Interview with Richard Hanners
Q. I’d like to start with a quick introduction to your six book alternative history series. A group of twenty-third century scientists and soldiers find themselves mysteriously transported back to 1801. Why did you choose this particular time period to land them in?
A: There are two answers to that question. In the first is the plot mechanism I used to drive my writing forward – put today’s readers smack in the middle of a 400-year long timeline, with the best and brightest engineers and scientists from 200 years in our future forced to deal with circumstances 200 years in our past. Most readers have a good idea of what happened in the past two centuries, even if they may need to conduct Google searches to keep up with arcane historical references in my stories, and readers who keep abreast with current geopolitics, science and technology can make a reasonable guess about what will happen in the next two centuries. With the exception of a space-time warp in the Asteroid Belt that transports the Anaconda mining ship back in time, and the existence of two crew members’ quantum consciousnesses melding with a quantum computer, all 23rd century technology that I present is explainable in today’s vocabulary. The second answer to your question, which is more specific to the year 1801, has to do with the 35 years I spent living in Montana, which is a setting for much of the series. Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery Expedition travelled from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean in 1803-1806, opening the western wilderness to the first wave of European imperialism – the fur trading epoch. I wanted my asteroid miners to reach the New Earth before Lewis and Clark left Saint Louis. As factions form among the crew members, two leave for the planet’s surface to establish a native army of liberation with the goal of driving the Spanish, English, French, Russian and American people off of North America. With about 2 million African slaves on the continent, including the Caribbean islands, that creates a tension between natives and freedmen that must be negotiated. As you can see, once I started writing the series, historical reality constrained plot development – who owned Saint Louis in 1801, the Spanish, French or Americans (thanks to Napoleon, the answer was all three)? How did Washington’s and Jefferson’s long-term plans for natives differ (civilize them or move them west of the Mississippi)? What native tribes still existed in 1801 and where were they? What were their native names? I have two dozen characters from the Anaconda to keep the story interesting and easy to read, but they can’t just go around doing anything – there are historical limits.
Q. I gather there are two more in the series still to come. Is this right?
A: Many more books could be written for the series. My sixth book, “Orbem Novis,” takes place in the 25th century of the old universe (our reality) and is only loosely tied to the rest of the series. It debates the ethics of terraforming and imagines an authoritarian government on a distant planet in blatantly recognizable terms (think of a golden-haired U.S. president). The fifth book jumps 10 years from the arrival of the Anaconda at New Earth to 1811, so more books could be written to fill in those missing years or to describe earlier and later times. The book I am working on now, “Pirates of the Middle Passage,” takes place in 1807 and describes the liberation of the Caribbean islands, among other things. I’ve also dallied with another book, “The Thing Called Jawn,” which takes place around 1812 after North America is liberated and war is brewing in South America. Throughout the series, I refer to socio-economic and political conditions in the 21st and 22nd century, when nation states were failing mostly on account of climate change, and the Social Limits laws that replace industrial capitalism on a global scale (alas too late). So books could be written about those earlier centuries, prior to the construction of the Anaconda at the L4 Lagrange Point. It’s worth noting that while the war of liberation dominates the series, it is only one of several plot lines – the corruption of the mining ship’s quantum computer and its manifestation on the planet’s surface as Jawn is possibly more important. And some of my readers find the zany adventures of the cadets particularly interesting – twin females who left a distasteful career in special ops and international police actions by joining the Space Force only to find themselves called back to duty on the New Earth. All Digger and Dagger want to do is fish, hunt, climb, ski, sail and explore but the ship’s captain keeps coming up with missions.
Q. You’ve published six books in two years. That’s quite an achievement. Do you write quickly, or is this a project you’ve been working on for a long time?
A: I read a lot of science fiction in my teens and twenties but not much since then. I thought I’d be a fiction writer some day but I made a decision early in adulthood to live the life of a pop culture renaissance man. So after dutifully completing four years of college, I headed north to Alaska and became a marine engineer, becoming proficient in mechanics, welding, pipefitting, hydraulics, boilers, refrigeration and especially electrical systems. After that it was Montana, where I learned farming, ranching and construction. It was a good-old blue collar experience that added to my academic background, but I also returned to university and completed a second bachelor’s degree, this time in history. Much later I got into the newspaper business as a reporter and editor, where stories with my byline got published more than 2,000 times over nearly two decades. Cranking out stories quickly with no time for writer’s block is a natural trait in the newspaper business. The rest of my background provided me with the experiences needed to create interesting stories (I’ve written several unpublished books, including in the noir detective genre). So when I finally decided to retire from paid work, I jumped right into the Anaconda series. Frankly, I wrote about a third of the first book in my head while still working at my last job, literally drafting sentences into paragraphs and then into chapters before actually hitting the keyboard. So the first book went quickly. The plot gimmick was set first – a space-time warp sending an asteroid mining ship into the past. Then I needed to come up with characters, which I created along the way. I don’t outline stories – I have an ultimate goal and I figure out how to get there as a write. That means I need to keep notes on a regular basis to keep story elements consistent. When I was in the newspaper business, writing a headline often could be difficult. A co-worker told me his trick was to think of lyrics from popular songs that fit the story. For characters, I imagine a particular Hollywood actor playing the role, so I have a face and voice if not a personality. A lot of my character development is driven by dialogue, which seems to come naturally to me – tender pleas, crass bullying, impossible legal arguments, angry political debate, silly jokes and cute kids (the descendants of the HMS Bounty). Once the characters were established and several plot lines set in motion, all I needed was a second window on my computer monitor opened to Google for on-the-fly historical research
