Why Lost Artifacts Make Great Adventure Stories with Kevin Tumlinson
Why do lost artifacts make such perfect fuel for adventure stories?
In this episode, I’m joined by Kevin Tumlinson, creator of the Dan Kotler archaeological thriller series, to dig into exactly that. Kevin is one of those writers whose books sit right at the heart of this genre, ancient mysteries, buried secrets, relics with power… the kind of stories that make you want to turn just one more page.
We explore why these ideas work so well, how a single object can drive an entire story, why readers are drawn to mystery, especially when there are no clear answers, and why sometimes it’s better not to explain everything.
We also get into the balance between history and fiction. How much truth do you really need? Where can you bend things? And how do you keep a story feeling real while still delivering that sense of wonder?
Kevin shares insights from his own journey too, from his early days writing sci-fi to building a grounded archaeological series, and how modern technology is changing the way we think about discovery.
If you enjoy stories about ancient secrets, hidden history, and the thrill of the unknown, you’re going to enjoy this one.
Check out Kevin's Dan Kotler series here!
In this Episode, We Explore:
- Great stories revolve around a central pursuit – whether it’s a lost artifact or hidden truth, it gives the narrative focus and raises the stakes.
- Mystery is what keeps people hooked – unanswered questions, open loops, and the gaps in history are where the most compelling stories live.
- Believability comes from grounding the extraordinary in reality – even supernatural or speculative ideas work best when rooted in something real.
- At its core, it’s always about people – we’re drawn to characters facing impossible odds, and it’s their journey (not the tech or the artifact) that keeps us engaged.
Episode Timestamps:
- 01:22 - Why Artifacts Captivate
- 04:42 - Mystery And Open Loops
- 08:00 - Grounding The Supernatural
- 11:26 - Villains And Underdogs
- 13:35 - History Versus Story
- 18:18 - Making Archeology Exciting
- 21:00 - Tech Changing Discovery
- 25:27 - Avoiding Dated Gadgets
- 29:55 - What The Story Really Is
- 31:32 - Origins And Wrap Up
Links Referenced in This Episode:
Got a Story Idea?
If you have a mystery, legend, or adventure you’d like me to explore, drop a comment or email me at hello@lukerichardsonauthor.com. I’d love to hear from you!
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When a priceless Picasso disappears in Paris, legendary thief Bernard Moreau is the prime suspect. But as two unlikely allies—Eden Black and Adriana Villa—hunt him down, the chase turns deadly. It’s a race through the shadowed streets of Paris, where every twist is as unpredictable as the city itself.
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Transcript
A lost manuscript, a sealed tomb, a relic whispered about in half forgotten legends.
Speaker A:You know the drill.
Speaker A:The moment someone uncovers it, that's when the story begins.
Speaker A:For centuries, we've told ourselves about artifacts that could change the world.
Speaker A:Objects of power, of knowledge, and of danger.
Speaker A:From ancient temples to desert ruins, the idea that something extraordinary lies just beneath the surface continues to grip us.
Speaker A:I tell you this though, today, right here, just maybe, we're going to find out why.
Speaker A:Hi, I'm Luke.
Speaker A:I'm an author of archaeological adventure novels.
Speaker A:I travel the world looking for stories to put into my books and to share with you right here on the Adventure Story podcast.
Speaker A:Just quickly, before we dive in, if you would like some more adventure in your life, and I think you probably would, I would love to welcome you inside the Adventure Society.
Speaker A:This is my weekly newsletter and it's your ticket to travel with me, to share my real world adventures and to find out first when a new story or a new season of the podcast drops.
Speaker A:Head to lukerichardson author.com adventuresociety to get your place now.
Speaker A:Right, let's get going.
Speaker A:So why do lost artifacts make such perfect fuel for adventure stories?
Speaker A:Why does archaeology, you know, that slow, methodical, often painstaking process in real life transform so effortlessly into high stakes fiction?
Speaker A:Well, today, Kevin Tomlinson and I aim to find out why.
Speaker A:Kevin is one of those adventure writers that I used to read before writing books like this myself.
Speaker A:The creator of the Dan Kotler archaeological thrillers series, Kevin has built a career around ancient mysteries, building buried secrets and the thrill of discovery.
Speaker A:So when he agreed to join me, I knew, I just knew we had to talk about why we think the adventure genre is one that keeps readers coming back time and again.
