SCI-fi Author Interview - JP Weaver

1. What inspired the world, characters, or core concepts of your story? Was it a particular event, piece of media, or a speculative scientific idea?

I took a lot of inspiration from a recent deployment. A lot of the character notes and how they interact in the beginning reflect what I observed. Also I combined that with listening to the Bobiverse on repeat at the beginning of the Pandemic. In the Bobiverse, the main character is just a regular IT guy uploaded into a von Neumann probes and he laments several times that he 'doesn't have a military mind' as he goes through a little cold war with an alien species. So yeah that was the beginning yarn.

I combined that big idea with the normal Military science fiction that seems very focused on tactical firefights and ship combat and I was like I would rather see something where the military focus wasn't just on war. There are space battles and they're as realistic as I think they would be, but a lot of it is the intelligence collection and the information gathering that I learned about while on the service. It makes sense for me that there would be some military reason for the space navy to be the beginning of humanity spreading to off world colonies mostly because of their budget.

2. How did you approach the creation of your main characters? Were they modeled after real-life figures, or did they evolve organically as you explored the world of your story?

    For the main characters, they have a flavor of people that I know. Jennifer in particular is drawn from a girl in my dungeons and dragons group, at least her mannerisms. Malcolm is a composite character of well I know like five Malcolms so say it's all of them out together and then something. Stevie and Erwin evolved organically as they have the fewest POVs, but both reflect characteristics of a lot of people I know. Stevie is a smart driven woman and you meet a ton of those in the military. Erwin is a child prodigy that got burned out and that's somehow more than a handful of people that I know growing up.

  3. Science fiction often delves into questions of ethics, technology, and humanity. What central theme or moral question does your story grapple with, and why did you feel it was essential to explore?

 It's about a lot of things. Handing over control to AI, and how we can be certain that AI has our best needs at heart. It's about uprooting humans and getting them to Mars, and laying down the ground work for what that would even look like. It's about the political problem of different nations trying to fight out who gets primacy in the stars. Also it's about North Korea, Hong Kong and China and how things could go. And through it all there's Malcolm and his small team trying to do some good for the world in their little corner.

4. How did you approach the integration of futuristic technology or scientific concepts in your story? Did you base them on existing theories or let your imagination run wild?

   So there's always the idea that you can hand wave something in science fiction and I based the upload machine off that as well as their near light travel engine. This is my best guess as to how we would travel to the stars- sending tester probes to check out things at near light speeds and report back, and using trans-human uploads(in the transhuman sense, not transgender). The rationalist community seems to think that humans would be able to upload themselves within the next 40 years but I don't know how that actually would work therefore, *gestures at the universe* magic.

The use of 3d printing and mining as a major game change is also something that I think is within the realm of possibility. Perhaps not as much as a grey swarm, but mining taking raw materials to a large modular 3d printer that can make anything by laying down atoms in the correct pattern? That seems doable. It seems power intensive and is the perfect thing for me to also do hand wavey scifi magic to.

Robots making more robots would make sense on this context. If it was someone who was bored and on their own, yeah they might clone themselves. I fixed this by making them already a group so it would make sense for them to clone another group. The Bob's all were very solitary, but my guys want their tribe.

5. The sci-fi genre provides a canvas to depict diverse cultures, species, and worlds. How have you incorporated representation and diversity in your work, and why do you think it's vital for the future of science fiction?

 Well Malcolm is second generation Ethiopian American. He was also a twice failed tech bro who then joined the Army after he got fed up. So he is quintessentially American with the added bonus that I want to try to weave in a bit more of this family dynamics in the forthcoming books. (I had just returned from a deployment to Djibouti, and the African culture of the tribe being first really was present and fore front in my mind.)

Similarly, Erwins parents are both Taiwanese immigrants to the United States, who both were professors. They pushed him hard in his youth and it wasn't until the start of the story that he begins to forgive them, and there's a chapter later on where a clone of Erwin visits them and they're... I tried to make it as true to what I expect it would be. There's some undertones of the Taiwanese versus Mainland China drama, updated in a way that I thought it would go. Also Erwins clone is the cultural guide when they go to Hong Kong.

I actually had a discussion with my writing group about how Jennifer would approach her ex wife as an uploaded AI. We were like what would they even do? So yes there is a space AI lesbian in there but no she doesn't get any mostly due to lack of hardware.

I had a long debate about if I wanted to include a transgender character as one of the core four AIs. Safe to say there will be one later on due to value drift(which is a special AI problem), but I felt like it was cheap to include a transgender character and then just allow them to make their avatar be whatever they wanted. I didn't know what I wanted to do with that so I didn't add that in this book. Now I have done a lot of research and yeah, you're going to see more of this.

I think that representation is vital to science fiction, but it has to be more than surface level. Malcolm might be all American but he is also read up on geek culture AND he knows how to sell goats to the other Ethiopians that all moved to Minnesota. I think scifi writers can benefit from a lot of cultural specifics and how they might change over time.

6. Every author has a unique writing process. Can you share a bit about yours? How do you manage world-building, plot progression, and character dynamics in such a complex genre?

 Unfortunately for me, I set down a hard timeline. Each chapter is a specific date or month from a characters log. So I had to go back and look at calendar dates(the attack that starts the main effort is on a particular date as is the four day) and really look into that. I did six drafts for this as it's my first book ever, and I spent a lot of time going back and forth with my writing group as to what worked for which characters and how they would react.

I did have a bit of a "is this character in their hero or queen arc" going on, and you'll see the difference between the characters in the beginning and the end. Each character and team has an arc(even a flat one), and if you'll believe me I had written this as three novels before my group made me split it into the parts that it is in now.

 7. What's next for you after SPSFC? Are there any upcoming projects you can share with us?

I'm working on the follow up novel as well as an in between novella for the Badger Company. I'm also always (chapters weekly) posting my regency romance novel x mist born x red wall novel serialized on royal road. If you like Bridgerton or Mistborn you'll like it though it's fantasy. That's free to read at https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/46687/red-mist and you can see other things I have written there as well.

The first 2/3rds of the sequel to The Badger Company "Embedded Agents" is up there as I work through the final act and how I want that to shake out. Link:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/70466/embedded-agents-chronicles-of-the-badger-company

It has a summary of the previous book written in first person from one of the characters which I think is a good thing for any writer to do.