Q. Tell us more about your work as a professional historian.
A: Immediately after I finished my bachelor’s degree in history, I landed a job at a professional research firm that included professors and teacher’s assistants I knew from the university. The firm employed 12 historians, two archaeologists, a geologist and two computer experts (this was the early 1990s, before the internet and large hard drives). The company was making about a million dollars a year assisting lawyers in a giant environmental lawsuit (150 years old and 150 miles long). They hired me because of a new deadline – while the rest of the historians identified and wrote about PRPs (potentially responsible parties), nobody had written about the victims of the PRPs. So my area of research was (officially) “Fish, Wildlife and Recreation.” Not only was I not familiar with the subject area, I hadn’t written anything at this level of precision (sometimes three or four footnotes per sentence). My task was to complete a narrative using the firm’s huge historical database in about two months. The thing that amazed me was that as I reached the middle of the narrative, I realized the facts were telling a straight-forward story that I knew nothing about. Remember, this is professional history, not fiction. I just kept inputting data into a narrative and let the facts tell the story. Learning something like that in university is one thing. To see history actually come to life is another. After the deadline passed, I got into new research for the same environmental lawsuit. I discovered some very important information in both the firm’s huge historical database and in the university’s library and archives. I reported this to my boss in a 15-page memo and she replied, “More.” Each time the memo grew in size, she wrote “More.” Eventually the memo was 300 pages long and had 300 footnotes and became known in the office as the $300 million memo” (the portion of the lawsuit I worked on claimed $1 billion in damages). My research style in the university library and archives is similar to my sci-fi writing style – I bulldozed through the stacks, journal volume by journal volume, flipping pages at a prodigious pace. As a professional historian, I was not allowed the benefit of curiosity – I was looking for facts that pertained to the lawsuit. The resulting narrative evolved from the facts I found. And so the Anaconda series is constrained by historical reality and my characters bulldoze themselves through what the Bird Woman calls the “fractal edges of history.”
Q. I wanted to ask, being a writer of alternative history fiction, and being a historian yourself, do you have a favourite alternative history book?
A: First, I need to point out that I don’t fit into the lit-crit world. I am not an expert by any means on science fiction or literature in general. As a renaissance man (I’m being funny), I know a little about a lot of different things but I’m not well-versed in any one thing. To focus on your question, I read Nicholas Meyer’s “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” and several of Philip Jose Farmer’s “Riverworld” novels when they came out in the mid-1970s, but I’m not sure they qualify as works of alternative history. Better examples are Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” and Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” but both Philips demonstrate a penchant for Nazi ascendancy as a plot device. Even “Riverworld” pits famed English explorer Sir Richard Burton against German flying ace turned Nazi Party leader Hermann Goring. When it isn’t Nazis, it’s Confederates winning the American Civil War that attracts alternative history writers and fans. I spent my whole life avoiding mainstream immersion and derivative constructs – the ideas and forces used in my sci-fi series sprouted from my head.
Q. I hear in your youth you were quite an adventurer yourself.
A: That may be an overstatement. Once out of the safe confines of suburban life, I took some risks. One was mountaineering, although I never moved past Grade II or III routes. I got into mountaineering for two reasons – I wanted to be able to get around in the wilderness on my own without a guide, and I wanted to get out of town. When sport climbing and gear-heads began to dominate the climbing world, I dropped out and returned several times, eventually settling on solo trips. I climbed in the North Cascades, Alaska, Peru and New Zealand. Another risk was my lifestyle choice – I did not pursue a professional life as a doctor or lawyer, as my parents may have wished, nor did I settle down to a family life with PTA meetings and Little League games. Both of these decisions came with drawbacks, but one thing I learned in life is not to be troubled by regrets. Those regrets are derivative – the zeitgeist or dominant paradigm defines them.
Q. If you could time travel to any place in history, just to visit, where and when would you go?
A: There are two ways of answering that question depending upon how long I get to stay. If I had several years, I would travel in Africa and South America in the years following World War II when it was safer for an American than it is now. If it was only for a few days, I would go to Jerusalem during Passion Week, circa 26-36 A.D. I’m not a religious person, but personally experiencing the truth of what happened in that place at that time would be absolutely fascinating. There are caveats – I would need to speak the local language and be familiar with local customs. In both cases, I would travel as an observer and would not involve myself in political change.
