Focus 580; Killing Time: A Novel

Good morning and welcome to focus 580. This is our telephone talk program. My name's David Inge. Glad to have you with us this morning. In this first hour of the show we'll be talking with novelist Caleb Carr. And you may know Caleb Carr as the author of a couple of bestselling historical thrillers books that were set in New York City at the turn of the century. Those books the alienist and the angel of darkness he has just published a new book that is science fiction and is set in the near future the book is titled Killing time and it's just recently published by Random House. And this morning on Focus we'll talk a little bit about that book and about some of the other work that Caleb Carr has done. And as we do that of course people who are listening are welcome to call in if you want to ask questions. All we ask callers is people just try to be brief so that we can keep things moving along and make room for everyone or anyone who likes to call him. But other than that all calls and questions are welcome here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. Also we have a toll free line that was good anywhere that you can hear us

around Illinois Indiana. Anywhere that signal will travel that's. 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Again here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 W I L L that's what you get if you match the numbers in the letters 3 3 3 W I L L and toll free 800 to 2 to W while I'm Mr Carr. Hello thanks for talking with us. Thank you very much for having me. Let's set the stage for killing time and talk a little bit about the world as you envision it in 2023 and it's not a terribly appealing place. We had a world wide economic collapse early in the century a staphylococcus epidemic that killed a lot of people. The ocean is polluted and doesn't have much in the way of fish anymore. People in Southern California are fighting over water India and Pakistan have fought a nuclear war over Kashmir. Maybe I'll stop there. It's a dystopia for certain.

Yeah. It's a cautionary tale I have no I have no. I make no bones about that. I don't necessarily think this is the way things will be but I did want to issue a pretty stern warning about problems that I see being going on addressed amidst all the globalization that has been taking place over the last several years. It seemed to me that there were many problems that were just getting swept under the carpet and left turn left and dealt with. So I wanted to write a story about what would happen if a lot of those problems did go continue to go untreated for another quarter century or so and then Time magazine came to me fairly early on in the process and by coincidence wanted to publish a serialized. Fiction in the magazine for the first time in its history and asked me if they were doing some millennial issues and asked me if I could do something that would take place in the near future. And I told them that I could and I would and so that was how the first part of the book came to be. And then I went on and completed the rest of it for the for the published

work. I came across an interview that you did in Salon a couple of years ago and they asked you about a moment where they're asking about science fiction or historical fiction or whatever but the answer that you gave them I thought was interesting and and also quite correct and that is whether you're talking about historical fiction or science fiction. It's not so much about the past or the future. It's about where it whenever it is that that thing happened to be written. Yeah writers are always bragging about the president essentially. We can't know truly know the package any more than we only just slightly more than we can truly know the future. We're looking at the president through a specific plan in order to entertain the audience in order to you know give the audience something that. But part of the writer's job is simply to you know entertain and divert. A job that too many writers today seem to remember is part of their job. But that is a huge part of a writer's job. And so you use that

lens to give the reader something interesting and different to view it through but you're making a point about the present through those through those lenses. The the two books that I had and I mentioned the alienist and the angel of darkness are set in New York City and I know that you spent a lot of time researching the city in the period to try to lend some authenticity to the details in the story so there you're somewhat limited by past reality in science fiction. I think the part of the appeal of that to read to readers and writers I'm sure is that is that you can virtually write anything that you want. You can virtually do it but if you're It's the same thing as historical fiction if you're going to write plausible historical fiction you have to tie yourself pretty tightly to what happened and pretty tightly to what people actually did. And if you're going to for instance with the alienist I I can find myself with historical. Characters confined them to sort of what we call in movies cameo roles.

And I didn't have them ever do anything that they didn't actually do in the record on the record and I didn't have them sent as much as possible the language that they use real figures in the book were the language that these somewhere else either in a letter or some kind of a document a speech whatever. And so to make it plausible you stick as much to as possible to the fact. And I think with futuristic stuff especially if it's the near future you have to do as much as possible the same thing which is really study the current you know scientific social political conditions and extrapolate in a in a reasonable fashion not in sensational sensational fashion. And I think that that also that what that meant for me was that this book required really just as much research as the others did and that was kind of surprising in a way that it did because there is such a huge literature now a speculative science of speculative history. Asking what's going to happen in the immediate future and you really have to familiarize yourself with it and understand it. So it was surprising to me how much research had to be done for

