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Interview: Natalia Theodoridou on “The Shape of Gifts”

by Spilogale Inc. August 28th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

F&SF: How do you describe “The Shape of Gifts” to people?

NT: It’s the story of an oracle running from her gifts. Of ecological disaster, of love and hope lost and found again.

F&SF: This story is grounded in the hard science of global climate change, but it uses fantasy elements to approach that topic in a really fresh and unexpected way. It’s something we haven’t seen before here at F&SF. What inspired you to write this story in this way?

NT: That’s a hard question to answer, because, as I recall, the seed of the story was this very specific moment of Terry receiving an oracle from the flight of birds and trying to deny it. Destiny and powerlessness and the terrible fates of living beings, the cause of which are sometimes clear and legible, and other times entirely haphazard; how do you escape that kind of bind, or how do you surrender to it, make it liveable, find joy in it, even? This is the question that birthed the rest of the story. The birds were already there, the landscape, too, so the theme of climate change installed itself inevitably; that is the world we live in.

F&SF: This story has a lot of elements that we’ve seen in your other stories: “birds, tall trees, gender weirdness, ancient greek myth, queer love,” to quote something you said on twitter. What parts of the story are personal to you and how did that affect the way you wrote it?

NT: Even though Terry’s experience of sex and gender is fantastical, the genderfeels that go with it are not. I have been steeped in greek myth from a very young age, and the story of Teiresias always spoke to me in my bones, in all sorts of problematic and productive ways. Also, I am queer, and so queerness is always at the center of all I do, one way or another.

F&SF: What were some of the challenges you had writing this story?

NT: I tried my best not to have Terry stand in for any group of people; I did not want her to be a metaphor. I wanted her to be a person, with a unique history and a unique understanding of her world, representative only of her own experience. It took a while getting there, and I don’t know if I succeeded. As a reader, I am generally wary of speculative fiction premises that are supposed to function as grand metaphors for some flavor of queerness because, you know, we’re right here! We exist, and we contain multitudes. As a writer, I’m more interested in sharp, specific questions run through the complexities of a character’s circumstances: their personal and cultural histories, their identity and all the intersections they might inhabit.

F&SF: Can you talk a bit about your writing process?

NT: Hmm, another tough question, because so much of the writing process for me is ineffable, “happens underwater” (as my good friend and Clarion West classmate B. Pladek has said). I tend to mull over ideas for a very long time before they become stories. Just last week I wrote a story the idea for which I was working on in my head for two years. Then the story itself was written in a single day. I need the idea to feel mature before I sit down to write it. A mature idea may mean: a firm voice, a character I know well, a beginning, an ending, a question I want answered or, at least, posed.

F&SF: What are you working on right now?

NT: Oh, so many things. A new Choice of Games project that I can’t talk about just yet; a novella that I’ve been kicking around for two years; a new short story about a haunted building; a maturing novel; a mental health game; a short story collection…

I live in front of my laptop.

—

You can find Natalia Theodoridou at…

Website: www.natalia-theodoridou.com/
Twitter: @natalia_theodor

“The Shape of Gifts” appears in the July/August 2020 issue of F&SF.

Order a copy of this issue…

Paper: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

Ebook: https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-july-august-2020/

 
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Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O

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Interview: M. Rickert on “Last Night at the Fair”

by Spilogale Inc. August 26th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

F&SF: How do you describe this story to people? Do you describe it to people?

MR: I don’t really have much occasion to describe my stories to anyone other than my husband. Even then, I prefer to read them to him. But I do remember right after finishing this one, going to the grocery store where a woman I barely knew asked me, in that polite way, how I was doing, and I blurted out that I had just written a story called, “Last Night at the Fair.” She, apparently nonplussed by my oversharing, closed her eyes and smiled.

F&SF: What made you decide to write this story right now?

MR: I decided I wanted to write some stories from the point of view of an older woman. I live only a few blocks away from the park that hosts the county fair every summer, and I’ve been enchanted by it since we moved here. I especially like to go up there in the morning before the fair officially opens to walk the grounds. My husband and I almost always go on the opening night to watch the pig judging, which is fascinating and strange. One year I timed it right to attend the judging of baked goods, and happened to sit right behind the winning bread maker and her two children who were so proud and excited when the judge described the perfection of the bite! There is just something about the fair that I find inspiring. Also, and this part is a bit of a spoiler for anyone who wants to read the story first and hasn’t done so yet… A few years ago there was a rumor of a lion roaming Wisconsin. In the tradition of such rumors, a single blurry photograph was published in the newspaper. There was some speculation that someone might have had a pet lion that either escaped or was set free. Ever since then, I knew that lion would become a part of something I wrote, and I don’t know why it appeared for this story, but when it did, I felt it was the right time and place.

F&SF: You’ve been inspired lately. We’ll publish three stories by you this year, something that we haven’t done in over a decade, plus “Evergreen” in our Nov/Dec issue last year. In general, these stories seem shorter, more economical, compared to some of your earlier work, but they’re all still very powerful, maybe even more powerful for their brevity. What’s brought about this sudden surge of writing

MR: Well, thank you for your kind comments about this recent work. I have had a lot of fun writing short after working on a novel for so long. I’m calling it my last novel because it takes everything I have to write a novel, which is part of the reason I have been away from short stories for a while. But, also, I began to feel like I was repeating myself too much in my own work and needed some time to find a broader approach. It helped me a lot to read Ray Bradbury’s One Hundred Stories, which I have been lingering over for some time. I very much enjoy the scope of Bradbury’s affection, and began to consider how I might want to challenge my reach. While all this was going on my agent and I parted ways, leaving me feeling very unmoored and quite a bit lost. I went through a season of doubt. My friend and I had planned a writing retreat In Michigan that coincidentally fell during my sorry summer. It was just the two of us in a lovely home near the beach. We each claimed our writing posts. She was very happy in the dining room, and I was thrilled to have the screened-in-porch. I don’t usually have any trouble with blank pages, but I remember that first morning, sitting at the table with a pounding heart. Just write something, I thought. So I started writing about an old woman who lived in a house near the beach. It was okay. It was something, at least. The next day a fairy popped onto the page, and I wrote the entire day, finishing a decent draft. By the end of that week, I had two stories I liked in my backpack when I took the ferry home across lake Michigan, feeling very much like I had gone on a much longer journey than miles could measure. After that, something rose up on me. I consider myself a fairly easy going person, but there is, inside of my quiet demeanor, a very large presence that wants to be heard.

F&SF: How has your writing process changed over the past twenty years?

MR: I frequently refer to George R.R. Martin’s quote about some writers being gardeners, and others being architects. I was a gardener for a very long time but have learned, in recent years, to cultivate a bit more of the architect. I think that is probably the biggest change. What that means within my writing practice is that I am able to approach plot more consciously than I had before. It’s been interesting to experience this evolution and to come to understand that, like much of life, the things I thought I knew about my strengths and weaknesses when I was in my thirties might no longer apply.

F&SF: What are you working on now?

MR: Right now I am working on final edits of my novel, The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie, which will be published by Undertow Publications in 2021. I’m expecting to get the copy edits for my novelette, “The Little Witch” (Tor.com) fairly soon, and I recently finished a novella which is currently under submission. Eager to complete all these tasks and get back to writing something fresh. These days, horror calls.

