I spoke with David D. Levine about his newest space heist novel, The Kuiper Belt Job. You can watch the interview here:
Transcript:
Jessie Kwak
David D. Levine is the author of Andre Norton Nebula Award winning novel Arabella of Mars, sequels Arabella and the Battle of Venus and Arabella the Traitor of Mars, and over fifty SF and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the Hugo, and he has been shortlisted for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and Sturgeon. Stories have appeared in Asimov’s,Analog, Clarkesworld ,F&SF, Tor.com, numerous Year’s Best anthologies, and his award-winning collection Space Magic. His latest novel is The Kuiper Belt Job, which is what we’re going to be talking about today.
So, first up, David, I absolutely love this book. It combines everything that I love about heists with everything that I love about space opera, and most crucially of all, it has an amazing set of characters. So, can you just talk a little bit about what were your influences for the Kuiper Belt?
David D. Levine
Okay. I’ve got a lot of different influences. But where I started with this was, there was a panel at the Chicago World Con, and I think it might have been as far back as 2003. This was not the kind of panel where you have a group of people in front of the room, it was just kind of a gathering of fans. And we’re all just sort of brainstorming another Firefly movie. The idea is, how could we come back to this world that we all deeply love. And so the group of us together, and at this point, I really have no idea who came up with which parts of the idea was that the Firefly movie sequel would be that of my little son, of course, Mel has a son comes out of appears out of nowhere and says, “dad’s in jail, I need to put the gang back together to break him out of jail.” Okay, so all of the Firefly characters, those who survived the movie must get back together again, it’s 10 years later, they’re different people than they were. But it’s still the same, the same Firefly gang, and having the same kind of fun that they had in the TV show. And this idea just stuck in the back of my head for years. I finally decided that what I would do with it was I would file the serial numbers off and make it a novel of my own. I really truly believe that this has been through so much. It took me like two years to write it. Yeah, I’m not a fast writer. So, by the time I finished it, it contained the fun aspects of Firefly in that there it’s a ?? picture in the space. It’s a lived in funky, kind of small-scale space opera universe. And it’s a found family of diverse loveable rogues. And I think that aspects of Firefly survive, but it shouldn’t be 100% obvious that each of the characters is in fact based on one of the Firefly characters. Although, if you’re familiar with Firefly, and you’re familiar with the capability job, then you’ll recognize who is whom. But I also became a big fan of Leverage. In the intervening years. Not everybody knows Leverage. Leverage was a TV show it was on TNT, I think around five seasons, and the three or four of the five seasons were filmed right here in Portland, I was an extra on a couple of episodes of Leverage. And Leverage is another found family of lovable misfits’ story about a group of con artists who team up to help defend the little guy against the big guy. And when I started thinking about, “how do I combine the fun bits of Firefly and the fun bits of Leverage”, because I wanted to not just have the Firefly characters, who were just sort of love a little space rogues, but I also wanted them to be con artists, like the characters in Leverage. And it turns out that you can do a pretty decent one to one map of the Firefly characters onto the Leverage characters. So each of my characters is kind of a mash up of a Firefly character and Leverage character, except also, there are a whole bunch of different ways of putting together a team and putting together a draft first group, and one of the ideas that I drew on was, there’s a concept in MMA called the five man band, and you can find lots about this in TV Tropes. Do not go anywhere near TV Tropes, you will never come out again. But if you do go into TV Tropes, you will discover that the enemy, a five-man band consists of the leader, the Lancer, the brain, the muscle and the girl. Okay, and so, again, you can map the Firefly and leverage characters onto this set of archetypes. And in addition, there’s the standard characters forming a well-balanced D & D party. You must have the magic user, the rogue, the fighter and the cleric. And each of these maps onto one of the five main D & D characteristics strength, intelligence, wisdom, charisma, and dexterity. Okay, so all of my characters are in some way representatives of these different avatars, making up the group of loveable rogues. This is the first time I had written an ensemble piece. And so, I drew on all of these other avatars and tropes, in order to be sure that my group really worked for my readers in the same way that Firefly and Leverage worked for me. And so far, the reactions I’m getting it seems to indicate that it’s working.
Jessie Kwak
Yeah, I think that totally worked. I loved the interplay of the characters, and I could very much see that, you know, the different archetypes. And I got extremely excited when you mentioned Leverage, especially that you’ve been an extra and I tried to cut you off back there, but you have to tell us were you an extra in what episodes?
