Author of Jonesbridge:
Echoes of Hinterland
1.
Your
book addresses an issue we all cringe about, showing a futuristic world where
our digital history can't be accessed. What inspired you to write this tale? My wife often laments, in
her photography business, that the growing trend with many of her portrait
clients is to request digital only files instead of prints. She reminds them
that that if their adult
grandchildren are searching their attic someday and discover a chest of DVDs or
hard drive backups, it’s’ likely they will be disappointed when they can’t
access the contents. The cloud addresses some of this, but in the event of loss
of cloud, that too is a puff of wind. It is true that photographs fade and turn
yellow with time. They are susceptible to fire and flood damage and your
grandmother’s attic may have a family of squirrels nesting in the photo box,
but we are storing an
increasing amount of our information in digital only format, which is subject to
configuration, encryption techniques, decryption technology, hardware and
software constraints, OS versions, drivers and dependencies and hackers. We
have become more and more dependent on digital media, and at our immediate
disposal, the vast amount of information about anything--conditioning us to
search instead of learn. What happens if this is lost? Finding an old book or
cache of papyrus in the desert can offer a wealth of information. Finding a
thumb drive without the means, format, or power to access the information
renders it useless.
The world
of the Hinterland Trilogy originates from an inexplicable fascination I had a
as kid with drawing factories and chimney stacks belching smoke into the sky. I
drew them tall and short and in perspective, no drawing complete until the the
smoke filled the page. Thirty plus years later, I ran across one of those
drawings in a stack of keepsakes at my mother’s house, and my eye was drawn
from the edge of the page to the world under the smoke, a future world in a
dark age where technology has been lost and with it the information we’ve
amassed in the digital realm. I wondered whether I would have found those old
drawings had my mother scanned them and stashed them into a raid backup drive
years and three generations of computers ago.
The
predicament the world of Jonesbridge finds itself in rises from the
growing trend and inevitability of all new information being store digitally
and what knowledge might be lost in a catastrophic failure of computers and
devices. When knowledge is lost only speculation remains. A dark age. The
characters Jonesbridge know what they have been told by others who know
as little as they do and the world is once again discoverable.
2.
Is
there anything we can do to insulate us from an online apocalypse? I don’t know. The
incredible amount of redundancy in our online infrastructure make it unlikely
that a civilization-altering loss of data can occur unless there is a
catastrophic EM/nuclear/solar event that culls a good bit of the population
with it--when advancement falls in favor of survival. The hard copy information
might survive. The digital might not. But it’s called speculative fiction for a
reason, I guess.
3.
What
challenges did you overcome to pen this story? The world of the Hinterland
Trilogy originated from a short story I wrote called, “The Harlot of
Baltimore,” first published in 2009 in the MacGuffin. I wrote Jonesbridge:
Echoes of Hinterland, the first novel in the Hinterland series, in response
to the interest generated by this short story, but it was long process. As most
novels, Jonesbridge endured numerous drafts at the request of my agent
and editor, but in the case of Jonesbridge, it took “many” drafts of the
ending before I found the one that truly fit. I believe there was only one
ending for Jonesbridge, and it was there, but it took a long time to
unearth it, I knew it when I finally found it.
4.
Speaking
of digital meltdowns, could ebooks one day be unreadable or inaccessible to us?
I think this is something that could definitely be a problem. I
have many old books, some hundreds of years old, and numerous books out of
print. There are many scenarios by which digital only books could be lost,
especially if the devices used to read them no longer have power or become
inoperable or incompatible.
5.
Where
do you see book publishing heading? I personally love books. I collect antiquarian books and I hate to
think of them disappearing (which luckily I don’t think they will). I do think
publishing will continue in the digital direction because it is a much more
efficient and economical business model and it is more environmentally
friendly. There is still a large demand printed books, a demand that re-gained
ground on digital books last year. It will probably be a push and pull, digital
vs. print, for a long time, but the economic models will become more creative.
6.
Any
advice for struggling writers? It’s never as good as you’re sure it is when you’re writing it and
never as bad as you think it is when you read it back for the first time. Write
the book you would want to read. And tenacity sometimes goes farther than luck.
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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog
are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter
@theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more
important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by
BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015
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