Interviewing Stark Holborn
This week I have been really lucky to review the great Triggernometry by Stark Holborn - https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2020/4/5/triggernometry-by-stark-Holborn and Stark has very kindly agreed to answer some of my questions on this smart story and their approach to writing as well as westerns!
Mathematicians and Westerns – what triggered this idea? No apologies for the pun!
Can’t argue with a pun now, can I? Someone said the word “Triggernometry”, and that immediately got me thinking about the sort of story that might fit… maths and gunfighters. Title first, write later, seems to be my general approach.
The idea of people deciding the experts are the enemies feels very 2020 – was this a deliberate choice?
I first wrote Triggernometry a few years ago, during the US election campaign that saw Trump voted into office, so, yes. It’s a dangerous trend that’s ongoing; we’ve seen first-hand the damaging effects here in the UK over the past few weeks. In my original idea for the book, I had another character who develops this theme called – ahem – Julia Mandelbrot: she’s part soothsayer, part spin doctor, all agent of chaos. She didn’t make it into the first instalment, but hopefully she’ll have her time in another book.
What made you choose the figures from history that you put into the cast?
Fermat was a given from the start, I mean, I could just see him with a pair of pistols. The others I chose after doing some research. Marie-Sophie Germain was incredible woman who taught herself Latin and Greek so she could further her studies in maths. She was barred from attending the École Polytechnique but got hold of lecture notes and studied anyway. She went on to win the prix extraordinaire at the Paris Academy of Sciences for her work on elasticity theory, but even after this – as a woman – was barred from attending. Likewise, Emmy Noether was an extremely talented mathematician who spent seven years lecturing unpaid, then four teaching under David Hilbert’s name, because the faculty disapproved of women holding academic positions. Solomon Lefschetz I chose because he was so idiosyncratic and eccentric. He lost both of his hands in an industrial accident, which was what pushed him towards studying mathematics.
What has been the key draw to you with westerns? How do you think they still talk to us in 2020?
I think as a genre it revolves around some eternal themes; morality, justice, what humans are capable of when societal structures are removed, the dream and the trap of “freedom”… I think if you pull away the layers from a lot of science fiction, especially science fiction rooted in the American tradition, you’ll find the western underneath. They still talk, to me at least, when “traditional” western concepts are subverted and turned on their heads, when the old, accepted stories are plundered and told in new ways. I like my westerns revisionist. Not a fan of John Wayne.
Is there a particular scene in a western you always enjoy writing?
Descriptions of landscapes, of vast spaces. Perhaps because, here in the UK, we so rarely encounter an open environment at that scale.
What are you working on at the moment?
Another western. But this one’s set in space, on a desert moon, to be precise.
If there was one book (not your own) that you love to recommend to other people what would it be?
Probably Ubik; hard to pick a favourite Philip K. Dick, but that one is up there.
