Questions and Answers What are you currently working on? I'm working on a novel about an international hacker organization. The organization, known as the Seventh Seal, has inserted a backdoor to the encryption algorithm used by the U.S. Government to secure top secret email, and has demanded one billion dollars in exchange for email already in its possession. An ex-hacker is retained by the FBI to locate Legion, the leader of the Seventh Seal. The trail winds between the real world and cyberspace, and lots of people die along the way. Who (Fact or Fiction) would you most like to meet, and what would you ask them? I would resurrect Winston Churchill and ask him if he wouldn't mind sharing a glass of Cognac and a fine cigar. A hundred thousand other questions would follow. Is writing your full time occupation, if not what is? That would be nice. I work for a high-tech consulting firm by day, and write by night. There is one complication. I also make love and sleep by night. Who is you favorite author? That's a tough one. I think I have to go with the Russians: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Anna Karenina is probably my favorite story. Though Les Miserables by Victor Hugo ranks high up there, but then so does Alexander Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. For living authors, I tend to enjoy John Le Carre the most. I might have said Patrick O'Brian, but then he just died. As for science fiction, Philip K. Dick or Gene Wolfe or Harlan Ellison or maybe H. G. Wells. Although there was a time I would have said Heinlein. Tolkien takes the fantasy category. Lately, I've been reading a lot of poetry; among my favorites are T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and William Butler Yeats. Favorite poem: The Waste Land. If you could give one piece of advice to a would-be author, what would it be? There is only one sure path to failure. And that is to give up. When did you first decide that you wanted to be an author? That's an interesting question. I should probably draw a distinction between wanting to be an author and actually striving to be an author. Wanting goes back to grade school, which at one point I was reading a book a day. Striving occurred at a time much later, when I decided I wanted to do something more with my life. I consider the printed word to be a kind of immortality. When did you first feel that you were an author? For some reason, I was reluctant to consider myself an author until A Step Beyond was published and I held a copy in my hands. Are you for or against e-books? For. E-books have their place as a new medium. I think they get a bad rap for a couple of reasons. First, the format is still sort of clumsy and the devices can be expensive. This is something that will be corrected with time. Second, a lot of unfiltered works are published as e-books. This results in a higher proportion of stories being published that, let's face it, are not so good. But it also results in some very good stories being published that weren't deemed marketable by traditional means. And that's where the true gems will lie. I suspect many of the great classics would have never been published if they had to pass today's marketing criteria. This is the secret horror of the publishing industry. What book are you reading at the moment? I'm currently reading several books: Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, John Le Carre's The Secret Pilgrim, Charles Darwin's Descent of Man, Paul Rambali's In the Cities and Jungles of Brazil, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, and The Best American Poetry 1998. Is there anything else that can be done with Alien Invasion, Time Travel or Robots? Is there anything else that can be done with a murder mystery? Of course. Next question. As a reader do you prefer Science Fiction, Fantasy or Horror? I enjoy all three. My only preference is for a story to be well written. Why do you think SF gets a bad press? Because there's a bunch of pedantic fools out there who criticize the genre based on a limited sampling. To criticize an entire genre is an act of ignorance. Every genre has its good and its bad. And I suspect at times SF may have more than its fair share of bad. But then SF also has some of the very best. What's the most memorable thing said in a review of your work? It would be from a review of A Step Beyond that appeared in Mark and Gerry's Science Fiction Reviews: "I read this 350 page book cover to cover in three days and my precocious 13 year-old daughter read it in two days." Many Thanks, Chris! Relevant Links C.K. Anderson Main Bibliography C.K. Anderson's Web Site