Please welcome Olga Werby author of Harvest
Olga Werby will be awarding 2 books to a randomly drawn commenter (LIZARD GIRL AND GHOST and SUDDENLY, PARIS) via rafflecopter during the tour.
Harvest
by Olga Werby
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GENRE: Science Fiction
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INTERVIEW:
What or who inspired you to start writing?
I wrote my first story when I was around ten or so. As a kid, I had a hard time learning to read (it turned out later that I was dyslexic) and my parents looked for interesting books that would make the hard work of reading worth it. One of the books they got for me was a translated series (from Polish) about a boy who after his mother’s death went on to live with his uncle. The uncle was a world traveler whose job it was to collect wild animals for zoos around the globe. This is perhaps a not very attractive or politically correct premise now, but back then I was enthralled. Unfortunately, only two books were available at the time and there was no way to get more. The boy in the book was around my age at the time. He didn’t have to go to school, he learned through books and by experience! I hated school… I learned to love books. I wanted to travel the world and help collect exotic animals for zoos… So I wrote more of the story, a continuation, if you will (fan fiction?). Thinking back on it, what I wrote was horrible—badly written, badly conceived, poorly executed…but full of heart. While my writing attempt has long seen the bottom of some landfill, I still have those two books on my shelf…just a few feet away from me now. Stories make a difference.
I never imagined I would write fiction. I got a doctorate in education, I wrote academic papers. But the Internet happened (really happened) just as I was going through grad school. My husband and I wanted to try to dosomething in this new medium. I wanted to do something educational, of course. He wanted to create entertainment. Together, we developed an online educational collaborative hyperfiction written by its audience. You can still see the project after all those years at TheTherapist.com. It was a collection of therapy session transcripts and their accompanying doctor’s notes, each patient was written by a different author. It was thrilling. It was a lot of fun. It was a deadline-driven writing factory. The stories were amazing, and they were written by people from all over the world. We won a ton of awards. (A note of warning, the stories on that site are rated R for mature audience.) After college and grad school, I can say definitively that I only learned how to write when we engaged in writing for The Company Therapist project. My dissertation (and that of many other people around the globe) was partly based on TheTherapist.com. There are still classes being taught at universities all over that use The Company Therapist to teach creative writing and the history of internet entertainment.
Years after we were done with TheTherapist.com, my husband and I wrote our fist science fiction novel, “Suddenly, Paris.” (You can read the first few chapters of that book here: https://interfaces.com/blog/suddenly-paris/). Almost a dozen novels since, I think I’m getting rather good…if not discovered!
What elements are necessary components for this genre?
I write science fiction and magical realism. I believe that regardless of genre, a story needs characters that are believable and to whom people can relate. I find that the books I like least have one thing in common—characters that are not sympathetic. If a reader doesn’t like the main character(s), how are they going to enjoy the book?
When we read, we place ourselves into the fictional world of the book. We try on for size the problems and joys the characters experience in the story. If there is no one in a book worth caring about, then the story is ultimately a failure, in my opinion. That’s true for movies and TV shows, too. People like to read about people they admire or empathize with. Take that away, and what’s left are some flat caricatures of people, explosions, and perhaps some interesting locations. That’s not enough to hold the reader’s interest.
How did you come up with your idea for your novel?
I became interested in the idea of galaxy’s first star-fairing civilization a few years back. I wanted to use all of the science I knew to extrapolate the implications of being the first intelligence and the first civilization and then the first space-fairing culture to arise in the Milky Way. There had to be the THE first. What if it is NOT us? How would we, humans, handle first contact with such people? Would it go well for us? Would it be like “Star Trek?” I had a feeling that it might not really play out that way…
The story of Vars, a professor of socio-biology who studies human origins and civilizations, came from my exploration on these ideas. I wanted her—a “soft” scientist—to try to solve the puzzle of communicating with someone very different from us, whose motivations we simply don’t understnad. For when the time comes, it won’t be the physicists and mathematicians who will be on the forefront of interfacing with aliens. It will be diplomats, sociologists, linguists, and lawyers! (perhaps teachers…)
What expertise did you bring to your writing?
