Dancing with the Dragon
Read previous BookPage interviews
|
Techno-thriller master returns
INTERVIEW BY KENNETH SHOULER
Two American reconnaissance planes flying a routine mission spot a bluish, white light in the night sky. Is it friend or foe? A laser? It moves in unpredictable directions with lightning speed. The pilots' fascination with the bogey turns to fright as it hovers and darts past them. Then one American plane explodes, apparently shot down by the mysterious craft. What was it? The Pentagon may know, but they're stone-walling. The president wants a meeting with the secretary of defense.
This is the opening of Joe Weber's latest techno-thriller Dancing with the Dragon. Like his previous hits Defcon One, which centered on the U.S.-Soviet nuclear rivalry, and Primary Target, which dealt with Middle Eastern terrorism, Weber's new book comes straight from the headlines. The focus this time is on China, an enigmatic rival of the United States which just last year seized a U.S. spy plane. "What I intend to do is take fact and fiction and try to project it into the future," says Weber, a former Marine fighter pilot who saw action in Vietnam. "So I like to make the books fact-based around geo-political situations and then project it on down the road." It works. Weber has become a leader in the techno-thriller genre, with worldwide sales of his six novels to date reaching nine million. The author has received scores of e-mails from readers who found an uncanny resemblance between the action in his novel Primary Target and the real-life events of September 11. His grasp of technical details -- from G-forces, to types of fighter planes, to military code -- is sure. The reader knows that he knows. "I understand where the book starts and I understand where it ends and I just fill in the middle," Weber said recently from his home on the Florida gulf coast. That middle part "must be topical and credible for the reader," he adds. "I never considered myself a Steinbeck or a Hemingway. Other than writing a master's thesis in aviation, I had no training in journalism or English and didn't know an adverb from a proverb. For me it's sort of like paint by the numbers. I never get writer's block since I know where I'm starting and where I'm going to end." Weber's humility about his writing ability belies his talent for constructing a thriller. Of his many skills, one is his pacing -- knowing when the action should ebb and flow. "There's lots of action, but it must be believable. I can't write action from page one to the end, because the reader would be worn out," Weber notes. Thus, while the U.S. gears up for a response to China's brutal aggression in Dancing with the Dragon, the reader follows government leaders discussing appropriate responses and sees the president address the nation with dire news. "You can't run full throttle the whole time or you blow the engine," the author explains. Three-dimensional characters also help in creating believability. In Dancing with the Dragon, the action is lead by Scott Dalton, a former Marine Corps pilot, and his female business partner, Jackie Sullivan. "The characters are fallible. They are also self-deprecating. But they have the capability to do extraordinary things because of their training." Weber's writing regimen is unwavering. His wife Jeannie downloads the latest news from the Internet. He reads the morning paper and then researches. He'll break for lunch and go till 6 p.m. Six days a week he's at it, and he pushes away for personal time just one day a week. Not surprisingly, his next book will be about terrorism. "I'm three-quarters through with the manuscript," he says. "I'm taking what happened on September 11 and, again, projecting it into the future, using real facts and real situations as they evolve." In the book (tentatively titled A Short Response) he portends another major terrorist attack on the United States, an attack not involving biological or chemical weapons but a low-tech, devastating assault. "Someone with my background and knowledge can do something like this [convincingly]," Weber adds. No doubt.
Kenneth Shouler is a freelance writer in New York.
|
Support your 
