Read our latest Q&A with author David Goodman to learn the inspiration behind his latest short story, “Best Practices for Safe Asteroid Handling”, available to read in our [September/October issue, on sale now!]
Analog Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
David Goodman: This one had an interesting starting point. I played a (fantastic) videogame called Hardspace: Shipbreaker, which is a really fun physics-based game where you play as a dockyard worker in an orbital salvage yard, using laser cutters and retracting cables to cut apart dozens of different models of spaceships. It’s a game where it’s very, very easy to die – cut through a bulkhead at the wrong angle or forget to depressurize a compartment and you may be vaporized by an exploding fuel tank or blown out into space. As I died in this game, over and over, I started to think about how easy it might be to murder someone in space and make it look like an accident. And when I started thinking about that, I wondered what kind of future schism in humanity might motivate someone to try and attempt a murder like that.
AE: Do you particularly relate to any of the characters in this story?
DG: Like many of my stories, this one is in first person. While I will always emphasize that I am not my characters, I would also be lying if I said that I didn’t inhabit them to some degree while writing, especially in first person. And I suppose I share two things with the main character Xavier Ingridsson – his bemused sadness at the ubiquity of impersonal hate and his hopefulness about what might be achieved by trying to bridge it.
AE: How did the title for this piece come to you?
DG: I wanted something for this story that immediately put you in the context of the story (a giant half-mined asteroid called Refur) but also evoked a slightly lighter tone. One of the ideas I explore in the story is that direct contact between minds might provide us with the empathy we’re sorely lacking in many modern contexts. The world of Refur (at least before the arrival of one Gabriel Halstead) is a peaceful, friendly, fun place to live, not one of the gritty, depressing corporate visions of near-future space we’re so used to seeing in fiction. So I wanted the reader to come into the story with that kind of impression.
Extrapolation and reflecting the world back at itself is half the draw of SF for me.
AE: Is this piece part of a greater universe of stories?
DG: Yes – this is another in the loosely-linked series of stories that started with ‘Vegvísir’ in Clarkesworld, continued with ‘Hull Run’ in the Jan/Feb issue of Analog and is referenced in several of my other stories. I have vague aspirations to one day collect these stories together.
AE: How much or little do current events impact your writing?
DG: A fair amount, probably about as much as reading, film, TV, games and other sources of inspiration. I write in two genres, science fiction and thrillers. Obviously the latter is very affected by what I read in the news and my own research around conflicts, crime, technology and so on. But the two inform each other. I’m not out there hunting for news stories to turn into science fiction. However, the natural tendency I have is to read about current events and think ‘what if this keeps going in this specific direction, or goes in this other direction?’ as a kind of constant mental game. Extrapolation and reflecting the world back at itself is half the draw of SF for me.
AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?
DG: People feeling out of place, then finding their place. And characters who find themselves wondering what is truly important to them, quite often after finding themselves in sticky situations because of someone else. I’m fascinated by how people find and understand their places in the world, or worlds, if we’re talking extra-terrestrial settings.
AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
DG: My debut novel comes out on September 12th! It’s a thriller called ‘A Reluctant Spy’. I’ve just finished the last few checks on that with my publisher and I’m now working on an outline for a potential sequel. In the meantime I’ve turned in an SF novel about generation ships, which my agent is reading and which might well be on submission by the time this comes out, and I’m also working on a couple more short story ideas. I write a lot.
AE: What are you reading right now?
DG: I’m just about to dive into ‘Ninth Life’ by Stark Holborn, which is the third book in the Factus trilogy, about an eerie desert moon where acts of chance and luck attract strange entities known as the ‘Ifs’. It’s a fantastic space western series and has some of the sharpest writing I’ve read in the last decade. The first book in the series, ‘Ten Low’, got me out of a big reading slump a few years ago and I can’t wait to see what Stark has done with this latest installment.
AE: What careers have you had and how do they affect your writing?
DG: I worked out the other day that I’ve had twenty-two jobs since I left high school, ranging from dish-washer to management consultant, via reservist, marketer, barista, accounts clerk and more. But I’ve worked in digital design the longest, thinking quite long and hard about how people interact with technology. I’m especially interested in how people interpret their relationships with their tech and project emotions and humanity onto machines. But every job I’ve had has provided some kind of insight that’s ended up in my work at some point, whether it’s the frustrations and indignities of low-wage retail, the tedium of office admin or the adrenaline and absurdities of uniformed service. People are fascinated by the millions of different ways we spend our time, in and out of the workplace. And I’m further fascinated by how quickly and completely the world of work has changed even in my own lifetime. As well as how it might change even further in the future.
AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing?
DG: The quickest and easiest way is to head to my website at www.davidgoodman.net, or my Linktree at https://linktr.ee/davegoodman.
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