything novel length.\u00a0 The only ideas I seem to get that feel big enough for a novel are my speculative ideas.\u00a0 My sci-fi thriller ideas.\u00a0 I can see maybe writing a science fiction\u00a0where the backstory of the main character is connected to the mills, but I suspect my novels will always have some speculative element to them.\u00a0 You never\u00a0know though.<\/p>\n

SFRevu:<\/strong> In Prophet of Bones<\/strong>, you created a young-earth that meshed with Creationist beliefs, but pulled the rug out from under them by facing the where did all this come from question scientifically anyway. In The Flickr Men<\/strong>, you do the same thing to a rational physicist who has to confront demons spawned from quantum physics. Who would you like to unsettle next?<\/p>\n

Ted:<\/strong> \u00a0I actually have a couple of different ideas that are\u00a0competing in my head right now.\u00a0 I write pretty much every day–either on my short fiction, or my next novel–\u00a0and I’m\u00a0really enjoying not having a deadline.\u00a0 I’m looking forward to seeing The Flicker Men on the bookshelves.<\/p>\n

SFRevu:<\/strong> So are we. Thanks Ted.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Reference \/ Links<\/strong><\/p>\n