Interview Published on Smashwords

This is a short interview that was published today on Smashwords.  You can find it at https://www.smashwords.com/interview/jackwilder1957.

 

Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?

              

Barely. It was in the 5th grade. That would be the fall of 1967. I don't remember if it even had a title. It was about a trip to the Moon, in a rocketship of the type you'd expect to see in a George Pal movie. And I imagine it was very badly written. I remember my classmates didn't like it and thought the whole idea was silly. "Nobody will ever go to the Moon. It's impossible." I thought my classmates were lacking imagination. I was right. Two years later Neil Armstrong was walking on the Moon, and I was building models of the Apollo spaceship and the lunar lander.

              

Do you remember the first story you ever read, and the impact it had on you?

              

I don't remember the first story I ever read, but I do remember the first science fiction story I read. That was The Runaway Robot by Lester del Rey. (To be accurate, it was ghost written by Paul W. Fairman using an outline by Lester del Rey, and published in 1965.) I got it through the Scholastic Book Club in 1966. I was in the 4th grade. I had read other stories before that: Charlotte's Web and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but I didn't get it. The stories were confusing to me at the time. I guess having dyslexia and ADD (which I wasn't diagnosed with until I was 55) had something to do with that. But The Runaway Robot was different. It captured my imagination, unlike more mundane stories, and made me think. "What is a domestic robot?" "What about this place Ganymede? What would it be like to live there and how would I get there?" That started something new for me. Of course, I had seen some old classic sci fi movies on a black and white TV, I had seen Lost in Space which came out when I was in the 3rd grade, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, a few 1950s' alien invasion movies, some classic George Pal movies, and Mysterious Island and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a couple of classic Disney movies based Jules Verne's stories. Star Trek had just hit TV when I was in the 4th grade, but I didn't pay any attention to it at the time. But literary science fiction was something entirely new for me. It kind of grabbed me. After The Runaway Robot, I read another book under del Rey's byline and ghost written by Fairman, Tunnel Through Time, which I got from the Scholastic Book Club in 1966. Then there was Theodore Sturgeon's 1961 novel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which I found in my parents' stash of paperback novels. In the summer of 1967 at a supermarket in Albuquerque I found Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter by Isaac Asimov, who was writing under the pen name Paul French. I don't know how many times I read that book in 67. Then later that year I found Dave Van Arnam's 1967 novel Lost in Space in a bookstore in Yuma, Arizona. By that time I had started watching Star Trek, a late bloomer, I suppose, but del Rey (Fairman), Sturgeon, Asimov, and Van Arnam had me hooked on literary science fiction.

What do you read for pleasure?

              

Right now I'm reading through Alexander Kent's series on Richard Bolitho, about the life of an officer in the British Navy during the American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. I also keep up with David Weber's Honor Harrington series, and I'm somewhere in the middle of Kevin J. Anderson's Saga of the Seven Suns. And then from time to time I dive into history, usually Roman history or the American Civil War, and into heavy duty theological texts, like God, Time, and Eternity by William Lane Craig. Theological questions about time, eternity, and justification, who-or-what-is-God, why does the universe exist, and what is the nature of the universe and reality (do we live in a holographic reality, and if so, why, and is there any real meaning to it all?), are things that deeply intrigue me...for the fun of it.

              

What is your e-reading device of choice?

              

For now, Kindle.

              

Describe your desk

              

In a word: cluttered. I once worked with someone, a neat-and-always-in-control type, who threatened to clear everything off my desk and trash it all, but sorry. That's my desk, not hers. My desk top goes through a life cycle. Every few months I clean it off. It quickly accumulates stuff, though.

              

You have graduate degrees in history and theology. How do these fields of study influence your writing?

A lot more than some people think. For example, I like to pick up on small details from history, say the frock coats worn by Union Army officers in the Civil War, and work those into my stories. There will be allusions to Roman history and Japanese history and culture. Bits and pieces of 1960's culture find their way into the stories. Monitors are a type of ship that hasn't been active in the US Navy since the early 1900's, but a type of monitor appears in my stories as a littoral space combat vessel. And the Imperator of the Commonwealth, Harry Truman? Of course, his name comes straight out of history. He's sort of an amalgamation of FDR, Winston Churchill, and (I hate to admit this, but it's true) Obi Wan Kenobi. Theological themes find their way into the stories also. One of the main characters in The Girl From the El Dorado Star System is Jewish and drops things from time to time that his rabbi says to him. Another character wonders what would have happened to him if he had never been born, a question he believes would stump a Zen Catholic rabbi. And there are questions about good and evil; what kind of god do the perpetrators of great evil believe in? Or do they believe in any god at all? A blind "prophet" does not foretell the future, but knows details about a hidden past he should not know at all, and can clearly see what needs to be done in the present, and so he speaks forth, speaking the will of Yah, the God of the Zen Catholic Communion. There are a lot of theological issues that appear throughout the story, sometimes in subtle ways: issues of conscience, idolatry, ethics, integrity, loyalty, honor, redemption, existence itself, and the will of God.

Who are your favite authors?

Jack McDevitt, J.R.R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov, David Weber, Alexander Kent, Steven Saylor (Rome Sub Rosa series), Colleen McCullough (Masters of Rome series), Robert Harris (Roman novels), Robert Heinlein, A. Bertram Chandler, Poul Anderson, Kevin J. Anderson, Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert, Terry Brooks, Dennis McKiernan, William Safire, Tom Clancy, Michael Shaara, Jeffrey Shaara,... Well, there's a few. And they're not all science fiction or fantasy writers, either.