Dark fiction author Scott Sigler was recently the Guest of Honour at Perth’s SwanCon 2010 and will be touring parts of Australia through April (Supanova in Brisbane). He graciously gave some of his precious time to talk to HorrorScope’s Craig Bezant about his latest novel, ‘Ancestor’, his podcasting journey, the formation of his own company and much, much more.
Because of Scott’s wonderful enthusiasm in his field, this interview was considerably lengthy to transcribe (it’s not a complaint, I am very grateful he was willing to speak for so long). Therefore, it will be split into two parts –
part two will be posted tomorrow, Tuesday 6 April 2010. Special thanks go to A Kovacs (Dark Overlord Media), Stephen Wroth (SwanCon Guest Liason), and Alexandra Barlow (Hodder Publicity Manager), and of course Mr Sigler, for arranging the interview.
Photo by Amy Davis Roth, taken from Scott's website.A little bit about the author: A Michigan native, Scott now lives in San Francisco with his wife and their two dogs. Scott's debut thriller ‘EarthCore’ was the world's first podcast-only novel, picking up 10,000 subscribers. His next podcast novel, Ancestor, drew 30, 000 listeners and saw 700,000 episodes downloaded by fans. Satellite network Sirius Satellite picked up the novel and made it their first serialised audiobook. To date, Scott's fans have downloaded over 3 million files of his fiction. You can find his work at:
http://www.scottsigler.comLet’s talk about your novel ‘Ancestor’. It’s gone through a huge range of publications, from podcast to PDF to small press (Dragon Moon Press) to major publisher print. Would you like to take us through that journey?Sure. It’s a book I’ve been working on for over ten years, since I started writing the first draft. It went through many iterations during the writing process. I started podcasting ‘EarthCore’ in 2005 (that was the first novel I podcast); when I finished ‘EarthCore’, I had ‘Ancestor’ already completed, so I podcast that as well. Then in 2007, we published ‘Ancestor’ with Dragon Moon Press, a small press in Canada. We put that out as a trade paperback available on Amazon, and part of the promotion was that we gave the whole book away as a PDF. We did a different layout would look good on the screen and we managed to put that into multiple feeds of multiple podcasts. The week before the book came out it had been downloaded 40,000 times. Of course every page on the PDF had ‘Click here to buy from Amazon’. I had a lot of fans helping to push for the book. So when it finally came out in print, it hit number two in Fiction on Amazon.com overall, behind only Harry Potter. And it was number one in Horror and number one in Sci-Fi.
So it had gone from giving that book away as a podcast to having it as an independent book, which did extremely well on Amazon. When it hit that level on Amazon, that got Crown Publishing [Random House] interested, and they came in and made a three book deal. Part of that deal was that they eventually wanted to re-publish ‘Ancestor’ and ‘EarthCore’. So now ‘Ancestor’ is finished and out in print [through Crown Publishing]. In the States it’s out June 22nd [2010]. It’s out in Australia first mostly because I’m here touring. So, yeah, now it’s gone from podcast novel to hardcover major thriller release.
Are you happy with the version out now? I know some parts and characters have been changed.Yeah, I’m pretty happy with it. It’s a working relationship with Crown. They’re trying to do things to make the book more commercial, you’re trying to do things to make the book more horror-oriented, nasty-oriented. So there’s some things that have changed in there. Some characters are gone who were there before; there’s new characters; some characters who died live, some who lived die. Largely it’s a very similar story, there’s just new twists and turns to get from the beginning to the end. I’m a lot happier with the overall writing, yeah.
What’s the best way to summarise the book (‘Ancestor’), for those who haven’t heard of it? It is an effort by a bio-technology company to produce a herd animal with human organs to solve the organ donor shortage which is a worldwide problem right now. Their efforts, if successful, would save millions of lives every year. But, this being a horror novel, things go horribly wrong, and instead of getting a 200-pound docile herd animal, they wind up with a 650-pound pack predator. And they’re on an island. So it winds up being a real summer blockbuster, popcorn movie-type novel. It’s pretty much a movie in a novel format.
Do you remember what first intrigued you about transplanting organs, or interspecies tissue transplantation (xenotransplantation)? I started reading about xenotransplantation and it was so utterly fascinating. On the one hand, it’s basic common sense that if you have two mammals, being able to take a heart out of a mammal that’s about the same size as us, technically that should work fine. And then you realise that when that organ is put into a human, the human’s own immune system attacks it. And so our immune system, as good as it is, is so automated that it will wind up killing the very person that it’s supposed to protect. So I started to read about that and that was fascinating to me. I then started to read about the efforts to take the gene that produces a certain protein/code from humans and put it into animals so that you could put a pig heart or a baboon heart into a person.
With further reading, you start to learn about viruses that are automatically in pig DNA that could produce a virus in a human for which a human would have no defence. If that virus adapts to infect a human, that could wind up being a real big pandemic. So all those things factored in – I knew there was a really good story there. And then as I started to research it further, it took a shift because with the genetic sequencing of people and of all mammals, realising we could digitise all this information, I found out there are machines that can literally print proteins or print DNA. So then this concept of sequencing the genome of all mammals, reverse-engineering that, so we get rid of all these unique bits and just take the bits that are common, you kind of wind up with the genome of the ancestor of all mammals. Which has been done now, by the way. Which is awesome. I first started writing about this in 2002 and in 2006, I think, some guys from the one of the University of California schools have conceptually done this. They have genetically, digitally sequenced the genome of the ancestor of all mammals.
So I just took the story to another level. Now we can print this DNA and go through a relatively common cloning process. Enucleate a cow egg, insert the new DNA into the cow egg, fuse it, put it in the cow and let it develop naturally. Then we could get the first generation of these animals. They tailored the animals to be organ donors and technically everything should have worked okay. So what interested me was that it started out very small and then the concept research started to take the story into all these different directions until I got what we have now.
You have put a huge amount of scientific information in ‘Ancestor’, yet it never slows the plot – much like Crichton’s ‘Jurassic Park’, which the novel has been compared to. Is this the style of novel you’ve always liked reading and writing, or was it something that grew as you began writing?One of the cornerstones of my work is that I want believability in the monsters. I want this to be somewhat viable so that by the time you get to the crazy stuff in the book, you’ve already seen enough things that you know to be true. You can see it happening. That is plausible. So in order to produce a plausible monster, that requires a lot of research into how things actually work. So there is quite a bit of science in there – I’ve been researching this book for ten years. You need to have science in there to set up the rule structure for the readers, but you also can’t do seventeen pages of scientific extrapolation. Which I had in earlier drafts, which really slowed things down. The podcast was the biggest help for that, ‘cause as I was reading it out loud, I would literally be able to hear myself and go ‘I’m kind of bored listening to this’. I’m the guy who wrote it, so if I’m bored with too much explanation, then you know the audience is going to be bored. So reading it out loud, cover to cover, really helped me to refine and compress the scientific information so that the pace would go there. At the end of the day it’s really fun to have believable monsters and learn a lot about biology while you read it, but you still have to keep the pages turning because it’s a thriller.
Something you’re becoming quite synonymous for is the delicate fate of all your characters. When the tension really mounts, no one in your story is escapable from death. I must say I love this – it’s more real life, not Hollywood. Is this why you decided to write in such a way – is it a backlash from these Hollywood-style stories?It is a little bit of a backlash. If you’re asking someone to spend money and time to purchase and read your book, you want to give the best possible entertainment experience. You want them to finish it and be shivering, ‘That was amazing’. In my opinion, the best way to do that is to make sure they don’t know what’s going to happen. With a lot of the established thriller writers (particularly the mystery writers, but that’s a different animal altogether), you know the main character’s going to live. I’m reading ‘The Dresden Files’ right now, by Jim Butcher, and really enjoying it; but at the same time, I’m on book two, and Harry Dresden is on the cover of book eight, so I’m pretty sure he’s going to pull through the situation that he’s in right now.
So I wanted to avoid that because one of the things that’s magical about Stephen King’s books and why people turn page after page and tear through them is ‘cause no one is sacred and you have no idea who’s going to live or who’s going to die. You can turn a page and out of nowhere someone is just flat out dead. That’s why his books are so riveting and mesmerising. So that’s modelling after his style a little bit, and also it’s just that I need to keep you on the edge of your seat wondering what’s going to happen. And I don’t usually know. I write the book, outline the book, and it has to be carefully plotted for the science, but sometimes you will get to a certain point in your book and be like the only logical resolution to this is that this character has to die. Then I have to re-outline and re-plot from there.
But it’s a very conscious decision, to make it as entertaining as possible. And it just makes it more real life. If you get into situations where the character could die, sometimes they do die and that makes it more believable. Also there’s a benefit to that when the character gets out of that situation, if you’ve set that up in a logical way then it’s far more exciting. It’s more exciting to think they could die and they get out, then to just know they get out.
Do you get backlash from readers, though, for killing off some of your main characters?Oh, tons. Oh yeah. Not just backlash from the readers, sometimes
I hate to do it. In some of the books I’ve basically killed off a franchise character that everybody wants to see developed. There are some things I wish I hadn’t done, but there was just no way around it in the story. It just had to happen.
But it’s a double-sided backlash (from the fans). People come up and say, ‘Man, why did you kill that guy? I thought that guy had made it. I thought he’d be okay’. But then there’s also part of that where there’s the excitement and the respect that they know the next time they read a Scott Sigler book, they have no idea who’s going to live or die. That just ramps up the enjoyment factor.
‘Infected’, ‘Contagious’, and ‘Ancestor’ all have beasts growing within either a person or cow, to disturbingly brilliant effect. Is there any special reason for such a device?
Right now it’s really because all three books are very biomechanical and into the biology. ‘Infected’ and ‘Contagious’ really get into the cellular level production in your body. Your cells go through all these amazing processes and people don’t really realise how complicated it is. Viruses can just hijack that and go make something else – we’re going to take your machinery, re-program it, and make it produce what we want it to produce. So for ‘Infected’ it was taking that viral infection and changing it to a macroscopic scale where you’re not just making copies of the viruses, you’re making a lot of parts. And these parts are going to self-assemble inside your body and create a whole new organism. You’re screwed, but at least the organism’s up.
So then ‘Contagious’ was a related organism where there’s also more modifications going on inside your body. And then for ‘Ancestor’, everything in there is one hundred percent real. Everything we can do right now, just not to the level I put it out. So there hasn’t really been a specific approach to why they’re all internal, but it’s all biologically related.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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