David D. Levine
I was a reporter in the in the First Contact Job, although I think I wound up entirely on the cutting room floor for that one. And I was also it’s been like, 10 years since Leverage was filming in Oregon. So, I don’t remember the title of the episodes anymore. And as I’m reaching for other examples of episodes I was in, I was in the first episode of Librarians. I was in several episodes of Grimm. And I’m only thinking of the one episode of Leverage, but I’m pretty sure I was in another couple of episodes, I compare to being an extra to be very similar to serving on a jury, in that you have to go downtown, and you there’s a heck of a lot of waiting, before you get in and you do the thing. And doing the thing doesn’t take very long. And sometimes you go, and you serve on the jury, and then the parties settle, and you never even have a chance to cast a ballot. And then in the end, you get paid minimum wage. So, the two jobs are quite similar.
Jessie Kwak
That’s funny. Thank you for indulging me in the little digression. So, one of the other things that I loved about the Kuiper Belt job was the details of the physics and practicalities of living in space. And but you did it in such a way that it didn’t feel like it bogged down the story at all. It was just really fun. It felt very realistic and scientific. And I know that you’ve done a lot of research. So, can you tell us a little bit about the research that you’ve done?
David D. Levine
Well, I’ve been a huge space fan since I was a kid. You know, I grew up during the Mercury program. So, I’ve been interested in space for about as long as there’s been a US space program. And I was always following really closely. I was a big fan of Commander Hadfield playing his guitar in the space station. And so, I took classes in college in like orbital mechanics and comparative planetology. I am so into space that I’ve done a lot of space related tourism. I was very fortunate to be selected to come and be a there’s a project called NASA Social, where social media users can apply to represent social media to NASA. So basically, you go if you submit your name and you get drawn and you were willing and able to pay your own way to come down to Cape Canaveral, then you get the same access to the launch that everybody else in the press does. So, I went, and I saw a launch of one of the Tejas satellites when the telecommunication satellites as part of this. I got to sit in the cab of the crawler transporter that carries the big boosters out to the launch pad and got to visit the Vehicle Assembly Building, the world’s biggest room. Then later, I had my father, very kindly pay my way to do one of those zero G flights, the vomit came. So, I got a chance to actually experience living in zero gravity for a few minutes at a time. And I discovered that book learning about how to maneuver in zero gravity is not the same as actually being able to do it. It’s a lot harder to move around in zero G than you would think it would be. Well, it’s simple, you just push off and you go into a straight line. Well, it’s not that simple. And it’s difficult to overcome your instincts, which are going to try to get you to swim, and swimming doesn’t work, you will continue traveling in that straight line. But pushing off in such a way that you don’t tumble is hard. And there you may run into someone else or something else before you get to where you think you’re going. And then my biggest bit of space tourism was in 2010. I actually lived for two weeks on a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert. And during those two weeks, we were not supposed to leave our simulated habitat without wearing our simulated spacesuits. And this location was chosen because it looks very much like Mars. So that was a real astronaut experience. And I got some great pictures out of it. So, I have studied a lot about space, and about zero gravity. And I have I have done everything I can to get that lived experience and convey it in my books.
Jessie Kwak
Yeah, I think you did such a fantastic job with that, I’d forgotten that you’ve done the Mars colony thing that looked like it was super fun.
David D. Levine
It was amazing. Life changing. That’s rad.
Jessie Kwak
So as well as the science and the characters, which we’ve already talked a little bit about the narrative structure of the Kuiper Belt job it was so interesting to me. So, it’s unique in a couple of ways. First, you kind of flipped between the job that went wrong as back, you know, a decade ago, and then the current day, the series of escalating jobs that the crew is doing as they kind of re gather. But you also tell each of the present dissections from the perspective of one, a new and different crew member. And what I loved about that is that it kind of it mimics, heists, and how, you know, a high story where you’re getting new information with each new perspective, and your own experience of the heist is constantly changing, because you’re like, oh, that’s what that was about. And that’s what that person saw. So how did you come up with this structure? It was done really well.