—

“Last Night at the Fair” appears in the July/August 2020 issue of F&SF.

Order a copy of this issue…

Paper: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

Ebook: https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-july-august-2020/

 
…or subscribe and never miss a single story!

Print edition: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/subscribe.htm

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Amazon US (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZFZ4O8/

Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O

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Interview: Brian Trent on “The Monsters of Olympus Mons”

by Spilogale Inc. August 25th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

F&SF: How do you describe this story to people?

BT: Three robots fashioned to resemble Martian cryptozoological legends get embroiled in a quest to remove a fascist flag from the cone summit of the largest volcano in the solar system. The story examines questions of consciousness, propaganda, and what a “monster” really is.

F&SF: What inspired or prompted you to write “The Monsters of Olympus Mons”?

BT: Some years back on a trip to Japan, I made a nighttime ascent of Mount Fuji. Once you’re above the tree-line, it’s a completely lifeless terrain of volcanic rock and scree. At certain points, you literally walk through clouds. I was several thousand feet up, stopping for a sip from my canteen, when I was struck with something like an enchantment: the barren volcanic slope illuminated by a pale moon, a lake of silver mist directly below me, and the sight of distant flashlights (from other hikers) slowly zig-zagging up the trail. In that moment, it was easy to imagine I was on another world; I immediately thought of Olympus Mons—itself a volcano—and how one day human colonists will attempt to scale it.

Flash forward to 2015. A conspiracy theory blows through the Internet (because that’s apparently what the Internet exists for) surrounding NASA photos of Mars. The Curiosity rover captured images of what could vaguely resemble a lizard… if you squint really hard and let imagination hijack your eyes. It’s not the first time Martian rocks have caused controversy—from the “face” at Cydonia to the Martian meteorites believed by some to contain fossilized bacteria. But I found the “lizard-or-pareidolia” debate particularly intriguing because it suggested the inception of a new folklore. I mean, here on Earth there are stories of trolls and dragons, which in the modern world became stories of Bigfoot and Ogopogo and the like. We have yet to set a human on the Red Planet, and that tradition is already continuing!

These inspirations fueled “The Monsters of Olympus Mons.” I created a folklore for the colonists of the story, including a Martian lizard-like creature and two other entities. Together, they took control of the story, and steered it into unusual places.

F&SF: How is this story personal for you?

“The Monsters of Olympus Mons” is some of the most fun I’ve had writing a story. It naturally unfurled into a large canvas that let me do a lot: it has a big cast (three main characters who are arguably six main characters, along with a villain) and so required a delicate balancing of narrative threads. It also demanded a careful approach to character development, as is the case with ensemble pieces: you want the reader to identify who is who, not only by descriptors but by language patterns. An additional challenge had to do with the villain, Commander Kleve. He’s a vicious individual and unquestionably the antagonist, but I needed to provide him the depth that all characters deserve.

The most enjoyable part of writing “The Monsters of Olympus Mons” was that I got to tackle a variety of topics: cryptozoology, artificial intelligence, propaganda, war, identity, and the future of myth.

And here’s a confession: when I was about ten-years-old, I wanted to be a cryptozoologist. Seriously. I read every book, article, and eyewitness report like a young Fox Mulder in training. This was before I discovered scientific rationalism, but the result was that I became intimately familiar with the subject, so I peppered “The Monsters of Olympus Mons” with lots of Easter Eggs that anyone with even a passing interest in cryptozoology will pick up on.

F&SF: You’ve published a lot of stories in F&SF (“Death on the Nefertem Express,” “Crash Site,” “A Thousand Deaths Through Flesh and Stone,” “Last of the Sharkspeakers,” maybe even “The Memorybox Vultures”) that all seem to be part of the same richly imagined future? Can you give us a brief overview of that future and describe where “The Monsters of Olympus Mons” fits in?

BT: Those stories are part of my “War Hero” universe, which chronicle humanity’s gradual ascent to the stars. Even “The Memorybox Vultures”—which is set about twenty years from now—introduces technologies which grow and develop in later tales.

I liked the idea of writing individual stories that highlight different points of a future history. Robert E. Howard did this in a fantasy vein for his Conan stories—each story examines a different time in Conan’s life, so you see him as a hot-headed youth and then as an older, world-weary king, and plenty of times in between.

My “War Hero” universe takes a similar approach. The stories are written to stand entirely on their own—you can read “Death on the Nefertem Express” and enjoy it as a playful mystery. But the main character of “Death on the Nefertem Express” (Jolene Fort) is referenced in other stories, and some of her exploits appear as headlines in the newsfeeds we glimpse. For example, the events of “A Thousand Deaths Through Flesh and Stone” are directly continued in “Crash-Site” and involve many of the same characters. At the end of “Crash-Site,” there’s a passing reference to a “high profile heist of an orbital vault”—it’s just a tiny detail, but the story of that heist is told in “Breaking News Involving Space Pirates,” which features Jolene Fort, and is referenced again in “Death on the Nefertem Express” when a character accuses Fort of “breaking into Bradley Winterfig’s vault.”

Again, a casual reader doesn’t have to be concerned with all that. But the connections are there, and they form a consistent chronology.

In that larger meta-narrative, “The Monsters of Olympus Mons” is a pivotal story. It is set near the end of the Partisan War, which is the very war being fought in “A Thousand Deaths Through Flesh and Stone.”

F&SF: How do you keep track of all the stories in this universe when you’re writing?

BT: In developing the chronology, I outlined some major events. Some of these I’ve already tackled, and some I will get to eventually. But often a story I didn’t plan will grow naturally from this tree. For example, in one story a character mentions that she used to work on Venus but “had to leave.” At the time, I had no idea why she had to leave; it was just a bit of implied backstory. It was only months later when I started wondering, “Why did she have to leave Venus? What the hell was she doing there?” that I came up with the story of what happened on Venus at that time, to that character.

In another instance, a story’s character rattles off a few of the alien races that are known to exist, including “the Cloud Kings on Tempest.” They’re just a name on the list, but their story is told in “Karma Among the Cloud Kings.”

My novel Ten Thousand Thunders and its pending sequel are the central narratives of this universe. Many of the other stories occur before, during, or after. In certain cases, like with “Last of the Sharkspeakers,” it’s set much later.

F&SF: What are you working on now?

BT: I’ve started an entirely new series of fantasy stories, set in an alternate history. I don’t like to get bogged down in one subject or style, and like to mix things up. Since I’ve been spending so much time in a fictional future, I thought it would be fun to write in a fictional past.

And speaking of alternate history, I have a speculative Cold War thriller entitled “Shadow Rook Red” which will be featured in the Weird World War III anthology from Baen Books this October.

—

You can find Brian Trent’s blog at briantrent.com

“The Monsters of Olympus Mons” appears in the July/August 2020 issue of F&SF.

Order a copy of this issue…

Paper: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

Ebook: https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-july-august-2020/

 
…or subscribe and never miss a single story!

Print edition: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/subscribe.htm

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Amazon US (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZFZ4O8/

Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O

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Interview: Stephanie Feldman on “The Staircase”

by Spilogale Inc. August 24th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

F&SF: How do you describe this story to people?

SF: A group of teenage best friends visits a staircase that’s rumored to lead to another dimension. When one of the girls walks down—and climbs back up again—their relationships will never be the same. “The Staircase” is about contemporary legends, gossip, paranoia, and friendship.

