>

Claire L. Evans' Road to Science Fiction Expertise

Shawn Conner: You seem to have a lot of diverse interests, and I wanted to know where they branch out from – where your initial interests lay?

Claire L. Evans: I’ve always been into sci-fi. When I was a little kid I read a lot of Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. 

I studied literature in university. I wasn’t into science at all, especially in school, I was always intimidated by science. It seems like a totally different method for understanding reality, which at the time freaked me out. I didn’t like going into Biology 101 and not knowing how to write a lab report and feeling like an idiot when I considered myself kind of an intellectual. But it’s a different way of being of intellectual.

That frightened me for a long time. Then I realized, that’s fascinating, actually.

I feel like science and art, or science and literature, whatever you’d call the humanities, are just two very different but fundamentally similar approaches to the world. They’re about trying to understand the universe, and make sense of it and our place within it, and come to a place where answers can potentially arise that bring meaning to life. 

Scientists want to decode, and scientists I think have this really fascinating historical approach. No single scientist thinks they’re going to figure this all out, it’s just a never ending lineage where through time we get closer and closer to a solution.

Whereas artists are more individualist about it. They have less of a concern for the heritage of building towards a greater solution. Artists want to, maybe not decode everything, but they certainly want to make sense of things.

When I started thinking about it that way I realized, everything I was interested in as a kid – I mean, science fiction is a place between science and the humanities using narrative techniques to decode a technological, scientific world.

I think Jona and I both consider ourselves to be polymaths to a certain extent. We like a lot of things and are interested in a lot of things, we try to have as many skills as we can, and access what we do from as many different approaches as possible. We don’t like to shutter ourselves to just think, We’re a band so we have to have musical influences that are clearly discernible in our music, and that’s all we do.

  1. luiswiechec reblogged this from trustyacht
  2. trustyacht posted this