Interview with hacker novelist John Sundman
Welcome to the February issue of Hacker Chronicles!
In this issue, I'm excited to interview fellow hacker fiction author John Sundman. He has used different middle names on his books — F.X., Compton, Damien — which confuses sites like Goodreads, but they're all him.
Sundman is a fascinating person and author, and my sprawling interview with him touches upon Sun Microsystems, Senegal, biohacking, nano machines, and the Bible. There's even some swearing. I'm confident you'll like it!
A short note on the devastating wildfires here in California. It has affected lots and lots of people in Los Angeles where I have a few friends, including my development editor Georgia. I really hope the community gets out of this peril. In fact, I'm absolutely convinced it will. It has to.
/John
Writing Update
Last week I had a couple of days off while in Germany and I rented a cozy loft in Mainz to sit down and go through all the copyedit notes. Sitting there under the angled roof with double mugs of coffee helped me focus and get it done. Here's photographic proof of the caffeine intake:
Copyediting is done through tracked changes in Microsoft Word. Now it's back with my editor for formatting so that it looks beautiful in print.
Wrapping that up also allowed me to send a copy to my voice narrator Kristin Price so she can get started on the audiobook!
I'm still awaiting the draft cover, so stay tuned for the cover reveal.
February Feature: Interview with Hacker Fiction Author John Sundman
I got a tip from a friend and newsletter subscriber about a year ago about John Sundman's novel Acts of the Apostles. It's a great read, I can say having finished it over the holidays. Below is my interview with namesake John.
Believe it or not, John sent me a deal to share with you! This link takes you to Bookfunnel without redirects. On that page you can enter your email address to sign up for his Substack newsletter and get Acts of the Apostles as a free ebook.
John Sundman himself.
Spoiler Alert: The interview doesn't go into the exact plot but it does touch upon a few of the characters, locations, key pieces of technology and science, and the vibe of the book. I would say it's perfectly OK to read it even if you intend to enjoy Acts of the Apostles later.
The Family Name Sundman
John W: Since I have a lot of Swedish subscribers and am a Swede myself, I have to ask about the origins of your family name, Sundman. Maybe it's not Swedish at all? The word sund has two meanings in Swedish, both of them matching the English word sound. It's either sound as in wholesome or making sense, or a nautical sound as in a narrow body of water between two landmasses. I believe Sundman is derived from the latter, meaning a man from a place with water between two pieces of land. Several Swedish family names are like that, for instance Bergman (mountain man), Sjöman (lake man), and Bäckman (creek man).
John S: Yes, the name is Swedish (actually Finnish, but Swedish language), and my understanding is that the name carries both meanings of its English language cognates: both the body-of-water sense and the wholesome, in-good-health sense.
I've heard a rumor that the name was invented in the 1800's and promulgated by royal decree on an eenie, meenie, minie, moe basis because every other Swede was named Peter Larson or Lars Petersen and nobody could tell who the hell anybody was. Which, if it's true, implies that various Sundman family branches are not necessarily any more related to each other than to any other Swede (or Swede-Finn) family. Who knows, maybe my great great grandfather was a Wilander.
For more on our family name, including how my grandfather fled Finland with Russians literally firing bullets at him, to how his first name was changed from 'Reinhold (or Reinholt)' to 'John' at Ellis Island and how a mysterious Swedish American was instrumental in my grandfather's survival, please see my essay A lone figure skis across a frozen sea, pursued by Russians shooting guns: How my grandfather left Finland and came to America
Writing Acts of the Apostles
The cover of Acts of the Apostles.
John W: Acts of the Apostles is packed with 90s stuff like the war in Iraq, sequencing of the human genome, the fears and wonders of being brain dead while on life support, and chemical and biological warfare. All of that gives me an impression of what was on your mind back then and what drove you to write speculative, dark fiction like Acts. Could you share what your memories are of writing the novel and what the urge was to get this story out?
John S: I began my career in high tech as a junior technical writer at Data General in 1980, with basically no qualifications. By the end of 1985 I had written about 20 technical manuals on hardware & software topics — learning everything I know about such stuff on the job.
In January 1986 I made my first trip to Silicon Valley. By 1991 I was managing a 50-person bi-coastal group, in late 1993 I was forced by circumstances to move to Silicon Valley in order to keep my job, in late spring 1994 my son Jake nearly died, I was laid off, and my wife & I decided to move to Martha's Vineyard.
I was as burned out and sick of the Silicon Valley cultish mindset as it's possible for a person to be. Also, my wife holds a PhD in molecular biology, a career she had to give up after Jakob was born so desperately ill. That's a really abbreviated version. Writing that book took 4 years, nearly drove me insane, and took my family into destitution.
More of the gory details can be found, should you be interested, in my essay The saga of Acts of the Apostles, revisited.
The "Real" Acts of the Apostles
Rembrandt's painting The Baptism of the Eunuch which is from Acts 8:26–39.