F&SF: What made you decide to write this story right now?

SF: I started this story some time ago. I’m not sure why this idea felt so urgent, but thinking about it now, in the summer of 2020, I’m drawn to its investigation of our most intimate bonds. These friends have thrived on a feeling of “us against the world.” (Today, they would probably be lobbying their parents to be a quarantine pod.) That kind of loyalty is appealing, but it’s also demanding and high-pressure. What happens when it explodes?

F&SF: Both of your stories for F&SF so far — “The Barrens” and “The Staircase” — feature characters who are young adults, but the stories don’t quite feel like YA stories. It seems to us that part of the tension in both stories comes from the gap that exists between our knowledge as older adults and our memories of what it was like to be that particular age. Are we completely off base?

SF: I agree. I don’t think of either of these stories as YA. (Though, to be fair, I tend not to think about any labels or genres when I’m writing.) I like writing about young people, but I’m not so interested (at least, right now) in writing for young people. My first audience is myself. So while both stories aim to capture something genuine about that age, they also include insights I’ve gained in my adult life.

F&SF: What’s the appeal to you of writing characters who are this age?

SF: I’m obsessed with storytelling and teenagers are such great folklorists! Rumors, urban legends, sub-cultures… “The Staircase” is also about friendship and identity, in-groups and out-groups, and teenagers feel like natural protagonists for exploring those issues.

Maybe it also just rings true to send a teenager out on an adventure like this. I don’t think I’d be any less excited to discover a mysterious staircase at this stage in my life, but I probably wouldn’t have the time or inclination to explore it, let alone an equally excited friend to accompany me.

F&SF: Can you talk a bit about your writing process?

SF: I always start with freewriting and brainstorming. I try to sketch out a central conflict, one that works on both a plot and emotional level. What is this character trying to do and why? What matters to them? How do they need to grow or heal?

Next, I write a super messy draft from beginning to end. I have to think about a story holistically. Then I go back and start revising. And, of course, I can’t get anywhere without feedback from writer friends and critique partners.

F&SF: What are you working on now?

SF: It’s been hard to find time to write during the pandemic, but I’m slowly adding words to a ghost story novella. It’s another piece that draws on folklore and my local environment—well, the Poconcos, so kind of local—but it’s also a love story, which I don’t write too many of. Usually, my characters are behaving badly toward each other, so I’m enjoying some good, old-fashioned true love and compassion.

I’m also preparing to teach two online writing classes this fall, one for Blue Stoop on the foundations of fiction and another for Catapult on developing the novel. Both classes are open to both beginning and experienced writers. I’ll be sharing more on my website (see below).

—

You can find Stephanie Feldman at…

Website: stephaniefeldman.com/
Twitter: @sbfeldman

“The Staircase” appears in the July/August 2020 issue of F&SF.

Order a copy of this issue…

Paper: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

Ebook: https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-july-august-2020/

 
…or subscribe and never miss a single story!

Print edition: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/subscribe.htm

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Amazon US (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZFZ4O8/

Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O

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Interview: Bennett North on “A Bridge from Sea to Sky”

by Spilogale Inc. August 20th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

F&SF: How do you describe this story to people?

BN: Other than as “my space elevator story,” I tend to describe it as a story about a woman trying to prove, both to other people and to herself, that she has earned the right to belong somewhere.

F&SF: We live in a country with a lot of neglected infrastructure, and here we have a story about the future where, instead of shiny new engineering triumphs, we have neglected infrastructure. Is that one of the things that inspired you to write this story right now?

BN: The last ten years have been full of exciting things happening in space—the Curiosity rover, the InSight lander, and SpaceX, to name just three. That’s the environment that inspired this story—the feeling of community that comes from being able to observe these things happening in real time. Astronauts posting their shots from the ISS on Instagram. Live-streamed space walks. Seeing pictures of Pluto for the first time.

Yet at the same time, the idea of the world coming together to fund the construction of a space elevator today seems far-fetched, especially when we look at the massive amounts of deferred maintenance we have on infrastructure that’s a lot closer to home. We’re not in the place we were when the ISS was constructed in the late ’90s and early ’00s. This is the world that I was exploring with “A Bridge from Sea to Sky”—one that had, at one point, made huge advances into space, but was now finding itself with shifting priorities.

F&SF: How is this story personal for you?

BN: As someone who works in the humanities, I’ve seen my fair share of promising projects losing funding due to budget cuts, so that was certainly part of it. But beyond that, I feel that science and the pursuit of knowledge is extremely important for the human race. It’s essential that, as a species, we look beyond the short-term considerations of profit and politics in order to ensure that we develop, advance, and, frankly, exist in the long-term.

F&SF: What were the challenges of writing this story?

BN: It took a bunch of research! I based the majority of my story on a report by NASA published in 2000 titled “Space Elevators: An Advanced Earth-Space Infrastructure for the New Millennium,” but I also read a lot about space elevator concepts through the decades—notably by Yuri Artsutanov, who proposed the idea of getting into space via an “electric locomotive” in 1959, and Arthur C. Clarke, who addressed the XXXth International Astronautical Congress about the topic in 1979 and endorsed the idea of calling it a “space elevator.”

F&SF: Your first story for us, several years ago, was a beautiful and heart-wrenching piece of fantasy called “Smooth Stones and Empty Bones.” It’s completely different from this story in so many ways. Can you talk a bit about your writing process, and whether it varies depending on what you’re writing?

BN: The main difference in writing the two stories was that the first draft of “Smooth Stones” was written in one sitting with no outline, while “Bridge” took a lot longer and had a lot more planning. These stories represent two extremes of my writing method—most of the time, I have a general idea of where the story starts, and very little idea of where it ends, and I feel my way from there.

F&SF: What are you working on now?

BN: I just recently finished writing a sci-fi novel about space bounty hunters that I’m really excited about. I also co-edit the biannual speculative fiction magazine Translunar Travelers Lounge. Our third issue just came out on August 15.

—

You can find Bennett North at…

Website: bennettnorth.com/
Twitter: @BennettNorth
Translunar Travelers Lounge: translunartravelerslounge.com/

“A Bridge from Sea to Sky” appears in the July/August 2020 issue of F&SF.

Order a copy of this issue…

Paper: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

Ebook: https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-july-august-2020/

 
…or subscribe and never miss a single story!

Print edition: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/subscribe.htm

Ebook editions:

Weightless Books (all formats and available worldwide): https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-6-issue-subscription/

Amazon US (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZFZ4O8/

Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O

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Interview: Ana Hurtado on “Madre Nuestra, Que Estás en Maracaibo”

by Spilogale Inc. August 18th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

F&SF: How do you describe this story to people?

AH: It’s a short story about redemption, about an unlikely hero, and about how pagan it seems that some Catholics pray to the souls of purgatory. Yesenia, the main character, has failed at her job and at her marriage. She is forced to move back home with her parents. Yesenia fails to move forward with her adult and is now doing what she used to do as a teenager—all of the chores. In the end, she ends up saving her grandmother’s life; the souls Abuela Juana prayed to have come back for her, and Yesenia fights them off.

F&SF: What inspired this story?

