Featured Interview – Patrick McGinty, Local Author of Test Drive: A Novel

How does an English professor end up getting interested in driverless cars? 

When my wife and I moved to the Morningside neighborhood of Pittsburgh in 2016, I spent a full day cleaning out all this junk left by the previous owners in the garage. I was trying to figure out what to do with these Tupperware containers filled with ancient white paint when suddenly a driverless car from one of the local companies rolled past the open garage door and down the incredibly potholed alley. I remember thinking: ‘wow, those things have reached the point where they’re mapping alleys as busted as mine.’ I knew that Pittsburgh had become something of a hub for the driverless car sector, but for whatever reason, witnessing that car in the alley was a bit of a wake-up call.

‘Wake-up’ as in you were excited to learn more about driverless cars? Or you were nervous about them? Or…?

Some context: my mom was at one point one of the higher ranking female employees in Allegheny County. By being incredibly smart and just a relentlessly, insanely, legendarily hard worker, she achieved a pretty high rank at a tech and manufacturing company. But: she became pregnant with my young triplet siblings. The triplets were born very premature, and her maternity leave was rather complicated, and, long story short, her position at her company was filled and they moved on without her.

So, when I am say, in an alley, and I see that there’s some sort of new technological advancement that is quite literally pressing up against my property, the ‘wake up’ I’m referring to isn’t necessarily ‘oh geez, how is this going to harm me physically?’ It certainly isn’t ‘oh neat, how can I benefit from this new technology?’ The ‘wake up’ is, I think, something like ‘oh, this new thing is moving fast, and when things or companies or technologies move fast, people get left behind and/or trampled, so I better figure this thing out as fast as possible so that the stakes are as clear as possible, both to myself and to others.’

Have your interests and writing always gravitated toward tech?

Not at all. I held off on getting a smartphone way past virtually everyone I know. I pay debts via check rather regularly. I could continue in this vein, but it would probably just look embarrassing.

So without a technical background in AI or even cars, how did you prepare to write a novel about this complex subject?

Well, I read. A lot. I read everything about driverless cars and wrote about it as I was reading. I talked to as many really smart people as I could. I even ended up teaching a course to first-year students about driverless cars, then I adapted that course into some national curriculum for other educators to follow. All during this time, I was drafting and revising Test Drive, pouring new observations and ideas into it as I learned more about the driverless car sector.

Was it hard to keep the novel ‘current?’ In other words, how did you grapple with writing about a sector where there’s often new developments and stories every week?

At a certain point, I had to make the decision to stop writing about the present day–it just became somewhat pointless to try ad keep the novel ‘current’ when ‘current’ was always changing. So, the story is set in a fictionalized but I think quite plausible 2030 Pittsburgh, where driverless cars still aren’t fully licensed. Most companies in the novel have pivoted their business models and technology so that the driverless cars are better equipped than a human driver to operate in the novel’s extreme climate conditions.

Who do you envision as your ideal reader?

Because the book centers around workers who ‘test drive’ driverless vehicles, there is an absolute ton of driving around Pittsburgh in the novel; there’s also quite a bit of Pittsburghese and Pittsburgh-centric culture, so I certainly imagine that Pittsburghers will get a kick out of the book.

If I’m being really arrogant, I’d say that one of the book’s goals is to balance small-press artistry on the sentence level with a wider mass appeal in the form of a heist plot, so a reader with an interest in either of those rough genres would hopefully enjoy the book. (I’m probably burying the lede here, but: the drivers try to steal car parts from their employer. They end up trying to steal an entire driverless prototype. The book can certainly be read as a heist.)

But I’d also like to think that the book might resonate with anyone who has ever had one of two internal debates 1) is this new tech thing going to cause me unexpected problems? 2) should I close ranks and focus on those right around me or work hard to cultivate new bonds and alliances with people who might be different than me?

Will you keep writing about driverless cars? Or is this it?

This is it as far as novels go, though it seems like I may well be writing about tech…forever? On the one hand, I feel unqualified to do so given my lack of technical competencies. But my grandpa was a steelworker who painted quite a lot, and when I would doodle with him, he would say “don’t draw what you think you see; draw what you see.” When I look at America, I see tech wrapping its tentacles around… everything, so I feel compelled to ‘see’ that. It doesn’t necessarily sync with who I am and what I conceive of as my interests, but when I look at the things I do have a deep, abiding interest in, and when I try to be really present and curious about these topics–like I am with say, the city of Pittsburgh–what ends up happening is that a driverless car rolls down the alley right as I’m trying to envision what kind of life I want to lead in my new neighborhood.