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Post by marianne on Jun 8, 2005 1:02:02 GMT
Hi all,
Richard will be here from the 27 - 29 June.
best Marianne
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Jac
Mueno
Posts: 68
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Post by Jac on Jun 8, 2005 13:52:01 GMT
He will?
That ROCKS! His stuff is excellent. I really like the sound of the New Takeshi Kovacs book.
J
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Post by Chirugal on Jun 9, 2005 0:39:32 GMT
Ooh, yay! Though once again I have no knowledge of his stuff. >_< But yay anyway!
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Jac
Mueno
Posts: 68
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Post by Jac on Jun 9, 2005 8:22:48 GMT
You should read them. Seriously they are very good indeed. Altered Carbon is a seriously excellent book.
J
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Post by Chirugal on Jun 9, 2005 12:36:40 GMT
When I get back to populated areas in a week (our uni campus is in the middle of the countryside, six miles from the nearest town) I'll definitely try and dig some stuff out of the library.
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Post by bluetyson on Jun 23, 2005 6:44:30 GMT
He will? That ROCKS! His stuff is excellent. I really like the sound of the New Takeshi Kovacs book. J Yeah. It is very good, handy to have a birthday when you find out about that.
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Post by bluetyson on Jun 23, 2005 6:45:25 GMT
You should read them. Seriously they are very good indeed. Altered Carbon is a seriously excellent book. J Yes, one of my all time favorites now. Not too easy to get on that list!
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Post by marianne on Jun 26, 2005 22:54:18 GMT
I might get things started as I'm a few hours ahead here. Hi Richard, welcome to Parrish's Patch! Thanks SO MUCH for taking the time to come and chat. We'll try not to inundate you Having just written a series with a dominant main character, I was curious how you felt about Takeshi after this time. Is he a character you are still happy to write about or do you see an end to the acquaintance. What are your feelings about staying with a character over several novels? When - if ever - does it cease to work? Best Marianne de P
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Post by richard on Jun 27, 2005 18:20:24 GMT
Hi Marianne,
I think Woken Furies is probably the last of the Kovacs books, at least for the next few years. While the Protectorate universe still has plenty to explore in it, I think Kovacs himself has been pretty much covered. I tried in each book to take him someplace new emotionally, and WF really completed his arc. Anything more right now is going to seem derivative and dull - with character novels, you're inevitably playing the law of diminishing returns game, and it's always best to quit while you're ahead. Every character series I've ever read/seen has crumbled in the end because it got milked too hard, and worse still the sub-standard latter excursions very often tarnishes your memory of the earlier, stronger stuff. Here less is definitely more - the strength comes from the limited exploitation.
Having said that, when I was on tour in the US, I had this same conversation with a guy called Terry Hertzler, himself a writer/poet and a huge Kovacs fan. He just grinned and said "Hey, that's cool - in five or ten years time, you'll be a different man, and so will Kovacs, so maybe then you'll think of something fresh to do with him." So, Never say Never - but I'll certainly say Not Right Now
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Post by marianne on Jun 27, 2005 22:15:43 GMT
Hi Richard, yeah I feel the same way as you. I can't think of a series that hasn't tarnished over time. Canadian author, Kelley Armstrong writes in the same world but alternates main characters. I think this is a much more enduring way to approach it. A few months ago I was asked in by an interviewer 'what I would like to have written in ten years'. I found this interesting. I surprised myself because I actually did have an idea of what I would like to have done. May I ask you the same question - that is, if you feel happy to share the answer And, has there been any recent movement on the movie plans for AC. Do you think it will happen? best Marianne
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Post by bluetyson on Jun 28, 2005 4:06:27 GMT
I have a question
Why Hungarian and Japanese on Harlan's World, that always intrigued me?
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Post by bluetyson on Jun 28, 2005 4:10:39 GMT
An 'envoy school' short story would be fun, ever think about writing something like that?
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Jac
Mueno
Posts: 68
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Post by Jac on Jun 28, 2005 10:31:22 GMT
Forgive me for jumping in with another question but I wanted to ask about the Tendering system in Market Forces, it seems frighteningly plausible. How did you come up with the idea of driving duels?
I've been involved in judging tender applications and I can see the appeal in the system you describe, is it something you've been involved in? (Tendering I mean, not running people off the road and killing them...)
J
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Post by richard on Jun 28, 2005 11:17:26 GMT
Okaaaaay...lessee. In reverse order, then:
Jac - I've been on the sidelines of tendering for business at various times, but never at the kind of levels MF deals with, and never with direct responsibility. Really, the driving duels were intended to accentuate the savagery of the geopolitical decisions being taken - the kind of decisions being made by corporate bodies and international finance houses today are matters of life and death to thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people in some far flung corner of the globe, but the people who take the decision are rarely risking anything more than a loss of monthly bonus. I wanted to bring the risk home to the risk-takers. In part this was inspired by the colossal arrogance of British Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont when, following Black Wednesday and the British withdrawal from the ERM, he put in place interest rate rises that effectively ruined tens of thousands of home owners by hiking their mortgage repayments to impossible levels. When called on this damage in the House of Commons, he stated that the loss of these people's homes was "a price well worth paying" - and no doubt it was, since he himself would not be paying it!
At the same time, I've watched the rising incidences of road rage in the developed world and seen how cars so easily become extensions of male rage and competitive stupidity. This chimed solidly with my own love for one of Australia's finest cultural exports, the Mad Max movies (well 1 & 2, anyway) - but the point, I thought, was that in a time of fuel scarcity, it won't be the "nomad biker scum" who rule the roads, simply because some rich and influential badass like Mike Bryant will have them cleared off the road and executed as soon as they prove problematic. Terrifying though the Toecutter and his pals were, they're a bucket of runny shit (to quote Mike) when it comes to corporate or state power.
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Post by richard on Jun 28, 2005 11:28:36 GMT
bluetyson - the Japanese and Hungarian (really East European) cultural mix on Harlan's World is an example of serendipitous creative back-thinking. I created the NAME Takeshi Kovacs purely because I liked the way it sounded - I'd been doing a lot of Japanese cinema and literature at the time, and the name Kovacs comes from a French penfriend I used to have when I was a teenager - his name was Kovacs, his father was a Hungarian national side footballer who'd sought asylum in France in 1956 (Stefan Kovacs, for any football enthusiasts out there, I understand he's quite famous). So, there was my character with this name - I then - belatedly!! - had to come up with an off-world cultural matrix to justify it. My appetite for and fascination with Japanese culture remains intact to this day, so it just became a question of doing some East European research as well to balance it up.
(Hey, speaking of names - what's the story behind bluetyson?)
Short stories - I don't really do these, for the fairly simple reason that I'm crap at them. Not for no reason did I manage to spend 14 years not getting published before I wrote Altered Carbon - all my short efforts were either hyper-compressed novellas in short story form, or mood pieces that never really went anywhere. To this day, I think SS writing and novel writing are two very different (almost opposed) skills, and it's rare you find someone who excells at both. A number of my favourite writers are quite clearly brilliant at one or the other, but not both.
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