Q. Do you see yourself as solely an alternative history writer or do you have plans to branch out into other areas of sci-fi?
A: I have spent a bit of time developing other fiction works, including “The Angel Dialogue,” which may not fit into any genre, and “Anti Gravity,” which could end up being more of a political-police chase drama based on a science fiction premise. My biggest problem in branching out is that I generally prefer writing explainable science fiction – no routine time travel or faster-than-light-speed spaceships or ray guns and interstellar empires. There’s already plenty of that in the marketplace. On the other hand, “The Angel Dialogue” is a one-sided interview with a supernatural being who acts as a counselor for humans having difficulty adjusting to the afterlife. Like much of my writing, I have an axe to grind – who sets the rules for Heaven and Hell? One of my all-time favorite sci-fi books is Robert A. Heinlein’s “Job: A Comedy of Justice.” Heinlein was always wielding his axe on contemporary society.
Q. The first book in your series, The Anaconda, has recently been made available as an audiobook. Tell us about the process involved. I imagine it must have been a real buzz.
A: My first book in the series, “The Anaconda,” has been available as an audible book for about a month now, and the second book, “A New Earth,” may become available in July. When I first contacted a friend in Montana about artwork for my Kindle book covers, she suggested I make an audible book. I didn’t follow through until the sixth book in the series was finished. The next part was pure serendipity – I found a narrator looking for work creating audible books and a sound engineer back in my old haunts in Montana. I knew of my narrator from when she performed in local theater and I had met the sound engineer when I was the editor of the newspaper in the town where they both live. The drawback was that I reside in Oregon, an isolated place with poor internet access. We use flash drives carried by snail mail to exchange the huge wave files for proofing, or I make the 10-hour drive to see them in person. All three of us learned the process during production of “The Anaconda.” Nearly everything a writer needs to know about how to create an audible book can be found on the ACX website – from bulletin boards advertising writers, narrators and sound engineers to YouTube lessons. ACX provides completed audible books to Amazon, iTunes or Audible for publication. As the writer, I had to create another version of my Kindle book to meet ACX specifications – particularly adding chapter headings. I also looked for sentence construction that didn’t work well if read aloud – for example, it’s better if attribution for dialogue comes first so the listener knows who’s talking. Also I couldn’t use the Bird Woman’s last name, the Chinese name Qi, alone because it sounded too much like “she,” so I always used her first and last names together, Lu Qi.
Q. So with your books available on kindle and eventually audiobook, may I ask why you have held off on the paperback format? Is it a case of hoping for a bigger publisher to take over with that process?
A: In the early days of modern novel writing, in 19th century Europe, a writer met directly with his publisher on a regular basis. Charles Dickens’ “The Pickwick Papers” was published serially in a newspaper. Samuel Clemens of Mark Twain fame at one time owned a printing press. I once published a work of comic absurdity that came out in weekly installments about 15 years ago on a website devoted to the novel. The website is now gone and the book is available on Kindle. The book business has come down to this – a writer needs an agent to get an agent who can find an agent who will persuade a publisher to accept your work. And then the publisher might want the writer to take over responsibility for promoting the work at his own expense. I’ve even seen cases where a writer is expected to pay for certain printing costs. I like writing. If everything else just clicked and moved onwards, I could crank out new books. Self-promotion is not my shtick.
Q. Okay, last question, and this is a bit of a strange one, but I recently read The Plague by Albert Camus and found it quite interesting to compare the pandemic now to that described in the book; especially in terms of human behaviour and governmental decisions. Being a bit of an expert yourself, do you ever take note of times when it feels like history is repeating itself?
A: I recall reading Steve Coll’s May 19, 2020 piece on Camus’ “The Plague” in the New Yorker magazine. Coronavirus was a scary thing at that time in New York City, and Camus’ book quickly drew attention (so did films like “Contagion”). While Camus was certainly writing about a specific medical affliction, the lit-crit crowd called it a metaphor for the virus of fascism. Is the coincidence of increasing right-wing politics in the U.S. and Europe and the coronavirus pandemic today somehow a sign of repeating history? First, answer the question, “Does history repeat itself?” Obviously no. To be more specific, can a historian discern patterns in past events? Perhaps Hegel’s dialectic works – thesis bangs into antithesis and the result is progress. Control of history is a major topic in my sci-fi series – two of the Anaconda’s crew want to change the world with a war of liberation, two others want to change the world utilizing global commerce, and the Bird Woman consistently challenges them. Lu Qi says no matter how well they plan and how smart they are, something will go awry. The Anaconda crew have access to the Alexander quantum library, containing every fact ever known to humans up to the time the mining ship entered a space-time warp and emerged 400 years in the past. Isn’t that enough to make them like gods? Lu Qi says no. In fact, she says the New Earth humans will catch up to the Anaconda crew in only a matter of decades. They are called the First Generation.
Thanks very much for the interview Richard Hanners.
You check check out Richard's 6 book series on amazon here
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