An Interview With Ian Benke
Science. Keeping the “science” in science fiction may seem like a duh, but in my view, it is the thing that makes the genre unique. Imagine Mr. Spock without his Vulcan logic. That said, the science in your story need not be stuck in the 21st century. If time travel is possible because of the discovery of the Qualia Rosetta, as my protagonist Charley Morton has done at the Edge of Yesterday with a little help from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, then it is plausible that she would build a time machine allowing her to travel through time.
Science Fiction and Fantasy are hugely popular genres. What does it take for a writer today, to write compelling and successful Science Fiction and Fantasy stories? Authority Magazine started a new series called “How To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories”. In this series we are talking to anyone who is a Science Fiction or Fantasy author, or an authority or expert on how to write compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy .
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Robin Stevens Payes.
Ever since former carpool mom Robin Stevens Payes began listening in on the backseat conversations among her kids and their friends, she was inspired. They wanted to be diplomats and play in a band and study medicine and invent a steering wheel heater. A science writer and educator, Robin was also concerned. She saw traditional school curricula feed kids down a narrow learning path, stifling their many interests and excitement for the future. She also saw the lack of opportunities available to girls, especially in underserved communities, for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) enrichment.
Determined to encourage young people to tap into the infinite possibilities for their lives, Robin wrote a YA time travel adventure series, Edge of Yesterday (EOY), which follows STEAM-smart (arts integrated into STEM) and modern Renaissance girl-wannabe Charley Morton, who is inspired to build Leonardo da Vinci’s plans for a time machine to meet the universal man up-close-and-personal. She’s determined to learn the polymath’s secrets to “doing it all.”
Payes also launched EOY Media, an interactive learning and storytelling platform for teens, and MASTERY, a learning approach, building on STEM, that integrates technical and human skills. Through internship programs with D.C. Public Schools, workshops and classes, and author talks in schools, Payes has helped hundreds of young people pursue their transdisciplinary interests, foster their unique STEAM and human skills, strengthen their creative muscles and see themselves reflected in a coming-of-age story.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share a story about what first drew you to writing over other forms of storytelling?
The first inkling that I was actually meant to write came when I was a college student studying abroad in France. For me, French was the language in which I really learned the structure, the mechanics — and the beauty — of writing. After graduate school — that seems like several lifetimes ago — I was hired by a small ad agency in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, as a copywriter. It was then that I first felt I could actually call myself a writer.
I went on to careers in television, public relations, marketing, nonprofit consulting and science writing before ever turning to writing books. That was probably the scariest transition of all, as I was completely out on a limb.
You are a successful author. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Interesting question. I worked on a project a few years back called Character Day, a national event in schools and communities that celebrates — and promotes — identifying and tapping into one’s most positive, or aspirational, character qualities. We learned from researchers and experts to call these “qualities” and not traits, as qualities can be developed, while “traits” are seen as inborn and fixed. And we all have the capacity to develop those qualities we would like to become better at.
Here are three character qualities that have guided me in my writing career:
- Perspective taking. It may seem obvious that an author would need to be able to see things from many sides, but it’s not always easy.
In my time travel adventure series, I write in the first person — seeing and recounting scenes, events and other characters from my protagonist Charley Morton’s perspective. This means that nothing — no events, no action, no scene — can take place without her being there and reflecting on it.
This is a problem when you are writing about things that are happening at home in the twenty-first century, say, once Charley has time traveled to fifteenth-century Florence to meet her Renaissance hero, that all-round polymath Leonardo da Vinci. How would she know what’s happening in what would then be (if she happens to survive) her own distant future? How would she be tuned into the fact that her mother, who is a violinist with the National Symphony Orchestra playing a concert in twenty-first-century Florence, has taken ill and may be dying — a fact that propels her desperate drive to get home? How, then, could I show that perspective, without getting out of the first person?
As you might expect, it takes modern technological wizardry, and maybe a bit of magic, to make that plausible for a modern girl of science.
And it’s impossible to consider all sides without the next quality. . .
2. Curiosity. The whole Edge of Yesterday enterprise grew out of a thought experiment. As a mom and storyteller, I wanted to inspire my kids and create media that would be appropriate, optimistic and entertaining. And, as I said, I could see that my children and their friends were interested in doing many things, pursuing many paths into adulthood.
