Jack Campbell is the pen name of John G. Hemry, a retired U.S. Navy officer. His father (LCDR Jack M. Hemry, USN ret.) is a mustang (an officer who was promoted through the enlisted ranks), so John grew up living everywhere from Pensacola, Florida to San Diego, California, including an especially memorable few year on Midway Island.

John graduated from Lyons High School in Lyons, Kansas in 1974, then attended the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of ’78). His active duty assignments in the U.S. Navy included:

• USS SPRUANCE (DD963) (Navigator, Gunnery Officer)
• Defense Intelligence Ageny (Production Control Officer)
• Navy Anti-Terrorism Alert Center (Watch Officer, Operations Officer)
• Amphibious Squadron Five (Staff Intelligence Officer/N2)
• Navy Operational Intelligence Center (Readiness Division)
• Chief of Naval Operations Staff N3/N5 (Plans, Policy and Operations)

He lives in Maryland with a wife and three kids.

We interviewed him after reviewing Dauntless, the first of the Lost Fleet series.

Are you a bookgeek?

Yes. Absolutely. You cannot have too many books. You may need more bookshelves, you may need a bigger house, but those are minor issues. I’m not as bad as the women in the R.O.D. (Read Or Die) anime/manga, but I’ve liked reading and books as long as I can remember.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it)?

The best advice I’ve ever received wasn’t actually given as advice. Some time ago I heard a quote attributed to Mark Twain in which he described his writing technique – “I chase my characters up a tree and then I throw rocks at them.” There, in a nutshell, is what a story needs to do. Whenever a story seems weak to me, it’s almost always because I’m being too nice to the characters. If I need to make a story stronger or figure out what to do next, I need to throw more rocks at the characters.

There’s a natural tendency to create characters that you like, and once you do that you want to let up on them. But you can’t do that. You have to hit them and hit them and hit them again, making life as hard as possible while always holding just of reach the peace and happiness they really want. It simply isn’t fun to read about a character who has gotten all the good things they deserve. A strong example of that was Lucy Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series. Anne starts out as a very hard luck story, and as book follows book she faces new challenges and tragedies. Until…Anne gets everything that she deserves. She’s married to the love of her life, she has great children, she has a wonderful home and she’s really dull. The last few Anne books aren’t really about Anne anymore, and even wander away from Anne’s children, because there’s nothing interesting happening any more.

I keep that in mind. The characters have to be such that readers care about their fate. The readers want those characters to be happy. Except the readers really don’t want the characters to be happy. The readers want the characters to be up that tree, trying to avoid the rocks you throw at them. The trick is keeping the rocks coming without overdoing it. I hate it when some plot twist out of nowhere creates tragedy just for the sake of drama. The rocks have to make sense, to be part of a believable narrative. Real life doesn’t have that. We all get hit with rocks that are unexpected and undeserved. In fiction, at least the rocks can be limited in their impact and make some sense. It’s comforting to see characters overcome such challenges even if more arise immediately thereafter.

Which authors do you find most inspiring as a writer?

Tolkien would have to rank high, because I vividly recall my reaction when first reading The Lord of the Rings. I had enjoyed books for a long time before that, but as best I recall it was LOTR that made me think “I want to do this, too. I want to create a world with a history as well as a present, a place that feels like it could have been.”

Poul Anderson wrote a great deal of SF and fantasy. He could spin words in a most remarkable way, creating sentences and phrases that still leave me wishing I could do half as well someday.

John Prebble wrote some marvelous histories (Culloden, Glencoe and The Highland Clearances) that did more than just illuminate events. He brought the people and the places to vivid life. That is history as it should be, in my opinion. This was the time, this was the place, these were the people, and this is what happened.

Hayao Miyazaki is mostly known as an animator and head of Studio Ghibli, but he is a writer as well. Works like his manga Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind are remarkable stories. A bit of fantasy, a bit of SF, a bit of everything, all combined into something powerful and unique.

