Dan Seligson studied physics at MIT (SB) and UC Berkeley (PhD) before starting a 30-year career in Silicon Valley.
He worked at Intel and held executive positions at, has been advisor to, and founded or co-founded several tech and biotech startups. He has 8 US Patents and others pending in fields as diverse as analog circuit design and immunology-based diagnostics. He's been writing for the drawer and a few friends all along. Here he is in a recent interview with the publisher.
Q: "When did you first begin working on
Moby Dx?"
A: "My first attempt was in the 11th grade. Nothing remains of that, nor of something I wrote for a class with the playwright A R Gurney in college. A 1990 eulogy to Robert Noyce, the founder of Intel, is the first extant scrap of it. I've been at this a a long time. I hope long enough."
Q: "Is this fiction?"
A: "Entirely fiction, set in an almost-real world. Well, no. There's a history of modern biology here, one that describes how biology was shaped by the physicists, and that's all true."
Q: "How long is the book?"
A: "As long as
Moby-Dick, or about three times as long as novels favored by today's publishers of commercial fiction."
Q: "Why are you releasing this as a serial?"
A: "Silicon Valley is a goldmine. There's global interest, struggles for money and power, and it is near the heart of one of the great liberation movements in America today. When I cracked Pynchon's
Bleeding Edge in October and discovered he'd tapped into the parallel zeitgeist of Silicon Alley, I realized I might get scooped. This format provides me with the shortest TTM and the greatest flexibility. Serialization allows the reader to scale into the text, and it's a suspenseful delivery vehicle. Also, Dostoevsky did it. I like the idea of Dan Seligson and Dostoevsky appearing in the same sentence."
Q: "Is there anything you'd like to tell the audience?"
A: "Buy this book. Tell your friends to buy this book. You won't believe what's in it. I promise you'll be entertained, occasionally maybe disgusted, and once or twice perhaps informed. Also, the book passes the
Bechdel Test and the
Vito Russo Test. Don't be the only one on your digital block to not be in on it. "