Speaker A:Kevin, welcome to the Adventure Story podcast.
Speaker B:Thank you for having me.
Speaker B:Thank you.
Speaker B:I'm gonna clip that intro and start playing it every time I appear on camera.
Speaker A:I hope it didn't make you feel, you know, too, too old thinking this is, you know, you know, when people quote their, the people, they, it's, you know, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway and Kevin Tomlinson.
Speaker B:You know, I have fairly recently, like within the past nine months or so, I have become good friends with Orson Scott Card.
Speaker B:He was the guy that I was trying to emulate when I first started writing.
Speaker B:And he and I chat frequently now.
Speaker B:I mean, we haven't a couple of months, but we, we chat via Zoom.
Speaker B:And he's learned that I know he'll start telling me stories about some of his books and he's learned that I Know all the stories I've read everything.
Speaker B:If that guy wrote the phone book, I would have read the phone book.
Speaker B:But he kind of cringed a little when I was like, yeah.
Speaker B:When I was in high school, I read Ender's Game and it changed my life.
Speaker B:He's like, oh, high school man.
Speaker A:That's it.
Speaker A:Well, I hope I didn't make you feel that way, but there we go.
Speaker A:There we go.
Speaker A:So we're talking today, then, about the sort of stories we write, which is a great topic, I think we can both talk about.
Speaker A:And they involve or some of the stories you write.
Speaker A:And some of the stories I write involve lost artifacts, ancient mysteries, secret societies, history, myths, these sorts of things.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Why do you think that's such a intriguing premise to readers and to writers?
Speaker B:I mean, for writers, it's obvious.
Speaker B:It's a MacGuffin, right?
Speaker B:We want that object of desire that everybody wants that we can't allow everyone to just have that.
Speaker B:That gives us some intrinsic motivation for the book.
Speaker B:So, you know, that's storytelling goal.
Speaker B:It makes the storytelling easier because what we're doing usually as writers is, you know, the object almost doesn't matter because, you know, you could insert.
Speaker B:I mean, just think about Indiana Jones.
Speaker B:If Indiana Jones had gone into a temple, let's say, instead of retrieving the Ark of the Covenant, he went and got the Spear of Destiny, or maybe he got the Philosopher's Stone or whatever, would that story change intrinsically?
Speaker A:No, probably not.
Speaker A:No, of course not.
Speaker B:So it's kind of a shortcut for the writers, for the readers.
Speaker B:The reason it's interesting is that all of us have this dream that there's some object that can change our lives, that can.
Speaker B:If I could drink from that Holy Grail, I'd be cured of all illness and I'd live forever.
Speaker B:Or if I had the Ark of the Covenant, you know, my enemies would be smited.
Speaker B:We all love that idea of some object imbued with supernatural power or, you know, mystery.
Speaker B:The mystery of these things is also intriguing, like considered like the Shroud of Turin, for example.
Speaker B:You know, we don't know.
Speaker B:I mean, I know that that thing is fake.
Speaker B:Frankly, I hate to admit it, but, I mean, the evidence is kind of in.
Speaker A:I like that.
Speaker A:We don't know, but I know.
Speaker B:We don't know for sure.
Speaker B:Kevin doesn't even know for sure.
Speaker B:Anything is possible.
Speaker B:But that's part of the mystery to me.
Speaker B:It's like, okay, let's just look at it as a reader.
Speaker B:Let's say that I Opened a book with.
Speaker B:He looked at the shrouded turin, knowing that it was a fabrication.
Speaker B:But right.
Speaker B:So now I want to know, oh, it's a fabrication, but what's the, you know, what's the deal?
Speaker B:And turns out, like, sure, it was fabricated, but who fabricated it and why?
Speaker B:You know, so now there's an unanswered question, or what we in marketing would call an open loop, which is also what we storytellers should be calling it.
Speaker B:And open loops drive readers crazy.
Speaker B:They gotta find out, they gotta see what the answer is.
Speaker B:So that's why it's intriguing.
Speaker B:That was a long winded answer to your question.
Speaker A:No, it was a perfect answer.
Speaker A:I think that's absolutely true.
Speaker A:And I think because there are so many open questions about all sorts of things, aren't there?