John W: There is of course the "real" Acts of the Apostles from the New Testament. I didn't go back and read it but I know that it's a historical part of the Bible, covering the time after the Crucifixion. Is your story based on or related to the biblical one? I hope I don't come across as ignorant here.
John S: You are correct. The original Acts of the Apostles, generally attributed to Luke, the author of one of the 4 Gospels, is a history of the very early church – that is, how the religion of Christianity got started. So it's not about Jesus, per se, but about what happened among his followers after he split the scene.
My book is sort of on the theme of how the Silicon Valley deification of technology is in some ways similar to how the early cult of Jesus became the religion of Christianity. But it's not an allegory, by any means. There's no one-to-one correspondence such that Monty Meekman is the new Jesus or anything like that [John W: Monty is the book's villain]. It's just about thematic echoes.
Before I forget, probably the most useful of my posts on all of this stuff is my essay A chronicler of biodigital technopotheosis: How I accidentally became a self-publishing cyber-bio-nanopunk novelist.
Super Early Indie Author
John W: I believe Acts of the Apostles was published independently in 1997 (the copyright starts then) which is so early in the indie world that I have to ask — what led you to publish yourself and what was it like? What was editing, formatting, printing, and distribution like?
John S: I published Acts in late 1999, after my agent had shopped various versions of it to NYC publishers & Hollywood movie producers for nearly 4 years.
I had been a manager of technical publications at Sun Microsystems for 8 years, so I had plenty of experience with formatting & printing, and friends willing to contribute editing & proofreading. The biggest (immeasurable, really) help came from my literary agent Joe Regal, who painstakingly edited 4 versions of the manuscript before I threw in the towel. For which, alas, he made nary a penny. He was gambling that it was, someday, going to sell for a lot of $$. Oh well.
I was flat broke when I published it; I worked a deal with a printer I had known from my years at Sun to print it for me on a handshake deal that I would pay off the bill when I could. Which I did, eventually. The only reason I got that kind of consideration was because I had given him $$$$$ of work when I was starting out at Sun.
The single key lucky break I got was a review in Slashdot in May, 2000. Years and years of desperate work made that lucky break possible, but it was, still, a lucky break. It's actually a pretty lukewarm review, but from it came lots of sales, much geek cred, and many doors opening.
This stuff is covered in my Saga of Acts of the Apostles essay.
The Dirty, Fuck It Style
John W: I love the grimy FU style of the main character Nick. A bit of Dirty Harry in him, although he's far from a cop. But Casey too. How do you build characters like that and get them to be so free-spirited?
John S: Thank you for saying that! I guess I've always been a bit like that myself. For example, I went to a military high school where ROTC participation was compulsory, and I was the only member of my class of 225 students who left without a certificate of completion of the ROTC program.
As discussed below, before I found myself somehow in the computer biz, my background was in smallholder agricultural development in west Africa. I never really drank the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid the way some people did. And, finally, I ran into a guy, one of my bosses at Sun, who was the original model for Monty Meekman. He was psychopathic, no joke. Or if not actually psychopathic, he really did seem to delight in ruining people's lives — mine included. Some of Monty's most insufferable lines, such as 'that's not my model,' come directly from that asshole. Acts of the Apostles is kind of a 'fuck you' to him and everybody like him.
Casey takes her name, and some of her personality from my friend Casey Cameron, who was, in addition to being a great technical writer, a singer in the quasi legendary post-punk band Human Sexual Response. The Wikipedia entry doesn't do justice to just how popular/influential the Humans were at their peak.
But the most part of Casey's 'different drummer' personality probably comes from my friend (and one-time fiancée) Anne. The closest Anne ever came to computer design was reading my novels, so she wasn't a chip designer. But she really was (and is) sui generis.
A Love For Africa
John W: Africa is featured in a couple of ways in the book, both in the main character Nick's flashbacks and in how the world changes given the villain's acts. I could tell from your vivid descriptions of scenes in Africa that you had been there. I could also sense your urge to include those impressions in your writing. Later I read your Substack post on being a Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal. How has those rich, truly off-the-beaten-track experiences affected your writing?
John S: Well, I guess in every way. My experiences in Africa very much helped shape my adult conception of what's important vs what's not. If you have the time or inclination for just one more essay, When the heavens opened over Fanaye gets to the heart of your question — how my memories of what I saw and did and felt in Africa are with me almost every day.
A photo of John Sundman sitting at the table in the small thatched hut in Fanaye Dieri that was his home for two years.
The Hacking in Acts of the Apostles
John W: The protagonist Nick is a programmer, and several other key characters are too. And there are hacks on both the good and evil side of the story. How do you think hacking works in fiction and what audience were you thinking of back then?
John S: Hackers look at complex systems as challenges; they are things to be broken into and manipulated for personal gain, or for political reasons, or to fix things that are broken, or for bragging rights, or, perhaps mainly, for fun; which is to say, hackers hack in order to learn how systems work and to manipulate those systems — just as any healthy 10 month old child delights in manipulating a simple toy.
