Like a lot of your other work, this novel feels very realistic.

I probably had three times as many as I used, but there are already a lot, so I had to show some restraint to keep from overwhelming the other parts of the book if I did. I made giant lists of quotes and little stories and such and then winnowed down to the ones in the book. I chose them because they seemed interesting to me, and I illustrated one aspect or other of New York’s great character as a city. Beyond reinforcing the themes of the novel, how and why were these chosen? There are a lot of references to history and/or quotes that serve as pseudo-epigraphs. Reading a novel is a highly creative act, so it seems to me that the reader can be invited in to do a lot of the work of “characterization” on their own. I ended up trying various modes of mysteriousness or suggestiveness. One interesting question for me became: how much can you not tell? And, can not telling be more interesting than telling if you’ve told the right things? Because with such a big cast, doing what your workshop vocabulary would call “backstory” was not always a good idea, or possible. Vlade, Inspector Gen, and Stefan and Roberto were probably the hardest. So I let myself go crazy and see what happens. What I do is give up on the idea of balance, also these various workshop categories like world-building or characters, which in effect pretend to know how fiction works, when they really don’t know how fiction works. That said, novels are about people, so that has to be kept in mind. The world is often more interesting than what people do to each other.

In fact, those scenes are often the most clichéd and boring parts of a novel, and many a novel is boring from start to finish because of that.

It also helps to have a narrator that is also a character, one way or another, that likes to explain things or talk about non-human actors in the story, like landscape and technologies and so on.Īs you probably know, when people speak of expository lumps, or worse, “info dumps,” I feel they are bad readers who aren’t getting it, who are in effect being narcissistic, as if nothing could be interesting but dramatized scenes about people interacting. So it helps to pick a cast of characters that do all kinds of different things. Hopefully the story will reveal a lot of the parts of the world. I focus on the characters and let the world-building take care of itself. How did you balance world building with keeping focus on your characters? The novel presents an impressive depiction of a future New York City, but characters are all totally relatable.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson