Nerd Daily contributor Carolyn Percy sat down with Drew Williams, debut author of The Stars Now Unclaimed. The pair discuss his new book, writing, and more!
Drew Williams has been a bookseller in Birmingham, Alabama since he was sixteen years old, when he got the job because he came in looking for work on a day when someone else had just quit. Outside of arguing with his coworkers about whether Moby dink is brilliant (nope) or terrible (that one), his favourite part of the job is discovering new authors and sharing them with his customers. Drew is the author of The Universe After series, including The Stars Now Unclaimed.
What was the original seed of inspiration that led to the idea for The Stars Now Unclaimed?
There are two answers to this one: the basic structural one, and the exciting, ‘now that’s how you’re supposed to start a book!’ one. We’ll get the boring bit out of the way first: like God (because I’m humble that way), I started with the universe. Very specifically, with the idea of a sort of post-apocalyptic space opera universe. I wanted the broadest possible canvas to work with. It’d be someplace where I could have lasers and spaceships and sentient machines in one chapter, then desperate knife fights between scavenging survivors in the next.
The second—and far more interesting—answer comes from ‘how does that universe happen’? And the answer to that one, like most things, was always ‘because someone made it happen’. This was someone’s choice; whether they knew the ramifications of that choice or not, it was still something they had let loose. I’m mildly obsessed with Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb as a concept. It’s a moment that defines our history very cleanly into ‘before’ and ‘after’. I’d always heard, anecdotally, that there was a collection of scientists working on the Manhattan Project who thought there was a not-statistically insignificant chance that the bomb wouldn’t stop. It might just go on, start an uncontrollable chain reaction of incinerating and consuming until the entire atmosphere of the Earth was burnt away by atomic fire. The end of all life. And they tested the bomb anyway; decided the risk was worth the ‘reward’.
I created the universe of The Stars Now Unclaimed to give me somewhere to play. But, the narrative came from that seed: a single moment, designed to win a war, that consumed everything instead.
How challenging was it to come up with and create the different alien races in the book?
Descriptive writing has never been my favourite part of the process. Ask my editor, who might be the only member of her profession usually demanding her author add more words, rather than cut. I like the idea of sketching a character or a moment, and letting the reader fill out the rest in their head. So following that philosophy for the different species of aliens, I tried to fix a single concept in my mind—these are the plant aliens! These are the canine aliens! These are the big strong aliens!—and get that sketch into place. If I could get that basic precis across to the reader, then hopefully they’d fill out the rest themselves, making it their universe as much as mine.
More interesting—to me, anyway—was then trying to decide the differences between them and us, and not just the physical ones. What separated their homeworlds, their culture, their history, from humanity’s? What parts of our evolution—socially, mechanically, biologically—could be considered ‘necessary’ for every species that reached the stars, and where might they have differed? That was the stuff that kept me staring into space and mumbling to myself when I was supposed to be doing something else entirely!
Action sequences and fight scenes are things that can be incredibly difficult to get right. However, yours flow incredibly smoothly whilst still managing to convey the frenetic nature of fighting. Do you have any advice or tips for those who find crafting action sequences difficult?
I should preface this answer by saying I’m squirming in ‘aw-shucks’ gratitude from the premise that my actions sequences do all of that. So, I’m going to phrase this reply like I’m talking about good action sequences in general, not just my own. My Southerner’s deep-seated need to downplay any praise won’t let me approach the question in any other way. Also: thank you!
I think all good action sequences—with the necessary caveat, of course, that what makes an action sequence ‘good’ will differ from reader to reader—have exactly one thing in common. Whether it’s the book-long rampage in To The White Sea or the bone-jarringly sudden bursts of violence in the oeuvre of Cormac McCarthy: they all relate back to the character. A simple mechanical description of how a fight plays out serves little purpose in and of itself, no matter how intricately you’ve worked out that choreography in your head. Selling can be exceedingly difficult in a novel anyway, since finding the balance of ‘laying out the combatants and their relationship in a space so the reader can understand what’s happening’ can plow right into ‘getting to the point of the sequence’.
What really matters, I’d say, is the effect that sequence is having on your character: are they desperate? Cucumber-cool? Terrified? Do they enjoy what they’re doing, even if it’s horrible and cruel? How does this moment of violence change this character? And even if the answer to that last one is ‘it doesn’t, this is just what they do’, that’s relevant information to the reader—far more relevant than a physical description of a weapon firing or a fist breaking on a jaw.