So my question was this: was there ever a time in history when young people were allowed — expected, even — to pursue their passions, to dream big and follow those dreams? Naturally, the Renaissance sprang to mind.
And who better to embody that quality of curiosity than Leonardo da Vinci? Leonardo said, “There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, and those who do not see.”
He was endlessly curious.
Similarly, I want to help young people learn to see without having to be shown: to ask questions, to follow their noses until they are satisfied that they are on to something.
A corollary comes from another idea of Leonardo’s: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” This is a lesson Leonardo teaches us. It’s the idea that we must see farther, work harder, never give up on our vision — or ourselves.
Which leads us to. . .
3. Courage. Showing up to a blank page, showing up to yourself every day is not for the faint of heart. You may not always be inspired. You may not like what you see. It may be ugly, or uncomfortable, or disappointing. But fear cannot be a deterrent — in fact, it might just be the kick in the pants you need to understand that everyone is scared of something.
It requires courage some days just to get up in the morning, but, as I’ve come to understand, we’re all just quivering bowls of Jello inside.
Here’s a story: in my youth, I did a lot of theatre. The summer I turned 50, my kids were old enough that they didn’t need — or want — me around all the time. I was looking for something to do that would feed my soul.
A local community theatre was putting on a Noel Coward play, Hay Fever. I’m pretty good at accents, and I love Noel Coward’s mannerly portrayals of very unmannered people, the very British humor. I decided to audition. My theatrical resume was decades out-of-date; my acting chops were rusty.
I didn’t tell anyone. My family didn’t know about my early passion for the stage. What if I failed? What if I couldn’t memorize my lines? What if I embarrassed myself or, worse (in the kids’ view, anyway), my very critical teenagers?
I made the play. I learned my lines. My family said they weren’t coming because they were sure it would be terrible. I was terrified opening night. And you know what? I summoned my inner Maggie Smith (who played the same role I had in a 1964 stage revival in London under the direction of Noel Coward himself). In that moment, I could be Myra Arundel, the country house guest who overstayed her welcome, on that stage.
Showing up, doing the work, daring greatly. It got me through.
Of course, I know what you’re going to ask me: did my family ever see the show?
Yes, closing weekend. They didn’t tell me they were coming, which was probably a good thing, in retrospect. But afterwards, my younger son, who was 12, rushed up to me and said, “Mom, I was worried it would be bad. But this was, like, professional. You were really good!”
Can you tell us a bit about the interesting or exciting projects you are working on or wish to create? What are your goals for these projects?
I’ve got several interesting projects at the moment. I’ve just finished writing the fourth book in the series, Find Me in the Time Before. It’s about an eighteenth-century French mathematician, physicist and philosopher who translated Newton into French in an edition still in use today, dueled and gambled at the court of Louis XV to earn money for textbooks and tutors (counting cards, no less!), laid the foundation for the Theory of Relativity two centuries before Einstein, was the consort of Voltaire, mother of four — and, today, no one knows her name.
The Marquise Emilie du Châtelet is Charley’s latest girl crush and, now that she knows the secrets of time travel, she’s determined to hear the Marquise’s secrets of success right from the mouth of this kick-ass Enlightenment genius. In my humble opinion, it’s time young people, and young women especially, learned of her amazing legacy. That book will be coming out in the fall of 2022.
I also run a summer six-week internship program for high school students with D.C. Public Schools and a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, On Ramps to Careers. We investigate how the past meets the present by doing a deep dive into history to bring a vision for a more enlightened future to life through story.
We teach our interns to write using a narrative journalism style (spoiler alert: nothing like what they learn in school!), where they actually create stories and content that will be published in the Time Travelers portal of my Edge of Yesterday interactive web site. By the end, they get published, with a by-line, and we all get smarter about how the past influences the present and intersects with a future that is theirs to create.
I am in discussion with several potential partners about expanding this “storytelling history” program by making use of multimedia formats: theatre, poetry and slam, art and design. We also are looking to expand beyond the D.C. area.
Through EOY Media, I’m also producing an online workshop for adults, “Story of My Life: Journaling through Times of Change and Crisis,” based on a popular in-person/hybrid program I’ve developed that really seems to resonate in this moment of uncertainty we’re all living through. Part of our process is to understand that we are all time travelers — and this is but a moment in time.
