Michael Marks Interview

Michael Marks is an extraordinary man of many talents whose writing I first came across in the form of his straight-to-ebook SF novel, Dominant Species. I was very impressed with the book and wrote a suitably glowing review on my blog as well as on Amazon and have now talked the man into taking some time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about his writing. We discuss past, present, and future work, as well as the hot-button topic of his straight-to-ebook publishing choice.

Michael has been writing since the sixth grade and his work covers such diverse genres as Christmas poetry, Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Non-Fiction textbooks for law enforcement personnel. 

Dominant Species is his first novel and tells the gripping tale of a top-secret elite unit of Marines of the future and their fight for survival against a powerful and mysterious foe. Interestingly, the book is replete with technologies that are currently being researched by the nice people at DARPA and NASA, which adds a very welcome sense of wonder to the story and is an interesting reversal of the Science Fiction to Science pathway that has inspired some of the scientific research of the last fifty years.

Phillip: Your book is available only as a Kindle ebook at the moment; what made you choose that particular route to publishing and how have you found the experience?

Michael: The whole ebook phenomena strikes me as a wonderful example of sci-fi transitioning into commonplace reality. People walking about with slim little data pads containing dozens of books were props for countless sci-fi stories, and now we have kids growing up in a world where they look at us old-timers in awe that we lived “back when books were on paper.”

Kindle seemed like a very logical place to start, and frankly, Amazon made the process very easy. While I’ve enjoyed success with non-fiction books on terrorism and emergency response, I was a virtual unknown as a fiction writer, a huge hurdle to getting the attention of traditional publishers. Ebooks offered a very attractive alternative. So far I’ve been thrilled with the results.

The draw of ebook publishing in the sci-fi genre struck me as a bonus; early-adopters of a cool new technology seemed, at least in my mind, to likely be more receptive to sci-fi than perhaps some of the other genres. Time will tell how that aspect trends.

Do you worry that the Kindle only format has limited your audience and do you plan to release it in other ways like Print on Demand for example?

The prospects are exciting; from the Nook to the iPad, consumers are getting more choices, and as a writer that spells opportunity. From what I have seen, PoD still faces the uphill battle of cost-effectiveness. Today’s consumer is justifiably very conscious of the buying power of their entertainment dollar.

I’m actively looking at alternate modes of distribution, but at present my focus is on creating more content and trying to build a solid readership. It seems to me that if you can establish name recognition and please a lot of folks with your writing that the business options will open up.

What was your inspiration for Dominant Species?

It was really a hybrid of a couple factors. I have always loved military sci-fi portrayed as Ridley Scott would film it–gritty, bloody, and so damn real you could touch it. But while high-tech is sexy and tech in combat situations can be downright awesome, the real story to me was the people inside the suits and how they carried on as both machine and muscle alike were beat to hell. Injuries persist, damage mounts, resources are consumed; that struck me as the kind of scenario that would suck me in, getting me to think how I would try to get out. That was a story I wanted to tell.

While working out the initial framing, I had the chance to visit friends at the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC, and saw some of the ultra hi-res imagery from the Titanic on these giant screens. I was breathless at the magic of this huge, empty ship and the stories that lay untold behind every scrap of debris that littered her decks and hallways. The Ascension was my attempt to place a military team in a new spin on the shipwreck story, “sinking” a titanic vessel in a completely incongruous setting that mixed mystery with a ghostly majesty. Together, the two elements formed the core of the story.

One of the things I noticed in the book was the intense realism of the combat scenes. What real life experience have you brought to the story?

My work has taken me on a long and unusual journey. The tunnels of Cathedral in Dominant Species drew heavily on my time in the massive Infiltration Tunnels bored deep below the DMZ in Korea. Some of the interior scenes in the Ascension came right out of a Soviet submarine research facility on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria.  Ridgeway’s impressions of the events at the Chungan Swamp came largely from deep in the jungles of Nicaragua in ’86 where whole villages got wiped out. Say what you want about tough grown-ups, but you haven’t seen “hardened” till you meet a twelve-year-old boy who has spent the last two years of his life hunting and killing the people who slaughtered his entire family.

There are other pieces in the story that draw from experiences like sniper school, but hopefully those details come across simply as things familiar to the character and not as a Melville dissertation on ballistics or tracking.

Some of the Marines in the book draw heavily on real people, dedicated war fighters who have risked, and in some cases sacrificed, everything in the service of their country. It’s no cliché when I say that it’s a real honor to call these folks friends.

