Three interviews with M.M.Buckner

Interview Done By Mike Wilkerson
From BlastZone

MW: How did you get into writing?

MMB: Writing is an act of reverence for the written word, so in a sense, every lover of reading is a potential writer. I began my first novel in the third grade and continued writing poetry and fiction throughout my life. I have a Master's in Creative Writing from Boston University, and I continue to teach and take creative writing workshops whenever I can. Teaching is learning, and vice versa.


MW: who are your influences?

MMB: My favorite authors are like the colors in the solar spectrum, too many to name. I read voraciously in many fields and idolize any writer who can surprise and delight me.


MW: How long did it take to write book 1 and then book 2?

MMB: Each book took about two years.


MW: Are you working on book 3 yet?

MMB: My third book, WAR SURF, is complete and will be published by Ace this coming September. Personally, it's my favorite so far. I am now working on my fourth novel, not yet titled.


MW: Does book 1 and 2 go together? Are they a continuing story?

MMB: All three novels, HYPERTHOUGHT, NEUROLINK and WAR SURF, comprise the "Greenhouse Earth Series." They are all set in the same near future where Earth is drastically altered by global warming. However, each story stands alone with a separate cast of characters and a separate theme.


MW: What was the best thing someone said about your writing?

MMB: I like what Allen Steele said about Hyperthought: "Quick as a cobra and just as wicked."


MW: do you think either book will be made into a movie?

MMB: Oh, wouldn't I love that! Who knows.


MW: Would you like to have them made into a movie?

MMB: I am a total movie freak, seeing at least one new movie on the big screen every week and many more on video. People say my books are "cinematic," and that pleases me. As I write, they play in my head like movies. Yes, it would definitely be a thrill to have my books made into movies.


MW: Who would you want to direct it? And star in it?

MMB: Tough questions. Just for fun, for Hyperthought I'll say Martin Scorsese to direct and Scarlett Johansson to star as Jolie.


MW: Do you write all the time or what do you do in your pasttime?

MMB: Besides writing fiction, I also am a freelance commercial writer, focusing primarily on web site content. My pass-times include: kayaking, hiking, biking, scuba diving, skiing, reading and spending time with friends.


MW: What would you like to say in closing?

MMB: Mike, best of luck with Blastzone Online. The immediacy of person-to-person communication through the web is phenomenally changing the way we experience fiction and many other aspects of our lives. I believe that is positive and fascinating. What we will witness in the next ten years may make the most imaginative science fiction pale by comparison.

Interview from Artistinterviews.com
by Marisa Darnel

ARTIST INTERVIEWS : Your first science fiction novel is outstanding. What inspired you to write about the mysteries of the human mind?

M.M. Buckner: In life sciences, the human brain is one of the most fascinating frontiers of exploration. Recently, researchers have made intriguing discoveries, yet so much remains unknown. Our brains empower us to perceive, analyze, remember, make choices, create new concepts, and execute actions – but how? We can’t even define consciousness. Our brains are intimately bound with our “selves,” our most personal inner natures – a subject that has enthralled us since the dawn of time. Do we have immortal souls? The study of the brain unites science, philosophy and mystery – for a writer, an irresistible combination.

A.I.: In “Hyperthought” you describe the planet Earth as being almost destroyed by pollution and weather changes to the point of being impossible to live on its surface. We also know that you are an environmental activist. How do you think the human race could help to heal ecology?

M.M.B.: Many technologies exist to restore our environment and prevent further degradation. All we need is the will to use them. Unfortunately, many available solutions are not used because they affect our comfortable life-style. I’m no different from anyone else. I use reams of paper to print my novels. I crank up the air conditioning in summer. I relish the freedom of driving my own car wherever I want to go. Taking the long view is difficult when it means immediate personal sacrifice. When most of the worst effects of environmental damage are decades away, it’s easy to bury our heads in the sand.

I’ve talked to some intelligent people who still deny the scientific evidence that our ozone layer has been depleted and that greenhouse gases are already building in our atmosphere. Some day in the future, our descendants may pass a harsh judgment on us, and I’m not sure they’ll be wrong. On the other hand, humans are as natural a part of the environment as any other species. We’re neither better nor worse. The mixed advances and destruction our human activities bring will certainly change our planet, but so will earthquakes and supernovae and the final extinction of the sun. Perhaps everything we’re doing is inevitable. Perhaps we’re following the natural way.

A.I.: Can you share with us some interesting experiences of your travels?

