Paul Levinson ~ The Interview
Paul Levinson
About the Author
Paul Levinson’s The Silk Code won the 2000 Locus Award for Best First Novel. He has since published Borrowed Tides (2001), The Consciousness Plague (2002), The Pixel Eye (2003), and The Plot To Save Socrates (2006). His science fiction and mystery short stories have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Edgar, and Sturgeon Awards. His eight nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge (1997), Digital McLuhan (1999), Realspace (2003), and Cellphone (2004), have been the subject of major articles in the New York Times, WIRED, the Christian Science Monitor, and have been translated into nine languages. He appears on “The O’Reilly Factor” (Fox News),
“The CBS Evening News,” “Scarborough Country” (MSNBC), the “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” (PBS), “Nightline” (ABC) and numerous national and international TV and radio programs. He is interviewed about media issues every Sunday, 7:20am, on KNX1070 Radio in Southern California. He is Professor and Chair of Communication
& Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City.
The Plot to Save Socrates
In the year 2042, Sierra, a young graduate student, is shown a new dialog of Socrates, recently discovered, in which a time traveler tries to argue that Socrates might escape death by use of a clone and travel to the future. Thomas, the elderly scholar who has shown her the document, disappears, and Sierra immediately begins to track down the origins of the manuscript, with the help of her classical scholar boyfriend, Max. The trail leads her to time machines in gentlemen’s clubs in London and in New York, into the past and into the future. Complications, mysteries, travels, and time loops grow as Sierra tries to discover who is planning to save the greatest philosopher in human history, or do so herself. Historical characters who make appearances include not only Socrates, but Plato, Alcibiades, Benjamin Jowett, William Henry Appleton – the great 19th century American publisher – and the ancient inventor Heron of Alexandria.
Q: If you had to write yourself as a heroine, what kind of heroine would you be? What would you be named?
A: Well, I do have a heroine – in The Plot to Save Socrates – and I named her Sierra Waters. She is highly intelligent, irresistibly attractive, and capable of great love and empathy.
Q: If you had to write yourself as a villain, what kind of villain would you be? What would you be named?
A: My villains always come from the parts of me that I might like to act upon, but never do, in real life. For example, a car cuts me off on the highway. I’d like to have a laser with which I could vaporize that car … The names of my heroes either just occur to me, like Stefan Antonescu in The Silk Code, or are taken from history, like Heron of Alexandria in The Plot to Save Socrates.
Q: What is the strangest source of writing inspiration you’ve ever had?
A: I’m not sure if this is strange, but I was writing The Consciousness Plague on a train from New York to Chicago. And something about writing a novel on that train ride was so inspiring, that I put a whole interlude about trains into the novel. There is something about people on trains – sleeping, talking, eating – that makes great material for stories. You’re inhabiting a separate world which exists just for the train ride. It’s fun to capture part of that and infuse it into a story.
Q: If your muse were to talk behind your back, what secrets would he/she tell?
A: That the joy I get from writing is right up there with making love. That the order of people that I really care about pleasing with my writing would be: Hollywood producers, me, people I already know and care about, the girl who sat next to me in 5th grade who ignored me, all other general readers, professional critics…
Q: Where is the last place on Earth you’d want to live and why?
A: The last place on Earth I’d want to live is any place other than New York City, and the beach on Cape Cod Bay. That’s because no place has the raw electricity that NYC has for me (though London comes close), and no place is as beautiful and quiet as our cottage on Cape Cod Bay.
Q: You’re the villain of your latest novel. What nasty things do you have planned for your heroine?
A: I’d hypnotize her with my sheer charm so she would happily, dreamily do anything I wanted. If that didn’t work, I’d hypnotize her some other way.
LINKS:
My books: http://theplottosavesocrates.com
My main blog: http://InfiniteRegress.tv
My YouTube videos: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=PLev20062006
My podcasts: http://paulpodcastjuke.blogspot.com
My homepage: http://PaulLevinson.info
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/twiceuponarhyme
Authors wishing to be interviewed, email me.
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