the future and how much I had to stick to things that were because I am of a political and military historian by training and that is I have a pretty rigorous approach toward It's either speculating or recreating. And I don't like I don't like stuff that you read that you know 50 years in the future and anything has happened. I like things that are really spun out very very plausibly from what exists now. Our guest in this part of focus Caleb Carr he's a novelist he's the author of the bestsellers The Alienist and the angel of darkness He's also written several volumes of nonfiction. He writes often on military and political affairs. He's an editorial advisor to the World Policy Journal and also H.Q. the Quarterly Journal of military history. And his new book is killing time published by Random House and questions are welcome three three three. W. Weil toll free 800 1:58 W while the the narrator of killing time is a psychiatrist from New York.

A criminal profiler and actually rather reminds me of the alienist as is this man a descendant of Laszlo Chrysler. No no they really only share they really only share professions he's more spiritually he's sort of more akin to John Moore the narrator of of the aliens the first of those but he's really again it's the use of the kind of the kind of everyman character he has this he has a slightly more interesting job but but really a character who is having a pretty good life in the in the situation as it exists in the future and then is drawn in to by by way of a couple of murders is drawn into this dramatic adventure that he undertakes and is brought face to face with the harsh realities of the time he lived in. But he's the kind of person like most people who would only be brought face to face of the stark realities through something extraordinary and only if he had to because they are pretty harsh.

So you really use a character like that because it's the easiest way to to to take the audience on the journey that you know he sees things with shock and surprise. And therefore we all see it with shock and surprise. It does though I guess what it leads me to to to think that or to to want to ask you about your interest in the criminal mind and in the end and in the workings of the human mind it certainly does need to be something that does interesting. Yeah that is definitely reflected in his occupation. I definitely have a desire to understand the criminal in the violent mind. And it's been an interest of mine really forever because you know history as I view it really is just psychology. And you know if history is the history of people and what. Motivates them and you know all of their all of their great the great historical characters all of the influences that shaped them early in their lives throughout their life the personal influence as well as the high political drama.

So that was that was how I got interested in psychology was through history it was through studying historical characters and then it became a more specific study later on in my life. You know never I never that was never a formal study for me in the sense that I attended school for psychology but I sort of did the Abe Lincoln route for myself what with taking a pretty rigorous course of psychological study and also studying 19th century psychology which believe me is no easy undertaking. Nineteenth century medical literature that was really the hardest part of the research I did for the for the books was the 19th century medical literature which is pretty sick going. But you have to do it. You have to really you have to understand it so that your characters again speak plausibly so that they don't speak a necker anachronistically in them in the language of the 20th century but rather that in the language that they were speaking at the time. One of the things that you have put in the resume of this character we're talking about

Gideon wealth is a psychological history of the United States right that that he has written and that's part of the reason that he. The this cast of characters that he becomes part of is interested in in him writes he writes bestselling books it's called the psychological history of the United States which through it which by the way is something I'd love to do someday myself which is basically he goes through American history sort of psychoanalyzing the famous history figures of American history and trying to figure out why you know how much their personal psychological history has to do with the way the country was shaped. And these characters who are up to this strange bit of business that they're up to trying to expose some of the dangers of modern society they say they really want to have a good historical profiler so that they can they're being pursued by various and sundry nations and enemies and they would like to

have a good idea of how the people that they are struggling against will react to things that they do. I think that some historians have tried to do this but it strikes me that it's sometimes a difficulty that one's on thin sometimes thin ice intellectually speaking because you're drawing a lot of inference and it's often hard to have real hard data to make these conclusions I would put it. More basically how much hard data there is. There is an incredible prejudice against psychology in among traditional historical historians. In the much the same way there is among local police departments they say they are so suspicious and hostile toward psychological profiling I actually did do this with a friend of mine James chase we wrote a book once together called America invulnerable which was a history of American national security policy from 1812 to the present.

