SPSFC3 Interview- Jake Theriault

SPSFC 3 Author Questions

*Please answer the questions in this document and send as a word document to matthewolney@msolneyauthor.com Also include a headshot and book cover image*

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?

It’s difficult to point to one specific thing that inspired The Hollow Sun, but there were certainly a whole mess of worlds I put into my worldbuilding blender to make the Hollow Sun smoothie. The biggest structural influences were probably Die Hard and The Empire Strikes Back, but then texturally I was pulling from all sorts of stuff: The Expanse, Firefly, Alien, 2001, Star Wars more broadly, Apollo 13, Sunshine, EVE: Online, Gravity, Interstellar, Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, Stargate; the art of Syd Mead, Roger Dean, Ralph Macquarrie, and Robert McCall; and if I’m honest, even a bit of Bill Watterson’s “Spaceman Spiff” strips from Calvin & Hobbes.

But my initial love for space stories comes from my grandfather, an aviation engineer at North American who worked in part on the design of the Saturn V.

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?

The initial version of The Hollow Sun (written almost a decade ago) was a feature length screenplay, and so when I began writing the story I was imagining how it would play out on screen. I knew the main characters would be the crew of whatever kind of hero ship I came up with, and to that end, as I was developing the world  of the screenplay I started looking at other fictional spaceship crews – namely those of Firefly’s Serenity, Alien’s Nostromo, and Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon. Then it was figuring out what roles I’d actually need to fill aboard the ship. I landed on a crew of six: Captain, Pilot, Comms Officer, Weapons Officer, and two Engineers. And I’d be lying if I said Alien didn’t further inform how I developed the characters. Ariel was certainly created in the style of Ripley, and my engineers are definitely versions of Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton. Star Wars too was a big influence on the characters. Max has shades of Han Solo, and Edward was 1000% Lando-lite in early drafts of the screenplay. In the 10 years since then though, I think the characters have grown into their own persons, and I’d like to think I’ve softened out the more derivative corners of their characterizations, but I’ll leave that to you to decide.  

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?

The screenplay version of The Hollow Sun was essentially the first bit of long-form fiction I’d ever written. I’d dabbled in creative writing before then, but had never written anything over 4,000-5,000 words. So, as I sat down the write this “big” story, I wanted to – as I’m sure all first-time writers do – “say something”, to prove I wasn’t just writing fluff. I’d recently read Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, and so I thought it might be interesting to write something climate-change adjacent, but set in space. I developed a disaster in which a terrestrial mining company began harvesting gasses from the Sun until it became catastrophically unstable, collapsed into a wormhole, and rendered the Earth uninhabitable. It was dumb, but I rolled with it for that first draft.

But then as I began writing a second draft of the script, and then began slowly prose-ifying it into the novel version it is today, I began leaning harder into The Hollow Sun as a “hard” sci-fi story, and so a lot of plot details needed to change. The disaster of the out-of-control mining corporation collapsing the Sun was quickly written out and changed to a warp-drive test gone wrong – one that didn’t wholly collapse the Sun but instead left a little warp-bubble embedded in its surface. The environmental themes took a backseat to broader criticisms of unregulated industrialization, and – in the cases of specific characters – vengeance and the danger of lies. If there’s a central theme amidst all that, it would be about how despite out best intentions, we can easily become complicit in the crimes of powerful industries. I think that last bit is the most important point I could make today, given the state of just how few companies and business leaders basically own the global market.

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?

Yeah, so dovetailing off the early story idea of the Sun collapsing into a wormhole – the wormhole that plot point generated was key enough to the plot as a whole that I couldn’t wholly throw it out when I began rewriting the story; so I spent a lot of time sifting through contemporary theories of warp travel, to see if I could incorporate one of them into my story instead. I settled on the theory of the Alcubierre Drive, which gets around the problem of faster-than-light travel by expanding and contracting spacetime behind and before the ship upon which the drive is installed. I played a little fast and loose with the theory, deciding that as long as we were playing around with physics, maybe if the drive failed – or rather succeeded in the wrong way – maybe it could form a permeant fold in spacetime that people could navigate for years after. That’s the biggest bit of imaginative thinking in the whole story. Apart from that, everything else is fairly standard genre fare.

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?

I think there’s certainly folks out there much more qualified to speak on this than me (your friendly, neighborhood, interchangeable white dude), but for my part I’ve always just tried to write my characters as real people; and since real people lives all sort of lives, come from all sort of places, and exist as wholly different people from one another, it would be disingenuous for me not to represent the widest swath of humanity possible in my writing whenever I can. Sci-fi especially is, by its very nature, looking toward the future, and I certain find myself leaning more toward the writing of Roddenberry-esque futures, where the conflict within them stems not from superficial differences between individual people, but from grander issues like the collapse of our ecosystem or the runaway growth of unethical corporations. What good is any vision of a grander future if we exclude certain people from it?

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?

I’m certainly still at the point in my writing journey where I feel like a bit of a poser any time I talk about my actual process (I only published my debut mere days before the SPSFC deadline after almost two years of unsuccessfully querying it to agents), but I’ll see if I can’t outline something at least sort of professional sounding.

First things first is always the outline. I’ve tried writing without them before, and it has been – in almost every case – a colossal waste of mental energy. Going into the writing with the structure already locked (or locked enough for a first draft) is leaps and bounds easier than just spilling text onto the page and hoping I can mould it into something down the road. Along with the outline I’ll often write up the one page treatment of the whole narrative and begin populating a story Bible with key elements I know I’ll need to keep track of. For The Hollow Sun this was all sorts of stuff, from outlining the governments of the solar system, seeing what megacorps fell under what government’s provenance, and even ship naming taxonomies based on each ship’s planet of origin.

Once I’ve got all that, then I can finally sit down and begin writing the actually story. But because I come from a background in screenwriting rather than traditional prose, I’ll often hammer out dialogue first (sometimes even in screenplay format), and then string all that dialogue together once I feel like I’ve got the flow of the scene.  

Then it’s just a matter of soldiering on until I have a first draft done. I usually edit a bit as I go, not anything huge unless I stumble across some monumental story issue that wasn’t present in the outline, but adjusting and revising small beats or bits of characterization as I discover who the characters are.

And then I’ll hand off my manuscript to my editor and we’ll work through it to make it the best version it can be. My editor, Cat Stewart, rocks. We’ve worked together on two projects now – The Hollow Sun and a novella titled A Slow Ship to Oblivion – and have recently begun working through my second novel. Cat’s work on my stories always makes them so much better than I ever thought they could be.

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

Well as I mentioned a second ago, I’ve got The Hollow Sun and A Slow Ship to Oblivion out right now, and we’re working on edits for an indirect sequel to The Hollow Sun. But I’ve got two other novels in the hopper, both in their own original universes. Neither is very close to being done, but I’m excited by how they’re progressing. I also recently completed a feature-length screenplay I’ve been passing around some indie producer friends of mine, but maybe that too will turn into a book somewhere down the road. All that’s really on the horizon now is just waiting to see how The Hollow Sun fares in SPSFC3!