Official Interview: Tom Gariffo

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Official Interview: Tom Gariffo

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Hello there, my fellow bookies! It's time for another rendition of interviews with Sarah. This time I got to interview the August book of the month author Tom Gariffo. Make sure to check out the official review for his book, World, Incorporated.

Review

If you would like to purchase his book, check it out on Amazon.

Purchase

Finally, if after reading this review, you decide that you would like to participate in the book of the month discussion, please use the following link.

Book of the Month

Without further promotion, let's get to the questions and answers, shall we?

1. Please tell us who you are and what you like to do when you aren't writing.

Well, I am Tom. Tom Gariffo to be more specific. I am 29 years of age and I'm from the San Francisco Bay Area, where I have lived almost all of my life except for a couple of years in Los Angeles for graduate school. I have a Master's of Public Policy degree, which should give you some idea of my desire to make large-scale positive changes in the world using a pretty wide range of interests. My day job is for the state of California as something of a professional combination of environmental and consumer advocacy. The kinds of things I do for fun are pretty nerdy, a lot of video gaming and tabletop gaming, also occasionally trivia (I auditioned for Jeopardy! but never got the call to be on the show). Diverging from that, however, I'm also a moderately avid fan of the Bay Area's professional sports teams, especially the Giants. And finally, I recently started practicing yoga and found it to be a surprisingly more fulfilling experience than I had expected, in a number of ways.

2. Who or what inspired you the most as an author?

There are a lot of ways I could answer that, honestly. I have known since I was 9 years old that I wanted to be a writer someday. My 4th grade English/Social Studies teacher (Mr. Kornfein was his name, I hope I'm not misspelling it now but it has been many years) was doing a unit on the California gold rush and one of our recurring assignments as we learned about the trek people made to gold country was to write journal entries from the point of view of a fictional traveler making the journey. I would get very excited to do the assignments and had a lot of fun describing the character and the things around him, and from that point on I always wanted to be an author because of how much I enjoyed telling stories.

Years later, the teacher of my first high school AP English class, Mark Reibstein, encouraged me a lot with some of the creative writing he had us do, as well as the feedback and rapport we had. I remember one particular assignment where we had a week to write some kind of short story, and then we came in and shared them with each other in small groups. The night before it was due, I got totally absorbed in writing mine and it became the first time I ever stayed awake until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. writing, powered just by ideas and adrenaline. Come the next day, I'm in my group with three other classmates, each of whom had written somewhere between half a page to two pages. I, however, had written 13 pages when all was said and done, and never finished reading my story to them because we ran out of time in class. The following summer I began work on my first novel-length effort, which is not available for purchase now but maybe will be someday with enough revision.

As for inspiration for World, Incorporated in particular, during the process of writing it I discovered that, more than anything else, music
really gets my creative engine running. A lot of the time when I was writing, or if I ever had writer's block, I would listen to Muse's "The
Resistance" album or Green Day's "American Idiot" album. It surely helps that both of those are thematically similar to the subject matter in World, Incorporated, but I love those two albums, and everyone in my immediate family is a musician of some kind. I am convinced there is some sort of connection between music and the parts of my brain that handle inspiration and creativity.

3. Let's talk about your novel: World, Incorporated. Can you give us a brief summary?

It is about the world in the near future. Years of economic and political turmoil have caused the fall of the governments of nation-states, and in their place five gigantic conglomerations of business interests called Supercorporations rose to power to provide security, public goods and services, and organize society in general. The story is centered around Agent Sliver, a man who works as a covert operative under the direct supervision of the CEO of World, Inc., one such Supercorporation. In the course of completing a mission Sliver discovers an anomaly in the employer's data, a young woman whose existence is unknown to any Supercorporation. Rather than simply dispose of her, Sliver feels compelled to protect her for reasons he himself does not understand. This woman, Kelly, knows nothing of the world created by the Supercorporations, and as Sliver interacts with her he develops a new perspective on his life and his missions until he is driven to a sort of tipping point. At its core, the story is an exploration of the dystopian world and these characters, along with a healthy dose of sci-fi and action thriller elements.

4. How long did it take you to write this story?

I got the idea during a class in my freshman year in college, and finished well before graduation in my senior year, so roughly 3 years.

5. It looks like the novel takes place in 2058, what made you decide on that specific year?

My intention had always been to make the story futuristic, but not so futuristic that readers did not have a tangible connection to the here-and-now. I like a lot of elements of the dystopian genre, but one thing that has always taken away some of the impact for me is how the authors want to depict some really shocking result of a certain concept that is prevalent in their time, and to do that they take things to an irrational extreme that becomes fantastical and a bit implausible. The most recognizable work of the genre is of course 1984, depicting runaway state control over society, inspired by the aftermath of World War II. Or you have Fahrenheit 451 dealing with censorship, and so on. So in World, Incorporated there are a couple of chapters that use 'excerpts' to tell the story of how the world changed from the one we know to the one the readers experience in the novel. As I was writing those, I tried to come up with what was a reasonable span of time in which the excerpts would progress, while attempting to factor in the big unknowns of how quickly technology is going to progress in the future and what impact a global economic collapse would have on that. That came out to about 45 years when I was first writing the novel. Other things in my life intervened between then and now, when I decided to try once more to get more attention and readers for the story, so the end result is about 40 years from now, 2058.

6. The OBC reviewer, Yolimari, mentions that you incorporate many contemporary issues into the theme of the novel. What statement about our world today would you most like your readers to walk away with?

