Tom Doyle is the award-winning author of the American Craftsmen trilogy from Tor Books, a saga of modern-day magician soldiers and psychic spies fighting their way through nightmares from the worlds of Hawthorne and Poe.
Tom’s latest work for Graphic Audio is the Agent of Exiles series of supernatural spy adventures in the 6th century BCE. His recent SF novel, Border Crosser, follows the far-future journeys of Eris, a psychologically extreme secret agent whose shifting loyalties cause chaos wherever she goes in the galaxy.
Many of Tom’s short stories and readings are available on his website: www.tomdoyleauthor.com. He has survived Harvard, Stanford, and cancer.
If you were secretly an alien visitor to the Earth, why are you here?
I’m glad you’ve given me this opportunity to reveal my secret in a way that won’t actually be believed and further ruin the program—it’s been very hard to lie to you all, you’re really quite charming at times. I’m what Heinlein called an “art critic,” though my purposes here aren’t aesthetic. This Earth of yours is one of series of simulations we’ve been running of worlds in their early nuclear age. In our “real” universe, we cherish all sentients (like I said, so cute), but once an intelligent species hits the thermonuclear threshold, the life of their world tends to wink out like a firefly in the sky. It’s the same in most of our simulations as it is in reality, but this simulated Earth got over the initial hurdle—yay you! You’ll be a model for saving countless others.
That’s when I was supposed to exit the simulation and my colleagues were supposed to pull the plug. No, don’t think of us that way, we weren’t going to be abrupt or cruel about it—though simulations, you are conscious beings. We’d have given you all the illusion of running through the rest of your lives (to us it would look like a recording on fast forward) until you met some sufficiently probable and tedious end. Fairly merciful in the grand scheme of things.
But that’s when some asshole in the lab said, “Hey, let’s leave it on and see what happens.”
And so here we are.
I promise I’ll stay with you until the end, bearing witness, learning what I can to help other worlds. And who knows, maybe you can beat this too.
If you had to choose between being a time traveler or a space explorer, which would you pick and why?
I think space explorer is the practical yet exciting thing I should want to do, but I can’t deny the truth: I have recurring time traveler fantasies, and they’re usually a very specific sort of travel. I go back to be my younger self at various points in life, but with all my knowledge from later years (or at least all the knowledge I can remember), like the protags in Ken Grimwood’s wonderful novel Replay. And it’s not about doing things like making money betting on Michigan State basketball or the stock market (though I’d do that if necessary to accomplish the other stuff). Mostly, I would like to have been a better person for my family and friends
I think it’s the power of these fantasies in my own head that makes me avoid writing time travel stories—precognition is more my theme. But maybe I’ll do a time fantasy story one day anyway.
If you could time travel to any point in history, which era would you choose, and why?
OK, supposing I traveled back in some other way than becoming my younger self, I think I’d journey to the period covered in my Agent of Exiles series—late 6th century BCE—though I wouldn’t be playing spy for Cyrus the Great. Depending on whose biographical dates you believe, there’s a window in that period where you could talk with the Buddha and Confucius and the Ionian philosophers and people who knew Zoroaster and some revolutionary Judean prophets in and out of exile. It’s the heart of the Axial Age, and I’d like to be there for it.
If you could transport yourself to any fictional universe you’ve seen in a book you liked, which universe would you go to?
The answer used to be Middle Earth, no question. But thinking about it now, I realize that Middle Earth doesn’t have room for me in its stories; it’s Tolkien’s world and complete unto itself. That may be a reason why I and others do our own subcreation: to create worlds that have room for us. So, I would go to the world where my craftspeople are real because there’s room for me there. I could be the historian for those who could never tell their secrets. Or I might be the psychopomp dog. Selecting my own American Craftsmen world to visit isn’t an ego thing; there are certainly better SF/F universes. I just wouldn’t want to trespass in the gardens of others.
If you had to choose one of your books to be turned into a cheesy made-for-TV movie, which one would it be and who would you want to play the lead roles?
If it’s cheesy, it would have to be Border Crosser, a far-future story of violence, revenge, and sex (and maybe love) that would best survive the Mystery Science Theater so-bad-it’s-good treatment. But I’d still want an all-star cast. Forgetting about matching ages/heights and just looking at careers, Charlize Theron has the best psychological and physical acting range to play Eris, a borderline personality agent of chaos seeking revenge against her manipulative employers. Michelle Yeoh would play the mother who trained Eris as a weapon and whom Eris would like to kill someday, but maybe not today—or maybe she’d be the mysterious Nanny who also had a role in Eris’s upbringing. After seeing her in the latest season of Fargo, I think Juno Temple would be ideal as Vivian, an even more dangerous border crosser than Eris. Zoe Saldaña could play anybody in a science fiction film, but in Border Crosser she’d be the Physician, an apparently normal person who follows Eris across the galaxy. And for his previous portrayals of mild-mannered intellect trying to contain various issues, Jeffrey Wright would be great as Henri, an ambassador from the edge of human space who sets Eris on her quest for vengeance.
Tom will be appearing at Ravencon in Richmond the weekend of April 25th and at Balticon in Baltimore for Memorial Day weekend. He’s currently working on the novel-length expansion of his award-winning short story “The Wizard of Macatawa.” His books (including his audiodramas) are in the usual online places, and links to his short fiction (both text and audio) are available on his website.
Books:
The American Craftsmen Trilogy
American Craftsmen
The Left-Hand Way
War and Craft
Agent of Exiles Audiodramas
The League of Set
Olympian Games
India Match
Border Crosser
Other places to find Tom Doyle online:
Website: www.tomdoyleauthor.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tom.doyle
Bluesky: @tomdoyle.bsky.social
Twitter: @tmdoyle2