And it really you know it really sort of laid open a lot of common threads in the way that America reacts to threats around the world in the way that America perceives threat around the world. And you really can see some extremely consistent behavior based on some early experiences. And it was Henry you know Henry Adams a great historian and great grandson and great grandson and grandson of presidents. Turn of the century historians said that you know to determining a national character the most difficult and the most important historical problem that exists. And it's really true. And we tried to do that just and just in the one area of American national security policy in the way that America response to threat and the hostility with which we were received by the traditional historic historical and historians historical community story and it was really fantastic. I mean it was it was unbelievable how hostile most of them were

a great many other people were not. You know people who were not academic historians people who were not you know people who were very historically brilliant. Some of them but really traditional historians don't like that. And it's the same kind of prejudice you do see among police you see among a lot of different communities. You know I cycle a second lot of psych psychoanalysis is really it's still something that makes people a lot of people tremendously uncomfortable. And when you turn it on people figures in history particularly beloved figures in history it can make people extremely uncomfortable. And we talked a little bit right at the beginning about what the what the world looks like in 20 23 and the fact that what you have done is taken many very contemporary concerns things that we're talking about. Now and simply play them out too logical to their logical

conclusion and sort of had it all play out at the same time so it's as if we took all of the all of the things that we worry now individually about future problems and said we let a mall rip and see where they go. And one of the things that is important in a sense almost an important character in the book is the Internet. Yes the Internet is sort of the trigger for a lot of for a lot of bad things which is the way that I view it now. You're right the book is the setting of the book. It's basically saying there's a lot of problem that exists right now that could be extrapolated to their worst degree all at the same time. And my feeling is that they're going to be a couple of events that the society the world the world economic and political society right now. I view it's extremely fragile. And I'm perhaps the most fragile thing about it is how much people are convinced that it's not fragile and all we all we need is one serious economic crisis which we will probably get in the next 10 years.

One serious health world health crisis of a really pandemic scale which we will probably get in the next 10 to 15 years. And our system may be overburdened to the point where we will see tremendous social steps backwards worldwide. And one of the things it seems to me that is causing people not to look at this is an obsession with commerce and marketing and I don't mean to say that in any sort of left wing way I have I hold no brief for the left any more than I do for the right. I am an extremely politically centrist oriented person. But the madness of the globalization phenomenon in terms of getting people obsessed with consumer goods particularly American consumer goods to the exclusion of almost everything else seems to me to be a great sort of. Again I hate to use a Marxist word but that seems to me to be the great opiate that is making people

ignore extremely fundamental problems and the great the delivery system for all of that right now is the Internet which is the system that carries not only the machinery of globalization and an international marketing into every home but the mentality of it. By keeping peace by getting people online keep the people on the line learning everything we can about people by having them online and then invading their their computers and sort of profiling them commercially. It seems to me to be the great path by which all of this is happening. The great symbol and the great instrument of this globalization and the marketing phenomenon. So the Internet does get set up as sort of the. The thing that these people are really worried about and and that's the worst thing about the Internet and the end itself is a tool. It's not evil in and of itself any more than television it. But what what is the evil that's going on is that the Internet is so pervasive and so unregulated

and all I'm really calling for in the book in terms of the internet is for some kind of sensible rigorous but. But in light and regulation of the Internet in a way that we already regulate television movies books printed matter anything and then what I mean by that is that certain material should not be allowed. All information available on the Internet should be fair FEIBEL right now we have no way of knowing what on the internet is true or not true you can put anything up on the Internet that you feel like without. Any of your worry about legal action if it's wide open country on the net right now. And that's a fundamentally dangerous situation and it's been recognized as such by a lot of people who are responsible for for its popularisation most notably William Gibson who's an author I respect and admire very much who is extremely concerned about the state. It's about the influence that the Internet is taking taking on the night.

I promise we'll not give too much of the story away but maybe we'll just say that what what the cast of characters that the your narrator Dr Wolfe falls in with do as they perpetrate a series of hoaxes that they create that first they create they end use the Internet to circulate and then say Aha. You say no this is not true. We made it up as a way of trying to get people to question the question generally the in from a. Content that exactly what they're where they're what they're attempting to do is to alert the world to how susceptible it is society is to manipulation by political and commercial forces by themselves manipulating events through the series of grand hoaxes which they perpetrate and which they expect to be discovered eventually one of which is the assassination of an American president which they change the visual evidence of it so that the wrong person is convicted of the crime and the wrong country ends up

being punished for it by the American military and it is their what they what they attempt to do to create these hoaxes and then when the public. Doesn't realize that they are hoaxes they even go so far as to who provide hints and finally open statement that these are hoaxes but they discover that for some reason people are unwilling to accept that their hoax partly because they're so good and partly because there is something inside people that wants to believe hoaxes and that becomes the sort of the psychological crux of the book is the issue. Why do people believe things like you know what each of us even in our intimate personal lives. Why do we believe things that we know to be untrue. Why is it necessary to believe them in order to get through every day. And each of us does have things that we know secretly are not true. Generally in our lives. That we still tell ourselves are true because for some reason whether it's within a a personal relationship or a job or whatever we we just need to believe that in order to keep