AH: According to my aunt who still resides back in Venezuela, my great-grandmother Juana used to pray to the souls stuck in purgatory. I liked imagining these souls manifesting in real life as zombies. The Caribbean is extremely magical, from its environment to its deep colonial history. There’s an unacknowledged wicked side to Catholicism that is brought out with magical realism, and I loved highlighting this in my story. The souls Abuela Juana constantly prayed to are now preying on her; they are monsters who have come back to haunt her. I often think of this religion as monstrous, the way that it was used as a veil for imperialism in Latin America.

F&SF: How is this story personal for you?

AH: The characters of these stories are named after my family back in Venezuela: Matilde after my maternal grandmother, Joaquin after my maternal grandfather from Portugal, and Juana, my maternal great-grandmother. The main character is named Yesenia, after my neighbor in Maracaibo, Venezuela. We are the same age and used to hang out a lot during summers.

It’s a personal story, too, because it’s my way of honoring those little stories that get told while we’re having lunch, or prepping lunch, or washing dishes after lunch—we’re definitely a food-centered culture—and that can be easily glanced over. But the second I heard that my great-grandmother prayed to the dead, I knew there was a story to tell. Like, how creepy and wonderful is that?!

F&SF: We’ve heard that you’ve recently finished a novel based on this story. How did that come about and what does it expand on?

AH: Yes — I have finished now the second draft of my young adult magical realism novel! I’m looking forward to wrapping up the third, and hopefully final draft, and sending it out on queries soon. After finishing this short story, I knew there was so much more I could do with the elements of the Caribbean and the purgatory souls turned zombies. I also wanted to write a book that my little sister, Francis, could’ve enjoyed back when she was in high school.

My novel tells the story of Yesenia (I love that name), a teenage immigrant from Venezuela who now resides in Ecuador, and her first love: a girl named Maria Jose, a ghost who has been roaming around Quito since 1662. The novel interweaves the history of an oppressive hacienda in Ecuador and Caribbean tales of magic to tell the story of a young and impossible first love set in 2007 Quito, Ecuador.

F&SF: Does your writing process vary between short stories and novels?

AH: My MFA thesis was a collection of short stories that explore the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial history of Ecuador, so I’ve always thought of short stories as a way to encapsulate multiple narratives. It just never occurred to me that I could make the big leap from short story writer to novelist. To be honest, I was petrified. How do people do this.

F&SF: What are you working on right now?

AH: Revising, revising, revising. This is such a colossal project to take on. And the craziest thing is I’m drawing out plans for a retelling of a Greek myth that has been on my mind over the course of the summer; I’m thinking it could be a young adult fantasy novel as well.

—

You can find Ana Hurtado at these places…

Website: https://anahurtadoro.wixsite.com/anahurtado
Twitter: @ponciovicario

“Madre Nuestra, Que Estás en Maracaibo” appears in the July/August 2020 issue of F&SF.

Order a copy of this issue…

Paper: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

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Interview: James Morrow on “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 37: The Jawbone”

by Spilogale Inc. August 13th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

F&SF: How do you describe this story to people?

JM: Samson and Delilah, Cecil B. DeMille’s loopy and somewhat disingenuous 1949 movie adaptation of the famous Bible story, will always enjoy a warm spot in my heart and a soft spot in my head. With “The Jawbone” I tried to give readers something like the opposite of a guilty pleasure—call it a rollicking discomfort. It’s all about the depressing historical continuity between Samson’s consecrated jawbone and Wayne LaPierre’s sanctified assault rifles.

F&SF: You wrote several Bible Stories for Adults back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. What made you decide to return to the series now, more than twenty-five years later?

JM: During the interval since I published my last adult Bible story, “The Soap Opera” of 1992 (the subject was Job’s ordeal), the world’s power elites exploited the planet’s sacred texts as never before. Their slogan seems to be “better living through theocracy.”

I’m thinking of the ascent of Islamic fundamentalism, Vladimir Putin’s exploitation of the Orthodox Church’s proclivity for bigotry, and, of course, the enthusiasm of American evangelicals for the Republican Party’s bottomless malice. So I decided to reboot my Bible stories project. It can’t be said too often: our holy books are wholly human, and it’s utter folly to privilege them in our efforts to forge a more just society. You can’t argue with revelation, of course, but I’m going to try anyway

Also, there were certain Bible stories that I couldn’t get an angle on 28 years ago, but now I think I have.

F&SF: Calling these “Bible Stories for Adults” is deliberately provocative. What kind of reaction are you trying to provoke in readers?

JM: There must be a thousand books out there that employ bowdlerization and mendacity in the name of making Bible stories accessible to children. The joke is that, when it comes to issues of morality, decency, and knowledge, many of these narratives are already about as childish as you can imagine.

It’s worth remembering, for example, that the run-up to the Good Samaritan (which certainly has a noble sentiment at its core) finds Jesus pronouncing a fiery and murderous curse on the supposedly irredeemable towns of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum. While the Gospels have much to offer, I would argue that the personality of their protagonist seems pretty unstable.

It occurs to me that all of my adult Bible stories turn on a challenge to myself. Show me a narrative from Scripture, and I’ll retell it in a way that either foregrounds its puerility or maps it onto some contemporary fashion in cruelty.

F&SF: What were the challenges of writing “The Jawbone”?

JM: The same challenges that confront me whenever I start grinding my ax on the theme of reason versus revelation. How do I stay ahead of an audience that already more-or-less agrees with me? How can I get this thought experiment to yield genuine surprises, as opposed to the superficial satisfactions of watching straw men disintegrate? How do I keep the reader from saying, “Hey, Jim, maybe it’s time to leave God alone”?

When I sat down to write “The Jawbone,” all I had in mind was deconstructing the Samson story, drawing largely on the nonfictional comeuppance he receives in Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, and Morality. I assumed I would simply foreground the atrocities and absurdities in which Samson indulges.

But then I realized the hero’s cudgel could be used to satirize America’s gun fetish, and I was home free. The challenge was to keep the thing from becoming on the nose, as they say in Hollywood. Whenever I hit on a conceit like “the National Retailers of Assbones,” I made a point of throwing the gag away and not repeating it.

F&SF: Can you talk a bit about your writing process in general?

JM: For all the unsavory dimensions of Western civilization, I’m always prepared to celebrate the 18th-century Enlightenment’s insistence on unfettered, open-ended discussion when it comes to religious, political, and scientific matters. As a philosopher remarks in my as-yet-unpublished novel, Lazarus is Waiting, “I never met an idea I didn’t like.” She hastens to add that she’s met many ideas she detested—but each nevertheless helped her to hone her intellect.

I feel privileged that the gods have let me work within the medium of science fiction, the literature of ideas. I love taking grand philosophical and scientific speculations and reimagining them as fictive thought experiments.

F&SF: What are you working on now?

JM: A new Bible story, of course!

I’ve always been bothered by the incoherence of the Sodom and Gomorrah narrative. Yahweh in his generosity has promised Abraham that the presence of only ten righteous people in Sodom would deter him from exterminating the entire population. But we never see the deity or the patriarch actually performing the calculation.

Instead, the rest of the negotiations happen offstage, if they happen at all, and a great opportunity for suspense is wasted. My version, I hope, will give the situation its due. My working title is “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 24: the Twin Cities.”

—

You can find James Morrow at these places…

Website: http://www.jamesmorrow.info/
Twitter: @jimmorrow11

“Bible Stories for Adults, No. 37: The Jawbone” appears in the July/August 2020 issue of F&SF.

