Earlier this week, Science Fiction Weekly published my interview with Jack McDevitt.

Here’s a taste:

Your writing has been lauded for the great sense of wonder it evokes. Many of your stories and novels also have a strong mystery element driving the plot. Is mystery an important component in conveying sense of wonder?

McDevitt: “Important” sounds like “necessary.” I don’t think it’s necessary, in the sense that wondrous elements, a supernova, whatever, form the backdrop for the events being played out by the characters. I’ve read novels that evoked my sense of wonder without bringing in factors that would normally qualify as mysterious. Greg Benford’s The Sunborn is a good example, or Ben Bova’s Mercury.

But I love a good mystery. And if I can use a black hole as the takeoff point for strange goings-on, sure, I’m on my way. Deepsix employs an approaching planetary collision to get things moving, but there’s nothing mysterious about the narrative. Polaris, however, uses a collision between a star and a brown dwarf to set up a situation in which the pilot and passengers disappear from a starship, much in the manner of the Mary Celeste.

On a different level, mystery is at the heart of all these things, because we cannot watch a butterfly without being struck by the complexity of the creature. Or the quantum reality at the heart of the cosmos, which introduces an element of unpredictability. Free will. Anything can happen. Some nice engineering there. I wonder how much more wondrous a sunrise was to the early Egyptians, who could not explain how the sun got returned every morning to the east. Some of them must have suspected there was an infinity of suns, one coming up each day.

Go read the whole thing and let me know what you think!