My background is in astrophysics and psychology. Granted, it’s not a very likely combination for a career…a regular career. But it is perfect for a writer of science fiction! “Harvest” is a book about first contact between an old alien civilization and the people of Earth. It’s all about physics and psychology! Here’s a little excerpt from the book in which the main character, a professor of socio-biology, talks about evolution and what’s necessary for a civilization to develop spaceflight:
“So, what are the prerequisites of space travel?” she asked.
There were a few shout-outs from up in the gallery—the cheap seats usually occupied by students. “Civilization.” “Faster-than-light travel.” “Aliens.” They were on the right track, even if their sources were limited to science fiction movies. But Vars was an evolutionary socio-historian, and that meant she was trained to look both into the future andthe past. She liked to think that her ideas about possible human future scenarios were well informed by historical precedents and intelligent extrapolations of cultural trends—meaning she wasn’t just talking science fiction here.
“Let’s start with something simple,” she said. “Time.” Time was never simple, but people always assumed it was. Everyone had experience with time, so everyone felt like they were experts on the subject. “Humans have a relatively long lifespan for a mammal. And we have the longest childhood of all animals.” Well, that was true now. Neanderthal kids had enjoyed a longer childhood, but Vars didn’t want to complicate things further. “Not only are we able to learn a lot before we plunge into adulthood,” Vars continued, “we also have the time to use that knowledge. I’m sure we would all like to live even longer, but nature has ensured that we live long enoughto transfer wisdom from one generation to the next, so our species can build on that, expanding our collective grasp of how the universe works. Each generation stands on the shoulders of all those that came before. Without a sufficiently long lifespan to learn and apply that collective mastery, space travel would just not be possible.”
Vars tried to peer into the audience to check that they were still with her.
“So why not elephants or whales, you might ask. Both species live a long time and spend a significant proportion of that life as children.” Vars didn’t wait for answers. “Unfortunately, neither were lucky enough to evolve hands. Even the elephant’s prehensile trunk can’t compare with the nimbleness of human fingers. And whales have the additional disadvantage of living in an underwater environment. These are significant handicaps to developing space travel. So again, humans got lucky. We evolved to live on land, and we have the right appendages to be able to tinker with objects in our environment. To bend it to our will.”
“Language!” someone screamed out of the dark.
Vars smiled. Language came up over and over again at each of her lectures. “Yes, language,” she said into the darkened auditorium. “It’s been said that language is the ultimate tool of mankind. Its greatest invention.” There were sounds of agreement from the audience. “But are we the only species on Earth to possess language? Sure, human languages are incredibly sophisticated and versatile, far more so than those of any other species we have encountered to date. But until a few decades ago, we didn’t even believe that there werenonhuman languages here on our planet. Now, of course, we know better. Dolphins, elephants, and even some birds have been observed using rudimentary languages unique to their species.”
Vars stopped to listen to the audience. There were murmurings of assent, but also a few mutterings of rejection. The idea of animals inventing languages was very new still, but it was no longer controversial among her colleagues. Of course, politics was always way behind science. If humans were to widely acknowledge that dolphins communicated via language, then we might also have to recognize them as having some legal form of “personhood”—and that just wasn’t tenable in the current political climate.
The dissent told Vars what proportion of the audience held human-centric views. It was about forty percent or so, judging by the noise. That was about average for this part of the country. In places like Berkeley, California, only one or two people in the audience dared to express such backward opinions loudly enough to be heard on stage. Most dissenters kept quiet, she knew. People were herd mammals, after all, and needed to be surrounded by others with similar views. That was how social echo chambers worked in the age of mass e-media.
“Language,” she said, “particularly written language, is essential to passing information from one generation and one community to the next. Written language saved us from having to invent things over and over again—”
“Oral traditions!” someone yelled.
“Oral traditions are fantastic for capturing and communicating culture,” Vars replied. “But they are lousy for transmitting technical information. There is no oral tradition of calculus.” There was a murmuring of agreement. Good. “And before someone brings up apprenticeship, let me just say that I’m a believer in learning while being embedded in a community of practice. We see such educational approaches in species other than our own. Chimps routinely teach their offspring how to fish for termites with specially made twigs. Birds teach their chicks how to hunt and which foods are good and where they can be located. Cerrado, a species of monkey from South America, use giant hammer rocks to break tough palm nuts over carefully selected anvil boulders. It takes years for the youngsters to learn how to select just the right hammers and anvils and to perfect the technique for bashing open the nuts. So yes, apprenticeship works—but it has its limits. We are the only species on Earth to develop otherintentional ways of passing on knowledge. Without written information, we wouldn’t be in the process of colonizing Mars, or mining the asteroids, or having permanent bases on the moon.”