Nick Harkaway wrote one of my single favourite fight scenes in The Gone Away World: a paragraph (a long paragraph) of kung-fu mastery that was his character’s last stand against the injustice and incivility of the world closing in around him. Harkaway does more work in that paragraph to tell me who that character is than most writers can with pages upon pages of dialog. It also happens to be a bonkers-fun action sequence that involves Tupperware.
I know it’s a little like asking to play favourites, but is there a particular character you’re particularly fond of? Did your attitude to any of them change over the course of the novel?
I’m going to cheat on this one a little, because my favourite character is most definitely Esa. As far as I’m concerned, this is really her story. Everyone else—even Jane, the point-of-view character and nominal protagonist—are really secondary to her.
‘Favourite’, though, is maybe less interesting to talk about than ‘favourite to write’, which was most definitely Scheherazade, and was from the jump. I have no idea what possessed me to give a spaceship bristling with dangerous weaponry—a bleeding-edge killing machine capable of taking on any situation and surviving—the personality of somebody’s favourite neurotic aunt. Particularly, the kind who laughs at her own jokes and cannot abide a messy kitchen and gave you your real birds and the bees education by turning a blind eye to the fact that you were covertly perusing her erotica. But… it did, and I couldn’t have been happier about that fact. Schaz makes me laugh, and I rarely see her next line coming, and that absolutely makes her my favourite character to write for.
Do you have a favourite set piece from the novel?
In terms of action set-pieces, ‘Jane alone on the skyscraper with the rifle’ is a standout for me. It’s really the first sequence in almost the entire novel (in fact, I think she comments on this in her internal monologue) where she got to be alone. She wasn’t surrounded by the other characters with their needs and ideas and definitions of who she is or who she’s supposed to be clamouring for her attention. She gets to do what she does best: fight against impossible odds by making one desperate call after another, doing everything she can to save lives—by ending those on the other side of her scope.
In terms of ‘emotional set-pieces’, though: it’s the end of act three that kills me, and that I’m proudest of—the conversation between Jane, Esa, and the Preacher about the decisions the two adults both made in the past that have led to that specific moment in time. It kills me, every time I re-read it—because I never saw it coming. I did not know that was how that sequence was going to play out—that it was coming at all until it started happening. I’ve had readers tell me ‘yeah, that was a lovely scene… even if I did see it coming’ and all I can say is ‘I didn’t!’
What books, film, and television are you inspired by, sci-fi or otherwise?
Well, that’s a list I can’t even start to make, because I’ll inevitably leave something off, and also because your readers will just be scrolling forever! I’ll try and hit what, in my mind, are the ‘big three’ of Stars, though:
Star Wars – I mean, come on. A), I adore Star Wars, it’s easily my favourite media ‘property’ of all time, and B), if you’re writing space opera science fiction in the twenty-first century and you’re trying not to build off of Star Wars… that’s even more noticeable than just admitting you’re building off of Star Wars and going with it. George Lucas fundamentally changed not just science fiction, but how we approach narrative, with Star Wars.
Firefly – Again: come on. Grungier-than-normal space opera populated by quippy, always-outmatched characters with outsized personalities? I mean, I could try to lie, but I’m not going to. And even setting Firefly aside specifically, I owe Joss Whedon (and Aaron Sorkin) a very specific debt in how I structure dialog, for the lesson that letting characters try—and fail—to be witty is often more important than letting them succeed every single time.
Mass Effect – Leaving aside the conversation about whether or not video games are art (because they are, of course they are, you can not like art or not understand why others do and still admit that it is art). The grace and pathos which the scribes at BioWare bring to their worldbuilding in that series is astonishing to me. The idea that an ‘alien’ can be just as defined as how they’re not like their culture at large as how they are is a great one, and one that definitely had an outsized influence on Stars.
What else are you inspired by?
Music! I don’t actually listen to music while I write, because if I do, I wind up writing along in meter, if not in outright rhyme. True story: I once accidentally wrote a thousand-word confrontational sequence that could be sung, line-by-line and note-for-note. It was to the tune of ‘Nothing Else Matters’ by Metallica, which is where I learned that particular lesson.
But the actual act of writing is only a small part of building a story; most of that heavy lifting gets done in my head whilst I’m doing yard-work or walking the dog or making dinner, and all of that is soundtracked by the music I’ve got playing. Again, making a full list of all the songs that inspired Stars would take forever and a day. I can say with utter confidence that it would be an entirely different novel (most likely a significantly lesser one) without a specific pair of albums: The National’s ‘Trouble Will Find Me’ and Dessa’s ‘Parts of Speech’.
