Interview: Debbie Urbanski on “How to Kiss a Hojacki”
Tags: InterviewsTell us a bit about “How to Kiss a Hojacki.”
I think the story’s intro in F&SF sums up the piece perfectly: it is a story about transformations. If I needed to elaborate, I would say it’s a story that examines how transformations affect our relationships and our ideas about love, especially when only one person in a relationship is being transformed.
What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
Like most people, I’ve been following all the #MeToo stories these past years, and what I’ve found missing in the ongoing discussion is the questioning of coercive sex and certain power dynamics in committed relationships. What is owed to a partner or a spouse? Does marriage or commitments make certain behaviors more acceptable? I wanted to probe these questions and maybe open up the discussion a little.
Was “How to Kiss a Hojacki” personal to you in any way? If so, how?
I used to have a very idealistic notion of love, believing that love would expand and change along with the people involved in it. As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that of course there are limitations to most people’s love. Some changes in our partners are seen as acceptable, some aren’t. Sometimes we fall in love with a certain version of a partner and that might not be an accurate version. So when that person we love changes into who they really are, there can be accusations, feelings of betrayal, and a suggestion of a denial of self. When we love someone, do we love the actual real person, the authentic center of them, or do we love who we think they are? After some difficult years in a complicated relationship, I felt it was time to examine all this stuff in a story.
Was there any aspect of this story that you found difficult to write?
In earlier drafts I wrote what I felt was an accurate portrayal of the husband Michael, but the first readers I shared this story with advised that his thoughts were too extreme. Part of me was like, “But some people actually think like that! Someone really said those things!” But sometimes real isn’t true I suppose, so I spent some time dialing back and restraining the voice.
What would you want a reader to take away from “How to Kiss a Hojacki?”
Really, I’m fine with whatever the reader finds in this story to keep with them. I acknowledge it may be a difficult story to read so kudos to the reader for choosing to engage with it. But here’s my dream takeaway. Let’s consider the possibility of treating other people’s revelations about themselves, and other people’s discoveries about who they really are, with kindness and celebration and love and acceptance whenever possible. And let’s consider expanding our definition of what a committed relationship/marriage looks like. Actually let’s consider getting rid of a rigid definition altogether and let whoever is in that relationship define it fluidly themselves.
Why do you write?
I started writing in part because I couldn’t find my particular perspective or my particular life in books. But I have always loved the process of writing too, the discovery and creation and the revision. Also I’ve found the act of writing a story helps me understand or work through events going on in my life. Writing gives me a safe place to play out my own thought experiments and see what happens.
Who do you consider to be your influences?
I’ll look to the authors and books I love and keep rereading. Shirley Jackson, Alice Munro, Hilary Mantel, Ursula LeGuin, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Grapes of Wrath, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song for starters. The Wall by Marlen Haushofer showed me speculative fiction, even apocalyptical fiction, can be quiet and slow and still gripping. That was a happy and important revelation. Also I’m grateful to my dad for giving me a thorough introduction to old horror and sci-fi films when I was a kid. A 16mm print of Night of the Living Dead was one of the first movies I remember watching. After that it was The Blob, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The Mummy, some movie about flying brains, Them!, and so forth. He taught me to watch (and read) widely, to ignore genre distinctions, and to find something to engage with in all sorts of stories.
What are you working on now?
I recently finished my first novel so I plan to enjoy writing some short stories for the near future. Currently I’m working on a political alternate reality story and I’m also playing around with mashing together horror and creative non-fiction.
“How to Kiss a Hojacki” appears in the May/June 2019 issue of F&SF.
You can buy a copy of the issue here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc1905.htm
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 (non-Kindle): https://weightlessbooks.com/category/publisher/spilogale-inc/
Amazon US (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZFZ4O8/
Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O
Debbie Urbanski’s website: debbieurbanski.com
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Interview: Tobias S. Buckell on “Apocalypse Considered through a Helix of Semiprecious Foods and Recipes”
Tags: Interviews
Tell us a bit about “Apocalypse Considered through a Helix of Semiprecious Foods and Recipes.”
It’s a set of futures examined through the lens of food and its importance to both us and the societies we create. Food is something our worlds revolve around, even when we don’t pay attention to it. How it is sourced and what that means is interesting to me.
