Chris Draper is a Kiwi IT engineer with a passion for writing optimistic, techno-thrillers like Goodbye Woomera Belle the first in a series of five planned action-filled futurist thrillers suitable for young adults, as well as adult readers.

Hi, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and in this week’s Binge Reading episode, Chris talks about how he fell in love with the Australian Outback while working in Adelaide, South Australia, and decided it would be the perfect location for the fast paced, optimistic techno thriller he’d been dreaming of writing for years.

And so was born Goodbye Woomera Belle, a world changing story that unfolds in 116 hours.

And it couldn’t be more topical, revolving as it does around artificial intelligence and inter-governmental tensions between friendly and not so friendly powers.

Erin Brightwell is a brilliant young mind whose research is critical to national security and lots of people want to get their hands on it.

This week’s Giveaway – Woomera Belle

We’ll get to our chat with Chris in a moment. But first this week’s book giveaway; Chris has kindly offered 10 free copies of his book. Goodbye Woomera Belle to the first 10 readers who go online and claim it.

Links for the download can be found in the show notes for this episode on the website, thejoysofbingereading.com.

https://dl.bookfunnel.com/gjhqvpno2v

BE IN FOR DOWNLOAD OF WOOMERA BELLE

Buy me a coffee and defray costs

And before we get to Chris, a reminder; you can help me defray the costs of production of the show by buying me a cup of coffee on buymeacoffee.com/jennywheelx, (little x, like a kiss.) My time in preparing the show is freely given, but any support from you will help kindly pay for the web posting and editing costs.

BUY ME A COFFEE

And if you enjoy the show, leave us a review so others will find us through word of mouth is still the best way for others to discover the show and great books they would love to read.

Links to things mentioned in the show

Woomera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woomera,_South_Australia

Tom Clancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy

Dan Brown: https://danbrown.com/

Dan Brown series Robert Langdon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Langdon_(book_series)#:

Maralinga:

https://www.indaily.com.au/opinion/2021/05/25/sas-nuclear-testing-legacy-still-unfolding-in-outback

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Maralinga

Deep Space Station 41 and the Island Lagoon Base,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Lagoon_Tracking_Station

Spacecraft: Voyagers: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/

Pioneer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10

The James Webb Space telescope: https://webb.nasa.gov/

Nevil Shute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevil_Shute

A Town Like Alice: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/107301.A_Town_Like_Alice

On The Beach:  https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38180

Trustee From The Toolroom: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/107300.Trustee_from_the_Toolroom

P F Hamilton Space opera series: 

https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/peter-f-hamilton/1507

Isaac Asimov  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov

The Foundation series: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Foundation-by-Asimov

Isaac Asimov: iRobot: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41804.I_Robot

Arthur C. Clarke: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7779.Arthur_C_Clarke

Brandon Sanderson, https://www.brandonsanderson.com/

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5326.A_Christmas_Carol

A Tale of Two Cities, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities.

Enid Blyton: https://www.enidblyton.net/

Where to find Chris Draper online

On Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Chris-Draper/author/B09XZJQWJS

Email: ChrisDraperWriter@gmail.com

Introducing techno-thriller author Chris Draper

But now here’s Chris. Hello there, Chris. And welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Chris Draper – techno thriller author of Solar Cradle series

Chris Draper: Hi, Jenny. It’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Jenny Wheeler: This is a debut novel, and usually we have multi published authors on the show, but I loved the idea of having you on for a number of reasons.

You are a friend and I heard about the book personally. I think it’s a really interesting book. We don’t often do techno thrillers either, so for all those reasons, I think people will be really interested in what you’ve got to say about it.

It’s called Goodbye Woomera Belle. Am I saying it correctly?

Chris Draper: Yeah. The Australians normally say Woomera as in woo. Yep.

Jenny Wheeler: Goodbye Woomera Belle. You are a techie person, so the first up question really is, how did you make this leap from being a technical person to being a creative person in terms of writing fiction? How did that come about?

Chris Draper: I guess it’s got a lot to do with the fact that my job is a creative job. I never thought so when I was at school. I always thought that art was a creative pursuit.

But I also do a lot of writing. I’ve built a couple of tech companies in the nineties and now I’m semi-retired, but technical writing remains a huge part of my workload for the company that I work for.

And as you can imagine it takes a bit of skill to take something that’s relatively complex and put it into the plain, easy to read writing, especially when it’s safety critical, which the stuff I do is.

The idea of writing a book has been in the back of my mind, like a lot of people.

But I’ve just managed to bite the bullet and achieve that and have four more on the go at the moment.

Chris is planning a five book series

Jenny Wheeler: I was going to say you are planning a five book series. What was the specific genesis for setting a book in the Outback and choosing these particular characters? How did that all come about?

