Dec. 5, 2002

A Faculty for Fiction

SBPM Professor Writes Detective Stories to Help Explore Deeper Issues

By Greg Licamele

John Artz loves reading a good book, but he enjoys writing them even more. As an unassuming associate professor of management science, he spends his academic time focusing on computer structures. He’s finishing a non-fiction book now, but his real passion resides in his fiction pen, writing detective stories.

“It tends to consume my time and I only want to think about fiction stories,” Artz says. “Writing a research paper is not anywhere near as fun as writing fiction.”

Two years ago, Artz began his fiction-writing journey with the “Thaddeus Wentworth Mysteries,” a series of five stories exploring themes such as identity and confidence. The chapters of each story were distributed via E-mail and posted on Artz’s Web site http://home.gwu.edu/~jartz. As a writing novice who wanted to explore the mechanics of the craft, he chose a familiar, yet fictional setting for the first story — Foggy Bottom University in Washington, DC — and recognizable characters, including colleagues and students.

In writing these first three stories (the final two will be written when his academic book is complete), Artz unexpectedly discovered parallels between authors and software developers.

“You’d think the two are totally different, but when you write software, you think of a result you want to have and what component pieces you need,” Artz says. “You do the same thing when you’re writing a story. The pieces are motivation, a character, or an event, but you still need to put the pieces together in some ways to achieve a believable result.”

The first story, called “Identity,” is a metaphysical detective piece where the search for clues or truth represents a metaphor for the detective’s search for himself.

“Wentworth goes through a series of transforming effects and realizes who he is,” Artz says. “But what does it mean to be somebody? When you know a person, what is it that you know? What if they turn out not to be who they are?”

For Artz, these questions and the concept of identity are consistent with his academic interests. Artz believes stories play a critical role in exploring, explaining, and evaluating solutions for ethical issues, especially computer ethics and privacy.

“We need to write stories,” Artz says. “Let’s explore ideas. When is privacy good? When is privacy bad? What are some of the consequences? It seems to me that in areas like computer ethics and biotechnology ethics, we need a headlight into the future. Stories are really the only way to achieve that.”

Historically, Artz says, writers have held a mirror to society, but he thinks writers need to be more fortuitous because technology is changing society with unknown consequences. Books such as George Orwell’s “1984” and Charles Dickens’ “Hard Times” have provided a few examples of exploring the future and its consequences through fiction, but he wouldn’t classify one or two as a “robust discussion” of an issue. He believes dozens of angles should be considered to grasp a complete understanding.

“Stories are entertainment today,” Artz says, “but in the future, they are going to have a significant epistomological role. Is human cloning correct? Is it OK to make people for spare parts? What happens if you have cloning and you have 12 identical people? In a democratic society, do they get one vote or 12?”

Though he writes fiction and appreciates it, he discounts those who say stories aren’t really true because Artz believes they have value in explaining ideas.

“You look at ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and say that’s not a true story because there really wasn’t a kid that went down the Mississippi,” Artz says. “OK, that wasn’t historically true, but that doesn’t mean there’s not some other kind of truth in there.”

 

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