going in order to make the situation bearable the leader of this group of people has as his his motto and it's a phrase that comes up frequently in the book is The World wants to be deceived right. It's the old Latin expression which means that the world wants to be deceived. And it's it that really is the core of the book that that is and that is an ancient that it's an ancient proverb and it has remained a very true proverb. And why is that so. Why why why has it remained such a constant in human society. We are already at the midpoint of this part of focus. We're talking with Caleb Carr. He's the author of the bestsellers The Alienist and the angel of darkness and his newest book is titled Killing Time published by Random House it's science fiction works out in the near future and is out now if you will certainly want to read the book. And if you'd like to talk with our guest you can do that to the number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3

3 9 4 5 5. Also we have a toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us 800 to toot. Tonight four five five we have a couple callers here we'll start in Freeport line number for that all morning. Yes I don't know if you've read his book or not by Professor James H Fetzer University of Minnesota Duluth called Assassination Science foreigners searching three pages on the John F. Kennedy assassination. And he carefully delineated the power of the industrial military complex and all of the big powerful wheel forces in Washington like Johnson Hoover the FBI and Richard Nixon at those times and it seems to me we're we're living on in a nightmare now. Many writers have said that the government the shadow government took over and we continued the war in Vietnam you know with 58000 US deaths and though income the workers of yore has gone down and and pre-stage you know all this. Jack London

around 1900 great socialist writer wrote the iron heel in which he also wrote about an industrial military oligarchy that ruled over society and the struggles of the workers against it and the nightmare conditions people lived under. Follow me. Yeah I know that the London book is a wonderful book I'm back on it of course was a great man. And I think that's part of his work that is not very well known and it deserves to be more well known because what what there's a great parallel between what's going on today and what went on 100 years ago which is that 100 years ago we had a completely beside having I'm the most politically corrupt society right now that we have had in 100 years. What we had a hundred years ago was a society in which the basic conditions of workers lives labor food drugs were completely unregulated and this is what I'm talking about when I talk about regulation I'm not talking about anything radical or even socialist. I'm talking about really basic in light regulation. And when what what happened was when Theodore Roosevelt became president

he simply simply for his own reasons decided that he was going to guarantee the basic a basic quality of life for workers limiting their hours. Eliminating child labor making sure there were certain food and drug standards that had to be abided by. What we need today are the same things because but not in terms of labor and food and drugs but in terms of what's going into our children and our own mind and we need and what that delivery system those delivery systems which are under the general heading of information technology. They are completely unregulated today. So what we have is a similar condition 200 years ago. That needs to be addressed through some very practical rigorous enlightened regulation now because the fact that there is information technologies are driving this great economic boom that we're living through. It is entirely unlikely that the average politician in Washington is going to do anything except go after the lobbying dollars of those technologies which means there will be no regulation.

And I am very pessimistic about the idea of of anything stopping all of this. But so were people like Jack London in 1900. No one no one predicted that the eurozone is going to come along and by accident of McKinley's assassination become president and it was a very happy surprise for people like Jacqueline and that that possibility always exists that someone will emerge from out of nowhere who simply by virtue of being honest and being ready to take up the struggle will take on some of these interests. But you know you never can depend on that. So it's it's not a happy moment. Appreciate the comments of the call let's go to Herb Elliott here for somebody else line one. Hello You know I was very interested in something you said much earlier in the program and I want you know from the time some of you may have already talked about this but I'm very candid and historians and I historians write history and how they write history and you said something very interesting about novelists had a lot of novelists writing about the past of having writing about the future.

Actually I'm reading about the president and I thought I could just speculate that perhaps he's turning to town the same thing from certain extent yes historians and even more even more on a personal level historians are often doing the same thing. Historians love to believe that they have attained a sort of a state of all commit objectivity and all of the state of bliss for them that they think that the Holy Grail that exists for them that they are no longer personally involved in their work at all and that's enough of course never true. Psychologically it's an absurdity. A lot of historians are really working out things they feel about the world around them and even things that they feel about you know things they feel personally and a lot of their emotional feelings. They're working out in the way in which they choose to interpret history and that's why you get so many different interpretations of history. It's because a lot of them are extremely personal. Now some of the best history that's ever been written is extremely personally slanted that which is why it's always

