Interview with Dr. Jeffrey A. Robinson

Interview with Dr. Jeffrey A. Robinson

 

Q. I was recently listening to a podcast of your short story, Ripples in Time. There’s a mention of a city that appeared as a mirage during the 1930s and the description was so believable that I found myself searching the web to see if it were true. How did you come up with that?

A: Well, I have a physics background and I juxtaposed a picture of a mirage with the memory that once, long ago, the great plains were under water. A fleeting idea occurred to me that mirages could be looking back to those times. Then I thought of turning it into a love story. The rest of the story just fell in place. That’s the way stories develop… from random ideas and strange questions that often start out with “what if?”

It's strange. The idea of the city came to me when I heard about distant mirages at sea. So… I just made up the story about a newspaper article years ago that recounted such an event.

It’s funny, I typically add fictional details to my stories and try to make them sound real... but sometimes I get people asking if that drug is real, or if that piece of science is true, or if a fictional historic event actually occurred.

I like to make my stories seem realistic and I guess it’s a compliment when people can’t tell where reality stops and the fiction begins.

Q. So this takes us nicely in to your rather successful Untold Tales podcast. You’re up to 72 stories now. How did it all start?

A: I had just published three short story anthologies when I met Melissa Del Toro, a voice-over specialist at a writer’s workshop. She was explaining how written books can be turned into audiobooks. After her presentation, I spoke to her and said that my biggest problem with audiobooks is that they take so long to listen to. (I read a lot and I also read much faster than a normal speaking pace) I explained that it typically took many sittings to work my way through an audiobook of any appreciable length… often 8 or 9 hours. I said that it was sad that no one converted short stories to audio format and suggested that such short audio stories could be listened to in a single sitting… such as while commuting to or from work, or at lunch. Thus, the idea of audio anthologies was born. Such collections of audio shorts could be targeted for people who don’t have enough time to listen to long audio recordings…. People who don’t want to stop listening when only partially finished. We envisioned that such a collection would be ideal for commuters going to and from work. And we thought of calling it TALES FOR TRAVELERS. However, we stuck with the title UNTOLD TALES since that was the name of my science fiction anthologies.

Q. So you met Melissa Del Toro Schaffner at a writing group?

A: Yes, as I mentioned we met and immediately started brainstorming about collections of audio short stories. We decided to start with the science fiction short stories that I had just published, but we’ve always planned to expand to other genres. When we get a larger listenership we plan to offer other podcast playlists for stories other than science fiction. They could be called CRIME FOR COMMUTERS, MURDER FOR THE METRO, DRAMA FOR THE DRIVE HOME, HORROR FOR THE HIGHWAY and more. We hope to kick off some new genres soon.

Q. One of the attractions of the podcast is that the stories are science fiction of a ‘high quality.’ How do you decide what qualifies as high quality and what doesn’t?

A: Well, I fell in love with Science Fiction at an early age. My father was a nuclear physicist and he got me reading books that his father had started. I grew up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and JOHN CARTER OF MARS, H.G. Wells, horror from the 20’s and 30’s H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, writers from the GOLDEN AGE, Asimov, Clark, Bradbury, Sturgeon, Simak, Doc E.E. Smith, and so many more. I tend to compare new books that I read to those classics. The other advantage that I have is that I was privileged to work with a friend who edited and published one of the early e-zines on the web. As co-editor, I had the unfortunate task to read through unpublished submissions that we received. We called the backlog the ‘slush pile’ because 95% of the stories we got were so terribly bad. It is ironic how reading very bad stories makes you really appreciate the very rare good ones.

Ultimately, only about 5% of the books you buy or read are worth the cost of the book or the time that you invest in reading it. Often, you work your way to the end, feeling in your heart that it will get better, but it doesn’t. I try to write stories that I would like to read and that I would consider to be in that 5%.

