Eric Flint

(continued)

Interview by Alyce Wilson

Well, it seems as if you…I'm thinking about Baen's Bar and how you have kind of really taken an unusual step in building real relationships with some of your fans and learn from each other in a sense.

That is directly a result, not so much in and of itself of my socialist ideology as my socialist experience, because I spent 25 years as a political organizer. So doing collaborative work and organizing is second nature to me. It comes very easily, and in fact I'm very good at it.

As evidenced by your writing career, as well.

I collaborate very well. What would end up happening with the 1632 series, it wound up being this kind of very large, collaborative effort. At this point I think there's something like — I'd have to get the exact numbers from Paula Goodwin — but I think between 50 and 60 different people have published. And when I say published, got paid for, commercially published, been paid, got royalties, in that series. Now of course most of them are relatively few short stories here and there, but still, that many people, and it's operated for years now. It has a convention every year, of its own. And this past year we held an additional one in Europe.

Why do you think there are so many who are anxious to participate creatively in that universe?

[...] I think there are probably three factors. I think the reason is that series hits a chord with people. It's interesting: I have a number of fans who are military, including some active-duty military officers.

Right, you mentioned that.

And I have chatted with a couple of them, last year, and one of them asked me, and I said, "Well, I think the reason is because since the collapse of the Soviet Union in '89 it has been very clear to everyone that the United States is rather, willy-nilly, becoming an empire." And I think most Americans are very uneasy about that and have very mixed feelings about it. On the one hand there's a great deal of pride in the fact that people are proud of their country; on the other hand I think a whole lot of people are not — including people in the military — are not real happy with some of the things that are done and some of the decisions that are made and just have doubts about it. I think the 1632 series taps that nerve, because what it does is it shows a group of Americans in a very difficult situation who wind up having to do — it's a very different situation, but they wind up having to make many of the same kind of decisions. I don't shove any particular political viewpoint down anybody's throat. I just simply show my heroes doing what I think should be done, and I leave it to the readers to decide if that's what this or any other administration would do. In my opinion, the answer is obvious, but people can make whatever decision they want.

I think the combination of the fact that the series touches on so many questions that are immediately of concern to so many Americans, and by the way not just Americans, the series has quite a few fans around the world, especially in Europe. I think has something to do with the fact that it resonates [...] with the modern situation without being directly tied to it. It's not an analog to it, but that's one thing. The second thing is it's very [...] complex, interesting and elaborate. And people get drawn into that.

And finally, I think what makes it possible for this to work with this kind of collaborative effort. I'm in charge of it, but there's a lot of collaborations; there's a third party involved which is objective reality as it actually happens. So that this is a universe I created only up to a point. I didn't invent the 17th century. [...] I didn't invent Holy Roman Empire. So that if someone wants to participate in it, there's all kinds of objective realities and research they can anchor the story on, and then we can work out whether it fits within the framework of the rest of it. Whereas, if you try to do that kind of collaborative work and it's a universe entirely created by one author, then that author has to make every damn decision about whether this story can be done, and it would just get unwieldy.

You know, what occurs to me is you got out of academia because you wanted to make a difference, and you went and did the political thing; then came back to writing. And, through the things that you chose to write about, you were actively changing how people are viewing the world and thinking about the world.

I hope so. Although it's always important… Part of the reason why I can get really harsh toward writers that I think use their fiction to hawk a particular political philosophy is because I spent 25 years hawking a political philosophy, and I consider them being dishonest.

That they're trying to do both.

Yes. It's like if you want to hawk your ideas, nothing prevents you from writing your political tract, whatever it is. Of course, the problem is probably not more than 100 people are going to want to read it. So what you do is you disguise it as a novel and shove it down people's throats. [...] I don't like that and I try to be very careful of my own writing to avoid it. Now there's no way I or any author can avoid letting your own basic, ethical and social values show through when you write. That's just a given. And by the way, even though I try, it's part of what you're trying to do with your writing. But I think fiction lends itself very well to illuminating ethical values, I think it lends itself terribly badly, to try to give people lectures on politics. I just do. It's a very emotional medium, in that it deals with emotions, even though we use words. You can have a very powerful effect on people on the ethical values you take, whereas what direct political conclusions are drawn from that, that's very hard to know.

It's just uncanny how much of what you're saying now, I was hearing similar points of view from Dave Weber when I spoke to him. And I can really see how you might come from slightly different, or sometimes very different political backgrounds or political views, and yet he was always very interested in the discussion.

Dave and I work very well together. We did have very different political views, although different to a point.

They coincide in some areas.

They overlap a great deal in some ways. I have a number of friends and collaborators that… my views are obviously very left-wing. I have friends and collaborators that are quite conservative and that I work with and it works out fine. I'm more concerned in… I don't know how to put it. There are basic social and ethical values that concern me far more than what they think. People can come from the same set of values and come to different conclusions about, "OK, what should we do politically right now?"

That's a given. What I mostly care about is that, insofar as that any contribution any author can make to society, the role storytellers have always had in society — and this goes all the way back to literally the days when we were cavemen, and storytellers have been around as long as the human race has, as far as we can tell it's the oldest art form...

Yeah, back into the oral...

Yes, all the way back into the oral traditions. There seemed to be some kind of hardwired-nature for human beings to have stories told to them, even though everybody knows they're really not true. Basically, they're all the kind of moral, ethical repository of the tribe, in a sense. That's what all these moral… Honestly, every story ever written, no matter how different, has two things in common: they all start with "Once upon a time" and they all end with "and the moral of the story, kiddies…" The moral may be, you know, modest. It may be the moral of the story is "Don't mess with hard-boiled private detectives." But there's a point to a story or it's not a story. And it's through those kind of stories that a tribe or nation or culture keeps hearing and repeating and changing in different ways; that it develops, elaborates, reinforces its basic mores. I think the basic mores of Western civilization are good. Not perfect, but good. Better than those any other culture has yet produced. And I'm all for strengthening them. There are going to be hard choices people are going to have to make, and they will make whatever decisions they make. But if anything I've ever written helps strengthen that basis from which they will make that decision, then I figure I've done whatever job a writer can do. So I'm not directly politically active the way I was, but I at least feel I'm still kind of engaged in — call it the moral battlefield or the ethical, but whatever you want to call it.

I like that.

You just have to be careful as a writer that you don't natter at people. Because people don't want to be nattered at when they sit down and relax after a day's work and be entertained. You owe them what you promised them.