David D. Levine
Thank you, thank you, um, you know, it was a big risk to use such an unconventional structure. And one of the other things that’s unconventional about it is, each of the five seats, each of the five views, single viewpoint character sequences, typical character, typical novel with multiple viewpoint characters is going to alternate between them, you might spend 357 1000 words in one person’s head, and then you go to another person’s head, and then eventually get back to the first one, you’re hopping back and forth. And I’ve written a couple of novels that way, alternating between the two points of view. But in this case, I had five points of view. And I just got this bee in my ear, I got this idea that, hey, you know, I’d like to give each person a long time on stage, give them an opportunity to have an interrupted FaceTime with the reader, and to really build up their character with a full arc of beginning, middle and end, all from just their perspective. At one point, I was actually thinking,” Could this be sold as a series of linked novellas?” And the individual pieces aren’t standalone enough to make that work, but I was thinking about that. But I just had this idea of doing these big chunks, and also the idea of interleaving flashback sequences between the chunks to give the backstory about of course, the backstory, if I was interleaving, it would have to be very carefully sliced up, so that you got the information, no sooner than you actually needed it to get the best emotional impact. And so, one other thing that I did, I omitted a lot of things I’ve missed that were huge risks, and just plain stupid in terms of in terms of, you know, meeting our readers expectations, like having these long sequences of first-person narrator narration from different narrators. And then also the flashback sequences are told in first person plural. They’re in they are told in a weak perspective, because the idea is, is that during that time, during the time, 10 years ago, when the big job went wrong, they were so close to each other, they were living in each other’s pockets, feet and finishing each other’s sentences. They were just they might as well just have been one person in seven bodies. And so, I decided, as a kind of almost as a dare to myself, you know, can I pull this off? Can I use first person plural All narration Can I have alternating points of view; except they don’t alternate? Each person just gets one long stretch on the stage. It’s unusual. It’s different. And as I’m, as I’m, you know, sitting there contemplating, I spent a long time doing what I call noodling, which is kind of writing notes and outlines before I began drafting. And as I was in that moving noodling phase, I was going, this is the way I want to do it. Is there any good reason to do it this way? No. Is there a good reason not to do it this way? Absolutely. Am I going to try it anyway? Why the heck not? Because I find that people that try interesting and unusual things with fiction, one of two things happens, either it doesn’t work, in which case, it just falls on the floor. Nobody ever hears about it or breaks the mold. And people go, “Wow, nobody’s ever done that before. This is cool.” So I’m hoping for the latter and kind of expecting the former, and we’ll see how it goes.
Jessie Kwak
Yes, well, in my opinion, you pulled it off. So hopefully, you’ll get a lot of great responses to that. What was one of your favorite parts of writing this book?
David D. Levine
So, in every episode of Leverage, there was a scene where the characters get together, and they’re figuring out what’s going to happen next. And somebody usually Nate says, “Hey, everybody, let’s steal, you know”, and he named something completely ridiculous, you know, let’s steal a dairy. You know, let’s steal an automobile plant, you know, let’s steal a genealogy, you know, that there would be this moment, in every episode of Leverage, when it says, “Let’s steal something ridiculous that you couldn’t possibly steal.” And yet, somehow or other, they do get together and do that. So, the moment that I was kind of writing toward the whole time, was the moment when they get together late in the book, and it’s, let’s steal a fest, and let’s steal a spaceship. And they do get together and steal the fastest ship in the whole system. And that was, I didn’t put the line, “Hey, folks, let’s steal a spaceship”. But I think anybody that knows Leverage will recognize that moment when they see it. There’s another couple of things that I would list as my favorite scenes. There’s the zero-gravity fight in the casino, spent a lot of time working that out with a martial artist, friend of mine, I understood the zero-gravity stuff, she understood the martial arts stuff. And there’s also another big zero gravity scene where all my characters are drifting in space. They have limited that they have suits with limited amount of oxygen and no jets, they’re drifting off to certain death. And how do they use physics to save themselves? Then and so those two scenes, showing off the zero gravity aspects of the story are scenes that I like to read it by readings?
Jessie Kwak
Those are both very fun scenes. I imagine. So, I also wanted to ask what’s one of the trickiest parts? And it sounds like those scenes probably fell into both categories. But yeah, what was one of the trickiest parts of writing it?