Again, it’s all about perspective, curiosity and courage: how do we regain and maintain our balance when it feels like that world — our world — is ending? And, in the face of such uncertainty, how do we keep showing up every day?
Finally, Edge of Yesterday began life as a screenplay. It’s a very visual, immersive story. We are currently workshopping the screenplay, doing table readings and pitching it to turn it into a film, TV or streaming series.
Wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. How do you define sci-fi or fantasy? How is it different from speculative fiction?
I heard someone say, “Science fiction is never about the future. It is about us.” In setting stories in different time periods, we are able to examine our own times from a different perspective, and in that snapshot, we are freer to see our own foibles, follies and fortitudes with greater objectivity.
Speculative fiction, as I understand it, takes the “science” out of science fiction. It plays more in the imaginative realm — Avatar, comes to mind. But since Charley, my protagonist, is a self-proclaimed “girl of science,” we actually turn that into a defining characteristic of the series.
To finish my screenplay, and turn it into a novel, I had to put the script away for 10 years in the early 2000s. Charley needed the invention of the iPad and the proof of the Higgs boson, a faster-than-light particle, to make her time travel work, to make it plausible.
The technology that we play with in the EOY series becomes a character in-and-of-itself. So, “Esme” is Charley’s AI that can detect the echo of GPS in a pre-satellite world. Sort of like the tech in Star Trek, it is more aspirational — but it has the potential to become a reality.
To me, the series and potential uses of technology raise essential questions that today’s tech company innovators should be asking themselves: where do we want our technology to take us? What can it do to help us expand our understanding of who we are in the universe? And who might we become (or aspire to become) if our physical reality, as we currently understand it — gravity, relativity, spacetime and cosmic time — were no limit?
And, finally, how do we maintain our moral footing, our humanity, our humility, when technology becomes a black box that even its inventors cannot see into?
It seems that despite countless changes in media and communication technologies, novels and written fiction always survive, and as the rate of change increases with technology, written sci-fi becomes more popular. Why do you think that is?
Great question. In my experience, good books, good science, and good fiction make tangible the connections between us and the page, and between us and each other. You can hold a Kindle and see a digital evocation of a story, but it doesn’t last.
There’s a reason the printing press revolutionized knowledge and the sharing of knowledge — it brought literacy, shared stories, to the masses in a universal format that was cheap and easy to reproduce. And science fiction stimulates our imaginations; for better or worse, it makes us peer into the future to see the way things are and imagine what they — what we — might become.
By turning stories into a game of pretend, we can imagine ourselves, our children and our grandchildren in a world that is different in some ways, evolving, without it being an existential threat. I truly think the imagination itself is, perhaps, our greatest in-born human technology.
In your opinion, what are the benefits to reading sci-fi, and how do they compare to watching sci-fi on film and television?
Books, in one way, shape or form, have been with us across millennia and, no matter how many technologies beyond the ebook reader come and go, humans will always be able to read a papyrus leaf, a parchment, an engraving on stone and a book. Our old family VHS tapes have been converted to DVDs, which themselves have gone by the wayside. Streaming videos tell stories now, but what happens in an electrical outage — or if, say, DNA becomes the next widespread technology for storing information?
Besides the technology itself, books spur the imagination. You see things in your mind’s eye that are far richer, far more personal, than an evocation on screen, no matter how richly textured, how much CGI or how immersive. Once you see, say, Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, how can you see that character as anyone else?
What authors and artists, dead or alive, inspired you to write?
One of my favorite authors as a young adult was Doris Lessing. Her Golden Notebook series about the growing pains, the joys and wonders, of a young woman making her way in a turbulent world — of loving, of falling in love, of growing — positively ached for me. Her stories showed me that the doubts and anxieties I had about the world, and myself in it, are universal. That I wasn’t alone in wondering what the hell I was doing on this Earth.
And she wrote science fiction! Her Canopus in Argos series took me to other planets and universes and imagined, “what if. . .?” And Mara and Dann, set far into the future, is an origins story — how does humanity begin again after cataclysm? That question has never seemed closer to our existence, the experience we’re living through, than now.
Her language, though! It is her words — and the worlds they evoke — that stick to my soul long after I have finished the last word on the last page.