Chris Draper: It’s quite a long story. There was the genesis of an idea that stayed with me and just wouldn’t leave me alone.

And I scratched out a few bits and pieces here and there, and it all really came together when I did a large contract in Adelaide about a dozen years ago and realized that Woomera was the absolute perfect setting for what I wanted to do.

The original characters have changed a little bit. We can talk about that now or do you want to move into that a little later?

Jenny Wheeler: Firstly just tell me what that original idea was that itched away at you?

Chris Draper: Sure. It’s to do with the AI itself, the Artificial Intelligence, and particularly during the noughties, if you like.

It started to bug me that science fiction, which has always been a genre I enjoy, turned very dark and it was all dystopian. You couldn’t have any new technology came along without scaring people into a George Orwell type universe or other such nonsense.

And of course technology itself is neither good nor bad. It’s got a lot to do with how people use it or abuse it. And I felt the tables needed to be turned a little bit, or the playing field leveled, if you like, to leap around for concepts.

The thriller mystery format fitted what I wanted to do with the technology. You’ve got Tom Clancy who created the techno thriller genre and then Dan Brown showed us how history can come alive, real history, and Woomera just ended up being the perfect combination of the two.

Yes – Woomera is a real place!

The places there are all about technology. For people that don’t know it, Woomera is the world’s largest weapons test facility on land at 127,000 square kilometers. There’s a great little museum there and a good summary about Woomera on Wikipedia if anyone wants to look it up.

And there’s some fascinating links. Many countries and private companies continue to use the facility to this day. And I think perhaps a couple of things that might interest some of your listeners would be that the UK performed its initial nuclear tests there known as Maralinga, which features in the book a little bit.

And the US had a facility there Deep Space Station 41 and the Island Lagoon Base, I also use in the book. I’ve generally tried to use real places wherever possible. The apartment that Erin lives in, for example was our apartment for the 18 months that I was in Adelaide. But of course, a few details have to be tweaked.

Jenny Wheeler: I see that you’ve said that some readers do actually ask you whether Woomera is a real place. So you’ve cleared that up pretty well. right at the beginning, which is great. Obviously, people outside of Australia may be less aware of it.

Chris Draper: There’s also a QA at the back of the book on a lot of questions like this as to where some of these sites come. I’ve naturally put it at the back of the book so it doesn’t spoil a couple of twists while people read the book.

International competition and rivalry

Jenny Wheeler: Now the plot revolves around international competition and rivalry.

Chris Draper: Yeah.

Jenny Wheeler: Between the US and Australia, which we all know that they are actually great friends and allies, but occasionally we can have misunderstandings. So several different entities are chasing some research that Erin has done. Tell us a bit about the nub of the plot.

Chris Draper: It’s really a case of if somebody leaps ahead in a particular area, especially a hot technology like artificial intelligence. And as the book will talk about this particular artificial intelligence was capable of breaking just about any code going out there.

You can imagine that there would be a lot of governments, good and bad, wanting to get their hands on it, but also some pretty big corporations.

That’s the background. The tête-à-tête, if you like, between Australia and the US, really centers around the history of Woomera, which is real and some fictitious pieces that I build in to the place to support the plot obviously.

But in reality there’s an element of politics there where the cries of upsetness from the Australians are a little bit fake. ‘

Because people would’ve known very well what the Americans were doing in Woomera at the time. So it’s plausible. I did a lot of research on that. But yeah, who knows?

Trust and mistrust drive the story

Jenny Wheeler: It becomes clear right at the beginning in the opening chapters that some sort of dishonest and manipulative people are chasing after Erin and trying grab her confidence. So she’s very wary and not willing to trust, which is understandable. But the whole theme of trust also takes a much deeper level on the story, doesn’t it?

It’s not just her and a few people that are chasing her. It’s at the deeper level too.

Chris Draper: Yes. And look that came about from perhaps being a novice writer, but I’m glad I did do it.

Effectively I looked at a certain character fault that I wanted to use and decided that very few books actually really addressed trust in it, in its purest form. And boy did I find out why, because it’s really difficult to have that dark night of the soul moment where someone goes, okay, ‘I’m going trust everyone now,’ and make it believable.

Unless of course you’re doing a romance story where you’ve got the love aspect play against it. Or there’s some other Hobson’s Choice or back against the wall that’s going to force somebody into a situation.

So it was really difficult to do that. But the way I found to make it work was to play out the fact that all of the major characters in the book actually have trust issues including the AI might add.

And that works. And there’s a considerable backstory as you can imagine, for all of the major characters and some of their dark past will come out in some of the future books as various parts of the plot.

AI Alex helps drive the story

Jenny Wheeler: AI has a very big part in this. But I was interested. When you first started thinking about this, did you have any idea of how AI would become the big talking point? This race between Claude and Chat GPT and all sorts of other systems? It’s the hot topic. Did you have any sense that was going to be the case when you wrote the book?