Speaker A:When you think about history and humanity and all of these things, different people have different theories.
Speaker A:But even those missed parts, no one is completely perfect, is it, in answering life's greatest questions.
Speaker A:So actually, the things that we talk about sort of fill the gap, right?
Speaker B:There's too many mysteries.
Speaker B:I think even those among us who.
Speaker B:I'm just gonna go out on a limb here, but like those among us who are not.
Speaker B:Who are, you know, say, atheist or agnostic, there's still a tendency to still think of there being some power greater than us out there, you know, that we.
Speaker B:That we are curious about, even if we can't bring ourselves to believe in the flying Spaghetti monster or, you know, my personal Lord and savior, Jesus Christ.
Speaker B:If you can't believe in that, it doesn't change the fact that there are things that happen in the universe that we don't understand.
Speaker B:And so we're always going to be looking for answers.
Speaker B:Quantum physics is like that.
Speaker B:Even if you don't believe in a deity, quantum physics will freak you out when you look closely at it because it doesn't make any logical sense.
Speaker B:I mean, and so we're always looking for answers to, like, why existence is so strange.
Speaker B:And we're always looking at.
Speaker B:There's always something greater than us.
Speaker B:The universe itself, by its very nature, is expansive.
Speaker B:It's mysterious, it's unexplorable.
Speaker B:So you never know what you're going to encounter out there.
Speaker B:And we want desperately to know.
Speaker B:That's what the writer's job is, is to give you a hint, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah, it totally is.
Speaker A:It totally is.
Speaker A:And many of those artifacts that we talk about, they sort of flirt with the supernatural.
Speaker A:And I suppose what I mean there by supernatural is that we don't understand how it works.
Speaker A:I'm not saying it's necessarily like magic in the Harry Potter sense, although, of course it could be.
Speaker A:How do you as a writer decide on that balance?
Speaker A:On, like, yeah, it needs to have that supernatural, that we don't know all the answers element.
Speaker A:But also it needs to be.
Speaker A:Could happen.
Speaker A:Where's the line, do you think?
Speaker B:You got to start with understanding what supernatural really means.
Speaker B:We tend to say supernatural when we have a box, we put it in, oh, it's magic.
Speaker B:Oh, it's God, oh, it's angels or whatever, aliens.
Speaker B:Even supernatural just means it is somehow above the norm.
Speaker B:Like it's somehow outside of what we know as normal reality that's going to be supernatural.
Speaker B:I mean, sometimes you just go straight for, you know, something chaotic and weird happened.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Something I have done with the Dan Kotler books from the beginning.
Speaker B:You know, I started my career writing sci fi.
Speaker B:I still do, but I wrote sci fi and a little bit of fantasy.
Speaker B:And in those, this sort of supernatural element is front and center.
Speaker B:And sometimes it's not even explainable.
Speaker B:There's just something happening.
Speaker B:You're never going to get a full explanation.
Speaker B:What I did with Dan Kotler was there are supernatural things that can happen, but they're almost always grounded in something natural and real.
Speaker B:And so for me, striking the balance is hinting at this thing that's greater than we can understand, but grounding it in such a way that the reader sees that, okay, yeah, there were Vikings in North America and this is how they got to Pueblo, Colorado.
Speaker B:Or this rune is tied into a lost science that we no longer understand.
Speaker B:The balance is kind of.
Speaker B:It can be challenging to find because with that series, everything has to be very grounded.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So if I hint at something truly supernatural, I have to give it a foundation.
Speaker B:I have to give it a reason for being so.
Speaker B:Making the decision, like, deciding what's too much.
Speaker B:If I can't give it an explanation, even if that explanation turns out to be wrong or inadequate, then it can't go into the book.
Speaker B:And a lot of the explanations I give for some of the more supernatural things that happen in my books are inadequate to explain.
Speaker B:It's that whole thing.
Speaker B:You've probably seen this where it's like the Christmas episodes of an adventure show and they go through all this stuff throughout the whole episode.
Speaker B:It looks like Santa could actually be real.
Speaker B:And then you find out it's just some billionaire, whatever.
Speaker B:But then while the billionaire is there having cookies with them, a present magically appears under the tree.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And everyone looks at each other.
Speaker B:So that's what I'm talking about.
Speaker B:Like, there's.