Order a copy of this issue…

Paper: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

Ebook: https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-july-august-2020/

 
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Interview: Mel Kassel on “Crawfather”

by Spilogale Inc. August 12th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

F&SF: How do you describe “Crawfather” to people?

MK: “Crawfather” is one of my favorite titles I’ve ever assigned to a work, so sometimes I let it stand by itself and invite curiosity. Otherwise, I’m pretty literal about it: it’s a story about a Minnesotan family that fights a giant crawfish every year during their reunion.

F&SF: What were some of the things that inspired this story?

MK: So many of the stories I’m working on right now are about the conjoined appeal and danger of unquestioned ritual. Family, in particular, is a petri dish for arbitrary and often harmful ceremony. I wanted to interrogate longstanding family traditions, ideas of monstrosity, and generational divides in thinking.

The setting and some of the broader family attributes are borrowed from the annual trips my own family would take to Minnesota every year when I was young. Each little subdivision of my mother’s relatives would stay in its own cabin, and we’d gather to swim and fish and eat.

Gradually, I came to realize that we were the odd cabin out—we didn’t share the same fundamental worldview as the rest of the family. And as that schism became more and more clear, I became increasingly baffled by what seemed like their blanket opposition to change and newness. I wanted to try on that collective stubborn voice as it was confronted with a more extreme version of change.

I also just love crustaceans! They’re old and hardy and bristling with all these great appendages.

F&SF: Once you have all those pieces of inspiration, what’s your writing process like?

MK: I drafted this story at Clarion in the summer of 2018, so I only had a week to write it, but it was the most enjoyable bout of writing I had there. This was my “fun” story, one with a ridiculous conceit and a slightly atypical POV, so I just leaned into the novelty and humor of it. Creating specific family members for one-off appearances was entertaining—Hank (the childless accountant) is a favorite. Having the setting fully-formed in my mind also made the first draft breezier than normal.

I’m someone who edits as they go, which means I end up with polished beginnings and (very) rough endings. It took a while for me to clarify exactly how Nancy and Archie would take on the Crawfather, and how the rest of the family would react.

F&SF: Last year you won the World Fantasy Award for “Ten Deals with the Indigo Snake” (published in the Oct 2018 issue of Lightspeed Magazine). What was that like, and has it changed anything for your career?

MK: It was so wonderful to receive that award, and I was especially delighted to share it with fellow winner Emma Törzs. This is perhaps an obnoxious thing to say, but I earnestly didn’t expect it—I was at a screening of “The Lighthouse” in Iowa City while the ceremony was happening in California. I’d read the stories by the other nominees and been so impressed. I figured I’d just check the results after the movie and be content with the nomination. Instead, I had to quickly toggle from anxious bewilderment at the film to surprise and excitement at the win.

I view it as a lovely personal marker. I want my first story collection to have a grab-bag of cross-genre credits, and the award gets me closer to that goal.

F&SF: What are you working on now?

MK: Theoretically, I’m revising the group of stories that will become my first collection, and gathering notes for a novel. It’s a new frontier for me, this much revision and note-taking—it’s hard and I don’t like it. I’m also preparing to teach an undergraduate class on writing and reading fantasy fiction in the fall, which I’m looking forward to very much.

—

You can find Mel Kassel at these places…

Website: http://melkassel.com/
Twitter: @MelKassel

“Crawfather” appears in the July/August 2020 issue of F&SF.

Order a copy of this issue…

Paper: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

Ebook: https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-july-august-2020/

 
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Interview: David Erik Nelson on “All Hail the Pizza King and Bless His Reign Eternal”

by Spilogale Inc. August 7th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

F&SF: How do you describe this story to people? We mean, besides just telling them the title and letting that speak for you.

DEN: Oh, man, I’m terrible at synopsizing my stories; that’s the whole reason I formulate titles like this.

That said, when I hear folks talk about this story, they mostly characterize it as something like “a tricky pizza demon story” or “there’s a hellmouth in a pizza oven”—and then quickly add “it sounds ridiculous, but it works!”

That’s nice of them to say, but I don’t think of it that way really. In my head, this is a story about sisters, and about all the crap jobs that fall to women. I saw Joseph Chilton Pearce speak once, back when I was still a teacher, and he said something that’s stuck with me ever since: “Men are powerful, but women are immensely, immensely strong.” So this story is about that, too: About the difference between power and strength. To me at least. Probably I should listen to my readers: It’s a pizza demon story—that sounds ridiculous, but it works!

(As an aside, my current goal is to sell you a story that has a whole other story embedded in the title. I’m getting closer, Charlie. I’m gonna get there, sooner or later.)

F&SF: What made you decide to write this story right now?

DEN: I didn’t. I actually wrote this back in early 2018, completing the draft in just two weeks (which is maybe a record for me). But it didn’t really become the story it is now until late that year. I listened to every word of Christine Blasey Ford’s congressional testimony—which included her detailed account of being sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh (who now sit on the US Supreme Court) when they were teens. I was in the kitchen, puttering, and something she said somewhere in the middle of her testimony stopped me dead, because it was a near perfect poem just as she spoke it. A poem like that, one spoken accidentally, hits you like lightning. It stops your heart. I wrote it down right then:

Indelible in the hippocampus
is the laughter,
the laughter,
the uproarious laughter
between the two,
and their having fun
at my expense.

And that’s when I understood what this story was really all about. It was a different story after I heard that poem, and so I rewrote it to be that story. The real monster isn’t the Pizza King and it isn’t Kip—it’s the two boys in that woman’s testimony, who appear in my story only briefly as the boot-grinding, laughing jackals in Lissa’s moment of clarity.

F&SF: What were the challenges of writing this particular story?

DEN: I feel like most of the content of this story is plagiarized from reality: Kip’s crime is basically lifted from the headlines (his real name was Kevin “Kip” Artz, of Jackson MI), the Pizza King is the Nain Rouge (more or less), and many details—names, phrases, cars, clothes, physical descriptions—are what my sister has characterized as “family-lore easter eggs.” The real writing challenge, to me, felt largely schematic: getting all of the details and incidents lined up and compressed properly so that the mechanism driving the story could actually function and folks could follow along. There are a lot of patient, patient people out there (yourself included) who gave me feedback I sorely needed in order to get this hooptie running.

F&SF: This is your fourth story for F&SF (the previous ones are “The Traveling Salesman Solution,” “There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House,” and “Whatever Comes After Calcutta”). All of them have disturbing or unsettling elements, even when they’re not straight up horror. What’s the appeal or fascination with that mode of writing for you?

DEN: I’ve always loved horror. When I was small, I was equal parts fascinated and terrified by Schwartz’s original Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I read my first Stephen King novel at 11 years old. The first stories I wrote were horror stories, as were the first ones I actually sold. I’ve tried going other directions in my writing, but despite what I thought, I never got far (e.g., I didn’t know “The Traveling Salesman Solution” was a horror story until I saw it pop up on Ellen Datlow’s recommended reading list for one of her Best Horror of the Year anthos). Nonetheless, I couldn’t have said why I was I was so drawn to horror until last year, when I saw Midsommar. This was the last film my wife and I saw in an actual theater. She didn’t much care for it, but I loved it, and in trying to explain to her why, I suddenly realized why I was so tangled up with horror:

Horror is the place where we most honestly explore how it is we respond to trauma. Some folks come through trauma—and are even stronger for it (all those “final girls.”) But many do not. Many are broken by what hits them. Even killed. And most of our art lies about this simple, brutal fact. Drama, romance, SF, comedy—even history!—feed (and feed off of) our optimism bias. “It won’t happen to me! I’ll come out OK! I’m one of the good ones, the strong ones, the Righteous Among the Wicked!”

