Previous Interview by KC Heath - Originally published on Yet Another Book Review
Interview: Paul C. Chafe
KC: What country and province / state do you live in?
PAUL: Nova Scotia, Canada
KC: Tell us a little about yourself.
PAUL: Haha! I like cats more than dogs, chocolate more than coffee. I put my faith in science. I plan world conquest but I'm kind to small animals and children. What can I say? I'm a complex person.
KC: Cats, chocolate, science ... all good answers, but I'm open to a peek at the complex you: want to add anymore about "telling us about yourself"? -- That "world conquest" part is too good to pass up--mind expanding please?
PAUL: World conquest - I'm fascinated by the extremes of human behaviour. I have in my life all I could ask for, which is many important aspects more than even the crowned heads of Europe could dream of just a hundred years ago, and certainly more than 95 percent of the world has even today. Its easy to want more, but I can see a very sharp limit to the amount of fame and fortune that I could actually use to improve my life. The most important thing is the freedom to choose how I spend my time, and I already have that. So what drives a person past that point? Why did Napolean invade Russia when he could have stayed home with Josephine and ruled France - why did Hitler? How come executives with eight figures in the bank continue to put in eighty hour weeks until the heart attack hits? What did Bush and Blair expect to gain by railroading their countries into Iraq? In a position like that - even if you win the reward is materially irrelevant, but you won't win because the disaster is inevitable, if not sooner then later. You have to be tremendously disconnected from reality to imagine anything else - it's insane decision making. But its a special kind of insanity that humans are very prone to and that makes it interesting. In a literary sense, that kind of hubris makes for powerful characters and the ultimate failure of over-reaching ambition is a story told hundreds of times - Macbeth is my favourite version. So I list world conquest as goal partly because the psychology is fun to explore, and partly to remind myself of how wealthy I truly am in the things that money and power really can't buy.
KC: Do you write full time? If not, what is your day-job?
PAUL: I write about as much as I can write, which is certainly not full time. Other than that, I study computer engineering at Dalhousie University here in Halifax, and I'm an infantry officer in the Canadian Forces reserves.
KC: How long were you in the infantry and what kinds of tasks did you do while there? Any good stories you can share from that experience; something that relates, perhaps, to your writing in one way or another?
PAUL: I've been in the infantry reserves twelve years in total, mostly
as a platoon commander. Its often a demanding job, physically and mentally very
challenging, but also very rewarding. I get to do things that are simply
unavailable to most people - jump out of helicopters, fire machineguns and
anti-tank rockets, lead raids and attacks, that's a lot of fun. The single best
part of the job is seeing young men and women come in off the street and seeing
how quickly they gain self confidence and ability through the training, through
being a part of the team. In terms of relating to writing - the experience
certainly makes me aware of what is possible and what isn't in terms of human
capabilities under duress - both much more and much less than you might imagine.
I think that gives some depth and realism to my writing that I wouldn't
otherwise have.
KC: Computer Engineering? What do you like best about that?
PAUL: Computer engineering - an entirely different world from the infantry. I'm a naturally curious person and I love to discover how the world works and I love to create things. When I was little I used to take apart clocks and tape recorders and so on, and I could never get them together again. When I was nine my dad and I built an intercom set from Radio Shack, which was really fun but didn't show me how all these little widgets actually took your voice from A to B. So when I was ten I got an electronics kit for Christmas, and it came with two transistors and some other components and a book that explained how they worked in terms of water channels and gates. You worked through all the projects and the big one at the end was an AM radio. So I developed a bit of understanding of how all the parts worked, but I could only build what the book gave instructions for, and I wanted to learn enough that I could build whatever I wanted. When I was twelve I learned about computers, on a Nova II, which was a minicomputer the size of a fridge with 64K of main memory, sixty four thousand little magnetic donuts strung on wires by hand and a ten megabyte disk pack a foot across. It was worth about fifty thousand dollars back then, and the very kind director of the computer lab at the college dad worked at was willing to let a twelve year old play with his system, which amazes me even today. So I just kept learning and now I'm designing microchips at the IDLab here at Dalhousie. My latest is a silicon retina that has around twenty thousand transistors on it, I send the design to Taiwan and they etch the chip and send it back. And I look back at all those mangled clocks and its kind of neat to realize that I started there and ended up here.
KC: What got you into writing in the first place?
