Interview - J. T. Nicholas

Hello! The lovely team at Titan have kindly invited me on the blog tour for Re-Coil by J T Nicholas a very good SF thriller with a fantastic vision of the future mixed with actions thrills and even a little horror. It is very enjoyable as my review explains but I’ve been lucky enough to get J T Nicholas to talk to me about the book and a few other things!

The review of the book can be found here https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2020/3/5/re-coil-by-j-t-nicholas

So how would you describe Re-Coil?

Hmm… I guess I’d call it a transhumanist sci-fi whodunnit with a healthy heaping of cyberpunk on the side. That’s a lot of different genre buzzwords, though. At its heart, I was going for an action/mystery, and I’ve always loved sci-fi and cyberpunk, so if I was going to write action/mystery, might as well put it in a setting that I loved.

What inspired you to write a book about a future where death appears to be gone for good?

The concept of immortality-through-technology has been around in sci-fi for a long, long time. But there have been a number of advances lately that make me think there’s a real chance at it. Not in my lifetime (probably), but I think to some extent the idea of backing up the human brain and putting it in another body is… well, let’s call it “not completely out of the realm of possibility.” Which is not to say that it’s likely, exactly, but I think we’ll eventually achieve some version of very-extended lifespans. I think that would have a huge impact on society – as in, on how we relate to one another and how politics and business and all that fit together. I thought it would make a great backdrop for a book.

You have a fascinating level of technologies displayed throughout the book. What was your approach to building this future universe?

I enjoy all flavours of sci-fi but have always had a special appreciation for the sort of “near-future prognostication” type. The Phillip K. Dick style where the future presented has a sense that maybe this really could happen. Don’t get me wrong – I also love universe-spanning faster-than-light space opera, but I’ve always found the more “realistic” sci-fi more intriguing. So, I tried to take existing technology and project it forward. The “Agents” in Re-Coil aren’t that far away from Siri-on-steroids, for example, and implanted tech is the next logical step from wearable tech. I was sort of intentionally vague on some things – like exact fuel sources and propulsion methods for spacecraft – but I tried to keep everything within the scope of “we might not be too far away from that.” Even stuff like cores and cloning… a lot of the tech already exists, and the rest has some really sound theoretical work behind it. One of the things that I find most fascinating – and a little scary – is that there’s nothing in Re-Coil that is all that far-fetched.

I noted you had martial arts experts thanked in the book – how did that work while it was being written?

There’s an old saying in writing: “Write what you know.” That sometimes get’s taken to extremes (particularly in overly indulgent writing conferences or courses) but I’ve always felt the intent behind it is that when you’ve experienced something first-hand, you’re able to paint a more vivid picture of that experience. I love writing fight scenes. I loved writing them before I ever got involved in martial arts. But once I had been doing martial arts for a while, I noticed that how I wrote those scenes changed. That’s not to say that they’re 100% realistic – realism in fight scenes would be fairly boring, since real fights tend to be a lot quicker, a lot more brutal, and favour numbers to a degree that fiction doesn’t really support. But I like to think that there’s a little more realism sprinkled in that you might find in an action sequences written by someone who has never been punched in the face and had to keep fighting.

How do you like to think of Carter Langston?

I like to think of him as a blue-collar “everyman” or maybe “everyperson” would be the better way of saying it. A relatively ordinary person forced into extraordinary circumstances and having to rise to the occasion. Maybe with a little more of past than we think of people having today – more jobs under the belt – but that’s only to be expected in a society where people live multiple lifetimes.

Was there a soundtrack to the book while it was being written?

Not as such. I have a playlist that I use when I’m writing and its pretty much movie scores from a bunch of sci-fi and fantasy movies. Things like Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, and Pirates of the Caribbean. I can’t really do music with lyrics when I’m writing (I get distracted by the words), so I stick with big orchestral pieces. The music does help, though… when the mood of a piece syncs up through whatever serendipity with the mood of what I’m writing, the words flow a little faster.

Do you have any other projects in the pipeline?

Yes. I’ve got another project with Titan, but I don’t think I can talk about it yet. I can probably get away with saying it’s another sci-fi novel and it’s not a sequel to Re-Coil, but an entirely new thing set in a different world.

If there was one book (not your own) that you love to recommend to other people what would it be?

That’s such a hard question. There are so many books I love, and I read a bunch of genres, not just sci-fi. But, because he was one of the big inspirations for Re-Coil, I’m going to say go read any of L.E. Modesitt Jr.’s sci-fi novels (or his fantasy ones – they’re all great). Modesitt has this ability to blend ethics and morality into his science fiction that I just find fascinating. Granted, that’s more than a single book, but it’s the best I can do…