Do you have an audience in mind when writing, or do you just write for yourself?

A bit of both, I suppose. When I first write, when I come up with ideas, I’m focused very much on a story unscrolling inside of me, as if I’m watching the story and writing it down. Sometimes it’s as if someone else is standing there telling me the story and what to write next. But once that first draft is done I’m definitely thinking in terms of telling a story to an audience. I have to make sure I’ve described what needs to be described, that I haven’t left things out or assumed things that need to be included for the reader. I had to learn that second part, to flesh out the story for others, because my natural inclination was to let my words spark images from my own mind. But as a writer you need to describe such things to the reader, not leave them inside of you. It’s all right to leave some things up to the readers’ minds, but you have to fill in the canvas enough for the picture to be clear.

There are different audiences, too. For example, I always throw in little incidents or actions which anyone who has served in the military would recognize. For veterans, those things are sort of inside-jokes. But for the audience without direct experience in the military, those things help show what the military is really like. Both audiences are served, in different ways, by the same bits of writing as long as I ensure what is happening is understandable to both audiences. Another example of that is in the latest short story I had published in Analog magazine. Betty Knox and Dictionary Jones in the Adventure of the Missing Teenage Anachronisms was a time travel story in which characters who had been kids in the mid-1960s found themselves back in that time. For people who had memories of that period, incidents in the story evoked those memories. For people too young to have lived then, the same incidents showed what aspects of the 1960s were really like. I don’t see any sense in limiting the audience for a story when I can write it in a way that broadens the potential audiences.

Where do you write, and why?

When I’m physically writing I’m usually at my desk which is positioned in a nook near the center of our home. I can look out a window at the front of the house and the trees and sky, and I can hear everything that’s happening, which is important when you have three children. The desk is usually very cluttered, and there are bookshelves to one side and behind me where I stack books I might need to reference. It’s my work place, where I have some mental separation from other places, but it’s also in the middle of life so I can react to what happens.

But if you mean “writing” in the sense of coming up with scenes and ideas, that can be anywhere. Inspiration usually strikes somewhere other than the desk, perhaps while driving or taking a shower or just walking. Part of me is handling the mechanical tasks and the other part is free to wander a bit. Often I’ll come up with a hook, a storyline, under such circumstances and then once I reach the desk I can start pounding out the detailed story and dialogue.

I don’t really like trying to write longhand in any old place. I’d rather get the thoughts and ideas mentally organized until I can get to my desk and write them all down in the place that’s set aside for that.

Tell us the book you most wish you had written.

Well, if I had written that Harry Potter story…

That’s not really a facetious answer. To me, what matters as a writer is engaging the audience, entertaining and holding them with characters that readers care about in a story that readers want to follow. The most successful writer in that respect in recent times has certainly been J. K. Rowling. She connected with huge numbers of people, and she didn’t disappoint them along the way or at the end. That is story-telling.

That’s the book I most wish I had written. Not one of the Harry Potter books specifically, but something that succeeds on that level with readers. I want one of my books to engage that many readers, my ideas to captivate people in that way, my characters to live in so many minds. I haven’t written it yet, but perhaps I will someday.

With the Lost Fleet series, did you consciously set out to write a book or books in which you could use your naval knowledge and experience?

Yes and no. I do enjoy writing about ships and sailors, but at the same time the primary ideas driving the story were the concepts of a long retreat and that of a figure from the past who is expected to save the day. It was only as I translated those overriding concepts into a story that I saw how much I would have to lean on naval matters as well to give the story the realism that it deserved.

I did not anticipate, for example, the extent to which I would be drawing on my experience to come up with realistic, three-dimensional battles. But once I began working out how such engagements would actually work, I knew my experience with relative motion would play a large role.

Certainly I like portraying the life of sailors and what ships are like. I wasn’t unhappy that the books ended up heavily involving such matters.

You seem to have decided to honour rather more of the laws of physics that many other space combat writers – what was the thinking behind that?

