David Louis Edelman: Wiping the Slate Clean

The wonderful Rob H. Bedford interviews Infoquakeand MultiRealauthor David Louis Edelman for SFFWorld today.

Loved this bit on worldbuilding:

Science Fiction is a language of mirrors by which we (readers and writers) can compare and contrast our own society and its problems. This is clearly the case with the Jump 225 trilogy, so when you created this future history, how necessary do you feel it was to sort of destroy everything and restart?

Wiping the slate clean with an Armageddon scenario five hundred years before the events of Jump 225 was really just a narrative trick. It enabled me to focus on the things I wanted to focus on -- namely, software and business and sociology -- and conveniently ignore the things I didn’t want to talk about. AIs? Boom! They were destroyed in the Autonomous Revolt. Nuclear weapons? Boom! Used in the Revolt and then subsequently abandoned. Cloning and genetic engineering? Same thing.

It’s one of the things science fiction and fantasy do really well. If I had set the Jump 225 trilogy in today’s world, I would have gotten sidetracked by lots of issues that I just didn’t feel like dealing with. It’s funny, but I think setting the books in an imaginary world allowed me to get a tighter focus on the real world.

And this bit made me laugh:

If you could take any pre-existing fictional character and plunk them into the events of the Jump 225 trilogy, who would it be?

Dr. Strange. He’s a guy who hops dimensions all the time. He ought to know how to handle MultiReal.

But you should read it all, right?