Of course, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the oldest author ever to have done so. It gives me hope — not assuming that my own writing is Nobel-worthy, but that writers can continue imagining and inventing and enriching readers’ lives and the wider world, and can flourish, into ripe old age.
If you could ask your favourite Science Fiction and Fantasy author a question, what would it be?
How do you research the future? And does it matter if there is, or might someday be, evidence to support — or contradict — your conjectures? And doesn’t science fiction, in some ways, actually imagine the future into being?
Sorry, I guess that’s three questions. I have a lot of questions — it gets me into trouble.
We’d like to learn more about your writing. How would you describe yourself as an author? Can you please share a specific passage that you think exemplifies your style?
I am a science writer who writes fiction, and a fiction writer who explains science.
In the second book of my Edge of Yesterday series, Da Vinci’s Way, my young twenty-first century adventuress through time, Charley Morton, having constructed Leonardo da Vinci’s plans for a time machine as found in one of his codices, finds herself (spoiler alert) blasted back to the fifteenth century conversing with Leonardo himself.
And yet, even as she recognizes this as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to interview her Renaissance hero and learn the secrets of his polymathic success (as an aspiring modern-day Renaissance girl), a family crisis makes it imperative: she must get home. And, to reverse engineer the technology using advances in physics from centuries in the future in a decidedly low-tech society, she’s going to need Leonardo’s help.
In this part of the story, Charley’s haste to figure out how to get home is at war with her own fascination with Leonardo’s inventive mind, and his need to understand her sciencia (“science,” as we think of it today, was a field that didn’t exist independently of art, the physical world, philosophy, magic and astronomy in Leonardo’s time). Here is an excerpt from a passage of the two (Leonardo and Charley) in the throes of that conversation, which I think reveals the push and pull of their competing yet similar needs — and Charley’s desperation to get home pronto — before everyone starts to worry — and her anxieties as a teenager navigating uncertainty.
“Madonna Carlotta, Leonardo interrupts me. “I recognize your need to make haste. But I must understand more of your sciencia to assist you in your return to America. As you came at moonlight, perhaps that is the time you must depart. And for you to reach light speed. . . I am not certain. . .
“But first you must share with me the knowledge of how you came here.”
“Yeah, well, that’s kind of a problem of proof, isn’t it? [Charley replies.] “So what if I told you that in 150 years, another genius, one Sir Isaac Newton, will prove, scientifically, the law of gravity: that two objects exert a force of attraction on each other…
“What’s more, when the forces of attraction are of equal mass, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. . .”
“Then your coming here in time must result in an equal and opposite reaction in your own America.” [Leonardo observes.] “What is the reaction to your coming here?”
I feel my face get red. “I am gonna get in a LOT of trouble!”
Based on your own experience and success, what are the “Five Things You Need To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories?” If you can, please share a story or example for each.
Challenge! Love it. Okay, here are my top five:
- Science. Keeping the “science” in science fiction may seem like a duh, but in my view, it is the thing that makes the genre unique. Imagine Mr. Spock without his Vulcan logic. That said, the science in your story need not be stuck in the 21st century. If time travel is possible because of the discovery of the Qualia Rosetta, as my protagonist Charley Morton has done at the Edge of Yesterday with a little help from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, then it is plausible that she would build a time machine allowing her to travel through time. The trick is keeping your science and technology consistent and evolving throughout the story. If mission astronauts find magnesium-rich sea water on Neptune in chapter 2, you must make sure that, in chapter 10, Earth scientists coming on a subsequent mission find the skin of the original astronauts rigid and waterlogged from bathing in magnesium water. What does that look like? Feel like? How stunning would it be for the newly-arrived Earthlings to see their fellow humans transformed? Would those epigenetic changes survive into subsequent generations of, say, an Earth-based human visiting the planet and a Neptune-adapted version of us?
- Imagination. I worked in PR and marketing for a federal health organization many years ago. After about three months on the job, my supervisor told me, “Robin, you have too many ideas and too much imagination.” She didn’t mean it as a compliment. I was stunned! How could these qualities not contribute to the advancement of science and health information for a public who was dying — literally — because they couldn’t understand the research behind addiction? While I stuck with that job for six years after that, I took to heart that exercising my imagination is something I should do outside the job. In my humble opinion, public health is the poorer for that restriction. So instead, I turned my imagination to storytelling. And science fiction. It was a blessing for me in disguise; I would likely have never finished my screenplay — the story that became the book series — about a science-smart teen girl who would learn to bend time — and enrich the world with stories of our science past to innovate her own STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) future!