good to read four or five different views of the same of it before you come to believe anything about it. Some of the most beloved historians that we have in the world are people who took an entirely personal and prejudiced slant would be things. So yeah you do see the exact same thing happening with historians. OK thank you very much. All right thanks for the call again. Other questions are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 1. I was rather than the comment you made to the to the previous caller about how about the parallels that exist between the place where now and where we were 100 years ago and I also was thinking that you know in the material that came with the book some comparisons are made between killing time and work of other writers like H.G. Wells and George Orwell. But the man who. I thought I was I was reading it. Who. Interesting Life is male sort of roughly contemporary with the characters of the alienist and the angel of darkness. The guy I thought about was Jules Verne. Yes of course. And that and that that also

somehow you're a character Malcolm to Sally and in killing time somehow puts me in mind of Captain Nemo. He has a bit of Captain emo and I mean he has he has not not obviously physically or in terms of his personal style but in terms of his of a kind of a mission that he feels himself to be on. Now I hasten to add much of that mission that we associate with Captain Emo if you go back and re read 20000 leagues into the sea and mysterious island the two books that I kept in the Moore appears in much of that specific mission that we associate with Captain Emo to sort of you know and and war and world hunger and all these kinds of things. That was really created by Walt Disney in and by A. A British director named Sarge Harding during the psi field price citing a character in the book in the two

movies that were done of the book. Fern was much more concerned purely with the sort of the science and the adventure. He was not so much of a moral interpreter of events and we really Walt Disney added an enormous moral dimension and mission he heightened all that about kept in the character. And it's fascinating to me how much that has become an equal you know Captain Eamonn has become a popular figure in the figure in the popular imagination as much because of an interpreter and because of his Creator which is always interesting when that happens. But definitely the book owes a huge debt. I read Jules Verne when I was a kid. I it is a third book however that the book really much more is much more drawn form which is. Which is called Master of the world that your friend wrote and that was a book which actually Walt Disney borrowed from a great deal in order to flesh out the

character of Captain emo in in his film version. There's a character in that book called Robur the cat's conqueror who's a much more morally high minded man on a mission even more than Captain the most and it's because it's a sort of shorter and more more more fun book in some ways than 20000 leagues which is packed with endless chapters about about forms of sea life it's almost a lexicon of 19th century knowledge of undersea life much of which Verne just took from textbooks or even made up and never having been to the ocean himself. Master of the world is a much more direct much more direct influence on killing time than even than even Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the sea. But it I make no bones in the book about there are many. There are many little subtle little sort of tip of the hat in terms of character names or places or things in the book. There are many steps that have to many of the Knights great turn of the century in and late 19th

century adventure and science fiction writers which were totally intentional in killing time because the book really is a sort of an all to that kind of story. It's not really the typical sort of late 20th century early 21st century story about the future in the sense that it is not concerned with it. It's written in a very sort of traditional 19th century style and it's meant to be almost a book of that period. As much as the Eliot. And it's sort of a piece with those with those other two books because of that. But I don't I don't for a second attempt to deny my my indebtedness to refer to Welles Robert Louis Stevenson and all these kind of people where were huge influences on me for from when I was young. Throughout my life. Still are. And I'm looking for in that same Salon interview. That I talked about a little while ago I'm looking for a quote and now I can find it I guess. It said where your where someone ask you

about having done a lot of historical research and how you get yourself into the mind frame to write the end here. They were talking about the alien as an angel of darkness and you said something like. I've always lived more in the past than in the present. My aesthetic sense my ethical sense is at something you can expand on. Well yeah I mean well obviously the static sense is simply a question of I I I find the both the folks the philosophy and the product of the 19th century. The late 19th and early 20th century art to be something that I am just more in tune with art or culture generally something that more in tune with and one of the reasons I'm more in tune with it is that there's a problem. There is a very powerful ethical and moral component to late 19th century early 20th century culture and had a component that I think is really lacking in modern culture.

There's a real attempt and one of the things that is really it was really important in the late 19th century and I think one of the reasons I feel that so many things of lasting value were created then was an attempt to combine the extremely beautiful or the extremely profound or or whatever with it. Combine that with a pot some kind of method that would make it accessible to the public on a broad basis. One of the reasons that the great buildings that you see that exist from the from the late 19th century one of the reasons that we still all understand them as well as we do and one of the reasons we can all still look at them and appreciate their beauty is because they were intended to be understood by people who had no knowledge of architecture for instance buildings that are built today. If you don't have about a six year degree in architecture the average person is going to think that most buildings that are built today are simply ugly.