Q. What are the essential elements to a good science fiction story?

A: Ah… many authors think the focus of good science fiction is the quality of the science. It is not. Science is really not that important to a good SF story. Science should be an excuse for a novel setting or situation. A really good science fiction story is ultimately just a good story… a who-dun-it, or a romance, a mystery, comedy or tragedy. Science should take a back seat to the story, the characters, and the plot. Science is really the backdrop, the surrounding scenery, window dressing. If the focus is on the science, how a blaster works or how a stardrive functions, then you often have characters that are flat and uninteresting, plots that don’t make sense or that go nowhere and writing that is bland and colorless. Indeed, I have written good science fiction that is in the Victorian setting as well as the far future and the heart of a good science fiction story is just that… a good story, one that is well written and has interesting characters that you identify with and care about, people who are doing interesting things in interesting situations.

Q. As well as an author of short stories, you’ve also written a few novels, some of which are grouped into trilogies. How about picking one and introducing it to us?

A: One trilogy, that is waiting for the third book to be finished is called MINDGAMES and is based on the premise that two researchers discover a drug that has a strange effect on a very small segment of the population. These people have a genetic defect that makes them hear voices. But there is medication they can take to treat that problem. Anyway, when those people take this new drug, they become telepaths… fully functional telepaths who can hear other people’s thoughts. It seems that they people were ‘latent’ telepaths and the voices that they sometimes heard were really ‘other’ people’s voices, or rather thoughts. These people have only one gene, a recessive, that partially enables telepathic abilities in their brain and when they take the drug it is like having that missing second gene and they become fully telepathic. The story basically addresses a specific problem. What would the government do if they had a drug that could turn one in 10,000 people into a telepath? and if they were the only people who knew about the drug? It is a story about power and potential, good and evil, and how such abilities would affect people. It weaves ancient myth and modern science and reveals that telepaths have always been among us, but have hidden themselves because over centuries they were killed as sorcerers or burned as witches when their powers were discovered. There is romance, horror, intrigue and drama.

The first book KNIGHT’S GAMBIT is about the discovery of the drug. The second book is called QUEEN SACRIFICE and is about conflict between the few remaining telepathic groups that have been hidden for centuries. And the third book CHECKMATE is about the conflict between world governments and these new telepaths. I like to think it is comparable to the Saga of Pliocene Exile and The Galactic Milieu Series by Julian May.

I have another completed trilogy that is a classic ‘space opera’ and a third that is partially written but most of my novels are standalone and almost all of them started with the question… “what if?”

Q. You’re a doctor of science and I’ve been looking up your qualifications (Ph.D, MBA, BA, BSEE, MBB, PMP). Also your career experience with computer programming and automation. How much do you think knowing your stuff helps with the creation of a science fiction theme/idea?

A: Well, it sure helps with managing details about science and technology. You see there are two types primary types of science fiction. Hard and Soft. Hard SF is technically accurate (though we may wink at things like faster than light travel or large cheap sources of energy. Hard SF tries to be as realistic as you can be. Soft SF is of two types. One is in the sense that it deals with softer disciplines of science, like psychology, sociology, anthropology, and so on.

The other aspect of Soft-science is where science is not treated realistically or where basic laws of physics are simply not applied. Things like, I bumped my computer, it became aware and took over the world. Or, using common household chemicals I developed a drug that made me super intelligent and immortal. Or you forget about things like inertia, mass, or gravity and end up doing things like walking on the surface of the sun. For those who have even an inkling of understanding of science, such things are as offensive as stating that 2 plus 2 is 22.

Q. You also flew F-4 Phantom Jets. What can you tell us about that? (Or is this classified?!)

A: Oh…well. When I went to college, the Vietnam war was still raging. Many of my classmates were drafted right out of college and spent the next couple years in foxholes in distant jungles. I had a very low draft number and would have been drafted, so I joined the Marines and qualified for their pilot training program. I got my private license and after college went into the marines. Fortunately, the month that I got my wings, the US pulled out of Vietnam. I never served in combat and count myself lucky in several ways. But I did have a few incredible experiences, like walking away from a plane crash, and flying at Mach 2 fifty feet above the surface of the Arizona desert. I later served as an air traffic controller too. It was…amazing.