- Vision. I think the greatest science fiction writers have been visionaries. From Jules Verne to Robert Heinlein, to Orson Welles, to the writers of Star Trek, they’ve been able to imagine technologies that would then become our realities. And you only get there by exercising the aforementioned imagination. It’s amazing!
- Curiosity. (I’m seeing a pattern here, that these qualities are all linked!) You get to the vision thing by asking lots of questions. What if: you could time travel? What would happen? Where would you/your characters like to go? Who would they like to meet? What does it look like there? What obstacles do they encounter? What do you need to bring with you — or at least be able to invent in that spacetime?
- Flexibility. Be prepared for the story — and whatever you’re planning to have happen — to change. I have outlined my books, including where Charley plans to go and when, what is happening in that time period, and what she needs to learn from the situation. Charley always has her own ideas! For instance, her most recent adventure (book 4, Find Me in the Time Before, scheduled to come out in fall 2022) includes multiple time leaps and adjustments to her new time travel app, to get her to the place she needs to go — and brings some horrifying developments from her own future into the deep past. It’s a roller coaster ride!
- Bonus quality: Empathy. In the end, this stuff is hard! My characters are inventing the future from the deep past, knowing at least one version of reality for how it all turns out. I’m with them every step of the way. As a time traveler myself, it’s exhausting trying to keep up with the story, and to keep going! So, giving us all a break and not holding to a hard-and-fast timetable to get it done has been my saving grace. And it takes all the aforementioned qualities to keep it all in perspective!
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Entertainment, Business, VC funding, and Sports read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them 🙂
Whew! Talk about dreaming big, here’s who’s on my personal meetup wish list:
Melinda French Gates is a fierce advocate for women and girls. She is dedicated to improving global health, and for ensuring equity and quality in public education through her work at the Gates Foundation. Her new online community, Evoke, is known as a “community of optimists” and a space to “forge stronger bonds” between changemakers. French Gates is also the mother of three, who has had to balance a high-profile career, leadership in philanthropy and family in an unflinching public eye. All this she has done with admirable grace. Despite being one of the wealthiest people in the world, she has worked to show her how great privilege comes with great responsibility.
Her superpowers — motherhood, professionalism, philanthropy, health, education, and optimism — are key to our future, and bringing that vision out into the world in a greater way is part of what my evolving work with teens and parents at the Edge of Yesterday and EOY Media is what my creativity workshops and intern and mentor programs are all about.
In addition to writing the Edge of Yesterday book series, I run writing and creativity programs and internships for teens to encourage them to dream big, create and reach for your dreams. We investigate how past-meets-present by doing a deep dive into history to bring a vision for a more enlightened future to life through story.
It is only through such inspiration that we dare to create a better future for us all. Would love to scale-up these programs in partnership with Melinda to bring greater opportunity to for young people to follow their dreams — and their parents to help nurture them.
Michelle Obama’s amazing work with girls and education through the Girls Opportunity Alliance would allow EOY Media to spread our mission to use storytelling to unlock curiosity, passion and activism to help young people understand themselves and their place in the world, navigate the challenges of today and prepare them with future-ready strategies to tackle the uncertainties of tomorrow.
Ron Howard would be a mega producer/director for the film and/or TV series (writing the screenplay for Edge of Yesterday was the original impetus for this book series). His filmography is long, but I believe he has the sensitivity and sensibility to create an amazing adventure to inspire a new audience of young people to see farther, imagine deeper, and tap the courage to find solutions to the existential questions that face humanity today.
Plus I think his daughter Bryce would be a formidable lead to play Emilie du Châtelet, the polymath “hero of history” featured in Charley’s next adventure to Enlightenment France in Find Me in the Time Before.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
We’re easily accessible at the Edge of Yesterday. Here are some of the places you can find us!
https://edgeofyesterdaybook.com
https://www.instagram.com/eoymedia/
https://twitter.com/robinpayes
https://www.facebook.com/RobinStevensPayesAuthor/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinstevenspayes/
Thank you for these excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent. We wish you continued success.
Author Robin Stevens Payes on How To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.