And by that even after you get there six years of study that allowed you to look at them and say well I understand what he was trying to do now. Finally maybe it looks a little bit better but chances are you may think says philosophically. But if it's not democratic in that sense it's not built so that just the average person can look at it and say. And the great art architect Richard Morris had a kind of great essay about this. He wanted his building his postcard great great postcard structures that he built like them at the front of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and many other structures like that. He wanted people to be able to look at it and say the average person walking into it to say I know I am in a place of great culture and great art now by the book based on what I am walking into the building or walking into any one of them to feel respect and awe for what they were going to see inside or if you but designed a court house who wanted them to feel great respect and offer the law by walking into it. And that's just an example of how both the aesthetic and the ethical combine during that period

to serve purposes that I really think are important. And frankly I feel are not being served today. We have about 12 13 minutes left in this part of focus 580 again I should introduce our guest We're talking with novelist Caleb Carr. He is the author of the bestsellers The Alienist and the angel of darkness and a new book. Those books set in the past turn of the century New York the new book is set in the near future. And the title of that book is killing time published by Random House just a been out just officially now I guess a couple of weeks. So it's in bookstores if you would liked to look at it in addition to his work as a novelist Caleb Carr has written several volumes of nonfiction he writes frequently on military and political fairs. And if you have questions. Since comments you want to call in you can do that. The number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. Also we have toll free line good anywhere that you can hear is that 800 to 2 2 9 4 5. We were talking a bit earlier about this. One of the central problems or concerns of the book is this idea of.

Well what do we know and how do we know it. And the fact that now with the Internet it becomes more difficult to answer that question because there is so much information that to one one has to ask where did it come from how did it get there who put it there what's their agenda and how do we evaluate it. At the same time I think it eventually you're the one of your characters that the psychiatrist and we've talked about in a sense comes to the point where he has to say well this is just something we're going to have to live with is it. Is it possible to make one's peace with the with the information. I mean you've always got to make peace with something that you can't overcome or can't change and then he says that in the moment of tremendous resignation he says you know this is just part of the advance of technology and the you know we're never going to be able to really to really affect it. He doesn't really believe that he's just gone through an extremely traumatic series of experiences

that have sort of led him to believe that what they're doing is no better by using technology to try to fight technology that what they end up doing through these hoaxes is no better than what the people who are behind the manipulation of society for their own end are doing in the first place. And that's the dilemma that it's eventually resolved in the conclusion of the book. But it's it can leave you and it can end up leaving you feeling utterly overwhelmed with information technology it can you know the pervasiveness of it the total irresponsibility of people who are operating it the avarice of the people who are operator rating and also the sense with which it really does invade your life. And you know people have talked a lot about the erosion of privacy as a concept in this country that's happening largely through the Internet and through information technology. And it's and it's a tremendously dangerous thing. Privacy is such a pillar of individual freedom in the

American sense and the erosion of it is more insidious than most people can imagine. There's a tremendous tendency to be resigned about it to say well you know what does it really matter if everybody knows that or about me. It matters a great deal matters a great deal to the quality of your life in terms of how much you're going to be not only not only in in in in even more critical way but just in terms of the daily quality of your life how much you're going to be bombarded manipulated annoyed irritated harassed by these kind of endless marketing and commercial campaigns which end up taking up so much time that people really have very little time for other traditional activities. Let's talk with another caller this is champagne and that's line. Hello hello good morning Mr. Carr. Good morning. I saw you the other day on one of the morning shows talking about your book and I was really intrigued. And I heard an earlier caller today mentions our Kwan thans of the iron

heel. The reason you know I can find them that you could be you know come close to saying things that might occur is for instance soon Jack London book The Iron Heel The thing that really caught my attention was that book was written about 1915 or 1916 30 years before World War Two. And in his book he mentions. Hole why you would be attacked by the Germans. You wouldn't fall off. You know it's it's it's it's it's very true I hadn't realized that that iron heel was quite that late but. It's it's it's follows it's following the same science same principle as well as if you know his book The Shape of Things to Come. CORDES cool was sort of the same kind of thing. If you've studied history and if you if you make a study of London it as a reporter of the

social political conditions around you it's really you know not tremendously difficult to make a not not necessarily an accurate because one of us will be totally accurate but a plausible projection into the future. And that becomes much more plausible than say you know that the real the stuff of science fiction and Hollywood say that something like The Matrix which when you strip away all the wonderful special effects involved in it is really nothing more than a sort of an old pulp magazine story about evil robots taking over the world. But there is a tradition of really a sort of you know intelligently researched speculative fiction and that's really the tradition out of which this book grows whether it succeeds or not is up to every reader to decide but that's that's the tradition that I readily acknowledge that this. This book grows out of and Wells who had a lot of predictions that were again involving the Germans unfortunately that were that proved to be extremely accurate.