Speaker B:Even though you can explain it, even though the Scooby gang can pull the mask off and show that it was Old Man Peters all along, there's always that one piece that didn't get explained.
Speaker B:That's what keeps the readers coming back.
Speaker B:That's the hook.
Speaker A:100%.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:100%.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:I.
Speaker A:Because that sort of sets up the next story often, doesn't it?
Speaker A:It's like, did you look over there for the thing?
Speaker A:And then that's, of course, where the next book's going to take place.
Speaker A:In that.
Speaker A:In that next place.
Speaker A:Oh, that.
Speaker A:That's right, that thing.
Speaker A:So in our stories, there's always.
Speaker A:It's never as simple as.
Speaker A:There's just this magic coin that shows you that proves the existence of this, that and the other.
Speaker A:There's always a villain who wants it for his or her own ends, isn't there?
Speaker A:There's always that antagonist who has to sort of be one step ahead 90% of the time, and then the protagonist saves the day.
Speaker A:Why do you think that makes such a compelling hook?
Speaker A:Why is that so important?
Speaker A:You know?
Speaker B:Yeah, we like to overcome the odds.
Speaker B:That's what we.
Speaker B:We love underdog stories.
Speaker B:We love stories of people fighting through, fighting the good fight and winning.
Speaker B:And, you know, sometimes we like to see stories where the bad guy won and maybe the victory is a sort of Pyrrhic victory.
Speaker B:You know, like the good guy won, but he also lost a lot.
Speaker B:You know, he won, but his girlfriend perished in the fire.
Speaker B:So, you know, sometimes we like those kind of stories.
Speaker B:But for the most part, people are out looking for stories where they get to see the disadvantaged, weaker person, the character that they can identify with, overcoming the overwhelming, all powerful bad guy.
Speaker B:We love that because we can empathize with the weak character and we feel powerless in our lives a lot of times.
Speaker B:And so if government is doing things we don't like, we can read fiction about people overcoming government.
Speaker B:If we're suffering from an illness, we can read fiction about people overcoming illness.
Speaker B:And it gives us hope.
Speaker B:That's what everybody's out there looking for.
Speaker B:And in these adventure stories, in my books and in the Indiana Jones films or whatever, you've got this hero who's kind of larger than life.
Speaker B:You know, he's going to win, but you get to see him get the hell be out of him for 90 minutes or 300 pages or whatever, and looks like he's going to lose.
Speaker B:And then he rallies and wins anyway.
Speaker B:It makes us feel like we could do the same thing.
Speaker A:You're absolutely right.
Speaker A:There is an element of sort of self reflection there, doesn't it?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Our books lean quite a lot into history.
Speaker A:Some of it very solid history, you know, like a realistic period of time, other parts of it slightly more speculative.
Speaker A:But at what point do you balance that historical accuracy?
Speaker A:I suppose this is sort of what we talked about, the, the myth and the supernatural as well.
Speaker A:At what point do you think that historical accuracy needs to be important?
Speaker A:Or do you think the narrative is the engine of the thing?
Speaker A:Which, where does that balance lie?
Speaker B:If you're going to connect your story to.
Speaker B:To a known period or a known event in history, you, You.
Speaker B:You're gonna need accuracy to a degree.
Speaker B:When I wrote Atlantis Riddle, when I wrote Atlantis Riddle, I opened with Thomas Edison watching his.
Speaker B:The labs that he had burned down, they were in New Jersey, right?
Speaker B:He's watching them burn the ground, and he's celebrating.
Speaker B:Okay, so that's a real event.
Speaker B:It's a real outcome.
Speaker B:He actually was excited.
Speaker B:He told his son to go get his wife to come watch the whole thing burn down, because she would never see anything like this again.
Speaker B:There'll never be a sight like this again.
Speaker B:And so I took that as a real event and I portrayed it accurately.
Speaker B:But I wanted to kind of turn it on its head and, and explain why he was so excited about it.
Speaker B:Because the whole crux of the book from that point forward is really kind of a reflection of why he was celebrating that this lab burned down.
Speaker B:So I opened a loop, I asked a question, and then the reader had to follow me to get the answer to the question.
Speaker B:I think when you are talking about real world events and real world people, you need to get those details right.
Speaker B:But the reader is going to be very forgiving when you take a left turn, Especially if it's one of these scenarios where it's like history didn't quite play out the way you think it did.