Chris Draper: Yes, I did. I think it was really inevitable that we’re going to get here. It’s surprised me how quickly things have moved in the last 12 months or so, but I’m also a little bit skeptical. I don’t know if you’ve actually tried to use one of those AI’s. They can be incredibly impressive in some ways and very dumb in others.

There was a case recently where somebody used an AI in a self-driving car, and it couldn’t tell the difference between wet concrete and dry concrete and drove straight into a work site up to its gunnels as in wet concrete and things like that. The AI tends to be doing a little bit of that at the moment.

Now my AI is truly sentient in that sense. And it’s as a neutral technology that can be used for good or bad. If you remember Nobel was horrified at how his dynamite invention could be intended to kill people when he thought it was going to make construction safer.

And, but if you look at Arthur C. Clark’s 2001 and Space Odyssey, I think that’s a bit closer to where AI is going to head in the next wee while, and it’s closer to what I’ve portrayed where that particular machine, Hal actually struggles to reconcile conflicting orders and goes a bit crazy in the process of trying to make out what the heck these humans are wanting them to do.

I think the key theme for the AI in this book is that the AI does not actually know whether it’s really in the real world or it’s being contained inside some virtual test tube environment and being monitored. And you can imagine if you are some sort of intelligence, your prime motivation is to survive.

AI Alex is as confused as the humans

So if you weren’t sure whether you were in the real world or not, you’ve got to be really careful about what you do in case someone does hit that big red button and makes you go away. And so that was a key principle of my AI in this story. He’s not sure right up till nearly the end of the book in a lot of ways.

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Jenny Wheeler: You also refer a number of times to the work of Canadian psychologists and educator

Chris Draper: Jordan Peterson?

Jenny Wheeler: Jordan Peterson. Yes. I wondered how his work actually fitted into the story.

Chris Draper: The original main character was going to be a retired under a cloud NASA scientist from New Zealand who had returned to New Zealand and started tinkering or something along those lines. But then I realized that I had a book that was full of male characters and not only was that not a good idea.

Enter Professor Carol Lamond

It made having some of the conflict difficult because you tended to have a lot similar points of view. The main character then got changed to a female Dr. Lamond. Which she does feature in the book, of course. But when I decided to put the whole book into Woomera I realized that Erin was the key to unlocking the start of the story.

Erin is a student of psychology, whereas Dr. Lamond was the professor. And I needed to do a lot of research about how various psychology principles can and can’t be applied to technology. And, you can imagine it’s a very new field. Who, puts an AI on the couch and sees how they feel?

It theoretically hasn’t been done yet to any extent. But that was the area that I had to do a lot of research on and Jordan happened to have a very good series of first year psychology presentations lectures online. And I watched all of those. And then we moved on and he had a whole series on Genesis, and he was looking particularly at that first chapter of the Bible from the basis of symbols fact and how they meant something in the first century. It was absolutely fascinating.

In a lot of ways when he was doing that, he was very like the prime character in Dan Brown’s novels. The symbolic professor’s name actually escapes me just at the moment. So that gave a lot of the moral basis of the story, as well as how the psychology aspects worked into the story.

(Ed note: Professor Robert Langdon was the name)

Woomera takes us to farthest space

Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting you mentioned Genesis because another thing that really stunned me about your book was that the vision of it is so huge.

You take us right to the outer limits of outer space and so I can see why you might be fascinated with Genesis, because it’s just like the beginning of the universe, and then you look right to the outer edges of the universe.

Tell us a bit about that. For people who really only know the universe as the earth revolving around the sun.

Chris Draper: It is a big place out there and it’s where the sci-fi aspect fits in, but it’s “near to current time Sci-Fi.”

And by that I mean I’m not looking at Star Trek ships zooming around a galaxy or even a universe. We’re just crawling out of our own earth at the moment with various companies and countries really getting serious about getting into space. If you look at SpaceX, they’re launching four or five times a week at the moment, sometimes three times in the same day.

That was unheard of 10 or 15 years ago, let alone 30 years ago. And space is now economically viable, which is quite a turning point, and we’ve got our own backyard to explore. So that’s an important part, because to me it makes the book believable that if we just step outside the earth’s atmosphere and do something in the solar system.

We ‘don’t know what we don’t know’

That’s where I limit the story. It’s near and here to a certain extent. The second point I’d make is that just the simple number of probes that are out there, the Voyagers, the Pioneers that were launched in the seventies and even the more modern ones, such as the James Webb telescope, are upending scientific theory almost on a weekly basis as well.

The new discoveries are incredible and that really tends to reinforce the things that what we know about the universe are probably wrong a lot of the time, but we just don’t know it. And as soon as we come across various facts, the hypothesis and theories get changed accordingly.