At his time so it's a it's a if there is a tradition for this sort of thing Mr. Carr I really appreciate the work and the work that you are doing in this book and I'm thinking about purchasing the book. You know it's just so nice to hear a little bit of reality now and then instead of the mythology we get on a daily basis from the media and that's all I had to say. Thank you very much. Well I thank you. It is it is hard with them in the mythology of the media and all you have to remember when listening to that is that you know the networks at this point are not their own people. You know there is that the tendency toward a merger and conglomeration in terms of information delivery which includes the media is unfortunately you know well advanced and just as we had a major trust busting activity in the beginning of this century we will have to face the fact that we can't have so many sources of information.

And what is called entertainment controlled by so few corporate entities who really don't and don't operate under very much regulation at all. You know one of the things just to go just desperate. A different set of questions about your writing one of the things that killing time has in common with the alienist an angel of darkness is that their ensemble casts. Right. And that's something that you like you like writing for. I mean everybody writes people I suppose people have asked me they said you know it's a bunch of people in killing time seemed sort of like a bunch of people in the alienist and there there are difference there are clear differences for instance in killing time which is a big gripe in Hollywood about the unit that there was no love story where there is a love story in killing time. So there are there are differences but I am everybody every writer has the kinds of personal relationships that they're most comfortable writing with. Many people write love stories. That's the way that's the kind of relationship that they want to most explore. For me it happens to be the kind of close knit groups of friends who

undertake a project or a mission together. It can be anything from you know just a hobby that they all share to right up to something like what happens in this book right up to some kind of. Prank terrorism or even subversive behavior. These are the kind of relationships that really that I really understand that I've always engaged in in my life and it's what I really like to write about. Well on behalf of the all of those folks who enjoyed the alienist in the angel of darkness I would be remiss if I didn't ask will there be more books about these people. Oh absolutely yeah. There's no nobody should be in there or any concern about that. It's you know we just I did not want to suffer from the Conan Doyle syndrome where you become so sick of you're so sick of your characters that you end up wanting to kill him or to kill off Sherlock Holmes and then be put forth by the public to bring him back to life.

I don't ever want to get that way with those characters really because by the end of his life Conan Doyle couldn't even barely make it stand to mention his name. I don't really want to ever reach that point but the character so the way to do that you know and also one doesn't really want to be pigeonholed as just doing one thing it becomes you know for the writer it becomes creatively very stifling. So you try to break out do other things. It's hard to get people to accept it when you do and when you break out into other things. But it's really a necessary process. You just mentioned Hollywood in passing I gather that at one time there was some talk about making a move. The version of the alienist. Yeah there still is. It's gone on and on and on because again it has elements that are difficult for Hollywood the lack of a love story the some of the you know the subject matter is obviously a little difficult for a straight ahead Hollywood movie and sadly you know Hollywood right now in a very in a very bad state of affairs in terms of what the kind of

material they choose to make. And the ensemble cast is it's difficult for them. From a casting is something the British have traditionally done much better than Americans. But it's you know there's always the chance that it will get revived and that it will end up happening. It's just a matter of time. So what are you working on right now. Really I'm just working on getting through this book tour for good. I'm it said the publishing business has got to be like the movie business a little bit in the sense that a rapid turnaround and I only did the final edit on killing time about three months ago and then it was published very quickly. So I haven't had time to really work on anything else and I'm kind of just going around making people aware of the book. And at that point when that's done I will sit down and figure out what I will do next. Well there I guess will stop it. We've come to the end of the time for this hour we want thank you very much for spending some time talking with style.

Thanks very much for having me. We bring our guest once again Caleb Carr. And if you're interested in reading his new book The one we've been talking about the title the book is killing time and it's published by Random House it's only been a couple of weeks now. And also you might go back and look at his other novels the alienist and the angel of darkness they are both now available in paperback.