The blurring of humans and machines, the use of technology to improve the human condition, and the dependency of humanity on their inventions are some of the themes of Thomas J.J. Starr’s books. Many might recognize Starr’s name from his leadership in helping to facilitate the spread of one of those inventions: broadband.

As he explains in the above interview, when he was Chair of the Broadband Forum, he was figuratively struck with an idea for a story about technology gone amok. Realizing he was the only one who could tell that story, he penned his first novel, Virtual Vengeance (the Viodi View review of Virtual Vengeance is here, below).

Two other novels followed: Retrograde and Fatal Entanglement. In the above interview, he provides brief overviews of those novels, as well as his writing process.

Interview Highlights:

• 00:30 – What prompted him to write novels
• 01:18 – His first novel, Virtual Vengeance
• 02:26 – Using fiction to explain the singularity concept
• 03:01 – World peace through genetic modification was the basis of his next book, Fatal Entanglement
• 04:04 – #1 advice to authors- get a good proofreader
• 05:23 – Retrograde is his latest novel. Each book is unique and not part of a series.
• 06:24 – Create the characters and let them write the story
• 07:38 – Could the technology he writes about be used to make movies of his books?

Final note: Fitting the theme of Starr’s novels, the above title was created in a back-and-forth discussion between this author and Google’s Gemini.