Vars gave the audience a few seconds to absorb this. She wasn’t done having fun with them yet. “But before written and oral language traditions, before the apprenticeship form of passing knowledge from generation to generation, there was another way. Nature’s way. Evolution’s way.”
She stopped, giving her listeners a moment or two to guess the answer. Some nights, the audience got it almost immediately; other nights, there wasn’t a clue in the house. Tonight, there was only silence.
“Evolution couldn’t wait for humans to invent language. Survival depended on passing some information down the chain of generations.” Well? Still nothing?“I’m talking about instincts, of course. Our drive to mate, to reproduce, to protect our children. Our will to survive against all odds. We’ve all experienced, or will experience, these instinctual needs. It’s in our DNA, so to speak. But that’s not the only hard-coded knowledge that we pass along to our offspring.
“I will focus on humans here, because that’s what I wrote my book about. Which reminds me: I will be signing copies in the lobby right after the end of the lecture. I’m required to say this by my publisher.” There were a few chuckles. Good. Vars hated dull groups. It was hard to speak without feedback. “Agoraphobia and claustrophobia, fear of dark places and of heights, ophidiophobia and arachnophobia, instinctual disgust of bodily fluids—blood, urine, pus, feces—all of these are innate for us humans. We are born to avoid tight places and grand expanses. We naturally avoid snakes and spiders even if we’ve never seen or heard of them before. But we have also learned to overcome these fears. We had to if we were going to go into space. Our spaceships are extremely cramped, and they float in vast expanses of space. Astronauts are forced to recycle their bodily fluids and to no longer be afraid of extreme heights and absolute darkness. Although I may never overcome my fear of snakes and spiders…” She shivered dramatically and earned a few more laughs. “And perhaps, one day, we will meet other explorers out there. And we might have more innate fears to shed.”
What would you want your readers to know about you that might not be in your bio?
I might not be the Mother-of-Dragons, but I’m a caretaker of an adorable little tortoise Terri. You can follow Terri’s adventures on Instagram, where she is known as #CucumberPrincess: https://www.instagram.com/olgawerby/
As far as your writing goes, what are your future plans?
I’m currently finishing up “God of Small Affairs”—a book about a god who, by chance, ends up in a small town in Wisconsin and in a middle of a murder investigation. It’s not a science fiction book, but rather a story in a magical realism genre. You can read the first few chapters here: https://interfaces.com/blog/my-books/god-of-small-affairs/
If you could be one of the characters from this book, who would it be and why?
My characters go through a lot in this story. I wouldn’t want to be any of them! I like them. I like Vars, I like her dad. I like a lot of the people in “Harvest”—they are good people, trying to do the best that they can in difficult circumstances. Some don’t make it… Books are great at allowing our imaginations to experience extreme situations and hardships…without actual bodily harm. Below is an illustration from “Harvest” of something that happens to one of the characters:
BLURB:
Almost a century after Keres Triplets asteroid impact and subsequent nuclear exchange almost ended all human life on Earth, a strange artifact is discovered on one of the moons of Saturn. Who should be sent to the outer reaches of the solar system to initiate the first contact with an alien culture? Dr. Varsaad Volhard, an evolutionary-socio-historian, is chosen to help the world understand the alien civilization that left an artifact some thirty thousand years ago, before humans even learned to farm, at the time when other human species still walked the earth. While Vars prepares for the mission, her father, Dr. Matteo Volhard, discovers nanobots among the microplastics he studies. The bots are everywhere and seem to have been created to bond with human cyber implants. Why? Matteo is made to keep his discovery a secret...as well as his and his daughter's true origins. Both were donated to a Human DNA Vault as babies. Matteo was raised as a Seed before leaving with his young daughter to study ecology around the world. Who knows what? Who is in control? How does one communicate with non-human intelligence? People seem to die in gruesome ways as their cyberhumatics go haywire on Earth and on Luna and Mars colonies. Is Earth under attack or is it all just a cosmic misunderstanding? Vars needs to use all she knows to solve the mystery of the ancient civilization on Mimas, as her dad battles the alien nanobots at home.
