Interview with R.W.W. Greene, Author of MERCURY RISING – Online Tour

Welcome to my stop on the Mercury Rising online tour! Big thanks to Angry Robot for the invite, and I’m thrilled to bring you my interview with author R.W.W. Greene.

---

Welcome to the blog, Rob, and congratulations on the release of Mercury Rising! Can you tell us what the book is about?

Thanks so much for having me! Long-time listener, first-time caller.

I keep trying to come up with a heady, MFA-level answer for this question. It’s about mankind’s inhumanity to man, or the Death of the American Jazz Dream, or something like that. “It’s a künstlerroman by way of noir with grenadine and a twist!”

 But I keep failing. Maybe I’m just not that fancy.

Essentially, it’s about a person, people really, who are way over their heads in a re-imagined 1970s wherein the Cold War and its trappings have been replaced with an alien invasion, the Kennedys didn’t die, and Robert Oppenheimer invented a spaceship engine.

OK, I’m totally admitting I had to look up “künstlerroman.” 🙂 One of my favorite things about Mercury Rising is the unusual mix of low tech and futuristic space travel. You have characters using punch card computers straight out of the 1970s alongside a worldwide space program where people are living on the Moon and Mars. What made you decide to combine the past and present in such an interesting way?

Thinking about a world where Oppenheimer invented an engine that put people on the Moon sixteen years early, I couldn’t assume computer or communications tech would have made the same leap. I mean, there’s more processing power and data storage in my flip phone (yeah, I still use a flip phone) than in anything NASA had in the ’70s, but I still don’t have a jetpack or a flying car. We’re still using nuclear fission to boil water to make steam to spin a turbine to create electricity, but you can get a Squatty Potty with a nightlight. Tech never advances equally.

Plus, I liked the idea of using 8-track tapes as computer-data storage.

I love that you made the reading experience so immersive by giving your characters distinct dialog that feels very 1970s at times, but you also captured “military speak” perfectly. Did you do any special research to get the dialog just right?

I was born in ‘71, and I feel a greater affinity to the decade than I do to others I’ve lived through. Working on this book, I remembered more of the flavor of it than I thought I would. The movie trailers for Jaws gave me nightmares, for instance, and I still remember the dream that showed up the most. I remember watching Walter Cronkite on the news almost every night with my parents, and consuming whatever sci-fi-action-people-with-powers shows I could get away with.  There’s a moment in the book where Brooklyn drops the pop top from his beer inside the can, which is something I remember my father doing. Lots of learning by osmosis going on there. 

That all said, I’ve also watched and rewatched many films from the time, both as entertainment and as references. I did a lot of deliberate research for Brooklyn’s basic training, most of which ended up falling out of the book. I imagine that’s where the military speak comes from, plus whatever I’ve picked up from anything else I’ve read or watched.

Which characters were your favorites to write and why?

I liked Topolski a lot. She lives very large and doesn’t care what anyone thinks. She’s all Id and motion. The character I probably identify with the most is Demarco. He’s older, thinks he’s funny. He’s more than happy just to pass his time with a beer and a good library, but people keep asking him to do things because he’s competent and dependable.

Were you channeling any particular movies or books as you wrote Mercury Rising? I thought the story had a very cinematic quality to it.

There’s probably some Midnight Cowboy in there, and a blockbuster film that takes the place of Star Wars in this timeline. I was trying to give the thing the feel of an SFF story that you might have read at the time, using the tropes you might have seen in films like Alien and Starcrash and Meteor and Death Dimension. 

I was also being a little less spare with my description, which likely no one will notice but me. Maybe that lent a little cinema to the thing.

Music is a big theme in Mercury Rising, and I love all the references to 70s bands and musicians. Did you listen to a lot of this era of music while writing the story?

I have twenty-eight days worth of music on my iPod, which is why it’s my second favorite piece of 21st-century technology. 

I listened to a lot of Swamp Dogg and Parliament while writing Mercury Rising. A lot of Rolling Stones and Tom Petty and Sly and the Family Stone and the Super Fly soundtrack and Velvet Underground and Blondie and the Who and the Runaways…

Yeah, I listened to a lot of music. The ’70s was amazing for the stuff.

The 70s is my musical era as well, so it was a lot of fun! This is your third book published by Angry Robot, and although each book can be read on its own, there’s a cohesiveness to both the cover designs and themes of all three books. Was this planned ahead of time, or did Angry Robot have a hand in making this happen?

Angry Robot geniuses do all the cover stuff. I mostly just nod my head. That’s not quite true. At the start of the process I do a few PowerPoint slides of ideas and images and pass them on to the geniuses. The typography they’re using is a deliberate visual language meant to tie the R.W.W. Greene brand together, or so they tell me. Either way, I like it.

The themes are mine, and I guess there are several that I like to revisit. Richard Thompson (a musician) said something about songwriting that I like. He was asked if there’s a danger for prolific songwriters in writing the same song twice. He said something to the tune of ‘it’s okay to write the same song over and over again because there’s a chance you’ll eventually get it right.’ Will I someday write the perfect ‘chivalric romance’? Probably not, but if I did, I bet it would take several tries.

Having read two of your books now, I’m curious about the sort of reading you enjoy in your free time. What are some recent reads that you loved?

I read a lot, and I read pretty widely. Three to four books a week, in and outside the genre. The last book that gave me feelings was All American Boys by Brendan Kiely and Jason Reynolds. I reread Slaughterhouse Five last week because I have a student who is reading it—for fun, and I wanted to be able to talk to her about it. I think it holds up. I also read Middlegame by Seanan McGuire, and it gave me imposter syndrome. The Storyteller by Dave Grohl is another recent favorite. And The Apollo Murders by Christopher Hadfield. I taught 1984 last month, read most of it aloud to the class because high-school sophomores apparently don’t read anymore, and I was dazzled by its language and flow. Gorgeous words used to describe hell on Earth.

Are you working on anything new at the moment that you can share with us? Do you have plans to write more stories in the vein of Mercury Rising?

I just tacked ‘The End’ onto the nearly-ready-to-send-to-Angry-Robot-Eleanor draft of the sequel to Mercury Rising. I’d dreamed the story into a quintology, but my agent talked me down to three books. In a perfect world, the closer will come out in 2024.

Somewhere in the next few, I need to figure out the Next Thing. I imagine it will be another standalone.

OK a trilogy makes me very happy:-) Looking forward to your next book, Rob. Thanks so much for the interview!

---

R.W.W. GREENE is a New Hampshire USA writer with an MA in Fine Arts, which he exorcises in dive bars and coffee shops. He is a frequent panelist at the Boskone Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention in Boston, and his work has been in Stupefying Stories, Daily Science Fiction, New Myths, and Jersey Devil Press, among others. Greene is a past board member of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project. He keeps bees, collects typewriters, and lives with writer/artist spouse Brenda and two cats.

Website | Twitter | Goodreads | Instagram

Read my review of Mercury Rising