What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
I was listening to author Sofia Samatar talk about story structure at an event. She mentioned that a story could be told as a recipe, as an example of how you could use an existing structure, and I penned the first section of the story out on paper right there and then: a family putting together the recipe for pancakes in a post-apocalyptic future in a piecemeal way.
Was this story personal to you in any way? If so, how?
I grew up food insecure, so I am fascinated by how much for granted many take the massive stores around them. I’m sometimes paralyzed by the choices or overwhelmed by it all. Even at a small grocer I can get stuck in the cereal aisle. And sometimes, the way I grew up, I see it portrayed in fiction as if it is the apocalypse.
I still remember reading the Army Survival Guide and hitting a section under tropical survival where it said that many of the fruits and vegetables I grew up loving were to be eaten only if facing starvation. Then I read a chance comment by an activist online (I wish I could remember who so I could cite, but it was a twitter comment that resurfaced in my brain) from an under-invested community that pointed out that many of the things people considered features of horribly dystopian or post-apocalyptic fiction were things that their communities faced. As a result, they didn’t find dystopian fiction at all fun to watch.
It was a clarifying comment, as I flashed back to reading the Army Survival Manual and realized that is was so true. And that’s when the arc of the story came to me. Four more recipes, each orbiting classic post-apocalyptic stories, all of which we struggle with today, dropped into my lap. I started sketching the story out quickly after that.
Was there any aspect of “Apocalypse Considered…” that you found difficult to write?
The fact that the closing example was so easy to write, I won’t give it away, was difficult.
What would you want a reader to take away from this story?
I try not to hope for anything, I’m just trying to tell a story that landed in my head, to be honest. What they take? That gets created in their mind as they go along. I just hope to entertain, or provoke a feeling, or a thought. Some kind of reaction.
Why do you write?
Because I liked to read. I wanted to be like the authors I read and dream up interesting things and tell stories.
Who do you consider to be your influences?
I used to answer this by making sure to list some interesting classic books and some newer stuff. But, to be honest, it’s a fermenting bubbly mix of old authors who shouldn’t be read anymore that I am trying to reinterpret now that I have some distance, authors who lit me up who were being published a lot when I happened to be in my golden age of reading a ton in my teens, life experience, stuff I am reading right now that I adore, my own aspirations for what I want the field to look like because the influence doesn’t even exist, and a billion pieces of stochastic world awareness filtered through my imperfect lens.
I guess I could say, “be 10 years old and read Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End just after the Revolution and then war in Grenada while listening to calypso on the radio and then try being 15 and reading Octavia Butler’s Wildseed listening to the howling wind in the middle of a hurricane and you have a small taste of my literary pedigree?”
What are you working on now?
My friend Dave Klecha and I are writing a book about a team of marines stuck in a fantasy world when things go wrong. Like Full Metal Jacket meets Game of Thrones. It’s been a lot of fun.
“Apocalypse Considered through a Helix of Semiprecious Foods and Recipes” appears in the May/June 2019 issue of F&SF.
You can buy a copy of the issue here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc1905.htm
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 (non-Kindle): https://weightlessbooks.com/category/publisher/spilogale-inc/
Amazon US (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZFZ4O8/
Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O
Clicking on Mr. Buckell’s photo will take you to his website.
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Interview: Kelly Barnhill on “Thirty-Three Wicked Daughters”
Tags: Interviews
Tell us a bit about “Thirty-Three Wicked Daughters.”
This story is about the numerous daughters of an affable, and often baffled, mostly-good King. The daughters are, both individually and as a group, vigorous and curious women, eager to do good in the world, and too often met with resistance from various entrenched concerns within the kingdom. And they end up finding themselves wedded to grasping and nefarious Barons, without their consent. The story is largely about their resistance to convention, and their efforts to turn the tables on their would-be woo-ers in order to build the sort of kingdom that is, hopefully, more fair, more just and more hopeful than the one they have inherited.
