Andreas Eschbach

Andreas Eschbach was born in Ulm in 1959. He studied Air and Space Technology, and initially worked as a software developer before completely dedicating himself to writing. In 1995, his first novel appeared which immediately won the German Science-Fiction Club’s Literature Prize; many other awards followed. He became well-known through many bestsellers like “The Jesus Video”, which was successfully filmed, or “1 Billion Dollars”. The author lives as a freelance writer in Britanny.

Interview

...with Andreas Eschbach on Black*Out

Andreas Eschbach, what is the topic of your new novel for young adults, Black*Out?

It is the story about a young hacker who is running from a mysterious danger called »The Coherence« that may very well mean the end of humanity the way we know it. The worst part about it is that he contributed to the creation of this danger in the first place – and he’s the only one who has even the slightest chance to stop it.

How did you come up with the idea for this story?

That’s hard to tell. The idea kind of grew on me over many years; it would take on this shape or that shape, and the story it finally turned into doesn’t have much in common with my original conceptions any more. I used a lot of things I read on neurology and computer sciences... Well, and then there’s the phenomenon that any story won’t really develop until you start the actual writing process. That’s what happened here.

The humans in your novel undergo surgery – most of them even willingly – to have a micro chip implanted in their brains that will enable them to exchange their thoughts directly with each other and to become part of »The Coherence«. What benefits are they hoping for?

Some of them hope they’ll never be lonely again and that they will be able to share their unfiltered feelings and thoughts directly with others. And some expect access to a higher and different intelligence – they want to become part of a collective intelligence that is superior to regular human beings.

You did extensive research into the theory of the so-called »collective intelligence« that’s also called swarm intelligence. What exactly does it mean?

According to this theory, a group of individual human beings may communicate to each other in a way that will collectively turn them into a kind of virtual being which has faculties the individual beings don’t have. A typical example is the ant colony – any individual ant only has an extremely simple repertory of behavior while the ant colony as a whole shows a considerably more sophisticated intelligence. Such models taken from nature have already been studied in computer sciences for quite a while; it’s an absolutely hot topic.

How close to reality is the scenario you develop in Black*Out today?

I think it could very well be that in merely a few years these things will be possible. Even though the chip described in my novel does not yet exist – at least as far as I know – there is some massive research currently being done on how to connect computers directly with brains, for instance in order to allow people who suffer from the locked-in syndrome to get in touch with their environment again. That certainly does not sound unethical – Who could object to helping people who are suffering from a disease??? – but past experience has shown that any invention, no matter what purpose it is for, will eventually be abused for less ethical reasons, including useless – or let’s say playful – purposes whenever it is possible. In other words: Everything humans can do, they will do some day. That’s why I think that there will be tests that will plug brains into each other as soon as direct connections between neural systems are technically feasible.

Many people, especially young people, deliberately offer a lot of information about themselves in popular internet forums. Is the direct insight into the human mind without technical means only the next logical step?

Indeed we are currently experiencing a massive change of values regarding concepts such as privacy, confidentiality, intimacy and so on. And as soon as we stop considering private space – i.e. your own place unknown to anyone else, where you can be all by yourself – as being important, the dissolution of your individuality is basically inevitable.

Should we be afraid of a future »super organism« that will control everything?

Well, in any case our individuality will be at stake in the near future, I’m afraid.

Christopher, the protagonist of your novel, is a super hacker who, in collaboration with the most famous hacker in the world, causes a medium-sized financial crisis and is constantly developing new and highly complicated computer programs. Did you actually meet such talents in your line of work as a software developer?

I myself wasn’t a bad programmer; yet I did meet some people that made me feel like a first grader who is watching a professor of higher mathematics – without understanding a thing. Obviously, I’m not at liberty to talk about most of these encounters but there was this rather funny incident: I once met this young programmer who, while writing a simple printing routine for a coupon printer, noticed that the printer had been installed upside down inside the equipment – so everything it printed would come out upside down as well. It took him only a few hours to write a program that redefined the printer to the extent that it now printed everything upside down, making it come out right. The funny part was that the manufacturer of the printer would absolutely insist that this was technically impossible to do...

Your books are always extremely well researched and based on lots of impressive facts. How do you proceed when doing that?

To tell you the truth, it’s not as spectacular as it may seem. I read a lot, especially books. That usually surprises people who only know the internet and who believe that anything can be found somewhere on the world wide web. In fact it doesn’t. The knowledge of the world is still found in the libraries, and that won’t change for quite a while.

Your last great series of juvenile novels published by Arena is titled The Mars Project. How does Black*Out differ from it? Will Black*Out turn into another series?

Yes, Black*Out is the first volume in a new series but I can’t tell yet how many volumes it will consist of in the end – there’s plenty of material so it’s very well possible that it will top the five volumes of the Mars Project. Obviously, the main difference is that this new series plays on Planet Earth and not on Mars – and it does so in the near future and not at the end of the century, as the story plot about Elinn, Carl, Ariana, Ronny and the extraterrestrials does.

You are a bestselling author. Has being so successful changed you?

That’s hard to say. Of course it changed my life, and people change over time anyhow – hopefully to the better – yet it’s hard to tell how much my success had to do with it. Certainly it does play a part. I am more contented, more relaxed because now I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do. As to the rest – you might ask others about that...

A few years ago you moved away from Stuttgart to live in Brittany. Can you tell us why?

Certainly not in order to pay less taxes as many people assume – if you want to do that, you shouldn’t move to France... Of course, the reason was that we like Brittany. Most people who know this region from their vacations would love to live here, too. And since you can live wherever you want if you’re a writer, as long as there is a phone line in your home and a post office nearby, we made our dream come true!