AISFP 238 – James S.A. Corey

Timothy C. Ward interviews Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, known for their pen name James S.A. Corey, to discuss their top-notch space opera series, The Expanse.

Discussed (Locus Mag interview as a source)

• The strengths of Daniel’s and Ty’s input into making the James S.A. Corey duo, writing and worldbuilding.
• How Ty created The Expanse universe
• What challenges they faced turning a pre-developed universe into a story
• Can you turn your favorite D&D campaign into a novel?
• Daniel’s writing quirks: how long he makes his chapters, not resolving problems in same chapter in which they arose, etc
• Thoughts on how technical they are in their prose regarding worldbuilding and science (in one draft, they take numbers out)
• “We will never have the cyberspace of William Gibson, because we discovered that typing a few words into Google is easier than  navigating a 3D virtual space.”
• 21′ “If we accept the premise that we’re always wrong, it really removes the incentive to spend a lot of time trying to make good guesses because even the good guesses turn out to be wrong. So, make plausible guesses… and tell a good story.”
• Celestia is a program Ty used to use to figure out how long it would take to get from one point in space to another.
• Vomit zombies and the accurate science behind them
• Character development between Holden and Miller and how their philosophies on the good of humanity differs.
• How to develop characters over multiple books.
• 33′ talk about process of selling original trilogy and how the story builds.
• How they’re adding to their story with novellas releasing in between the novel releases. Gods of Risk: An Expanse Novella
• A quote from Caliban’s War, and how they incorporate human stupidity into buy neurontin cod their plot–how stupidity is subjective, being completely reasonable from one person’s perspective. How The Expanse books are not nihilistic.
• George R.R. Martin influence mainly through Daniel, who isn’t his assistant (Ty is).
• Their upcoming Star Wars book, Honor Among Thieves.
• After this interview was recorded, The Expanse was optioned for TV. Variety reports, ““Iron Man” and “Children of Men” scribes Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby will script the pilot of “The Expanse…””

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Timothy C. Ward
Executive Producer

Timothy C. Ward has been podcasting since 2010, first as AudioTim, and now with AISFP. His first publication, Cornhusker: Demon Gene (A Short Story), is available on Kindle for $.99. He just turned in his novel to his editor, Joshua Essoe. Kaimerus is described as “Firefly crashes on Avatar and wakes up 28 Days Later.”

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Podcast: Download (Duration: 57:35 — 52.8MB)