Interviewing Stewart Hotston

Helloooo!

This weekend I reviewed the excellent SF novella The Entropy of Loss by Stewart Hotston a great combination of first contact with alien life and a couple having their final ever conversation. Strange, wondrous and thoughtful I really really enjoyed it. Wanting to know more Stewart kindly agreed to talk to me about the story and future projects

How do you like to tempt people to read Entropy of Loss?

Haha, this really depends on the person! For some I want to talk about the fact that it’s really hard sci fi about information theory and first contact. That, at least for me, this is as least as likely how we’ll encounter non-terrestrial civilisations as going out there into the universe. I mean, there is no prospect of warp drives and hence getting anywhere is not just slow but energetically expensive. Getting people, alive, out of our solar system is beyond us and is likely to remain so for decades to come if not longer.

Information space however…now that’s an interesting place to explore and if there are other civilisations out there who have the same challenges we do with space travel then exploring information space is a viable, if mind bending, alternative. What would we do if we met them in our equations, our simulations?

I’d also talk about the two founders of the field, Claude Shannon and Ronald Fisher and how their complimentary but parallel ideas led to modern communications technology. This is as much a story about them and their ideas as is it about anything else.

For other people I want to talk about love and grief – this story is about someone processing the death of her lifelong partner. I wanted to explore how someone might experience that, how their perception of everything would be filtered through that lens – even big life changing events would be coloured because of it. Sarah’s entire language for what she’s experiencing is told through this filter and I’d suggest that she is, therefore, a very unreliable narrator as a result…

And of course, an unreliable narrator is someone whose information you need to suspect…which brings us right back around to information theory.

We have a balancing act of a first contact and a final farewell how did this come about in the writing?

I originally wanted to tell a first contact story the way I think it could happen. Then I realised that the science was a little too hard for the story. So I sat back and reflected on what emotional beats sit at the core of a first contact story, and in the idea of why so many people think first contact is so massive when it happens. From there I realised that for all of us, when we have those moments of first contact (be it in relationships, jobs or even when travelling somewhere new), there’s a sense of death in it as much as there is a sense of new life. There’s a violence in experiencing the radically new and it felt like the emotional heart of this story was in death and new beginnings as a result.

We get black holes, information theory, and ideas on communication explored in this story – how much fun was the research??

Lots. I read some fascinating papers on this stuff, especially some of the founding papers around Information Theory and some of the more recent ideas around information as it encounters black holes. This is my bag so it was a LOT of fun to think through.

With Sarah we have someone who we could say is doing something terrible in her private life, but we begin to understand why she has done this as the story progresses. What was the challenge in writing such a character?

I wanted Sarah to feel real. She’s under horrendous pressure in her life but, crucially, she’s suffering by association as it is her wife who is really the one suffering. I wanted to explore how someone in that position might find a pressure valve to make everything bearable while trying to do the right thing and not make the situation about them.

Ultimately I wanted her to be hanging on and doing what it takes to hang on even as her fingers are slowly being prised loose and everything threatens to fall apart.

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and where can we find out more?

I have two novels out this year – both set in the Watchdogs universe. The first of these is due out now and brings back one of the series’ most popular characters in what I like to say is basically john Wick vs. White Supremacists. It’s called Watchdogs: Stars & Stripes.

The second novel is called Day Break Legacy and is a direct sequel to the UBISoft WatchDogs Legion game. I’m particularly proud of this one as it features my late grandmother, Barbara in one of the main roles and it was a chance to immortalise her memory in a way I’d never dreamed possible.

Recently what have you enjoyed reading?

I have recently read Red Pill by Hari Kunzru which was bitter, acrid and fantastic.

I am currently reading Resilient by Allen Stroud which I’m enjoying immensely.