Though the characters in the book are compelling, the technology they use really stands out in terms of the scientific detail lavished on it. In fact, one might say that the Marines’ Carbon Nanotube armour and covalent rifles are characters all by themselves.  I mentioned above that the technology is based on current research, but what I’d like to know is how close to the science are the technologies you’ve woven into the story, and, in your opinion, how far off into the future are they?

The science in Dominant Species is far more real than most people would believe. Shortly after I finished the initial manuscript, DARPA publicly kicked off its $50 Million exoskeleton program. That program has advanced through several phases, centering largely around UC Berkeley and Sarcos Research in Utah. The advances they have made are staggering. Add to that developments in material sciences, most notably carbon nanotube construction, matching up with things like electroactive polymers–artificial muscles of potentially superhuman strength–and today’s engineers have options that did not exist in the piston and heavy metal days. Things like shared sensor and battle space data fusion technologies, active camouflage systems, and the like, are all advancing as independent components that the realities of combat will draw together to make the war fighter safer and at the same time more lethal.

The covalent rifle drew a lot of buzz among some of the future-tech guys at NASA. While admittedly we don’t yet understand how to selectively manipulate the balance of the attractive and repellant forces that hold molecules together, they were pretty adamant that short-circuiting that balance as described in the book would produce “one hell of a dramatic effect.” Hopefully the notion, presented today in fiction, will capture the imagination of some physics geniuses who will crack the code of what it takes to make it happen for real. In much the same way that robots have entered and proliferated in the battle space, powered armor technology will become a natural step in the ongoing merger of man and machine.

Every author has a list of writers who have inspired and influenced them. Which writers do you feel inspired or influenced you?

It may sound trite, but for me it was the classics. My dad was an aerospace engineer who worked on things like the Mariner 9 program, so it’s no surprise I grew up with dinner conversations on the Three Laws of Robotics and reading books like Starship Troopers and The Forever War. Science fiction, to me, was the writing of the nearly possible, the just-around-the-corner, and being a kid as man first landed on the moon, many of the great advances depicted in sci-fi seemed well within my lifetime. I’m still heartbroken that my personal hover-car has not yet arrived!

John Steakley’s Armor came out while I was in college, and as you might imagine, it blew me away. My dog-eared original copy still has a place of honor in my bookshelf, and its impact on Dominant Species is obvious. Recently I was fortunate to discover the brilliant John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War trilogy and read with delight the wealth of humor and personality that he infused alongside riveting and often poignant combat scenes.

In the never ending debate about the “death” of Science Fiction, where do you believe the genre will be in the future? Does it even have a future in your eyes?

Science Fiction has always led the way to science fact. Through common examples, it is nonetheless no great surprise that the first nuclear submarine was the Nautilus, or the first shuttle the Enterprise. Sci-fi writers have an ability to envision a technology and portray it in ways that inspire the engineering brainiacs of the world to say “y’know, we just might be able to make that work.” The guys who can design this stuff for real are rarely the guys who can come up with the wild idea to begin with–it’s a true symbiosis.

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recognized this fact so vividly that it set off on a program to fuel more real science in sci-fi, tracking away from the techno-fantasy angle and back towards things that, if not possible today, might well be achievable tomorrow.

I challenge anyone to look at something like the THEL, a laser that can burn artillery shells out of the sky, and tell me it wasn’t inspired by science fiction. My money says we have a generation looking for sci-fi to separate itself from fantasy and tantalize us once more with the almost possible.  In that role, sci-fi not only has a future, but is an indispensable part of our ability to advance technologically.

And, lastly, what are you working on at the moment?

The decision to write Dominant Species realistically, where an elite military team does not have the Charlie Sheen wildcat character who continues to get his teammates killed, created an unexpected challenge of developing interpersonal tension between people who were carefully screened and hand-picked for their ability to perform predictably and uniformly under great stress. Yeowch! Not the easiest path for a first novel, but the challenge forced growth, and I’m thankful for that.

Hopefully a bit wiser for the experience, I am currently working on a project set much closer to home, taking (I hope) a fresh look at how things might play out should an alien race come to visit our planet sans the obligatory walking tanks or oversized pods growing in the basement. It’s a brutally pragmatic spin on the genre with a very diverse cast of both military and civilian personnel trying to cope with widely competing interests. And yes, the bullets fly; it wouldn’t be a “Mike” book without a ton of action.

I’d like to thank Michael Marks for taking the time to talk with us. More information about his work can be found on his website at www.michaelmarks.com