Speaker B:If you can give them an alternate version of.
Speaker B:Not an alternate version of what did happen, but an alternate version of why it happened, that's the kind of story that readers will follow.
Speaker A:Exactly right.
Speaker A:Exactly right.
Speaker A:It's a sort of like, it fits 90%, doesn't it?
Speaker A:And you're just sort of making up the little.
Speaker A:The little 10%, and that's forgiven because that fits with the story and that fits with where you're going.
Speaker B:Well, and also that's part of why these readers gravitate to These books, because there are question marks like that in history, you know, they're not gonna get an answer otherwise.
Speaker B:You've got all kinds of events in history that didn't have neat resolutions.
Speaker B:So we're there to kind of, you know, fill in the gaps a little, you know, without overcommitting.
Speaker B:You know, you don't want to say definitively that this is what happened with that artifact, or you want to give the reader, you want to leave some questions open.
Speaker B:But some of the great mysteries, like D.D.
Speaker B:Cooper, back in, like the 50s super famous story, but no one knows what happened to that guy after he jumped out of the plane.
Speaker B:He robbed like a bank or something.
Speaker B:He boarded an airplane in mid flight.
Speaker B:He basically puts on a parachute, jumps out of the plane.
Speaker B:We don't know what happened to that guy.
Speaker B:Now we have since, like, found some evidence, like, people have found some of the money destroyed, charred bills and things like that out in the area where he jumped, but we don't know what happened to him.
Speaker B:So that's fertile ground, man.
Speaker B:You've got an intriguing story.
Speaker B:You got a guy who stole an artifact, in this case, money.
Speaker B:He did something crazy, jumped out of an airplane and then disappeared.
Speaker B:And then 70 years later, we still don't know what the heck happened to him.
Speaker B:Lots of room to play in that, right?
Speaker B:That's the kind of story that's gold for authors like us, because you see similar stories, like I wrote about the Mayan death God Apuch.
Speaker B:There's a lot of stuff about that mythical figure.
Speaker B:That's just a big giant question mark.
Speaker B:I had the advantage of no one's heard of that character, so I can paint him however, I like the real historic stuff that's surrounding, like, why he, you know, he had owls as a symbol, right?
Speaker B:Why?
Speaker B:Why is an owl a symbol of this God?
Speaker B:Well, you know, it turns out that that culture believed owls would carry spirits off to the underworld when people died.
Speaker B:And so it became a symbol of death.
Speaker B:And, you know, all these little tidbits you can throw in there, you're introducing the reader to this character and then introducing them to the mythos and then introducing all these mysteries, and then you're solving all the mysteries, and they get to be right there in the passenger seat the whole time.
Speaker B:Dan Kotler is looking into it.
Speaker B:That's exciting.
Speaker A:It is exciting.
Speaker A:It is exciting.
Speaker A:But sometimes we do have to amp up that excitement, don't we?
Speaker A:Because research itself, and archeology especially, is really slow and methodical and bureaucratic, and I often get messages from in inverted commas.
Speaker A:Real archaeologists who say, I love your books, but, you know, but we have to up the stakes, don't we?
Speaker A:We have to move that forward because that's the story.
Speaker B:The reality here is if anybody had to go through the stuff that Dan Kotler or Indiana Jones went through on a regular basis, they wouldn't survive long enough to actually be archaeologists, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah, we do.
Speaker B:We take some liberty there.
Speaker B:Rightly so.
Speaker B:I mean, the same is true for every.
Speaker B:For all fiction.
Speaker B:Even romances don't go the way, you know, real world romance does not work the way fiction.
Speaker B:Romance works.
Speaker A:Really.
Speaker B:I mean, I thought it did for three years, but no, turns out romance is hard.
Speaker B:Romance, you know, relationships are difficult.
Speaker B:There's things that you're not prepared to deal with.
Speaker B:You know, I won't go into the intimate details, but, you know, when you get into a relationship, it ends up not being softly lit with dramatic music in the background, you know, but that's the thing, that's what we're here for, is to present an idealized version of these stories so that they are fun and exciting.
Speaker B:I guess if you're trying to determine how much of that to do or when to do it, the whole point is to keep the reader turning pages.
Speaker B:So if the story is dragging, nobody wants to read the real accounts of an archeologist at work.