But I have had a lot of other experiences too. I have been a short-order cook, a cartoonist, a business manager for a small weekly paper, a marathoner, a scuba diver, and more. My background is rather… eclectic.

Q. You’ve said already that you grew up loving to read sci-fi. What were your old favourites?

A: The Lensman by Doc E.E. Smith. Anything by Issac Asimov, Arthur C Clark, or Ray Bradbury. Later I fell in love with dozens of authors in other genres, Michael Moorcock, the English author who wrote the Eternal Champion series. Robert Heinlein, of course. And I have fallen in love with others along the way, David Gemmel, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Pohl Anderson, Ben Bova, comedy by Terry Prachett, mysteries by Lee Child. I sit in a room filled with 15,000 books. That’s a book a day, every day, for 40 years. My list of favorites would sadly be many pages long.

Q. Is it true that you read one book a day?

A: Yes … I have read one (or more) books a day for nearly 40 years (though I am down to one a week now because I am writing so much).

Consider a typical paperback book that is about 120 pages long. If you open the book to any random page, you can probably read a single page out loud in about a minute. True, you would probably be reciting words as fast as you can, but it would still only take about a minute to read one page out loud. Therefore, if you could keep up that pace, you should be able to read the average paperback book, out loud in about 120 minutes or two hours.

First you have to build up the endurance to sit in one place and focus sufficient attention that you can read or an hour or two a day. When you do that, your reading speed, comprehension and attention will all eventually improve as well. Then, in the time that you would have spent watching a single TV movie each night, you can read a book instead.

Q. Having read so many books, it must put you in a unique position in terms of coming up with something original. That is, you’re more likely to know if an idea you have has been done before. Does this help or hinder your writing?

A: Yes … original is hard, but sometimes I borrow pieces from other stories but add a new twist that I think is interesting. (For example: One Last Time, Where All The Roads End, and Collaboration)

I do get some original ideas (for example Ripples in Time), but some topics are so overdone that it is almost impossible to do something new – but I try, for example The Timepiece).

Q. Being an avid reader as well as a writer, how much do you in turn think of the reader when you are creating and editing a story?

A: Constantly… is the pace too fast or too slow? Is the sentence structure varied enough so that it does not get boring? How much should I explain and how much needs to be revealed slowly? It is ultimately ALL about the reader. If a writer does not constantly think about the reader he is likely just a self-centered egotist writing to himself to themself.

A true storyteller respects and identifies with his audience. The best storytellers are lucky because they get actual eye-contact with their audience.

You see… I am also a reader and I want to write stories that I would like to read. As a writer I am trying to paint a picture with words, just like every artist who has to figure out what colors to use to make the viewer see the picture properly. In the same way, I have to find the right words to convey that image that I see. If they don’t see or hear or experience what I meant… then I used the wrong words or the wrong ‘colors.’

Q. Okay, and as a final question, what are you working on at the moment? Any new stories or novels in the works?

A: Well, I am continuing to work on the podcasts, of course. We just published episode 72. We are in our third year and we have a major release coming at the end of the year that will include re-airing all our podcasts as YouTube videos as well as creating a new website, facebook pages, and a writer’s blog. We have a total of 111 short stories in the pipeline for our podcasts and we haven’t opened up the other genre playlists yet (mystery, crime, drama, horror, or military-SF) I have written nearly two dozen short stories in the past two years… about one per month and have also published 7 novels in that time. I currently have two more anthologies already completed and they will launch at the end of the year, and… if possible… two more novels, as well. Ideas are not my problem. My problem is that I have too many stories and not enough time. Note… I also have seven grandchildren who are competing for my time and attention and a wife who tolerates my eccentricities remarkably well. I couldn’t do any of this stuff without her.

It’s funny. I worked as a technologist for 40 years while teaching graduate school for 30 of those years. I’m supposed to be retired, but I feel busier than ever.

Thanks very much for the interview, Jeff.

You can check out the Untold Tales Podcast here.

Also you can find Jeffrey’s website here,

connect with him on goodreads here

and his amazon page is here.