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EXCERPT:
“The exton controls are not responding!” Marc shouted into his exoskeleton spacesuit helmet.
His exoskeleton was the heavy-duty dirt-and-boulder-mover type. Move a ton with exton. Right now, Marc was really just an intelligent bulldozer with life support. But the suit had disconnected from his D-tats, the personal computing device tattoos embedded in his lower arms and jaw, and his directional controls were busted. Now his exoskeleton acted with a mind of its own, moving him away from the construction site and out into the open Martian landscape. He needed to get back to the Malfy–an affectionate acronym for Martians Live Free, a city-sized habitat being built for the next wave of planetary immigrants.
“Marc?” his SB responded from the inside Malfy’s operational center. “What’s on the fritz this time?” Every contractor working outside was in constant communication with a personally assigned safety buddy. “I can’t seem to toss the controls over to my side.” In an emergency, Marc’s SB could take over the controls of his exton and bring him in, even if he was unconscious.
“I’ve got nothing!” Marc was more irritated than scared. This was his second equipment failure in as many months, and their group of union builders had reported three more to the management since the start of the project about two hundred days ago. It was always the same MO: at the end of a shift, the movement controls failed to respond to their operators’ commands, taking the builders out into the desert; and yet, after the rescue when the equipment was checked out, the engineers found nothing wrong with the extons. The first time it happened to Marc, he was even accused of faking the failure to get extra time off for hazardous conditions. As if construction work on Mars wasn’t dangerous in and of itself. Fortunately, Marc’s supervisor made everyone carry extra oxygen and a spare battery pack after the first few incidents. Just in case. Inconvenient for sure, but it was better than being stuck out of breath without a heater among the Martian dunes in minus 125 degrees Celsius.
“Send someone out to get me,” Marc said. “It’s an official request.”
“Are you sure, Marc? You know if they don’t find anything again—”
“I’m telling you, I’ve got nothing. Everything is dead on my side.”
“Yeah, mine too,” Marc’s SB agreed. “I’ll get Greg out there. But he won’t be happy. He just got his exton off and you’ll be cutting into his three days off period.”
“Tell him that I’d go if it was him out here. And tell him to hurry up about it.” The earliest he could expect Greg to arrive would be at least an hour, probably more–it took time get these darn things on.
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AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Olga Werby, Ed.D., has a Doctorate from U.C. Berkeley with a focus on designing online learning experiences. She has a Master's degree from U.C. Berkeley in Education of Math, Science, and Technology. She has been creating computer-based projects since 1981 with organizations such as NASA (where she worked on the Pioneer Venus project), Addison-Wesley, and the Princeton Review. Olga has a B.A. degree in Mathematics and Astrophysics from Columbia University. She became an accidental science fiction indie writer about a decade ago, with her first book, "Suddenly Paris," which was based on then fairly novel idea of virtual universes. Her next story, "The FATOFF Conspiracy," was a horror story about fat, government bureaucracy, and body image. She writes about characters that rarely get represented in science fiction stories -- homeless kids, refugees, handicapped, autistic individuals -- the social underdogs of our world. Her stories are based in real science, which is admittedly stretched to the very limit of possible. She has published almost a dozen fiction books to date and has won many awards for her writings. Her short fiction has been featured in several issues of "Alien Dimensions Magazine," "600 second saga," "Graveyard Girls," "Kyanite Press' Fables and Fairy Tales," "The Carmen Online Theater Group's Chronicles of Terror," with many more stories freely available on her blog, Interfaces.com.
Links:
http://www.interfaces.com/blog/
amazon.com/author/olgawerby
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4056895.Olga_Werby
https://www.facebook.com/OlgaWerby/
https://twitter.com/OlgaWerby
http://Pipsqueak.com
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDE3BNceupMYgvoaoAps2mg
Selected Book Links on Amazon:
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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE:
Olga Werby will be awarding 2 books to a randomly drawn commenter (LIZARD GIRL AND GHOST and SUDDENLY, PARIS) via rafflecopter during the tour.
