The following is the first installment in a series of blog posts that will eventually be put together into a written interview. If you have interview questions of your own, please leave them in the comment section below. Thanks!

Q:

Tim, you are best known for your documentary, What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire. You’ve switched mediums and are now writing fiction. The people who loved What A Way To Go were interested in resource depletion, overpopulation, environmental destruction and economic collapse. This seems like a departure. Who do you think is the audience for this book, and why should they read it?

A:

First and foremost, I worked to write a great story, with juicy mysteries, intriguing ideas, and interesting characters you can care about. All of the Above is for anybody looking for a page-turning sci-fi conspiracy thriller. It’s got psychopathic government agents, enigmatic aliens, indigenous and astral allies, and the first female President of the United States. It’s got love and death, hope and despair, grief and loss and joy and redemption. A perfect end-of-summer, or end-of-Empire, read.

And All of the Above is a book that goes further. I’ve long known, and have recently begun to put into words, that my work in this world is this: to question the assumptions, beliefs, and stories that surround me, whether those assumptions come from the schools and family in which I was raised, from the larger culture of Empire in which my family was embedded, or from the more fundamental paradigm of materialism out of which Empire rises. I didn’t stop questioning assumptions when I finished my documentary. I kept going, following the paths that opened before me, striding down avenues that might surprise those who’ve seen my film. So I would say that All of the Above is also for anyone wishing to go even further than my documentary went, and certainly further than the dominant global culture wants you to go.

I’ve actually come full circle, back to the information and analyses that first pushed me down my own path toward What a Way to Go so many years ago. Anomalous experiences and evidences, new science and old wisdom - these are the things on which I first cut my critical-thinking teeth. These are the realms that opened me up and helped me to develop the analytical and emotional tools I needed in order to explore, head on and without blinking, the current global environmental, economic, and energy situations we now face.

I’m in a somewhat unique position, I think; I can view our collective present predicament from an extreme outlier’s perspective. Sure, we’re facing an unprecedented set of conditions, with oil declining and ecosystems failing and the economy ready to unravel, but we’re facing all of this in a world, and a Universe, that feels, to me, determined to undermine our every assumption about matter, spirit, time, space, and the nature of reality itself. What happens when you view the unraveling of Empire through the larger disintegration of the paradigm of materialism? That’s what I explore in this story. If you’re up for that, come along for the ride. I’ll be glad to have you along.

Of course, why one might wish to go further is another question entirely…