David D. Levine
The trickiest parts of writing this book were all around making the schemes work, making the cons work, that I needed to develop the con, figure out a way that it would go wrong, improvise, along with the characters. So basically, I set the scene I figured out, this is the job, this is what they’re doing. This is who the characters are, this is the resources that they have. And then it would say, okay, now here’s the thing that goes wrong. And I would be kind of thinking along with my characters, using what they knew and using their priorities and their motivations to help try and figure out what they would do. So it was really a case of building myself a puzzle, and then finding and then finding a way out of it. And then, the superpower of any writer of fiction is that if I wrote myself into a corner, I could always go back and change the premise to give myself the out that I had discovered that I needed. This is something that is a lot more difficult if you’re writing in series, because the previous versus the previous chapters have already been published or sunk. So that’s why I prefer reading at novel length. I like to say that writing is more like acting than it is like directing, that you actually internalize the character. And then you learn to behave as the character except your writing, you’re writing the actions down instead of portraying them on a screen or on a stage. So the process of improvising my way when I say my way, I mean as the group as the cannibal club, improvising my way out of the impossible situation that I, as writer had put myself and it’s really time consuming. And there were so many blind alleys and so many. I’ve already established that that’s the case. So I can’t do that. But I can go back and I can change it so that this is not as impossible as it is now. I just finished workshopping a prequel story to the real job, which is called the FTL job. And this is, it isn’t it is in the state of being drafted and critiqued. But it’s a long way from even being submitted, never mind being published. But the feedback that I got, indicates that I didn’t have the thing at the end that goes wrong isn’t nearly big enough. And so I need to go back and have something much bigger, go wrong and force my characters to improv their way out of it. And when I went to sleep last night, I was thinking, okay, so I know what goes wrong. How the heck are they going to get out of it. And then I woke up at like, three in the morning. And I had the beginnings of an idea in my head. And I just didn’t want to go back to sleep and risk losing that. So I got up and I started typing and I typed for like, two hours. So I did not get a lot of sleep last night, but I do have an outline for what exactly goes wrong, and how they get out of it.
Jessie Kwak
Oh, that’s awesome. I love those moments. I can certainly attest to writing an entry Chronicles books that is one of the trickiest parts is all those heists and colons and because you can’t just let it work out, right the way that they want it to. And then you’re like, I’m writing in theory characters that are seasoned to con artists and are, you know, much smarter than me about these sorts of things. So how would they get through this? Yeah, I have a lot of conversations with my husband where I’m like, Alright, so if they’re going to do this, what about that? And yeah, a lot of three epiphanies about oh, that’s what could work.
David D. Levine
Yeah, when I talk about my noodling phase, and right now I’ve gone back from drafting to a kind of a reading noodling phase. There’s a lot of what if, and so what if they, and hey, what about and here’s an idea. In my notes, I usually write something in the vicinity of two to five times as much in the way of notes is as draft.
Jessie Kwak
Yep. So many notes. Well, you mentioned that you are working on a prequel right now. Please tell me that there are going to be more stories in this world because I got to the end of this book. And I was just like, David, where’s book two?
David D. Levine
Well, Book Two is just sort of a nascent idea at this point. There is one prequel story called The Bucket Shop Job, which was published in SNSF, earlier this year, and the second prequel story, the FTL job is will hopefully find its way to publication sooner or later. Given that I now have a publisher for the novel, which I did not have. At the time I wrote the first prequel story. If nothing else, I’m sure that my publisher can put it up on their website. So I think that the FTL job will find its way to the public, moderately sweet moderately soon as these things go. I have a vague notion for a sequel to the hypothetical job. And the kind of the point here is that I’m visualizing this as being like Firefly, in that there are short stories, which is to say TV episodes that take place before the Orca job. And then the and the Orca job is the first Firefly movie. The Kuiper Belt job is the second Firefly movie. And then the subsequent novels will be subsequent movies. So each so there’s, there’s really no end to the number of prequel and sequel works that can be generated out of this universe. It just comes down to is it successful enough to justify that?
Jessie Kwak
Yeah, well, I’m putting it in terms of movies and TV shows. This would be epic on the big screen or the small screen, so fingers crossed for all
David D. Levine
The producers here.
Jessie Kwak
Did you hear me Netflix gods?
David D. Levine
If you’ve got a line on the Netflix Gods we need to talk.
Jessie Kwak
Yeah, well, I wish I did. Maybe they’re watching this interview.
David D. Levine
Let’s hope so. Netflix gods.
Jessie Kwak
Well, if they are, where can they and everyone else find you on the internet?
David D. Levine
I’m easy to find. I am at https://daviddlevine.com/. And it’s got two Ds in the middle. Because David levine.com was so taken Levine’s out there it’s actually really common name. I’ve been using my middle initial professionally since I’ve been an adult really. The most famous David Levine is a New Yorker cartoonist, David Levine, very famous caricaturist he’s passed on now. There’s an IndyCar driver named David too. I mean, there are a heck of a lot of dentists, lawyers and real estate agents named David Levine. And then also there’s David Beckham and Adam Levine, who are found together frequently enough that Google searches on just David Levine. We’ll find a picture of the two of them at some party more often than not. That’s up to us that middle initial David D. Levine.
Jessie Kwak
Well, perfect. Excellent. Thank you. All right. Well, it was a pleasure talking with you. And everyone go read the Kuiper Belt Job.
David D. Levine
The Kuiper Belt job by David D. Levine. available November 7, from arc minor press and Kasich sfsf.