Speaker B:Nobody.
Speaker B:Trust me, I have met and worked with, I've been on dig sites.
Speaker B:This is not entertaining stuff.
Speaker B:This is not fun.
Speaker B:There's nothing dramatic about it.
Speaker B:It's only exciting at a sort of cerebral level.
Speaker B:I've been in the hot sun, high humidity, out in the middle of nowhere, you know, meticulously brushing dirt off things.
Speaker B:Nobody wants to read that.
Speaker B:They want to see 30 seconds of that to establish what's going on.
Speaker B:And then they want to see this character discover that, you know, oh, this is that rare lost gem that turns people into frogmen.
Speaker B:You know, they want that.
Speaker B:That's what they're willing to tolerate.
Speaker B:30 Seconds.
Speaker B:They're not willing to tolerate an entire novel that's realistic.
Speaker B:When it.
Speaker B:With its look into archeology.
Speaker A:You are absolutely right there.
Speaker A:And I think we, yeah, we.
Speaker A:We sort of forget that at our peril, don't we?
Speaker A:We forget that you need to.
Speaker A:That people aren't used to that.
Speaker A:You don't need to see it in that sort of minutiae to sort of move things forward.
Speaker A:Thinking more about the present and the future now, and this is something I find interesting in, in my own books, is that technology has changed exploration and discovery and archaeology and all these things so much and continues to do.
Speaker A:We're talking, like, satellites, AI, lidar, gps, lidar.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:And now there's, like, AI models that can decode ancient scripts, you know, probably better than.
Speaker A:Certainly more quickly than humans can.
Speaker A:Do you think that modern tech has made archaeological adventure harder to write, or has it just made it a different genre?
Speaker B:It's changed the genre a little, but in some ways it's made it easier, because now, rather than me having to write an interesting scene where Kotler is poring over scrolls and trying to decipher ancient languages, he feeds it into an AI and now has to deal with the result.
Speaker B:And that's the part that's fun and exciting for people.
Speaker B:The rest of it is just nostalgia, you know, the rest of it is just fantasy about what?
Speaker B:You know, like I said, nobody really wants to see that.
Speaker B:And we always glossed over that part anyway.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:If Kotler was going to spend six days, you know, studying ancient manuscripts, it happened in one, a couple of paragraphs.
Speaker B:And then I moved on.
Speaker B:For him, it was a grueling six days.
Speaker B:For the reader, it was one paragraph.
Speaker B:But now I don't even have to put my character through that torture.
Speaker B:I can have him discover something, send it to a lab, get the results back that afternoon and act on that information.
Speaker B:I can have him engaged in something else.
Speaker B:That's what everybody's there for anyway, you know, everybody wants to see.
Speaker B:Basically, the entertaining thing about any novel is watching the character respond to things.
Speaker B:So it doesn't really matter that much how he got the stimulus.
Speaker B:It's how he responds to that stimulus from there that matters.
Speaker A:That's so true, isn't it?
Speaker A:And I hadn't thought of it like that.
Speaker A:Whereas before, you might have said six months later, after looking through all of these records for that whole time, which.
Speaker B:Is the same, by the way, as saying there's functionally, in storytelling, zero difference between me saying he sent this off and six months later got the results, and me saying he sent this off and that afternoon got the results.
Speaker B:There's no difference to the reader at all.
Speaker A:No, no, you're absolutely right.
Speaker B:So it adds to the credibility of the story.
Speaker B:And he could have him say, look, you know, 10 years ago, this would have taken six months.
Speaker B:Today he got it in the, you know, that afternoon.
Speaker B:That's even better.
Speaker B:That's even more interesting to people.
Speaker B:They get to see how the technology is impacting the field.
Speaker B:I will invent technologies, by the way.
Speaker A:Oh, yeah, Tell me about that.
Speaker B:Yeah, totally.
Speaker B:I mean, you know, I have an entire series built around that, which has now become kind of obsolete because I had my Quake Runner Alex Kane books and she was the inventor of a quantum based AI that's basically a universal skeleton key for any kind of digital system.
Speaker B:What's interesting is, you know, that was a great story.
Speaker B: hat I started it back in like: Speaker B:But now, now AI is such a prolific topic that I don't think those stories could have the same impact as they had.
Speaker B:I would have to change things a little.