As I wrote the first portions of the story, I realized how easy it would be to simply ignore real-world problems and do the instant-communications/perfect-knowledge-of-everything-going-on/start-stop-and-turn-on-a-dime sort of thing. But I’ve never liked that, because it’s not real. I know that may sound strange in a story about an interstellar war far in the future, but it’s important to treat the story as real. Tolkien did that. Middle Earth along with its elves, orcs, hobbits and Nazgul didn’t really exist, but Tolkien treated all of those things as if they were real. Each had rules they had to follow, ways of acting, strengths and weaknesses. I think every really good story maintains that sort of internal consistency. This is how things work, and the characters have to operate within those rules. Out of that grows conflict and hard decisions.

So I decided to handle the physics as close to real as possible. My ships had to feel real, my battles had to be real, with tactics and strategies that actually made sense. My characters have to make choices instead of depending on some perfect tech that can be easily modified in mere moments to accomplish exactly what they need. My assumption was that readers would feel that reality, that insistence on doing things as if it were all actually happening, and that they would respond to that. And they have.

Honouring the laws of physics made me do things right. No shortcuts. No easy answers.

‘Black Jack’ Geary is a man out of time, dealing with a legend around him that has grown up since his apparent death. Do you think the equivalent figures in our own military history would face the same problem if they were miraculously resurrected?

I think they would. Of course, it’s much easier to idolize someone who is safely dead and therefore can’t do things at variance with whatever legends have grown up. Imagine, for example, Lord Nelson, who in life frequently clashed with superiors in the Admiralty and had some scandalous personal behavior. He didn’t care much for rules, which was the secret of his success but would also cause quite a bit of friction. It’s one thing to imagine a shining legend and another thing entirely to have that legend clomping around in muddy boots being human.

One of the truisms of military history is that the qualities which produce success in wartime (things such as initiative, innovation, and daring) are rarely rewarded in peacetime militaries. Instead, peacetime militaries favor steadiness, conformity and obedience to rules both large and small. It’s not hard to imagine the chaos a legend from the past could create among the bureaucracy of the present. All of that assumes that the legend deserves the accolades. There have been any number of legends whose acclaim far exceeds their actual accomplishments.

At the one extreme you would have people like Geary, who realize their own limitations and humanity, but will try their best. At the other extreme are those legends who believe themselves to be legends, and thus pay no attention to contrary opinions or matters that lesser mortals must concern themselves with. Even a very capable leader can fall into the trap of becoming the second type of legend-in-their-own-minds commander, and then the legend becomes a recipe for disaster. Legends can inspire us, but in real life they can be legendary pains-in-the-neck or cause legendary disasters.

If you could bring back one figure from military history, who would it be and why?

That’s a difficult one, but I think in the end I would chose Joshua Chamberlain. You may not have heard of him, but he was a remarkable individual.

When the American Civil War broke out, Joshua Chamberlain was a professor at Bowdoin College. The College wouldn’t approve time off to serve in the Union army, so Chamberlain finally got approval to take a sabbatical in Europe and promptly joined the army instead. He was made an officer in a regiment from the state of Maine, and by the time of the battle of Gettysburg he had become the Colonel in command of what was left of the regiment (about one hundred men). At Gettysburg, his regiment was rushed into place on the far left flank of the Union army to defend a small hill called Little Round Top. Strong Confederate forces hit his regiment repeatedly, but Chamberlain’s men fought off each attack until they reached the point where ammunition was almost exhausted and many men had been lost. Chamberlain knew he couldn’t retreat without unhinging the entire Union line, but he also knew that he couldn’t hold against another attack.

So when the Confederates charged again, he ordered his men to fix bayonets and charge the attackers. The Confederates broke, and eventually lost the battle.

After Gettysburg, Chamberlain rose in rank to General and command of an entire division. After the war, he returned to Bowdoin College, but was also twice elected governor of his state by wide margins. He became president of the college before having to retire because of war injuries.

He did it all, and he did it all well. I would love to meet such a person.

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