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David Weber's Off Armageddon Reef
(http://e2ma.net/go/880762914/763328/27383100/goto:http://www.tor-forge.co
m/offarmageddonreef) (0-7653-5397-0, $7.99 / $9.99 CAN) was released from
Tor in pb in January. - First of a new series.


Religion vs. innovation and technology is a significant theme in Off
Armageddon Reef. Why did you decide to use this potentially incendiary
topic? How do you equate it to what's happening in our world today?

If you take a look at the main body of my writing, you'll see that
religion and personal decision-making and choices have always been major
elements of my stories. My own religious beliefs are strong, and I think
that may make me more comfortable using religious elements--negative and 
positive alike--in my writing. It's obvious that I see technology as a
liberating force, although (like religion) there's always a Darth Vader
dark side waiting for the unwary. Perhaps because of that, I don't see
the question of religion versus innovation and technology as particularly
incendiary. The conflict between innovation and religion, I believe,
results primarily from collisions between innovation and exclusionary
religion. That doesn't mean there aren't legitimate religious and moral
concerns where specific areas of innovation or types of research are
concerned. What's happening on Safehold in the novels reflects the
conflict between zealotry and faith-based reason. Between an ideology (in
th
is case, a religious one) which enshrines control and authoritarianism;
the renunciation of personal responsibility to think, judge, and make
informed choices and live with the consequences. I think that in an era
of "postmodernism" and relativism, human beings--including, perhaps, my
readerssense the need, like Archimedes, for a place to stand, a moral
basis of inviolable core principles, if they truly hope to move the
world.

Off Armageddon Reef is the launch of an epic new series. Can readers new
to your work enjoy it as a stand-alone novel? How does Off Armageddon
Reef relate to your other novels, including your wildly popular Honor
Harrington series?

I think that Off Armageddon Reef
(http://e2ma.net/go/880762914/763328/27383100/goto:http://www.tor-forge.co
m/offarmageddonreef) can be quite satisfying  read as a stand-alone
novel, although, obviously, I think it will be even more satisfying as
one element in an ongoing series. Readers of my other novels, like the
Honor Harrington books, are going to find some familiar themes and story
elements. I don't know that anyone can produce the number of books that
I've produced without having familiar elements surface in different
guises. I believe that the strongest attraction for the majority of my
readers is that my protagonists are decision makers, choice makers, and
responsibility takers. They are the sort of people all of us, I think,
both want to see in our leaders and would like to be on a personal level.
And I think some readers probably see characters like Honor or Nimue and
the choices they make as a sort of escape  from--or an antidote for,
perhaps--the cynicism which envelops s
o much of our own  society at this particular historical juncture.

It's been said that you challenge current gender roles in your novels.
This is certainly true in Off Armageddon Reef. What are your reasons for
returning to this theme?

I think I'm probably attracted to "challenging current gender roles"
because of all of the strong women I've known in my life, beginning with
my mother and certainly including my wife, Sharon. I never set out to
challenge any gender roles as a deliberate marketing point. I happen to
prefer strong, competent people who are willing to take chances for the
things they believe in (even when they're not necessarily the things I
might believe in), regardless of whether they're male or female. I do
take a certain pleasure in juxtaposing "traditional" roles and duties,
but if you really look at most of my science fiction--Off Armageddon Reef
is something of an exception in this  respect, although that begins
changing in the second and subsequent volumes of  the series--you'll see
that it's not so much a case of challenging gender roles as it is of
simply ignoring them.

I've always had a problem with far-future science fiction in which
current gender roles or social disputes are presented  without change
from our present-day ideological battlefields. If you're going to build a
far-distant literary future, then you have to explain to the reader why
nothing has changed in the last several centuries of your future
society's historical experience. As I've said at more than one science
fiction convention, my view is that if we're on the right track where
gender equality is concerned (and I think we are) by the time of someone
like Honor Harrington--or Nimue Alban--it's going to be a done deal. And
it's also going to be a purely  historical issue for mainstream
societies, about on a par with our own concern over Pharaoh's foreign
policy towards the Hittites. So that's the way I structured Honor
Harrington's society, and Nimue Alban's birth society. And if  you do
that, then almost by definition you appear to be "challenging" gender
roles in that you've pr
etty much eliminated them entirely from consideration whether
"challenging" them was what you set out to do in the first place or not.

Technological advancement poses grave danger in Off Armageddon Reef.
Could this storyline be compared to the target our technologically
advanced country has become today?

With one glaring exception, I certainly didn't set out to draw a
deliberate parallel between our own country's technological advancement
and the dangers--internal and/external--it faces. As I said above, I have
strong religious beliefs of my own, but as I've pointed out in my books,
no one has a monopoly on fanaticism, and that's the one parallel I've
deliberately and consciously set out to draw. Organized religion, and its
opponents, have a long  history of producing fanatics. In fact, it's
probably fair to say that up until the last few centuries religion
produced more fanatics than anything else. In the Western experience,
particularly, I think that political and economic ideologies have had a
tendency to displace religious fanaticism to a large degree, although
some people seem to feel that a religious basis is necessary for true
fanaticism to exist. I think we forget the power of fanaticism at our own
risk.  In fact, up until the last few years, we had pretty much forgotten
the 
power of  fanaticism . . . and have yet to discover the full cost of that
forgetfulness. The collision of human belief structures is the greatest
underlying cause for human conflict, and there are, unfortunately, times
when, with the best intentions in the world, it's impossible to coexist
peaceably with someone else's belief structure. For coexistence to be
possible, both sides have to believe  that it's not only possible, but
desirable, and that, alas, is not always the  case.

At this particular time, the United States is the poster child for a
technological-industrial society. The basic social  blueprint for the US,
ideologically speaking, is based on the values of Western humanism, which
have been hugely influenced by Judeo-Christian religious teachings. Those
humanist values, with their emphasis on the individual and on freedom of 
conscience, are anathema to those who fear secularization. When you
combine that fear of secularization with the wealth, power, and fervent
faith in  technology and science which are so much a part of the United
States' image  today, it's inevitable that we should become the "Great
Satan." If I were a practitioner of conservative Islam today, I know that
I would be horrified by what I saw bearing down on my religion and my
society from the United States and Europe. And I would also be aware that
the West's economic and industrial success would be dreadfully seductive
to those who do not enjoy an equal level of success, and th
at the possibility of similar secular success must inevitably fragment
the cohesiveness of my own theocratic view of how the world is supposed
to be organized to the glory of God.

Right there, I believe, you have the core causes for what's happening in
the world today and the reason that so many on both  sides believe that
true coexistence simply isn't possible. Which, in a somewhat  roundabout
way, brings me back to the situation I've created on Safehold. I don't
propose to turn this series into a polemical argument about what we ought
to be doing in our own specific, actual situation. Obviously, the options
and  alternatives for my fictional characters are going to be quite
different from the constraints we face in the actual world. But the
mindsets which create the constraints we face are something I want to
examine, turn around, maybe even "illuminate" (to use the artsy term) in
the process of writing what I hope will be an enjoyable action story. ==

-- 
Litle Egret