Geosynchron (73 page)

I saw the same pattern over and over again. Handsome, charismatic
entrepreneur with a pot of money hires pudgy, nuts-and-bolts engineering guy to build this crazy idea he has. Enter cynical marketing
woman and slick sales guy to throw a coat of polish on top of it. The
half-baked idea is rushed into a half-assed product before the seed
money runs out, and then the juggling begins.

I really wanted to do something different, something that I had
never seen before. I wanted to write a science fiction book about the
workplace of the future that was really about the workplace of the
future. Too often in fiction, you see the workplace treated as a nice
jumping-off point for the inevitable gunfights and car chases and theatrical courtroom speeches. I wanted to find the inherent drama in
press releases, sales demos, and marketing meetings. I wanted to write
an exciting book about, as one critic sarcastically put it, "the office politics behind the creation of a PowerPoint presentation."

I had material. I had inspiration. I had a good head start. So what happened? Why am I just now finishing this fucker in late September
2009?

What happened was that some fundamentalist assholes decided to
slam a few planes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
I had literally just finished the first draft of Jump 225 the day before.
And when I sat down to reread it in the days that followed, I saw a
cutesy little satire about dot-coms that was meant to elicit lots of wry
chuckles. There were a zillion silly tech-sounding names and
acronyms, like L-PRACGs, the Defense and Wellness Council, and
ChaiQuoke; Quell was an old man who liked to smoke cigarettes;
Brone (then named Bill) got whacked during the Shortest Initiation;
and Natch had a plucky, long-suffering girlfriend named Ferris. Part
I-the part that became Infoquake-was titled "Randomly Generated
Pleasurable Startle 37b."

Imagine a cross between Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom and Jeff Noon's Vurt, except much, much suckier. (You can
read some of the early drafts on my Web site if you're feeling brave.)

In those days following 9/11, I started over. I began to ask myself the
same deeper questions the entire country was asking itself at that point.
Did our consumer culture lead us to this? Is capitalism really a vehicle
that can sustain humanity through the long run? Is this obsession with
advancing technology a healthy thing, and is it improving us as a species?
How do we judge if the species is improved, anyway? And so on.

As I rewrote, I discovered that I already had a perfect vehicle for
these speculations in the character of Natch-a person who embodies
simultaneously the best and worst impulses of the West, and possibly
of humanity itself. He's endlessly inventive, but he's shortsighted; he's
got boundless drive, but he's not sure where he's headed; he's got the
capacity to save the world, and he's got the capacity to destroy it. It's
really a classic novel setup. Take a deeply flawed antihero, put him on
the fence between the ultimate selfishness and the ultimate selflessness,
and see what he does.

I thought about Bill Gates, who (whatever you think of his Windows operating system) has saved tens of thousands of lives through his
Third World vaccination efforts.

I thought about Adolf Hitler, who chose to use his remarkable
gifts of oratory, strategy, and motivation to conquer a continent and
pointlessly slaughter millions.

As you surely noticed if you just finished reading the trilogy-and
if you don't mind an author divulging the structure behind his workNatch starts his journey at the beginning of Infoquake well down the
path towards ultimate selfishness, and he concludes by committing an
act of ultimate selflessness at the end of Geosynchron. Jara, meanwhile,
is engaged in a parallel journey in the opposite direction. She begins
the trilogy as someone who has completely lost her sense of self, and
by the end she's found her center and her self-worth.

It seemed to be a pretty serviceable structure. But for some reason,
it's thrown a lot of readers for a loop. Perhaps I should have signaled
early on in capital block letters that you really weren't supposed to
admire the way Natch threatens civilization to achieve number one on
Primo's. ("Natch cackled evilly as he released evil black code on the
Data Sea in an evil manner like the evil, evilly evildoer he was.") I sorta
assumed that my readers would get that I was writing a novel with a
flawed hero, someone you are supposed to feel ambivalent about by
design.

Instead, a number of people concluded that my trilogy was supposed to be a libertarian propaganda tract or a love letter to capitalism.
And we're not just talking about readers, but some critics and at least
one hard leftist author whom I very much admire. They gave up on the
trilogy in the opening chapters of Infoquake, because they felt they were
being preached to about the virtues of extreme selfishness. This to me
seems kind of like abandoning the original Star Wars trilogy before
Luke Skywalker hits the screen, because the first twenty minutes of the
movie glorify Darth Vader.

The truth of the matter is that I've never had a political or an economic agenda in these books. I never meant for Natch to be a heroic
emblem of capitalism standing tall against evil government bureaucracy, any more than I meant for him to be an example of a greedy capitalist pillaging and exploiting his fellow workers. I wanted the politics in these books to be credible, and I'm sure some of my biases slipped
in around the edges here and there. But the politics are definitely there
in service of the story and not the other way around. My own personal
views are all over the place and don't fall neatly in either the governmentalist or libertarian camps. As for economics? Truth be told, I can
look up the Laffer curve or Adam Smith's invisible hand on Wikipedia
as well as anyone, but that doesn't mean I've got any special insight
into the way money works.

(And allow me to confess that I haven't actually read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. I'm sorry, but jump 225 is not meant to be a
paean to John Galt. The only Ayn Rand I've read is Anthem, and that
was because-uh-Rush wrote a song about it. Hey, I really dug Rush
in junior high school, okay?)