Horror, in all of its over-the-top ridiculous histrionics, plays it straight in that one regard: It actually looks right into the eyes of the Worst Possible Outcome—the mass graves, the ovens, the lonely ditches, the morgues, the hospital beds, the single table setting, the blood in the gutter. And yet still, even looking in that grim place, it still shows us all the way folks cope and resist and fight, clawing their way back up for another gasp of air. They all find their way to the end, one way or another. I love the final girl, truth told. But I love the schlimazel that gets the axe in the head in the second scene, too.

I didn’t get all that just from watching Midsommar, of course (although it’s all there; that’s a helluva movie, in my humble). But it was in defending Midsommar, and thinking of the horror that had most sung to me over the last several years, that I realized why it was that I kept coming back to that well. Other stories that paved the way for me to see this in myself include the films A Dark Song; As Above, So Below; The Endless; and The Babadook; and Daryl Gregory’s excellent novella “We Are All Completely Fine.”

F&SF: What are you working on now?

DEN: The usual stuff: a music producer with special-needs son blunders into Lake Michigan cult, Jewish girl gone bad is pursued through forest by a church full of tentacles, skinheads demand their magic Torah back—all the old cliches.

—

You can find David Erik Nelson at these places…

Website: https://www.davideriknelson.com/
Twitter: @SquiDaveo

“All Hail the Pizza King and Bless His Reign Eternal” appears in the July/August 2020 issue of F&SF.

Order a copy of this issue…

Paper: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

Ebook: https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-july-august-2020/

 
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Interview: Rati Mehrotra on “Knock Knock, Said the Ship”

by Spilogale Inc. August 4th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

F&SF: How do you describe this story to people?

RM: I say it’s a story about how a super cool ship AI and a refugee save their captain and crew from murderous space pirates. If that’s not enough to hook them, I add that there are multiple knock knock jokes, all told by the ship.

F&SF: What made you decide to write “Knock Knock, Said the Ship”?

RM: It’s the child of a story I wrote a few years earlier. That one didn’t quite work, but it gave me the bones to build this one. I had the world and the characters in my mind for a long time. The basic plot developed from Deenu’s refugee background. But mainly, I wrote this story because I couldn’t resist the ship AI’s attempts at humor. Those jokes just demanded to be written. And the ship is someone I would personally love to meet.

F&SF: How was this story personal to you?

RM: Kaalratri, the name of the ship, is one of the nine forms of the Goddess Durga. The name literally means ‘darkest night’. She is regarded as a fierce form of the mother goddess, who chases away evil and destroys fear and ignorance in her devotees. I grew up hearing stories of the mother goddess, and it is this reference which makes the story most personal to me. I like to think of the ship as a protective and powerful, if not wholly understandable, mother figure – much like the goddess herself.

F&SF: Deenu and the ship have a great relationship and it must have been a lot of fun to write their dialogue. But what were the challenges of writing this story?

RM: Yes, I think I’ve had more fun writing this story than any other. My main challenge was giving a satisfying resolution to the plot. I had this great set-up, but it took a while to figure out how I could wrap it up in a way that felt deserved and natural.

F&SF: Can you talk a bit about your writing process?

RM: It varies. I am capable of writing five thousand words in a day when inspiration strikes – or when I have a deadline, which is its own kind of inspiration. I can also go weeks without writing a single word. I don’t like to plan ahead too much. I am definitely a pantser, not a plotter. This means that I often have to go back and revise or delete what I’ve written earlier. It’s not a very efficient way of writing, but it’s the only one that works for me. Once I have a complete draft, I’ll set it aside for a few days, re-read and revise, then request beta reads. Once I have feedback, I’ll revise it again. Only then will I submit the story to a market.

F&SF: What are you working on now?

RM: I’ve just finished the draft of a YA fantasy novel based in medieval India that I’m very excited about. It’s full of monsters and mayhem! Fingers crossed I get to share it with the world one day.

—

You can find Rati Mehrotra at:

Blog: https://ratiwrites.com/
Twitter: @Rati_Mehrotra
HarperCollins: https://www.harpercollins.com/blogs/authors/rati-mehrotra

“Knock Knock, Said the Ship” appears in the July/August 2020 issue of F&SF.

Order a copy of this issue…

Paper: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

Ebook: https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-july-august-2020/

 
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Interview: John Kessel on “Spirit Level”

by Spilogale Inc. July 30th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

F&SF: How do you describe “Spirit Level” to people?

JK: A ghost story where the ghosts are not necessarily the spirits of the dead. It’s meant to work within and against the tropes of classic ghost stories. Another way to think of it is as a story about trying to find a way to live beyond the regrets that haunt anyone who lasts into middle age.

F&SF: What inspired this story?. How is “Spirit Level” personal for you?

JK: In some ways it’s one of the most personal stories I’ve ever written. I have certain points of biographical contact with Michael, and have felt some of the things he has felt, though Michael is not me and his situation is not mine.

I started it nine or ten years ago, wrote a lot of words, then put it aside for many years. I had the character’s situation, but did not really know what the consequences after his initial ghostly encounter might be. In a way I wrote it as a warning to and critique of my younger self.

F&SF: We don’t want to spoil any aspects of the plot, but this takes several unexpected turns for a type of ghost story. What were the challenges of writing this particular story?

JK: I thought about the kinds of things one usually finds in ghost stories and then about what I might do a little differently. I can’t claim to any grand innovations, but it was fun to try my hand at a kind of story that I had never written. I wanted it to have some of the eeriness of classic ghost stories like Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” or “The Jolly Corner,” and like James use the ghosts to explore the character’s psychology.

F&SF: How has your writing process changed over the years?

JK: I don’t plan everything out quite as much as I used to before I start. This means I sometimes wander off into blind alleys and don’t always know what the story is about until I am well into it. It’s not as efficient a way to write, but the results are interesting to me; I eventually figure out all that I need and then can pull the pieces together. The shape of the story emerges more organically than it used to. This involves a lot more rewriting, but I enjoy rewriting until I get a story right.

Lately I have been returning to stories I started in the past but could not finish—something I almost never did earlier in my career—and have discovered that I see them better now. It goes a lot slower, but I’m okay with that.

F&SF: What are you working on right now?

JK: I’m writing a novella, a prequel of sorts to the novella you have already from me, “The Dark Ride.” “The Dark Ride” takes place at a world’s fair, the Pan-American Exposition, that took place in Buffalo, NY in 1901. In that story one plot thread deals with a “Trip to the Moon” fair ride that was inspired by H.G. Wells’s novel “First Men in the Moon.”

This new story takes place a year earlier, in England, during the period when Wells wrote “First Men in the Moon.” It involves other writers such as Stephen Crane and Henry James, with whom Wells was friends, and with Wells switching from writing scientific romances to becoming a public advocate for socialism and what some have called the first futurist.

