After successfully launching a tech startup in the restaurant hospitality space which transformed payment and ordering experiences, Thomas R. Weaver realized he had no more excuses not to do what he always wanted to do: write fiction. Despite swearing to friends and family (none of whom apparently believed him) that he’d never run another startup again, he recently started another one focused on bringing some of the ideas to life in Artificial Wisdom, his debut novel, specifically around communicating in augmented reality. In Thomas’s spare time, he is an avid cook, and loves drawing, painting, and chess. Thomas collects more books than he has time to read, especially if they have beautiful covers, like Folio editions.
Artificial Wisdom is set in 2050, where a heat wave has killed millions across the Persian Gulf, including the wife of journalist Marcus Tully. But he has a lead like no other: the heat wave was unnaturally diverted from hitting the USA by geoengineering. The president who gave the order is now running for an even greater office: dictator of the nation states, with a short-term mandate to make hard decisions in order to prevent a climate apocalypse. His final opponent is the world's first AI politician, Solomon, governor of New Carthage, a domed city-state protecting the elite. Solomon's creator may have the evidence Tully needs to make his case to the world–but in the middle of the most important election in history, someone will do anything to stop the truth from coming out.
Thomas R. Weaver stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing and researching the book:
Several weeks ago, I was listening to a new BBC Maestro talk by historical fiction bestselling author, Ken Follett, where he talked about the extensive research he had to do before writing a single word, to the point where for one of his books he spent nearly a year simply researching.
I don’t write that kind of fiction, and that kind of research would drive me mad. My books are mysteries, set in the future, for one thing. Detail is still important, but often my research focuses on how things work today, and how it might be extrapolated into the future.
For example, my debut novel, Artificial Wisdom, a murder-mystery technothriller, was set in 2050, where there has been huge technological progress even while we are on the verge of extinction. It’s a world full of augmented reality devices, super intelligence AI, global cryptocurrencies, new social networks and shifts in the way basic things (like news corporations) function.
How do you even go about building a new world? Educating myself on the macro-trends was the easy bit: not only are there countless non-fiction books to dig into covering each of these subjects, but documentaries, articles, podcasts, Wikipedia pages and more. Writers thirty years ago would have had to camp out in libraries and travel to research, or perhaps consult their trusty home encyclopaedia. Now, we have it all at our fingertips. We probably have the opposite issue: for any one thing we need to know, there’s almost too much information available, and you could study any one thing for years of your life. However, I subscribe to the Aaron Sorkin method of character and plot development: the backstory only emerges as you need it, and so the question becomes researching enough to make things authentic, but not too much that the detail is no longer useful, maybe even detracting from the narrative.
Creating a murder-mystery set in the future presents all sorts of challenges. It’s often said that the 1990s, and the rise of the mobile phone, changed how authors put their characters in jeopardy. The smartphone, with its ability to track locations and be tracked, has changed it even more so. Writing a complex murder-mystery set 30 years from now meant firstly figuring out what technology was going to be possible in the future, and then finding potential loopholes in it. For example, what if automatic cleaning bots cleared up your crime-scene before the police got there?
For me, researching, then, is really à la carte. I’ll be in the middle of writing a scene, and will decide the best thing my character could do right now is, say, go into an underground speakeasy. In Baghdad. In 2055. Fine, but is that even possible? And I’ll go and spend an hour of my life learning what kind of rock ancient Baghdad is built on (limestone), do they have cellars (some) and if you had limestone stairs leading down, would they get slippery with age (yes)? One hour, for perhaps three words most eyes will jump over, but more importantly the validation that I technically could have an underground speakeasy in a future version of Baghdad, and that the character can go there.
Or perhaps a plot point will depend on how cryptocurrencies actually work, and I’ll need to actually speak to an expert about it. We live an incredible time where we can reach almost anyone on social media, although that doesn’t mean they’ll always want to talk to you. When writing my book, I directly consulted experts on climate, geoengineering, augmented reality, cryptocurrency and many more things, usually on very specific snippets to make sure I was being accurate.
ChatGPT has changed the game on this, and has certainly replaced Google for me as my first search tool. I can clearly remember the moment that changed everything for me. In my second book, my protagonist is trying to save someone who has just lost a limb. They need a tourniquet, and don’t have a lot around them to use. I started to Google makeshift tourniquets. I can’t remember what I searched for, now, but I can tell you know that if I’d really needed information in a hurry, my patient would have bled out on the floor before I found anything. There was a lot more about what not to do, than what to do. Asking ChatGPT the question immediately gave me some solid suggestions I was then able to verify externally.
Last week I needed to know how brush motors were made, and how they worked. What were all the individual parts, and what order might they be put together? Googling it was very challenging, since amateurs don’t just make brush motors in their garage, and if they do it comes with the assumption you already know a lot of basic information about electromagnetism. I tried a ChatGPT prompt: “Explain to me all the individual components of a universal washing machine motor as if I know nothing about it, but am going to build one from scratch”, and got a succinct list of all the parts and how they fit together.
Now, no-one who isn’t going to build a brush motor themselves really wants to know all that, but my character knows, and needed to build one, from recycled parts, in a hurry. There’s a fantastic episode of the podcast Writing Excuses (S3E1) on Worldbuilding, where authors Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler and Dan Wells explain what’s going on here. They call it smoke and mirrors, the magic trick that creates the illusion things are real, just enough detail to suggest things are credible without providing the entire text of Wikipedia.
When it comes to it, the point of all this research is to add an illusion of authenticity to an imaginary story. We don’t need to put in all the detail, but suggest it, like an impressionist painter. Fiction triggers brain activity like you’re a participant, not an observer, and the brain is great at filling in the gaps, so as authors our job is to maintain that illusion and keep people in the story, ideally helping them learn something new along the way.
You can learn more about Thomas R. Weaver via his website and follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and TikTok. Artificial Wisdom is now available via all major booksellers.
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