It is really important to me that people see this novel as literature, in other words a work of art, and as such it has a more interpretive meaning that probably is a little different for each person that reads it. I think the greatest power of art is that it can speak to people on their own level in a way that an academic text, with a very specific thought it is trying to convey, does not do. So I am a little wary of answering this with a direct statement, lest it color how others interpret the story. But that being said, there is one theme I would really like to highlight that I think gets overshadowed a bit by the action and intrigue. That theme is the role that access to information plays in shaping a person's worldview and their sense of self. It is something that impacts all of the principal characters in World, Incorporated, that has impacted me, and that impacts everyone in today's information age.

7. Are you planning any follow-ups to World, Incorporated? Any other future novels in the works?

I have a general sense of what a sequel to World, Incorporated would be. Whether or not that ever comes to fruition depends a lot on how World, Incorporated is received and if I think I can make the sequel a really good standalone piece. And like I said in the answer to the second question, I have wanted to be an author for a long time, so I have at least a few other really strong ideas for novels that I would like to write, if I had the time and the audience. Those are more in the historical fiction, retrofuturism, and fantasy genres.

8. As a dystopian lover myself, I have to ask what you think about other such novels? The Hunger Games series? The Divergent series?

My experience with dystopian novels really comes from the three I think of as the fundamental classics of the genre: Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. There is definitely a strange allure people have to depictions of a world that has gone wrong in some way, but I think that is because they are a really good release for readers in times of civil and social unrest. Generally speaking, fear is not a feeling that our society really wants to acknowledge openly. A good example is how in the State of the Union speech that the president gives each year, the thesis of the speech is always that "the state of our Union is strong" even when everyone knows there are big problems that are not being addressed. So to the extent that each dystopian work seems to be driven by one or a few overarching topics that are disturbing for a large number of people, I think they bring people together by making the expression of that shared fear more accessible. With Hunger Games, that focuses mainly on inequality, which is obviously a huge issue right now particularly in the United States that is not being addressed. I will have to apologize though, as I am not very familiar with Divergent, and I don't want to just wildly speculate.

9. Did you incorporate any of yourself into any of the characters in the story?

It would be completely disingenuous to say that there was nothing of myself in Sliver. For me, one of the most fascinating parts of the process of writing and publicizing World, Incorporated with a gap of several years in between was being able to see the parts of myself that I consciously incorporated into Sliver at the time I was writing, and then a few years later with a better understanding of myself to see the parts I incorporated unconsciously into Sliver as well. The kinds of misanthropy, alienation, or disaffection that Sliver often displays are things that I would say I have in my psyche on bad days, but on the flip side there is an innate desire to protect the ones who matter the most. A bit less seriously, my personality would probably be very similar to Rex's if I was literally invincible.

Let's move on to a few fun questions.

10. What's your favorite color and why?


Definitely red, the various shades of red, probably a brighter shade like scarlet to be really specific. Never really thought about why until now. On a surface level, red is associated with a lot of things I really liked in childhood, like Christmas, the San Francisco 49ers, and Cyclops' optic blast (even though my favorite X-Man is Wolverine). But going deeper, I'm not someone with a lot of middle ground in my emotions, which is probably what draws me to writing. Along those lines, red is associated with overwhelming passions, love and fury, roses and flames, and the lifeblood that we all share as humans and are willing to spill in devotion to the people and things that matter the most to us. So that is probably why. (Don't get me wrong though, there are some shades of blue and green I really like too...)

11. What was your favorite subject in school?

Usually history or something related to history, like classics or mythology. I guess I'm a firm believer in learning from past mistakes and successes. The natural answer would seem to be English/literature, but I only *really* enjoyed that when we did creative writing and that was relatively rare where I went to school. And since sentence structure sort of came to me naturally, I always found memorizing grammar rules to be really irritating.

12. If you could pick any career (other than what you do now) what would it be?

When I was younger, I remember thinking that David Letterman must have the most fun job in the world. I know now that those late night comedy shows actually entail some pretty intense work and schedules, but even so having the platform to entertain and possibly inform millions of people every day or every week sounds awesome. To be a little more down-to-earth, I think a career in journalism could also have some similar elements, in addition to investigation and writing. Who knows? That may yet happen.

13. What superpower would you most like to have and what would you do with it?

I think I would go with telekinesis, because in addition to being very useful for doing superhero stuff, it would also be very versatile in
everyday life. Flight and super strength are great, but a telekinetic basically gets the benefits of both of those powers if they were to, say, save people from a burning building or fight a stadium full of ninjas. And on days off, nevermore would I find myself needing to keep running between rooms for stuff, or having to go *all the way* to the kitchen for a snack. Basically what I'm going for can be summed up thusly: "With great power comes great responsibility. And great laziness, if you do it right."


I'd like to thank Mr. Gariffo for taking the time to answer our questions! I know after that interview, many of us just can't wait to read the book. I encourage everyone to purchase it on Amazon and follow along on the book of the month discussion.
A book is a dream you hold in your hands.
—Neil Gaiman
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Manang Muyang
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Post by Manang Muyang »

It is good to read the musings of a young writer. I hope his debut novel will do well; he seems to have the passion needed for a writing career.

I have read the sample for World, Incorporated, and I would say I am impressed. I didn't realize that it was the work of a budding writer.

Thanks, Sarah and Tom!
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kandscreeley
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Post by kandscreeley »

Thanks Miriam! He definitely put some thought into his answers, and I know his book is going to be great... I just haven't quite gotten to read it yet. Soon!
A book is a dream you hold in your hands.
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Post by JHuschle519 »

It's great to read an interview with an author that puts thought into their answers, but also doesn't appear to take themselves to seriously. A lot of times when I read author interviews, I see really short answers that don't really give much insight into the author and their inspiration. Having read World Incorporated, I was especially interested to read that he is considering a sequel. It would be really interesting to find out what happens to Agent Sliver after his fallout with World Inc. I think I'll also have to check out some of the other dystopian novels he mentioned, because as much as I have heard of them, I have never read any of them.
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