So now that I've done one thing authors aren't supposed to do by
baldly revealing the structure underneath my book, I'll do something
else authors aren't supposed to do-science fiction authors, at leastand say that I have no immediate plans to continue writing in the
Jump 225 universe. I won't say never, because one of these days
someone might actually pay me a big chunk of money to write more
Jump 225 novels, and I'm sorry to drizzle motor oil all over your
romantic ideals, but I am capable of being swayed by money. Truth is,
I've had twelve years to play around in this sandbox, and I'm ready to
find another one.

Regrets? I have a few. I regret that Quell called Benyamin "boy"
during a conversation in Infoquake. I regret that it took me until the
middle of MultiReal to figure out what the Autonomous Minds were
up to, though I knew all along that they were still out there. I regret that I had to chop out several chapters' worth of Quell/Margaret Surina
backstory from Geosynchron because it was sucking energy and focus out
of the rest of the book. I regret that I had to take out the scene of
Horvil jumping off a (virtual) cliff, and I regret that I never found the
right place to stick in a reference to TF/EAG-PERN (Task Force for
Eliminating Acronyms in Government and Providing Easily Remembered Names).

But overall, I have to say that I'm very proud of Infoquake, MultiReal, and Geosynchron. They're very carefully structured and very carefully written, even if I have shaded the prose a bit too purple for some
tastes. In fact, I bet that if you picked up Infoquake and started the
whole trilogy again from the beginning, you'd see a whole bunch of
stuff you didn't see on the first go-around.

Ready? I'll start you off.

Natch was impatient....

-David Louis Edelman

Reston, VA
September 30, 2009

The author would like to thank the following individuals for their editorial contributions to this book: Lou Anders, Cindy Blank-Edelman,
Jerome Edelman, and Deanna Hoak.

For their contributions in publicizing and promoting his work, the
author would like to thank: John Joseph Adams, Charlie Jane Anders,
Lou Anders, Jon Armstrong, Rob Bedford, Joshua Bilmes, Carrie
Blakeway, Darrell and Marsha Blakeway, Cindy and David BlankEdelman, Bruce Bortz, Tobias Buckell, Colleen Cahill, Paul Cornell,
Ellen Datlow, the other bloggers at DeepGenre, Michael de Gennaro,
Thomas Doyle, Jerome and Barbara Edelman, Deborah and Steve
Edelman-Blank, Kate Elliott, Shaun Farrell, Nat Forgotson, JP Frantz
and John DeNardo at SFSignal, Jim Freund, Matthew Jarpe, Jackie
Kessler, Mindy Klasky, Mary Robinette Kowal, George Krieger, the
folks at LibraryThing, Joseph Mallozzi, George Mann and the folks at
Solaris Books, Philip and Erinn Mansour, Stephan Martiniere, Jill
Maxick, Karen Wester Newton, John Picacio, Cat Rambo, Daniel
Regard, Suzanne Rosin, Nick Sagan, Rob Sawyer, John Scalzi, Tom
Schaad and the folks at Fast Forward, the other authors at SFNovel-
ists.com, Patrick St-Denis, Meghan Still, Evo Terra, Peter Watts,
Eleanor Weis, David J. Williams, and Sean Williams.

A special thank you to everyone at Pyr, especially Lou Anders, Jill
Maxick, Jackie Cooke, and Chris Kramer.

Thanks to Sophie and Oscar for keeping the back of my neck warm
while I write.

Final thanks go to Victoria Blakeway Edelman, who has suffered
through my obsession with this trilogy since our first date. Not only
has she listened to me angst about the books at all hours of the night for close to a decade, but she grew the two most wonderful children in
the history of children, Abigail Blakeway Edelman and Benjamin
Blakeway Edelman, in the process. And how did I repay her? I went
ahead and put Ferris into this book after all (though to be fair, it's a
different Ferris).

DAV I D LO U I S E D ELM A N is a Web designer, programmer,
and blogger. He lives with his wife, Victoria, and their two children
near Washington, DC.

His first novel, Infoquake, was nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel. Barnes & Noble called the book
"the love child of Donald Trump and Vernor Vinge" and named it the
Top SF Novel of 2006. His second novel, MultiReal, was named one of
the top SF novels of 2008 by Gawker Media's popular Web site io9 and
Pat's Fantasy Hotlist, among others. His short fiction has also appeared
in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two.

Mr. Edelman was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1971 and
grew up in Orange County, California. He received a BA in creative
writing and journalism from Johns Hopkins University in 1993.

HOW TO CONTACT THE AUTHOR

E-mail: [email protected]

Web site: http://www.davidlouisedelman.com

On Facebook: http://facebook.com/davidlouisedelman

On GoodReads: http://www.goodreads.com/profile/davidlouis
edelman

On LibraryThing: http://www.librarything.com/profile/davidlouis
edelman

On Livejournal: http://david-l-edelman.livejournal.com

On MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/davidlouisedelman

On Twitter: http://twitter.com/davidledelman

*For a more detailed synopsis of the events of Infoquake and MultiReal, books 1
and 2 of the jump 225 trilogy, see appendix A.