By playing, the child learns — about the toy, about their bodies, about their world, and about the pure joy of control. Many hackers hack for the same simple reason: it's fun.
The Soul of a New Machine, a nonfiction book by Tracy Kidder, conveyed to general readers some of the joy of designing computer systems. In books like Snow Crash and Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, among others, created a new genre of science fiction that came to be called ‘cyberpunk,’ that was about the joy of hacking those systems. Breaking into them. Taking control of them.
About the same time as Snowcrash and Neuromancer, although at first not quite as noticed, another new subgenre of science fiction was emerging: biopunk. If ‘cyberpunk’ is the genre that looks at digital systems from a hacker's point of view, then ‘biopunk’ looks at biological systems from a hacker's point of view.
Most non-biohacker/non-biopunk people make a distinction between, for example, living, carbon-based biological systems on one hand and silicon-based digital systems on the other. Biopunks don't make that distinction. A system is just a system, and the only question is, how do you hack it?
Now if the system is, for example, you — your brain, your mind, your essence, your soul — you may like it just fine the way it is, thank you very much, and you may not want somebody else (where "somebody" might be "the government" or some squicky corporation) to hack it. So your challenge becomes, How do I define who I am? How do I maintain the integrity of my system?
All my novels deal with themes like these. In Acts of the Apostles, among other things, I imagined nanomachines analogous to bacteriophage that manipulate DNA and rearrange brains (and by rearranging brains, thus minds, and selves).
In a lot of ways in Acts of the Apostles I anticipated CRISPR, the powerful new way of programming DNA that emerged about a decade ago. The plot of my novel revolves around how such a mechanism might work on the molecular level, and invites readers to ponder the ethical considerations that come with it.
Biology in Acts of the Apostles
John W: There's also a bunch of medicine and biology in the book. Not in the least in the main plot, tying into a conspiracy. What is your background in biology and how does it work in fiction? I mean, it's a complicated topic and with the programming you straddled two such things.
John S: When I was in grad school at Purdue, taking a degree in agricultural economics with a focus on smallholder agriculture in west Africa, having taken exactly one college introductory biology course in college, I met a woman working on a PhD in molecular biology -- in particular, viral genetics. Her research was literally world-class cutting edge, miles above me. She was smart, she was funny, and earnest, and blah blah blah. None of that stuff really mattered. Because what mattered to 26 year old me was, mainly, that she was smokin' hot.
So I immediately began sneaking into graduate seminars on molecular biology, taking books out of the library, etc etc. By the time I began work on Acts, the hot biologist & I had been married for 15 years and I had spent lots of time in her various laboratories (in Indiana, North Carolina, Boston …). I managed to pick up a reasonable understanding of such topics along the way.
Other Books
John W: Tell me a bit about your other books. Are you writing on something now?
The cover of Biodigital.
John S: Other books covered in the Chronicler essay. My novel Biodigital is a thoroughly revised version of Acts of the Apostles. (Why I undertook that project is another long story.) In Biodigital the character Bartlett Aubrey, estranged wife of protagonist Nick Aubrey, is much more fully developed. And it turns out that Bartlett and Monty Meekman had some kind of interaction years before Nick and Bartlett met. (This is mentioned almost in passing in Acts, but more prominently in Biodigital).
The book I'm working on now, and have been, off and on, for more than ten years, called Mountain of Devils, concerns that earlier encounter between Bartlett & Monty -- when she was a teenager, and he was a twenty-something rising-star professor at Stanford. It's set in the 1970s, at the dawn of the age of genetic engineering. Unlike all of my other books, it contains no science fiction or fantasy. It's a straight-ahead psychological thriller.
Speculating About the Future
John W: Many authors use their writing as an outlet for thoughts and speculation they have about the future, or the past. Do you generally have a positive or negative view of our technological future? What do you think will be most important in getting it right?
John S: I guess you would have to say I'm pretty paranoid/negative at this point – because I don't see any way to separate the future of technology from either the climate crisis or the crisis of democracy/fascism. However I believe it is a moral imperative to maintain hope and work for good, which I am trying to do. What will be most important in getting it right? That is one frickin' good question, John. I wish I had an answer for you.
I could point you at yet more essays I've written on this topic, but given all the links I've already provided I think that sending you to read any more of my stuff would be just too fucking obnoxious.
Thank you!
John W: Thank you, John. You have such great life experiences and it's fascinating to hear how you draw from all of that in your writing.
John S: Thank you for your interest, and for your excellent questions.
Currently Reading
I finished reading Scandinavian Noir novel Den skrattande polisen / The Laughing Policeman and am now reading fantasy. More specifically The Demon Lord by Irish novelist Peter Morwood. It's part two of a series of four books that I read back in high school. I've been wanting to re-read them and did so with the first book, The Horse Lord, three years ago.