M.M.B.: Travel is the best kind of education. Living in the world’s only super-power, we easily fall into traps of provincialism. When I see how people with other cultures have arranged their lives and created works of startling beauty, I am humbled. Every journey has its own memories. Once in Paris, I was walking along a busy urban sidewalk and happened upon the ruins of an ancient Roman building. One night I lay on a sandbar listening to the music of the Colorado River, and watching the full moon rise over the Grand Canyon walls. Once in Austria, I visited a castle with a torture chamber and saw a wheel that was used to crush a man’s bones. Once I flew through a thunder storm in southern New Zealand, and our small plane fluttered so low, I could see moss growing on the bark of the trees.

A.I.: After such a success with “Hyperthought”, will you continue to write science-fiction?

M.M.B.:Penguin Putnam/Ace will bring out my next two science fiction novels in 2004 and 2005. Both are still in the works, and I can’t tell you the titles yet. They are all stand-alone novels, but all are set in a near-future Earth that’s been changed by global warming.

A.I.: What are your favorite writers?

M.M.B.: Where do I start? So many fine writers have given me hours of pleasure in so many different ways. Here are a few in no particular order: Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Walter Scott, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Goethe, H.G.Wells, Poe, Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, Edith Wharton, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, all of the Latin Magic Realist writers, notably Fuentes, Cortazar and Borges, also Anthony Powell, Willa Cather, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, Thomas Pynchon, John Le Carre, Elmore Leonard, Toni Morrison, Robert Stone, Carson McCullers, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Stirling, C.J.Cherryh. Naturally, I’ve left out many of the best.

A.I.: What kind of music do you enjoy the most?

M.M.B.: I’m not an expert in music. I enjoy listening to jazz and classical works, also ethnic music from just about anywhere. Any kind of music can be beautiful, from country/western to rap. I respond to the artist, not the category.

A.I.: What are your future plans?

M.M.B.: My plans are to continue reading and writing, to learn more about the craft of fiction, to learn more about the amazing discoveries scientists are making about the nature of our “multiverse,” to travel whenever possible, to savor every moment of life and to have adventures.

A.I.: What's a day in the life of MM.Buckner like?

M.M.B.: Most days, I’m sitting right here in front of my computer, watching words appear on the screen. You see why travel means so much to me!

A.I.: Thank you very much!

M.M.B.: Thank you, Marisa.

Original interview can be found here: www.artistinterviews.com/literature/mmbuckner.htm

Interview: M. M. Buckner (Author of Neurolink and Hyperthought)by John C. Snider © 2004

One doesn't usually think of Tennessee as a hotbed of science-fictional creativity. True, legendary SF&F writer Andre Norton (now in her nineties) lives in semi-retirement not too far from Nashville, but other than her, one would be hard-pressed to come up with somebody from the Volunteer State who even approaches being a household name within fannish circles.

But keep your eye on M. M. Buckner. This author from Nashville burst onto the scene in 2003 with her novel Hyperthought, which was nominated for both the regional SESFA Award (awarded to individuals from the Southern US) and the very prestigious Philip K. Dick Award (awarded to science fiction published in paperback format). Proving that she's no one-hit wonder, Buckner just released her second, equally strong novel: Neurolink, set in the same futuristic milieu, an earth flooded due to global warming and dominated by powerful mega-corporations that act as virtual governments.

scifidimensions: Thanks for talking with us - and congratulations on Hyperthought being nominated for the PKD!

M. M. Buckner: Thank you! Yes, the Philip K. Dick nomination was an unexpected thrill. And as you know, Hyperthought has also been nominated for the SESFA. I feel genuinely honored to be nominated by readers here in the South, where the written word is held in such high regard.

sfd: Unless I'm mistaken, your first published work was Hyperthought. You skipped straight over the usual "building your way up from short stories" route and went right to novels. What was your journey from prospective writer to published novelist?

MMB: That's true. Hyperthought is my first published SF. The masters of short fiction have my profound respect, but I feel more natural working with the longer novel form. Everyone's publishing journey is different. I started my first novel in the third grade, wrote all through college, and earned a Master's in Creative Writing from Boston University. Writing has always been my dream. But it took a while to arrange my life to have enough time to write novels. I began sending material to Ace in the late 1990s, and by an immense piece of good fortune, one of the editors noticed and liked my work. Even though he rejected the first two novels I sent, he encouraged me to keep trying. I still carry his letters as talismans. Whenever an aspiring writer asks for my advice, this is what I say: Keep writing, and never give up. In the words of Joseph Campbell, "Follow your bliss!"

sfd: I've noticed that Hyperthought and the new novel, Neurolink, both take place in the same imagined future. Do you consider Neurolink a sequel to Hyperthought?

