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by Brad Cook Kevin J. Anderson loves to send people on exciting adventures. To the wind-swept desert planets Arrakis and Tatooine. To a space shuttle launching pad under terrorist attack. Even inside an extra-terrestial body on a miniaturized expedition. But wherever the best-selling author sends readers and wherever he journeys himself, Anderson depends on two tools—his imagination, of course, and his Macintosh computers. “They’re tools I use all the time,” he says of his PowerBook and Power Mac, “and I use them naturally, without thinking, which is what you’re supposed to do when you’re writing.” He has more than 30 solo novels under his belt and more than 50 in collaboration with other writers, and Anderson estimates he’s used about 18 Macs in his career so far. One of the First Lone Gunmen In fact, his experience with Macs goes back to his days at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, CA, where he was a technical editor who put together large presentations full of graphs and typed reports. “I was one of the very first lone gunmen to say ‘We don’t need these gigantic typesetting departments,’” he recalls. “’I can do all these graphs on my computer.’” “So I was one of the first to push that laboratory into doing all sorts of things with the Macintosh.”  Dune and Macs Today, Anderson co-authors a new series of Dune novels (prequels to the groundbreaking series by Frank Herbert) with another Mac user—Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert’s son. Anderson considers their co-reliance on the Mac invaluable to their creative process. “The Mac helps so much because it’s invisible,” he says. “Brian simply sends me his files, and I get to work—no conversion necessary. His format comes across as my format. It takes an entire brainless step away from the work, and that’s why I like the Mac so much.” The two also depend on the Macintosh as an important planning tool for the books. Before they start writing, Anderson and Brian get together face-to-face and create a list of color-coded chapters in the computer. “All the Emperor’s chapters are in blue and all the bad guys’ storylines are in red,” he explains. “All the desert storylines are in brown. So we can look at the storylines and say ‘Woah, it’s been some time since we’ve had a blue storyline, so we better move a chapter up.’” |
Futuristic Interfaces With a universe as massive as the one Herbert created, it was important that the writers not contradict, in their new books, any facts established in the original Dune series. So Anderson had his assistant, Catherine, scan all six of Frank Herbert’s original Dune novels into her Power Mac and clean up the copy so that he and Brian could search on keywords and extract what they needed. Using these files, Brian then compiled a massive concordance, cataloging all the obscure references in the original novels. Anderson’s creative use of computers to compile and access information is often reflected in his writing, and he offered an example of that from the forthcoming “Dune: House Corrino” novel. “In ‘House Corrino,’ we have the Lady Jessica, who’s one of the major characters in the Dune books, going into the Bene Gesserit library system, a vast virtual-reality complex, and it’s like she’s walking into a Macintosh screen; she accesses information by moving icons around. “So my view of futuristic computers has always been very much colored by the way Macs look at things, in that they should be easier and more hands-on for people to use, rather than like the arcane medieval priests who were the only ones who spoke Latin, so they were the ones who could translate the documents.” No Longer Afraid Anderson also believes the Mac responsible for a change currently afoot. Aberrant computers that threaten mankind—from the malfunctioning HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the half-machine, half-human Borg from Star Trek—have figured prominently in many science-fiction novels and movies during the past several decades. Anderson thinks the science-fiction genre is now finally moving beyond that paranoid, techno-phobic notion. “I think we’re starting to learn that the computer revolution is just like the industrial revolution,” he muses. “At first, people were against it: ‘Oh no, all these machines will put people out of work and take over our lives and change the way we live.’ But then people learned how to adapt to it, and they realized that it was a lot better than the way things used to be. “The Macintosh was one of the first computers that genuinely made people stop being afraid of computers.” |
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