Speaker B:And I have begun changing some things, kind of playing around with a few things to see if I can update the stories.
Speaker B:But the technology is more or less catching up with the technology of the books and surpassing it in some ways.
Speaker B:It's not quantum based yet.
Speaker B:That's a whole other thing.
Speaker B:But I don't think it's long before we see things like that and true artificial intelligence comes along and it's like, well, who needs to write?
Speaker B:Nobody's going to want to read these books anymore because they're busy engaging with AI all the time.
Speaker B:So there's nothing unique about it.
Speaker B:So that's the danger of relying on technology as a cornerstone of your stories, by the way.
Speaker A:Yeah, that's dated really fast.
Speaker A:I haven't thought about it in that way.
Speaker A:I try and if I use technology, which I do, of course, but it's very much like the story isn't about the technology, the technology is there.
Speaker A:I think you said this earlier, you make a phone call, you scan something, whatever, you don't care how it works, but it works.
Speaker A:And that's the result.
Speaker B:I mean, you have to be careful.
Speaker B:And I used to write in a whole lot of existing tech, modern consumer tech, talking about iPads and iPhones and things like that all the time.
Speaker B:And then I realized the danger here is as much as it seems like this stuff is here to stay forever, now look how rapidly things can change.
Speaker B:I mean, imagine that we lived in the era of telegraphs and everybody's sending telegraphs and the whole story revolves.
Speaker B:It's.
Speaker B:I've written a novel that is a series of telegraph messages and then 30 years later, nobody's even using a telegraph anymore or whatever.
Speaker B:So that story feels dated.
Speaker B:Well, the same is going to happen.
Speaker B:We've already seen such a jump in technology.
Speaker B:If I read books from the 80s and 90s and someone does use a cell phone, the way the cell phone is described is so archaic that it makes it stand out and throws me right out of the story.
Speaker A:So it's almost described with the assumption that you don't know what it is, right?
Speaker B:Well, no, no, no.
Speaker B:It's described with the assumption that you do know what it is and that it's a common object.
Speaker A:Oh, I see what you mean.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:But to the modern reader, it's like, why is he carrying around a phone in a bag?
Speaker B:What's that about?
Speaker B:You know, and computers, you know, I mean, so you may be aware of Stieg Larsson.
Speaker B:He wrote the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the whole Millennium series, which I loved.
Speaker B:I was enough of a geek, you know, when he wrote that.
Speaker B:It was during the era where I into all that technology.
Speaker B:And so was he, obviously.
Speaker B:Like, he's describing the MacBook that she's using and how powerful it is.
Speaker B:And it has 100 megabytes of storage.
Speaker B:You know, it's just.
Speaker B:It's so quaint now to read it.
Speaker B:It dates it so poorly that it made me realize I have to avoid direct references to things like that.
Speaker B:You got to vague up the technology.
Speaker A:I also feel that there's a window that's.
Speaker A:It's a moving window in that sort of thing.
Speaker A:Now you're talking about something here that's about 20 years old.
Speaker A:So it's in that age in which it is not yet cool again.
Speaker A:Whereas leave it another 10 years and it'll be like, you know, because now we talk about Walkmans, you know, you put the tape or the CD in or whatever, or mini disc players and you'd be like, wow, that's so cool.
Speaker A:You know.
Speaker B:But if you write about a Walkman today, you're going to describe it as if the audience doesn't have any idea what it is.
Speaker B: you wrote about A Walkman in: Speaker B:People are going to be like, what?
Speaker B:What do you mean, tape?
Speaker B:What's a Walkman?
Speaker B:You know, why do you need headphones for it?
Speaker A:That's true, that's true.
Speaker B:I mean, even the term headphones now I think is getting a bit dated.
Speaker B:I mean, we're back to having over ear headphones again, even wireless ones.
Speaker B:But most people are like, yeah, I popped my AirPods in, I put my earbuds in, or whatever.
Speaker B:And we understand that now, but 30, 40 years from now will we, when everybody's got an implant that's a cochlear implant that just vibrates the bones in their ear so that everything that's set on their mobile device is in their head.
Speaker B:Is anybody going to understand what headphones are?
Speaker B:Or earbuds?
Speaker A:Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
Speaker B:Why would I put something in my ear that's gross?
Speaker A:You're absolutely right.