What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
Normally, I would be able to tell you exactly what prompted me to write any given story, but in this case, I honestly don’t know. I simply suddenly found myself writing it. Frankly, I’m as confused as you are. The story itself comes from what’s known as “The Albina Story”, which appears all over the place in early English literature – there’s a reference to it in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, as well as in works by Milton, Wace, Layamon, Holinshed and others. The most complete tellings of the story are in Recuyelle of the Historyes of Troye (a courtly romance written by Raoul Lefevre, and first translated by William Caxton in 1464), Des Grantz Geanz (or On the Great Giants) written anonymously in 1333, and History of the Kings of England, by Gregory of Monmouth in 1136. Now, the purpose of these stories is to tell the history of England, imagined by legend to be populated at first by the wild and wicked progeny of untamed women, only to be eventually defeated by the Trojan heroes Brutus and Corineus. Depending on the version of the Albina story that you’re looking at, there once was a king (or an emperor, or a duke), living in Greece (or Rome, or Troy, or Syria – there is little agreement in these stories on that point), named Diocletian, or Diodicias, take your pick. Now here is where all the stories agree: he had thirty-three wicked daughters who shocked the world with their wanton ways. In order to bring chaste order to presumably sexual chaos, the King orders the daughters to be married to noble Dukes. The daughters, unhappy with this fate, conspire to cut off their new husbands’ heads, and are summarily exiled onto a sail-less, rudderless boat and set adrift at sea, presumably to die. But even here the daughters do not obey orders. Their wandering boat lands on a green island, which the oldest daughter, Albina, names after herself. The island is, at first, inhabited only by incubi and demons, which delight the daughters, who go on to first get busy with their new neighbors, and then birth a nation of giants, who rule Albion until the arrival of the Trojans. Now, obviously, I went in several different directions than the original, but I was fascinated by the ways in which our culture reflexively punishes transgressive women — especially, well-spoken, forceful women who keep showing up even though the world keeps showing them the door, and who speak up even though the world keeps telling them to be quiet. I also wanted to explore the relationships between fathers and daughters, and among sisters, and the ways in which we let people believe wildly untrue things about ourselves because it’s just easier that way sometimes.
Was “Thirty-Three Wicked Daughters” personal to you in any way? If so, how?
Well. Yes? No? Gosh, I don’t know. It was personal to me in the way that every story is personal to me — everything I write comes from this place of vigorous curiosity and prickly questioning. Every story starts at a place of irritation. I can’t remember the first time I ran into the Albina story — probably reading Gregory of Monmouth a million years ago, or maybe it was Spenser. In any case, while I don’t think I’ve ever consciously drawn from my own life with any aspect of my work, it typically resonates with my life in ways that I don’t often anticipate. For example, as a parent of children who are either arriving at, or hurdling towards, their own adulthoods, I sometimes feel like the King in my story — both baffled and delighted at my children who are embracing lives that I can bear witness to and celebrate, but cannot ever truly share or understand. And that is by design: our children never belong to us; they only belong to themselves. Additionally, within this story are aspects of my own frustration with the limits we place on women — discounting their work, downplaying their achievements, erasing their voices. And maybe you might be able to find some echoes to my own interactions with various elements of Men’s Rights Activists over the years. When I write, I never actually think about these things — I only think about the story. It’s only after I’m done that I can find bits and pieces of my life, stitched and woven in, pulled so tight I couldn’t take it out if I tried.
What aspect of this story was the most fun for you to write?
Oh, gosh, are you kidding me? The pigeons, obviously. The pigeons were my favorite, favorite part.
Okay, fine, and the dresses too. And the beads like spiderwebs. And the pick-pocketing children. And the giants, of course.
Why do you write?
Well, mostly because I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life and have been fired from most of them, and I have no other marketable skills. I actually feel pretty grateful that I have a space to write in and time to do it and people willing to read it. I also write because I get agitated, or curious, or restless. I sometimes feel the limitations of my own experience or world or skin or time — it can feel at time like a dress that does not fit, or shoes that pinch the toes. I think the urge to write is the same as the urge to read — it’s that need to have an experience of radical empathy, to live in someone else’s body and point of view for a while. To think as another thinks, and to see as another sees, and to know as another knows. When we write and when we read, we become more than ourselves, and that can feel pretty wonderful.
Who do you consider to be your influences?
Originally? Fairy tales. And Louise Erdrich and Octavia Butler and Diana Wynne Jones, more fairy tales, C.S. Lewis and Tolkein and Baum, more fairy tales, Angela Carter and Borges and Nesbitt, and more fairy tales.
What are you working on now?