Did bookselling prepare you in any way for writing a book of your own?
Absolutely, in large part by broadening the horizons of what I read. When I started working in a bookshop at sixteen, I pretty much had a sixteen-year old’s taste, which ran heavily to fantasy and sci-fi to the exclusion of almost everything else. There’s nothing wrong with those genres (obviously!) but I think there’s something to be said for at least trying to find value in other types of stories beyond that which you’re comfortable reading (and I’d say the same thing to someone who doesn’t read SFF).
Working in a bookstore expanded my scope for what a book could do beyond anything I ever might have imagined: how to jump from J. K. Rowling to Alexandre Dumas to Anne Patchett to Stephen King to Haruki Murakami to Tana French. Along with how to find an equal amount of value in each one is something I never would have learned without the constant exposure to both customers and co-workers constantly arguing the merits of their favourite (and least favourite!) writers.
And especially as a writer—if all you read is ‘your’ genre, your work is just going to wind up sounding like every other work in your genre. That’s true no matter if you’re writing space opera, family-drama ‘literary’ fiction, or niche-market speciality erotica. It’s ‘your’ story, but our characters’ voices are influenced by how we think, and how we think is directly influenced by the stories we consume.
Technology’s role in warfare is a big part of The Stars Now Unclaimed, as it is what leads to the creation of the Pulse. What is your view on the current state of technology? Is its progression outstripping our ability to wield it responsibly or do you think there’s some hope?
Before this gets too grim: of course there’s hope. Of course there is. There has to be; without it, there’d be no reason for anything. We, as humanity, have spent the last several thousand years (at least!) bettering ourselves. In the long run, I have to believe we’ll continue to do so. In a very real way, I’d say that’s the theme not just of The Stars Now Unclaimed, but of The Universe After as a whole: ‘so long as parents struggle to not pass on their own sins to their children, the universe can get better’.
That being said: my major technological bugbear is less some scary-advanced form of weaponry, and more ‘the Internet’. To put it simply—we weren’t ready. We weren’t prepared for what the stew of anonymity, depersonalization, and ease-of-use would do to us. Nobody saw the more horrible corners of the Internet—and the way they’d leak out and infect the rest of our culture—coming. And I don’t know that we could have. Did I purposefully echo the sectarian divisions and echo chambers of the modern Internet with The Stars Now Unclaimed’s ‘sect wars’? Well… no, I didn’t, I’m not that smart. But as Freud almost certainly never said: ‘the subconscious wants what the subconscious wants’.
So the question with the Internet now becomes: what do we do about it? We invented the nuclear bomb and learned to restrain ourselves from its further use; we invented the factory and learned how to form societies no longer entirely based on agrarian necessities; we invented fire and learned how to not burn our eyebrows off. What do we do about the caustic side-effects of the Internet? What do we learn now? Because by and large, the Internet should be a tool for good, and it can be. However, ignoring the harm it’s doing to our social fabric, to our cultural discourse, by pointing to those gains and saying ‘it balances’ is a poor equation, because we should always want to make something better. ‘Just barely more than zero sum’ isn’t good enough, not nearly, not if there’s even a sliver of hope—there’s that word again—to do more.
Okay; soapbox moment done.
Do you have a particular writing routine?
I wake up, have a coffee and a cigarette (don’t start smoking, kids, and really don’t start smoking at thirteen; you’ll never, ever quit), and then I write. Dive right in. I write chronologically—oh, I’ll jot down notes and ideas and slips of dialog that I know are coming, but the vast majority of my writing is done based on the preceding sentence and nothing else. I just pick up where I left off the previous day and try to get at least fifteen hundred words done, even if it takes me hours on end. They may not be, you know, useful words, but at least when I hit that target first thing in the morning, I get to tell myself they were. I can then spend the rest of my day feeling like I’ve accomplished something, and everything else is a bonus.
At night, I edit for the same reason. I’m usually editing an entirely different manuscript than what I worked on in the morning. I don’t tend to touch a rough draft until it’s finished, outside of looking backwards for reference. Usually I also want as much time between the two types of work as I can, so one manuscript doesn’t start to unduly influence the other. Plus I get to close out my day feeling ‘useful’.
Can you give any hints as to what we can expect in subsequent instalments?
I’ll just say this: the best sequels, to me, don’t just build upon what came before—they subvert it, too. And that is all I’ll say about that. Partially because my editor will murder me if I say more. But partially because I don’t want your readers to build one idea in their heads and have me turn around and do something that’s different entirely from what they were expecting!
The Stars Now Unclaimed is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
