By Amanda Knox

I think there were four kinds of scotch. The reason I’m not completely certain about that number is because I am certain we each had a glass of each. Discussing characters, conclusions, and the measure of literary success degenerated into comparisons of Star Trek: The Next Generation to Moby Dick, a trip to QFC for roast chicken, a roof-top hang-out overlooking the Space Needle, and finally, a quiet meandering back to our respective Capitol Hill apartments in the wee hours of the next morning. This was the context of my interview with Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite about War of the Encyclopeadists, published May 19th. What follows is what fans can look forward to next:

Kovite: We’re going to write a book about Amazon in Detroit.

Why?

Kovite: Detroit because Detroit is super interesting. And also Amazon is super interesting. And Amazon is developing drones, right? And because of the plight of the economic issues in Detroit right now...The idea is that, in the near future, somehow Amazon gets the FAA of Detroit and Michigan to carve out a few blocks that so they can do a beta testing.

Robinson: They’re only like a year away from actual deliveries. It’s set near enough in the future that we’re going to have to be open to revising the concept as the future catches up. We want to be topical. We want to deal with race and class and the internet economy and the efflorescence of arts cultures. These things are combined in this complicated nexus in Detroit right now.

Who are the characters you’re grounding the reader in?

Robinson: We have a couple characters who are not based on anyone in particular. We’ve got one vet character who’s probably the closest hold over [from War of the Encyclopeadists] to this book, who’s just getting out of the army, who’s a Detroit native who comes back home and gets a job as an EMT and his wife just left him with a young baby and he has visitation with his kid. His best buddy from high school has been dabbling in petty crime. Nothing much has been happening for him and he’s competing in the local Mixed Martial Arts circuit. There’s a group of art hipster kids who move into a foreclosed house and start up an art colony. They have a rotating cast of artists and residents coming though. There will be some urban farmer types connected with them.

Kovite: There’s the Amazon drone nerds and the program head who comes over, who may or may not be based on my friend who works at Amazon. Which is cool because we live in Seattle and have access to people who work at Amazon. Although, Amazon is really secretive. My friend told me that there’s so much security in the company that people in one program don’t know what people in another program are doing and they’ll only find out from regular news, because there are these firewalls between the groups. It’s almost like the army.

Robinson: Our main Amazon character is this woman who’s a VP of some kind, and she’s responsible for spearheading this new Amazon program, Amazon Sports. They have their own TV network now, and they’ll have the NFL, but Amazon only.

Kovite: Well, it’s like lacrosse. Pingpong.

Robinson: It starts with a golf open. They pay a bunch of money to a bunch of golfers to do this four-day tournament and it’s broadcast only on this Amazon streaming service.

Kovite: And curling and arm-wrestling. Stuff that doesn’t have a big league already.

Robinson: And then they branch into MMA. The goal is maybe one day they’ve got MLB. So this MMA guy in Detroit is one of their first fighters in one of the fights they’re going to have at the Amazon Sports League. The Amazon VP moves from Seattle to Detroit to supervise this project. And there’s also someone doing the drone delivery program there. There will be some hacker kids in Detroit who capture a downed drone and reprogram it and use it. There’s a social activist, aspiring rapper girl who’s one of the black characters. There’s going to be a fair black-white divide, I think, between the Detroit natives and the immigrants.

Kovite: We’re going to Detroit for a month to get into the community.

Robinson: In Detroit, do you remember what the percentage is?

Kovite: It’s something like 80% African American.

Robinson: So most of our Detroit native characters are going to be black. And most of our arts colony kids and Amazon workers are going to be white and there are going to be tensions over that.

How are they going to come into contact?

Robinson: In a bunch of small ways. Things like the Amazon drone crashing and these kids finding it and reprograming it. Or like the aspiring rapper girl finds out that the arts colony kids have built a recording studio in their foreclosed house and they come together that way. Or this Detroit native guy who’s dabbling in crime who gets recruited to be part of the Amazon Sports League. So it will be...I don’t know if picaresque is the right word...It’s very grounded in characters, but not in plot. War of the Encyclopeadists was already a little like that, and this is pushed even more in that direction, where there’s even more characters and even less plot.

Robinson and Kovite spoke to me on the eve of their departure for a War of the Encyclopeadists reading tour across the country. The tour will come to end at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park on June 22nd at 7:00pm.

War of the Encyclopeadists is a thoughtful, touching, fun novel about two millennials coming of age via love triangles, grad school, and the Iraq war.