I hope to write a third novella, set a year after “The Dark Ride,” in 1902, about the French film pioneer Georges Méliès creating his famous movie, “A Trip to the Moon,” which draws elements from both Wells’s novel and from the Pan-Am Expo fair ride.

I hope this tryptich of novellas will eventually make a book.

—

You can find John Kessel at these places:

Simon & Schuster: https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/John-Kessel/2098446902
John Kessel’s website: https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website
His Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/john.kessel3

“Spirit Level” appears in the July/August 2020 issue of F&SF.

Order a copy of this issue…

Paper: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

Ebook: https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-july-august-2020/

 
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Interview: Madeleine E. Robins on “‘Omunculus”

by Spilogale Inc. July 15th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

F&SF: How do you describe this story to people?

MER: A Pygmalion/RUR mashup with no romance. I think George Bernard Shaw would approve.

 
F&SF: What inspired you to mix Pygmalion with R.U.R., and how did you bring those pieces together to write this story?

MER: I think it began after having a discussion with one of my daughters about the shared responsibility of teachers to teach and learners to learn. Teaching isn’t just a matter of opening a student’s head and pouring the information in—but that appealingly robotic image may have been what started me thinking about the story. After all, Henry Higgins, egoist that he is, believes that all the effort is his; even the flesh and blood Eliza in Pygmalion is a prop in his experiment, rather than a partner in learning. Henry Higgins does not do partners (Col. Pickering, in the original, and Rossum, in “’Omunculus,” are merely higher-status props in Higgins’ story). So I’ve got Henry Higgins and an automaton, which meant, me being me, that I would have to hook Higgins up with Rossum (a character who doesn’t exist in Câpek’s play). Pygmalion debuted in 1913; R.U.R. in 1920, so I figured my story takes place before Rossum improved his automata and sold the business to the characters in R.U.R. With the two of them—and Eliza—in place, the rest while not precisely easy, was pretty much laid out for me by the structure of GBS’ play.

The other thing that appealed to me was that there is no possibility of a Higgins-Eliza pairing if Eliza is a robot (it’s not that kind of story). I could go back to Shaw’s original material with a clear conscience (I yield to none in my fondness for My Fair Lady, but GBS was adamant that Higgins and Eliza did not wind up together). Since there’s no chance of a Freddie Eynsford-Hill and Eliza romance either (really not that kind of story) that left me free to come up with an ending that also made use of those two redoubtables, Mrs. Higgins and Mrs. Pearce. I have a serious soft spot for tough old broads, no matter how well mannered.

 
F&SF: Besides the soft spot for tough old broads, is there anything in this story that’s personal for you?

MER: I’m sure there is… I suspect that most women have had the experience of being underestimated and undervalued by a man who saw them as a prop in his story. I would not say this is revenge—I am not the vengeful sort. But I am human, and writing the scene in the theatre where Eliza breaks down—intentionally? Not intentionally?—was very satisfying.

 
F&SF: How has your writing process changed over the years?

MER: I’m still either glacially slow or fairly rapid—it doesn’t seem to matter what the text is: some pieces just drag me along and some require unearthing. What hasn’t changed is that while I know the emotional destination I’m heading for I often have no idea how I’m going to get there until I look around and Hey! Presto! there I am.

I never used to outline, but these days on most projects I almost always get to a point about two thirds in, where I realize I need at the very least to make notes on what has to happen and in what order. I’m also a lot more comfortable writing what I’d call placeholder text when I cannot nail down the exact phrase or word I want. Making myself crazy trying to nail the mot juste for a first draft is a form of procrastination; better to plough ahead and come back and fix things in the edit, as my recording-engineer partner says. I’m also much more aware of the sensory surroundings of my characters than I was as a younger writer—I think that came, in part, from a work-for-hire gig writing a Marvel novel staring Daredevil, who is blind but whose other senses are heightened. Since I couldn’t describe anything visually, I had to think of what the smells, and textures, and tastes were. It was a great experience.

Oh: and in the very beginning I wrote sitting crosslegged with my typewriter on my knees (it was a Selectric, and weighed the earth). Nowadays I write on a laptop and while I still sit crosslegged, my knees are happier.

 
F&SF: What are you and your happier knees working on now?

MER: A fourth in my Sarah Tolerance alternate-Regency detective series (Point of Honor, Petty Treason, and The Sleeping Partner—all three can be found here), with a fifth beginning to distract me, which is not helpful. Also a fantasy novel set in contemporary San Francisco. And a challenge short story for my writing workshop. Sewing cloth masks for donation. And just at the moment, a loaf of sourdough bread. I am a Covid-cliche.

I have nothing coming out right now (see “glacially slow” above), but I am blogging at Treehousewriters.com, as well as at my own website, madeleinerobins.com.

—

“‘Omunculus” appears in the July/August 2020 issue of F&SF.

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Interview: Richard Bowes on “In the Eyes of Jack Saul”

by Spilogale Inc. June 30th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

Tell us a bit about “In the Eyes of Jack Saul.”

“In the Eyes of Jack Saul” is an amalgamation of Victorian fiction and reality. Jack Saul was a real person and served, at one point, in a male brothel that was visited by several elites including Prince Albert Victor, grandson of Queen Victoria, for whom the era is named. The fictional inclusion was Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Dorian Grey”, seen through the eyes of Jack Saul, as real a figure as the gay world has ever produced.

What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?

The Rent Boys and Mary-Ann’s in somewhat different circumstances appeared throughout my life. As a kid in Boston I realized that I wasn’t like the other boys. I sought out the attention of other men and found myself in situations not unlike Jack Saul’s. Later when I became a writer, I discovered that these experiences grabbed me above all else.

Was “In the Eyes of Jack Saul” personal to you in any way?  If so, how?

Gay material was fairly uncommon when I began writing stories like this one. People didn’t imagine there was much of a crossover between historical and gay stories. I knew it was working because it captivated me.

Can you tell us anything about your writing process, for this story or in general?

My writing process is this: I get an idea, I jump on it until I strangle it to death.

Why do you write?

It’s a bad habit, one I find hard to break.

Who do you consider to be your influences?

Many people write, I steal from my influencers. It gives me a jumping off place to begin my own stories.

What are you working on now?

Something I am calling “My Old Inner Life”. What that may amount to, I have yet to find out.

“In the Eyes of Jack Saul” appears in the May/June 2020 issue of F&SF.

You can buy a paper copy of the issue here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

You can buy an electronic copy of the issue here: https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-may-june-2020/

You can subscribe to the print edition of F&SF here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/subscribe.htm

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Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O

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Interview: Robert Reed on “Who Carries the World”

by Spilogale Inc. June 23rd, 2020

Tags: Interviews

“Who Carries the World” appears in the May/June issue of F&SF.

You can buy a paper copy of the issue here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

You can buy an electronic copy of the issue here: https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-may-june-2020/

You can subscribe to the print edition of F&SF here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/subscribe.htm

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Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O

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Interview: Rebecca Zahabi on “Birds Without Wings”

by Spilogale Inc. June 16th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

Tell us a bit about “Birds Without Wings.”

Zoe is hitch-hiking across Spain with her boyfriend Alex – but as the story progresses, they are separated along the road, and we discover that there are shifters in the country, fake people which can replace your loved ones, and you would never know… The story progresses from that premise. I can’t tell you more without spoilers! It’s a story about love and change, and life on the road.

What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?