MMB: Hyperthought and Neurolink are both part of what I call the "Greenhouse Earth" series, but they're each stand-alone stories with separate characters, plots and themes. It doesn't matter what order you read them in. My next novel, War Surfing, will also be set in "Greenhouse Earth," where runaway global warming has altered the way people live, but again, it's a completely new story with a new cast of characters.

sfd: How much attention have you paid in working out the details of the future your novels take place in? Do you work out detailed chronologies or anything like that? Or do you like to hint at just enough detail to give the work a certain believability?

MMB: My working notes are extensive, with maps, histories, timelines, economic and social structures, even religions and musical styles. However, I prefer to suggest this background with brief details rather than with long descriptions that might bog down the dramatic flow. My novels depict a very hot, polluted, overpopulated future where people migrate gradually toward the poles to find milder weather. Given that kind of world, I like to imagine how climate would affect everything else. For instance, with an overheated equatorial zone, the northern and southern polar populations would become increasingly isolated from one another, so they might develop very different societies.

sfd: In both your novels, a good bit (if not most) of the action takes place undersea. Do you have a thing for the ocean, or is that just an inevitability based on the universe you've created?

MMB: Yes, I definitely have a thing for the ocean - and water in general. Life emerged from the ocean. Oceans cover two-thirds of the Earth's surface, and more species live underwater than on land, many not yet discovered. Our ocean is a true frontier, unexplored and mysterious - as exciting as outer space, and much closer! One of my all-time favorite SF novels is Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Guess it's no wonder I love scuba diving.

sfd: Two more things your books share...global warming and global domination by mega-corporate interests. What kind of research did you do on global warming? Are you convinced it's a man-made phenomenon - or do you concede the possibility that some have suggested that global warming is a natural result of a long-term solar cycle?

MMB: I've done a lot of research about climate change, and though most reputable scientists agree that human activities have accelerated global warming, no one knows for sure how it will affect our future climate. My books are strictly imaginary - just one of many possible futures. Regarding global domination by mega-corporate interests, that's not imaginary - that's the world we live in today.

sfd: Neurolink ends on a positive note, but your overall vision of the political and economic future is (like most of cyberpunk) generally pessimistic. Do you believe our destiny is to be dominated by corporate interests even more powerful than our current situation?

MMB: I regard myself as an optimistic rationalist. Human history is brief in the cosmic scale, yet it shows a consistent trend for the strong to dominate the weak. I don't see that changing any time soon - though the parties in power will shift, and their rationales will change. It may be that human ambition, greed and aggression are biologically based, all necessary aspects of our survival instinct. Some anthropologists have argued that. However, there are other, equally powerful trends that permeate our history: the search for knowledge, the creation of art, respect for the natural world, and individual acts of selfless sacrifice for the common good. No matter what our future holds, I think there will always be reasons for optimism.

sfd: Perhaps I jumped the gun in implying that Neurolink and Hyperthought are
cyberpunk. Do you reject that label? How would you describe your work and
how it fits within the spectrum of science fiction?

MMB: Labels are handy but limiting. I generally call my work "post-cyberpunk" because neither my vision nor my writing style is as dark as those of the cyberpunk masters. Like them, I extrapolate a near future from present trends, so it's not surprising that our outlooks are similar. I write about the future because it's coming at us so fast. We need to think about how technological changes will affect our humanity - now while we may still be able to make choices. Plus, it's exciting to speculate. Thinking about the future is the imagination's best kind of play.

sfd: What do you like to do when you're not reading or writing science fiction?

MMB: The outdoors is always calling my name. I love to hike, bike, kayak, snow ski and scuba dive. I'm a certified instructor in both whitewater kayaking and sea kayaking. The one skydive I made was fabulous, and my next learning adventure may be sailing. The woods and waters strengthen me. I need them at a visceral level. I'm also a commercial freelance writer, occasional writing teacher, and environmental activist.

sfd: What's up next for you?

MMB: My next project is taking shape. It's wavering in and out of phase, so I can't describe it yet - although, guess what, it's about WATER. This is one of the most exciting times for a writer - when a new project verges on the edge of the possible. It's tantalizing.

sfd: Thanks for your time - and best of luck with Neurolink!

MMB: My pleasure!