Lee Schneider is the author of the new novel Liberation, the third in his Utopia Engine trilogy. Also a playwright, screenwriter, producer, and director, he lives in Santa Monica, California.
Q: Liberation is the third in your Utopia Engine trilogy--do you think your character Kat has changed over the course of the series?
A: Kat Keeper begins the series as a startup founder who hires an AI savant to create a software version of her late husband. The software is so good, she falls in love with it and falls in love with the guy who made it. It’s a love triangle for the 21st century.
At the start of the series, Kat believes in the power of tech to make things better. As the series progresses, she wonders if everything we call "progress" is unquestionably good. She starts to see that in a world run by technology, the people who control technology run the world.
As the story unfolds across all three books, Kat encounters people like Raaven Vaara, a celebrity yoga instructor who believes that not everything in the world can be understood rationally. It shakes Kat to her core and makes her open to a community that embraces technology and also respects nature.
Q: What inspired the plot of Liberation?
A: The plot? My characters tell me what to do. They’re the boss of the narrative. I start by writing detailed backstories for all of them, and start to imagine them in scenarios with each other. Eventually, since they know more about the story that I do, they start to suggest how the story should proceed. I disagree with them at times, but usually they are right.
Q: Did you know from the start that you'd be writing a trilogy?
A: No. I was amazed that I’d written the first book and was ready to take the rest of the decade off.
But the world changed. AI became the dominant narrative of business. Corporate surveillance has become more pervasive. Suddenly, there were choices to be made for all of us. Was all the tech around us good for us? Who controlled it? Did the corporations that controlled it want the best for us?
I wondered whether we could refuse to use some of the technology around us and still function in the world. When I presented that idea to my cast of characters, Kat and the rest of them, they had many ideas for me. I listened to them and had enough storyline for two more books.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: We’re headed into a time when we have crucial decisions to make about the technology we choose. It’s a time to question who has created the technology that is part of everything we do now and to wonder who really benefits from it.
My focus in Liberation is on how Kat Keeper and the other characters make decisions about corporate control of information and memory. When we have characters in a novel grapple with these ideas, we might get some ideas about how to deal with them in our world.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m taking a break from AI and the near future and disappearing into a forest world that may be in the distant past or future. A group of teens is on a quest to discover the true nature of their past and the disturbing power that they have over the adults around them. It has some tech but mostly magic that cannot be explained rationally. It will also be a trilogy.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: It may surprise your readers to know that while I am steeped in technology, I love gadgets and write on a computer, an iPad, and via dictation, I do like a good pencil and notepad. I engage stories differently when I’m trying to get them to flow out of that little sharp point.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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