Jake Vickers - Large Scale Events Through the Lens of Individuals
Jake Vickers is an author who is fascinated by the inescapable ways in which exponential technology shapes the evolving nature of humanity. His conflict rich stories deeply emphasize individual characters, and often convey large scale events through the lens of the individuals affected by them. As our Author of the Day, he tells us all about his book, H-17 The Morningstar Abduction.
Please give us a short introduction to what H-17 The Morningstar Abduction is about.
On the world stage, a new clandestine and highly advanced nation is emerging. H-17 is recruiting candidates from around the globe. Its purpose and location remains elusive. Peculiar training camps are established to indoctrinate potential citizens with experimental methods that range anywhere from nurturing to brutal.
Gabby Morningstar is a child genius who lives with her father following her sister’s runaway and the disappearance of her mother. Gabby is in class when she receives the news of her father’s murder. Her quickly compounding horror offers no breathing room as she’s then abducted by the detective assigned to her father’s case and sold to a group of people stationed in a compound off of an unmarked highway exit. Gabby’s feral runaway sister Nikki catches wind of what has happened and then sets out on a journey to save her.
What inspired you to write about a child genius who gets abducted?
As far as writing about a child who gets abducted, one of my motivations was to create an adventure. Safety and adventure are mutually exclusive. So if the aim is to construct an adventure, then the story needs to start with the relinquishment of safety. Many stories take a gentler approach, but I prefer to let the audience know early on that all things are possible. If there is a line you’re not willing to cross, and you create a conflict-rich story, then the reader will naturally have an awareness of your limitations. Over time, they will develop a sense of what you are willing and unwilling to do, and the places you are willing and unwilling to go—thereby hindering the possibilities, and restricting the adventure to the mere confines of your sensibilities.
Tell us more about Gabby Morningstar. What makes her tick?
Gabby is complex in a way that is often difficult for her to cope with at her age. There is too much information coming at her, and too many logically mature concepts that quickly defy her inexperienced nature. Despite her understandable pessimism, given her situation, she is a hopeful but terrified individual. On top of that, there is a constant flow of equations and numbers in her mind that have her inventorying and quantifying reality. She longs for a sort of devoted support to match the love she feels for others—perhaps a love that only her sister Nikki can return. She focuses on everything around her with a deep concern, and sometimes feels that her focus is all that keeps the world from crumbling. If she were watching a rock climber, her hands would begin to sweat, and she would envision the path of their safe ascent. If she were to observe a free diver, she would focus on their oxygen reserves in order to protect them. On flights, she glares nervously at the shaky wings of airplanes to keep them intact. It isn’t that she believes that her focus is so powerful that it holds reality in check, but rather that reality is so fragile that sometimes all that keeps things from falling apart are the invisible strings of her imagination.
You are fascinated by the way technology shapes humanity. Why?
I’m interested in the way technology shapes humanity because it’s completely uncharted territory. We implement new technology at such a pace that we can’t possibly even begin to account for the effects it has on our behavior. It could also be that we have already changed irrevocably, even if we are physiologically the same as our ancestors. For example, mathematical patterns are often not recognized unless one samples from a very large number.
Much of the technology we interact with serves to accelerate our impulses and overt motivations—a hundred or a thousand social interactions, or business deals, within a week, rather than a small handful, makes an unfathomable difference. The machines we use to build now create structures at a rate that would have only been previously perceptible through the lens of geological time. With such an acceleration, we are sampling from a larger and larger portion of humanity at an ever more exponential rate. The patterns we are exhibiting, and what we truly are, may yet be an emergent discovery.
Readers say that the story is intricately woven and quite detailed. Why did you take this approach?
Though many of my favorite novels are simple in structure, I prefer to offer an immersive alternate reality. The structural intricacy probably came about due to the multiple first-person perspectives, paired with my desire to make each chapter gratifying in a way that a short story can be gratifying—yet still tied into the larger picture.
As for the detail, it is often as much for me as it is for the reader. I have a fairly dissociative way of seeing the world. Quite a lot of what I write never makes it into the story. When writing, I imagine the sensory detail for a given scene until I feel that I am actually there. Once the scene, characters, and conditions are believable to me, the story writes itself.
What is the hardest thing about being a writer?
Maintaining good posture—I mean, sometimes you just don’t feel like sitting up straight, so you just kind of plop there like a slug. However, over time, that hurts your back and uncomfortably constrains your internal organs. While the normal person thinks this feels ridiculously awful, I should probably just be an adult and sit up straight, the writer often thinks, I should probably get drunk so this stops hurting. But then the alcohol drains your vital energy so you have to combat that with a clearly inadvisable dose of caffeine. Then you’re just a wobbly, yet jittery weirdo, drifting in and out of consciousness, jolting back to life to preform the act of writing like a creepy coin-operated fortune teller. And don’t even get me started on eye strain, hand cramps or the chasm of lost documents.
Is there something that compels you to write? And do you find that writing helps you achieve a clarity about yourself or ideas you've been struggling with?
I’m compelled to write because I haven’t seen the stories I want to experience out there. I grow very unsettled when the majority of films, shows, novels, or games expose themselves to be replicas of a remakes of unoriginal ideas.
In concerns to originality, there is a common and foolish idea that there are only seven basic plots. One should take no issue with the fact that there are seven basic plots. However, everyone who creates should take deep issue with the notion that there are only seven basic plots. The implication of the word “only” was not part of Christopher Booker’s analysis. The foolishness of this assumed idea, and the perpetuation of this concept serves only to restrict unimaginative defeatists.
There are not only four strings on a violin because that phrase does nothing to capture the beauty, depth and splendor of music. There are not only three primary colors because that notion does not get you the Sistine Chapel. A world weary individual indulging themselves in their notion of the limitation of expression has not nearly considered the matter deeply enough. To consider seven categories of stories, in any mix, and in any configuration, incorporating the varying arrangements of the vast arrays of human personalities—and then applying those personalities in various physical bodies and to various conditions, already leaves one with an infinity so overwhelming that meaningless reiteration is shameful. That is not to say that we should not build on what has come before us, but that we should be better than to offer meaningless imitation.
Was there a single defining moment or event where you suddenly thought, 'Now I'm an Author,' as in—this is now my career?"
There was a moment when I was in the warm ocean. Not the leisurely swim one would often prefer to indulge in, but rather a tense night fin. I was in a USMC battalion that was filled with a group of highly motivated individuals who I had no business surrounding myself with. We had planned to fin back to shore that night. They set a nicely sized campfire on the beach. We were to swim towards the light of the beach fire until we made it to land. Before we set out, they made sure to tell us that the second largest great white ever caught was caught off these shores. They laughed and said it was safe. Though the practice didn’t seem all that safe, we consoled ourselves with the fact that we were each equipped with a mighty red glow stick in the event of catastrophe. Personally, I feel it’s crazy to swim in the ocean at all, and if you ever swim in the ocean at night, you’re obviously pursuing ambitions of becoming Jaws fodder.
So, Zodiac boats hauled us several kilometers out, and then we jumped into the water. We were to swim back in pairs. I, of course, said fuck that, and began to fin vigorously away from my relaxed friend as though my life depended on it—because I had quite a vivid imagination and had seen plenty of slow-motion videos of great whites shooting up at 20mph from the depths of the ocean to snatch some poor seal in its mouth before breaking the surface and splashing down with magnificent violence. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to be the bitter thing in the great white’s mouth when it thought...aww, man, hairless monkey? and then spat my pitiful bleeding carcass back out into the subtropical night ocean.
Though nothing devoured me that night, it was then that I felt my vivid imagination would be better suited to an activity that involved fewer sharks and more coffee.
Is there an underlying message you wish to relay about basic human nature through your characters?
That’s a big question that I imagine could receive unnecessarily ego-driven responses. I don’t think that “basic human nature” is unexplored territory, and if it were, I would hardly be qualified to elaborate on it. As a species, we’ve discovered and described archetypes and pathways that are axiomatically true. That information is slow to be absorbed from generation to generation, and often we are doomed to live in ignorance of even our own wisdom. Divergent philosophies still combat themselves in the form of war, political turmoil and the dumbest one-liner conceptualizations of our ideas that we can possibly manage.
Not having a strong sense of the knowledge that we are already privy to is especially problematic when you throw the confusing nature of exponential technology into the mix. Though the archetypes of the past are largely true, I feel they are insufficient to describe or anticipate our metamorphosis in an era when technology has started to exponentially augment our motivations and impulses.
What are you working on right now?
I’m working on the second H-17 novel. H-17 We Become the Things This Does takes place entirely within H-17, versus the first novel which centered around the recruitment of the Morningstar sisters. In the upcoming book, the seemingly omniscient AI Seven D One has divided the physical structure of the H-17 compound into six political factions, each represented by a powerful chairman in parliament. The six divergent political groups each occupy equal territory, seemingly so that Seven D One can watch human conflict unfold in a condensed microcosm of deceptive productivity that the species otherwise only achieves during war. Gabby seeks to learn what Seven D One wants of her, while Nikki causes havoc and is sent on her first Crimson Brigade mission.