Taking No Prisoners
by Barrie Trinkle

Andrej Koscuisko, hero of An Exchange of Hostages and Prisoner of Conscience, is a man of unusual gifts who has been forced by a peculiarly sadistic system into the dual role of torturer and healer.

At the beginning of An Exchange of Hostages, he has finished his medical training and has arrived at Fleet Orientation Station Medical, adrift in deep space. Here he is to be schooled, with his reluctant consent, in the fine art of Inquiring—extracting information from prisoners of the Judicial order. Andrej has both a finely tuned sense of justice and a deeply buried kink in his psychological makeup. How he controls and comes to terms with his odd desires, and how he manipulates the system to wring a fair resolution from a thorny catch-22, is a story so powerfully told that An Exchange of Hostages has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and made the preliminary ballot of the Nebula Awards. The newly released second book of the series, Prisoner of Conscience, is equally disturbing and riveting.

Susan R. Matthews, like her creation Andrej Koscuisko, is a Renaissance personality. Now an accountant at Boeing, she has traveled the world, been in the U.S. Army, and has read widely on myriad subjects from Chinese history and philosophy to dark fantasy. Amazon.com's Barrie Trinkle had some second thoughts about meeting her.

It occurred to me after I read An Exchange of Hostages and Prisoner of Conscience that I had agreed to come into a little room with you and shut the door, and I got a bit nervous.

Susan

Ha! May I direct you to the author photo in the back of the book, of a rather fluffy, pleasant person who would never hurt anyone.

Susan

Oh, no research was necessary to come up with the kind of environment in which the protagonist finds himself at the beginning of An Exchange of Hostages—it's just boot camp.

One of the criticisms that I got from a very respected science fiction writer about the book was that the system was impossibly closed and repressive. Nobody can live like that. Well, this dude had never been in the military! Andrej is put into in an environment that has been specifically constructed to be as controlling as possible, to force a profound alteration in what normal people do of their own free will. And for this reason, Fleet Orientation Station Medical, where the first book takes place, is even more tight and claustrophobic than when the story moves out past that stage and goes out into the fleet, out in the galaxy.

Many totalitarian governments in the past century have shown the same behavior that happens in my books. As the system gets too big, it loses control. As it loses control, it becomes more and more repressive. A point I hope I made clear enough in An Exchange of Hostages was that when Andrej's father was in the fleet, this system of inquisition did not exist. People were roughed up, but that was all there was to it. There's quite a difference between people being beaten up in an alleyway and what's going on in Fleet Orientation Station Medical. The situation is developing; the jurisdiction is getting worse as it's trying to maintain control of an increasingly fractious population.

 

So you're a student of history.

Susan

Oh yeah!

Susan

One writer I've read a lot of lately is John Myers Myers, who's written about Doc Holliday, Tombstone—lots of books about the West. I've always loved Joseph Conrad and Dostoevsky and all the other Russians. I like the interior structure of Russian novels. Before the OK Corral stuff, I was reading Icelandic sagas, but they've been moved from the bedside table to the bookshelves.

Susan

I'd love to write a book exploring Chinese accounting systems—their history, changes in accounting practice over the centuries, lessons drawn from the Chinese historical laboratory.

In my first accounting class, I was told that double-entry bookkeeping, the foundation of modern accounting, was developed in Italy during the Renaissance, and that it was a unique outgrowth of a combination of elements peculiar to the Renaissance and eventually to the Industrial Revolution—things like enterprise accounting (keeping books for a sea voyage from start to finish, for example), factory production, and accrual accounting. All of these business challenges can be found throughout Chinese history at one point or another, and it's counterintuitive to believe that if double-entry bookkeeping is really such a powerful business tool it wouldn't have been invented until the 15th century in Italy. I've been interested in what the Chinese accounting experience might have to teach us ever since.

Of course, to write the story of Chinese accounting, I'd have to learn to read Chinese. That's the one drawback.

Susan

I wrote the first draft of the first novel in the story of Andrej Koscuisko in early 1979. And it was primitive, let me tell you. But I got my copy of the Writer's Market and sent my manuscript off to a publishing house in New York. It came back with a half sheet, which was a mimeographed "thank you for considering us, not quite right at this time" sort of thing, and I sent it off again to another house, and it came back again.

I went through periods when I just didn't have the energy to send the manuscript back out, but I had friends who kept saying, "You can sell this story; people want to read this story." I got to the point where I told one of them, "Well, if that's how you feel, then you sell it," and she said, "All right." So I kept writing new stuff, and we worked for several years on An Exchange of Hostages. An editor suggested some changes to that one, but then it came back again, "just not quite right for our market at this time."

Finally it hit the right editor at the right time at the right place, where they wanted to initiate a new program. They were looking for something a little bit different, and boy howdy, is this a little bit different! So through persistence and stubborn luck, I finally found myself in a position where all the factors came together.

Those people who sell their first story on their first submission—well, good for them, but it doesn't happen for most people. For most people, it's sending it out, and getting it back, and sending it out again, and getting it back again. That first manuscript was pretty primitive stuff—I hope to God that no one has a copy of it—but in persisting for 20 years I was also continuing to write for 20 years, and that means I was getting better at it.

Susan

And you have to believe in your story; a lot of suggestions I got for revisions were things that I really couldn't entertain: "This is so depressing. Why don't these characters sneak offstage and have a Coke?" Well, there isn't any offstage to sneak off to, and that's part of the point, but apart from that, the entire dynamic involved in sneaking offstage to have a Coke is very different from what I was trying to do here.

Susan

Or some other part of my anatomy... Yes, Andrej and everybody else in that universe have gotten a lot juicier and more fully fleshed with time. Andrej was always a fully realized personality, because of his peculiar psychological situation; that tension developed him fairly early on. Robert St. Clare is an example of a character that started out recognizably different, and was fine-tuned into the personality that he is today.

Susan

Well, gosh, you know—in the beginning of Paradise Lost John Milton states that what he's after is to reconcile the ways of God to man. To take that into a more psychological realm, it is my firm conviction that there are a lot of us who are capable of doing fearful things, things that we know to be wrong, but that are so powerful within us that trying to not do them is extremely difficult. And so I deliberately put my protagonist into a situation where he has no way to avoid doing what he knows to be wrong.

We are all capable of atrocity, but this does not make us evil people. If we've never said, for instance, "I could just slap that kid," and meant it, then the chances that we might accidentally haul off and do it are much higher than if we already knew that there were some times that we might be tempted. And for every one of us who ever hauled off and whacked that kid—it doesn't mean that we are forever ruined. We can stop kid-whacking at any time.

Susan

Even if we enjoy it. Now it's going to take Andrej, in this artificial environment, a little longer to understand that he has a choice: he can decide to just not go along with the system, even though they can kill him. It takes him longer because I have really stacked the deck against him. So that is, I guess, my deep moral meaning.

One of the reviews that An Exchange of Hostages got on amazon.com absolutely delighted me because the reviewer said that the point of the book is that we are all Caliban, but nonetheless, worthy of being loved. That's just such a cool way of saying it—I wish I'd thought of it.