Speaker A:I love that.
Speaker A:I love that idea.
Speaker B:These are the.
Speaker B:We're talking right now.
Speaker B:Everything you are experiencing right now is an artifact, is waiting to become an artifact in a story a hundred years from now.
Speaker A:And that's the point.
Speaker A:That's the interesting thing here, isn't it?
Speaker A:Because I'm wondering that with the sort of technology we learn more and more all the time.
Speaker A:We know.
Speaker A:We know more and more.
Speaker A:And I wonder whether these sorts of stories change.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:The archaeological thrillers of today are perhaps like the sci fi books of the future because we're not exploring the surface of the earth.
Speaker A:Maybe we're exploring the depths of the ocean or even the dark side of the moon, you know, and these things, because they become more regular and normalized.
Speaker A:That's how the story, that's how the genre goes, perhaps.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And that's why I kind of started this by saying it almost does not matter what the artifact is.
Speaker B:The thing that matters in these stories is the way the characters interact, how they respond to what's happening.
Speaker B:Generally what you're going to do is if you've got an artifact based story, you've got the MacGuffin, the artifact of question of desire.
Speaker B:Whatever it is the story you're telling is, why does everyone want it?
Speaker B:What danger does it represent if the bad guy gets it?
Speaker B:How far will the protagonist go to prevent the bad guy from getting it?
Speaker B:You know, what are the consequences?
Speaker B:What's the price that the protagonist pays to keep it out of the hands of the bad guy?
Speaker B:And that is the story.
Speaker B:And it doesn't matter what the artifact is, except that the artifact makes it intriguing to the.
Speaker B:So, you know, if I'm telling, if I rewrite one of my books and I replace, say, if I rewrote Indiana Jones and replaced the Ark of the Covenant with a rubber duck, it changes what the story is only in its energy and its essence.
Speaker B:If the characters were still taking those seriously, the reader or the viewer would probably take it seriously to a degree as well.
Speaker B:But they might not give that story a chance because there's no mystery around a rubber duck.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Except the general mystery of what the heck is up with this rubber duck.
Speaker B:Yeah, that kind of makes me want to write a book with a rubber.
Speaker A:Duck, as often you should yeah, the.
Speaker B:Rubber duck of Destiny.
Speaker A:I like that a lot.
Speaker A:Kevin.
Speaker A:This is fantastic.
Speaker A:So to conclude, I ask everyone this question and I think it's a really nice touch point for all my guests.
Speaker A:What adventure stories first made you fall in love with lost cities, ancient secrets, and just this general thrill of discovery?
Speaker B:Indiana Jones is right up there at the top.
Speaker B:That was the first stories of that genre that I ever encountered.
Speaker B:But I read books when I was a kid.
Speaker B:Like, Encyclopedia Brown was a big favorite of mine.
Speaker B:And even though that didn't involve lost cities or whatever, you know, exploring mysteries and solving puzzles, I kind of tell people sometimes that Dan Kotler is basically Encyclopedia Brown, all grown up.
Speaker B:But I read a lot and watched a lot of stories.
Speaker B:Like choose your own adventure, for example.
Speaker B:I read every choose your own adventure and almost all of them involved this kind of story.
Speaker B:Some ancient temple artifact, whatever, and then, you know, the cartoons and things I watched.
Speaker B:But I read tons of comic books growing up.
Speaker B:It was probably how I learned to write.
Speaker B:Honestly, I read every spider man I can get my hands on.
Speaker B:And the number of times that that ancient cities, lost civilizations, ancient artifacts would pop up in those, it's uncountable.
Speaker A:Oh, that's fantastic.
Speaker A:Kevin.
Speaker A:Where can people find you and your books?
Speaker B:You can find me@kevintumlington.com that's all things Kevin are there.
Speaker B:And if you are a writer, I have the Word slinger podcast that you will want to tune into.
Speaker B:For sure, you can find it on that site, but you can also go to YouTube.com wordslingerpodcast thank you so much.
Speaker A:That was great.
Speaker B:You got it.
Speaker A:This is the Adventure Story podcast and thank you so much for hanging out with me today.
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Speaker A:And if you're a fan of adventure stories like the one we've talked about today, check out my books@lukerichardson.author.com Bon voyage, enjoy the adventure and I'll see you next time.