PAUL: Like most SF fans I always dreamed being a writer, and I wrote a lot for my own enjoyment. Larry Niven was always one of my favourites, and so when the Man/Kzin Wars came along I wrote my first real story, Prisoner of War, for that series. I sent it in to Larry, not even really expecting a response. To my surprise and delight he wrote back promptly and not only liked it but wanted to publish it. Writing is a lot more fun than any conventional career, so I've been doing it ever since.
KC: Tell us about your writing mentors. How did you meet them and how have they helped you?
PAUL: The first one of course is Larry Niven, who liked my first work enough to buy it - that was a tremendous boost. Selling your first story is almost unheard of, let alone selling it to a series as high profile as the Man/Kzin wars, so I was tremendously fortunate. I quickly wrote two more Kzin stories, imagining fame and fortune. They weren't written with the same care as the first and Larry was scathing. That was hard to take, but he was right of course, and that taught me to never let my standards down. At the time Donald Kingsbury was riding herd on the series for Baen, in charge of continuity and so on, and so that process put me in contact with him. He's an amazing writer and puts an incredible amount of work into the fine details of world creation - Courtship Rite is a bible on world creation. He was extremely generous with his time and advice, both on writing and also on how the publishing world works - I'd just call him up and we'd chat for an hour or two about this sort of thing. He still is in fact. At first I was in awe of that fact two writers of such stature would give a beginner the time of day, but I've since learned that this is just the way it is in science fiction. Its a very generous, inclusive community.
KC: What specific aspects of your past aid in your story-telling? Please give examples.
PAUL: Everything goes into the mix - obviously a military background combined with a scientific background is helpful for work like the Man/Kzin Wars, but I think the single most important factor in storytelling is a good imagination and an ability to express it. In my case both those things come from a childhood where books in general and SF in particular were an escape from the painful realities of a school system that I didn't fit into very well. I read voraciously and I was fortunate to have parents who were supportive of that. My mom started getting me Tom Swift books when I was eight, and it opened up a whole new world for me.
KC: You once told me that you had to write Mission Critical in only three weeks. How did that happen?
PAUL: Mission Critical - it was six weeks actually. The book is based on the game of the same name, which was the game of the year at the time. I was originally supposed to write the book for another game, but it never made it into production, so they switched my project. By the time all the juggling had been done and the contracts worked out and I'd flown down to talk to the game designers and get a feel for their world I had only six weeks to actually write the book. There is nothing so motivating as a deadline, let me tell you!
KC: Of all the books you have written, which one(s) is/are your favorite(s), and why?
PAUL: I like everything I've written for different reasons, but I'd have to say my best work is "Phantoms", which is a screenplay about a fighter pilot in the Vietnam war. It's a very powerful, high impact story. I think my best SF book is my current work-in-progress, Forge of War. It's got a strong plot line, dynamic characters and I really like the worlds it builds.
KC: Which of your characters do you identify with most? (&/or) What is it about you that brings certain character's to life?
PAUL: Whichever character I happen to be writing at the moment is the one I identify with most. I like to get right into a character's headspace and just let their actions flow from the motivations that dwell there. That gives them depth and it makes the plot respond to the characters, which makes for a better plot. Plus its half the fun of writing - to take on for a while the persona of the quiet man pushed to heroism, the hardened mercenary, the brilliant but unstable scientist or whoever, the edgy killer or whoever.
KC: What do you want to accomplish with your writing? What are your writing goals?
PAUL: The first goal is simply to tell good stories, to create a universe that other people want to participate in. Within that I like to put my viewpoint, my thoughts, my creativity out there for people to have a look at and consider. One of the best things about writing is seeing how much more people can get out of what you've created than you ever dreamed possible.
KC: Have you published outside the genre?
PAUL: I've written outside of SF, everything from technothrillers to romance, but none of that is yet published.
KC: Tell us about your next project.
PAUL: Currently I'm working on a major Man/Kzin war novel, Forge of Empire, which is about two hundred thousand words. It's largely set on Kzinhome itself and it goes deeper into the Patriarchy and Kzin social structure than anything yet written in the series. That should be done by Christmas. I'm also doing the background work for Exodus, my next project, the first of a trilogy about a colony ship on a ten thousand year voyage to Barnard's Star.
KC: Which web-sites can readers go to when they want to keep abreast of your work in the future?
PAUL: http://paulchafe.com
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