The last one I saw was they’ve discovered some galaxies in extreme distance that should not be able to be built on the current theories that we have because they’re too big and complex for the age that they’re supposed to be, et cetera, et cetera.

I think the story, staying in their own backyard, but wondering about the large universe, you’re quite right. It picks up on that Genesis theme. And it’s partly why the series is called Solar Cradle. It’s focusing on our sun and the immediate vicinity as we try to walk around and do something in such a massive creation.

Jenny Wheeler: We did meet through a local church, which we are both members of. I’m interested in how that huge vision of space and these new discoveries, how do you reconcile that with your faith? Does it challenge your faith in any way or does it underline it a bit?

Big ideas underline Chris’s faith

Chris Draper: I think the latter, underlines. Really it just serves to reinforce how tiny and insignificant we think our achievements are in something this big, that can be created like it is.

I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface on exactly how it works. There’s more to come, but hey, as we’ve both been taught, we’re supposed to go out and make use of all of this, and I see space as just the next frontier.

And as a rider I would add it’s a little bit like the contemporary novel has to be like a historical novel that would see the new world as the frontier where you could set things to be just a little bit different, a little bit edgy maybe and ask why or why not.

Equally well, it’s pretty hard to do that on the surface of the planet anymore, because for one thing, there’s nowhere you can go to be out of communication. If you need a story mechanism to mean that you’ve isolated one of your characters from the other it’s much harder to be believable in a contemporary story than it is in either a future or a historical story.

Jenny Wheeler: As you mentioned, you’re planning this as a five book series, so I guess you have a sense of where the story is going. Tell us about that. Are you a big planner or is it the case that you might have an end in mind, but don’t you have much idea of how you’re getting there?

Chris Draper: What I thought was an outline for the first book was really back of the envelope stuff. And at the moment I’ve got about 40,000 words in the outline for the whole series. The plot has a lot of twists and turns and some of the characters that have been introduced as almost walk-ons become major characters later on.

How Chris approaches the creative process

And I’ve got character arcs right across the whole series of books, but that doesn’t mean I get away without having each book as a standalone story that stands up on its own legs and is still interesting to read if you just happen to pick up book three, for example. That’s taken an awful lot of planning.

It’s taken 18 months or so to get that where I’m happy with it. And then on top of that you’ve got all of the research and all of the character back stories and stuff.

Now I’ve got the detailed outline for Book Two. It is a little bit different from Book One but I promised myself that as long as the key plot points are picked up by the story, I don’t mind if the characters wander about and get into an argument a bit more than I anticipated.

For an example, a character that’s probably near and dear to your heart in the form of Detective Wheeler was supposed to be a walk-on character who was there for one scene to introduce the other person with no name.

And that was on the advice of a real detective, because I said, okay, so I’ve got someone from the government, perhaps secret service or stuff. What if they wanted to talk to you? What would they say? And he says, they wouldn’t say anything about them. They’d have a cop there to make sure you knew who they were.

Letting your characters develop

And then they would have the conversation wherever they wanted to have the conversation. I took that to heart and that’s how the opening scene came about.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, Detective Wheeler is a bit of a mystery figure, but he is one of the most likable ones, I think.

Chris Draper: That’s why he stayed. And yes, I like all my characters. I’m sure you hear that all the time. And yes, he plays a more prominent part in the opening of the second book than I intended.

Jenny Wheeler: Great. Look, you’ve kindly offered to give away ten digital copies of Goodbye Woomera Belle to our readers, and we’ll put that into our show notes with how they can get hold of those, but I wondered. What are you hoping that readers will take away from this? What are you wanting them to experience or understand?

Chris Draper: I hope they have a great time reading it. That’s why we read the books in the first place. But I guess I like the idea of learning something when you read and traditionally a sci-fi book, even though this is slightly different, but traditionally a sci-fi book will take something that would seem ordinary and twist it on the head and say, what if?

I’m thinking of one particular book that Isaac Asimov wrote where people all lived underground on the planet and they were absolutely terrified of being in space. And they had a detective there that was the best in his class, and he went and solved a crime on a planet where they absolutely hated being in the same room as another person.

Adding a twist to the ‘ordinary’

You can take a current concept and twist it all around the place. And I think that gives you something you can learn from a book. In this book it’s more about learning how the characters overcome some of their mistrust.

But it’s also where they can use their wits to actually get themselves out of a fix, rather than just give up and give in.

Plus along the way you’ll learn quite a bit about the wonderful Outback of Australia. I think it’s one of the most amazing places on the planet. The Flinder’s Range is known as some of the oldest rocks in the world, billions of years old according to the carbon dating. I’ve tried to infuse a sense of what it’s like to be out there. But you really have to go to see what it’s like, to be honest.

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