(2013-03-19) Exclusive Interview With The Curve Of The Earth Hero Samuil Petrovitch

Exclusive Interview with THE CURVE OF THE EARTH Hero Samuil Petrovitch (Metrozone Series).

To celebrate the publication of THE CURVE OF THE EARTH ( UK|US|ANZ), Orbit was lucky enough to be treated to a rare interview with one of the post-apocalyptic world’s most brilliant minds: Doctor Samuil Petrovitch.

What matters is what I do, not how I think of myself as doing. Ask me another, better question. (To Be or To Do)

Michael is dead against any form of redaction, censorship or secrecy. Mainly because it gets in the way of it knowing everything.

what I’m trying to explain is that we’re friends. That’s not conditional on whether it has a soul or not. Yeah, sure, Michael is a massive, inchoate AI, imprinted on the matrix of a quantum computer, but that doesn’t stop it from being a kind, patient, loyal, and somewhat sarcastic friend.

People who see the point of the Freezone, who want to us to get more, not less involved. Who use our data to stop themselves getting shafted over things like land rights and market prices, who use our tech to generate power for themselves, use our education system to get taught for free. They become active citizens where they live, agitating for change.

The Freezone is an adhocracy, specifically set up to pool resources co-operatively. It’s way more efficient and compassionate than anything anyone else can offer, and we’ll eventually out-compete all other forms of government. We’re working towards post-scarcity when our resources become effectively unlimited. Whatever we want, we can make out of dirt and energy.

Exclusive Interview with THE CURVE OF THE EARTH Hero Samuil Petrovitch (Part 2) | Orbit Books

Both me and Michael are reasonably certain we can build a working reactionless space drive. It’s technically difficult, though, not least because getting access to space is, at the moment, a matter of brute force. We’re trying to fix that, too. We’ve a prototype reusable space plane sitting in the desert in Morocco.

Who’s your favourite strategist?
SP: Oh, okay. That’s not a stupid question. When they say favourite, I take it they mean whose advice I tend to follow most often. Sun Tzu is always going to be my fall-back position, because his approach was very adaptive to the situation. Rigid planning always falls apart, which is where some of the post-Rennaisance strategists come unstuck. But sometimes, you get dealt a crappy hand and have to go with it anyway: that’s when I go with Ellen Ripley. Ripley gave pretty much two near-universally applicable tactics. Firstly, take off and nuke the site from orbit, because it’s the only way to be sure; and secondly, get away from her, you bitch. That covers a lot of the situations I find myself in.

Everyone thinks they know Raymond Chandler through the films, but the books are different kaiju entirely.