I’ve lived with my partner for 7 years now, and of course we’ve both changed during that time. When I started writing this story, I was wondering – why does our love feel special? Lots of couples separate. There is no good reason to believe we won’t too, in time. To me, that is a frightening thought: the fact that what we have spent so much time building together, trust and love, can be overturned. That love, as well as people, can die. So I started playing with that idea: what if he changed – what if I changed? We weren’t the same people we were when we met. We could change again, and change more. What if he looked the same, spoke the same, was still the person I loved – but what made me love him had been taken away?

Of course in this story, the change is more than simply growing apart, or growing up; but I think it comes from the same place, this fear that we won’t recognise the people we love.

Was “Birds Without Wings” personal to you in any way?  If so, how?

As I’ve said, I was writing from a personal place when I started this story. Aside from that, I’ve done the same trip as Zoe – the Santiago pilgrimage, picking the path across the North of Spain. When I was 18, I went hiking for a month, stopping in a different inn or youth hostel every night. I walked through the South of France, reached the border, and crossed over to the Northern Camino, which I followed until Bilbao, where I turned back. I didn’t do any hitch-hiking – I walked all the way – and I was alone, but it was an interesting setting which I wanted to put in a story. And it really did pour down with rain the whole time!

In this story and in your previous one for F&SF, “It Never Snows in Snowtown,” a recurring theme in your work seems to be the idea that evil lurks beneath the surface of people and places we trust.  Can you talk about this at all?

I think we take a lot for granted – the people around us, modern comforts such as food, heating, transport, etc. And we don’t spend much time worrying about what would happen if we lose it, because it feels so set in stone. But as we’ve seen with this pandemic, not everything is set in stone; people, and circumstances, can change quickly, leaving us treading quicksand. I think that’s why I often wonder what evil, or darkness, can lurk beneath the surface. Sometimes it was always there but we didn’t see it – like in It Never Snows in Snowtown – and sometimes it appears – like in Birds Without Wings.

Why do you write?

That’s a difficult question! For lots of reasons. Because I can’t not write; the voices whispering in my ear want to be heard. Because I believe (and I hope I’m not wrong!) that I have something useful to say. But mostly because we need stories: they change and shape our mindscape, and our mindscape changes and shapes the world. 

Anything else you’d like to add?

I hope readers enjoy the story and, if so, I’ve got an exciting announcement: my début novel, The Game Weavers, is coming out this fall 2020! I mentioned it briefly in the interview for Snowtown, but I can tell you a bit more now. We follow Seo Kuroaku, a champion of Twine, a high-pressure international sport. Played in arenas where thousands come to watch, weavers craft creatures from their fingertips to wage battle against fearsome opponents. But Seo is harbouring a secret. When he is outed, he has to find a way to get his life back on track, whilst facing the biggest match of his life.

Watch this space!

“Birds Without Wings” appears in the May/June 2020 issue of F&SF.

You can buy a paper copy of the issue here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

You can buy an electronic copy of the issue here: https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-may-june-2020/

You can subscribe to the print edition of F&SF here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/subscribe.htm

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Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O

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Interview: Holly Messinger on “Byzantine”

by Spilogale Inc. June 9th, 2020

Tags: Interviews

Tell us a bit about “Byzantine.”

I call it a gay demon romance set during the Siege of Constantinople. I wanted to play with the “deal-with-the-devil” trope, to figure out why a demon might enter into a bargain with a human in the first place, and who might come out ahead in such a deal? For self-indulgent writerly reasons I set that story against the historical backdrop of the Conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire in 1453.

 

What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?

“Byzantine” is the origin story of a villain, and I’d been composting it for a while—I had the characters in mind, I just needed to find them a setting with the appropriate grandiose background. This isn’t a Bond-type villain who has grand plans for taking over the world; he’s a pure sociopath, but clever enough to keep the world from noticing how much destructive potential he has. I wanted to explore the motivations of such a villain, and I needed to set that against the stage of major world events, to illustrate how the struggles of kings, especially in the name of faith, can outshine the predatory or indifferent acts of evil that take place in the shadows.

 

Can you tell us about any of the research you may have done for “Byzantine?”

I initially chose the Conquest of Constantinople somewhat at random, because I needed the backdrop of a long siege with plenty of carnage, but once I started doing research I became fascinated by the military history, the politics of the world stage at the time, and the character of Mehmet II, who was a bleeding genius and probably a sociopath himself (this was a guy who had his baby brother drowned in the bath while his father’s body was still warm). He ended up being a magnificent foil for the antihero of my story, because both of them are dudes whose inner lives will never be known, only inferred from their actions and the myths they create of themselves. And maybe when a guy succeeds in conquering the world, the myth he writes of why he did it is probably not that inaccurate.

 

Was there any aspect of this story you found difficult to write?

Honestly, this one came together so easily I kept second-guessing myself, thinking it wasn’t going to work: that it was a cheat to use actual history for the backbone of the plot and I was just writing my own fanfic. And both those things may be true but it doesn’t mean the story can’t work on its own machinery. I wasn’t sure until the next-to-last scene whether it would come together, but a writer’s subconscious is a marvelous thing. Once I got to that “Aha!” moment—or as I prefer to call it, the “Oh, shit!” moment—I could see the whole architecture of the thing and it was solid.

 

Can you tell us anything about your writing process for this story?

I’ve been deep in the historical fantasy trench for a while now and I’ve kind of developed a pattern. I write the beginning of the story, get the setting, characters, and hook in place. Then I step back for a bit, do some research, make sure I have a feel for the setting and the worldbuilding. Often then I will write the ending, or what I think will be the ending, just to stake out the emotional arcs and/or the plot backbone. After that it’s advance, survey, research; lather, rinse, repeat until I get to the climax. “Byzantine” was so dependent on actual events, and the events themselves were so jaw-droppingly cool, it was more a matter of deciding what I was going to leave out. At the two-thirds mark in the story there was a turning point I knew needed to happen in my character arc, and I had to find an event during the siege that I could turn to my purpose. And that’s sort of my process in a nutshell—finding those parts of history I can exploit to serve my story.

 

Why do you write?

I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t invent stories. I remember being 7 or 8 years old, watching Wonderful World of Disney and suddenly understanding how plot worked. I wanted to write a sequel to The Apple Dumpling Gang. I went to first grade the following Monday and stapled together a little booklet in which to write my opus, and the teacher took it away from me because I wasn’t doing my seatwork. That set the pattern for my school and work life to date.

 

What are you working on now?

I just wrapped up the rewrites for my second Jacob Tracy novel, Curious Weather. Hopefully the pandemic won’t delay its release too badly. Ironically a major subplot of that novel has to do with creating a vaccine for a deadly magical contagion. Next up is a novel about Trace’s pal Boz and his adventures. Werewolves, Chinese coal miners, and worship of money-demons feature heavily in that one.

“Byzantine” appears in the May/June 2020 issue of F&SF.

You can buy a paper copy of the issue here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm

You can buy an electronic copy of the issue here: https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-may-june-2020/

You can subscribe to the print edition of F&SF here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/subscribe.htm

You can subscribe to the electronic edition of F&SF at the following links:

Weightless Books (all formats): https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-6-issue-subscription/

Amazon US (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZFZ4O8/

Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O

Visit Holly Messinger’s website: www.hollymessinger.com

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