Oh, heck. A bunch of stuff. I just sent a story about an Ogress to my agent who will be sending it to my editor, so we’ll see what she thinks. And I attempted to write a short story about a bunch of 1950’s housewives who randomly turn into dragons and devour their husbands (somewhere in the middle of the Kavanaugh hearings, it suddenly became very very important to write an allegory about female rage), but the story accidentally became a novella and that novella is now becoming a novel. And I’m also working on a children’s fantasy about an ex-pirate and a thwarted mathematician and a possibly-sinister alchemist. We’ll see where that one goes. Also I’m writing fairy tales. A whole gaggle of them. We’ll see what I decide to do with those as well.
“Thirty-Three Wicked Daughters” appears in the May/June 2019 issue of F&SF.
You can buy a copy of the issue here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc1905.htm
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 (non-Kindle): https://weightlessbooks.com/category/publisher/spilogale-inc/
Amazon US (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZFZ4O8/
Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O
Click on Ms. Barnhill’s photo to visit her website.
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Interview: Matthew Hughes on “Sternutative Sortilege”
Tags: Interviews
Tell us a bit about “Sternutative Sortilege.”
It’s another episode in the unlucky life of Raffalon, a journeyman thief in a world of wizards and walled cities.
What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
It’s been my practice in recent years to write series of fantasy stories built around a single character who was originally created when Gardner Dozois asked me to write a novelette for one of his anthologies co-edited with George R.R. Martin. Raffalon was the anti-hero of “The Inn of the Seven Blessings,” which appeared in the bestselling antho, ROGUES.
I thought he was too good a character to discard, so I wrote seven more Raffalon stories that appeared in F&SF. I then put them together in a self-published collection (ebook and POD paperback) 9 TALES OF RAFFALON, that ended with the original novelette from the antho. I thought it would be a good idea to add an original story that would entice Raffalon fans to buy the collection. “Sternutative Sortilege” was that sweetener. It also had the merit of connecting the Raffalon who had developed over the course of the F&SF stories with the original character introduced in “The Inn of the Seven Blessings.”
What are you working on now?
Right now I’m rereading Jack Vance’s Demon Princes novels with the aim of making a proposal to Jack’s son, John Vance, about writing a sequel to the original five. I’ve always wondered what would have happened to Kirth Gersen, the hero of the novels, after he tracked down and killed the five master criminals who had destroyed his family and community. Indeed, at the end of the fifth novel, Gersen himself wonders what will become of him now that “his enemies have all deserted” him. So have a lot of Vance fans. Now that John Vance is licensing other authors to write stories set in his father’s worlds, under a publishing program called Paladins of Vance, an answer might finally come. It’s a project I would very much enjoy taking on.
Anything else you’d like to add?
The big thing that’s happening for me this year is the publication of my historical novel, with magical realism/slipstream elements, WHAT THE WIND BRINGS, scheduled for mid-August. The publisher, Pulp Literature Press, has set up pre-order pages for a hardcover edition (http://pulpliterature.com/product/what-the-wind-brings-hardcover/) and a 100-copy signed limited hardcover (http://pulpliterature.com/product/what-the-wind-brings-signed-limited-edition/). The regular hardcover is $40 — that’s Canadian dollars, so it will be US$30 or UK£23. The limited will be C$70 (US$52 or UK£40)
I waited more than forty years to write WHAT THE WIND BRINGS. It’s a serious novel, my magnum opus, and the book I want to be remembered for.
“Sternutative Sortilege” appears in the May/June 2019 issue of F&SF.
You can buy a copy of the issue here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc1905.htm
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 (non-Kindle): https://weightlessbooks.com/category/publisher/spilogale-inc/
Amazon US (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZFZ4O8/
Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O
Click on Mr. Hughes’s photo to visit his website.
Interview: John Kessel on “The Mark of Cain”
Tags: InterviewsTell us a bit about “The Mark of Cain.”
The story is based on a fragment that I wrote in the 1980s, fifteen handwritten pages in the voice of a character telling of his past, his ambitions, and his conviction that he has let down the people around him and failed in his professional and personal life. In going through my old story files I ran across these pages and thought, “This is pretty well written. This young writer has some talent, but he doesn’t have a story yet. But I could make it one.”
What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
The character of “Cal” is based on somebody that I knew back in the 1980s when I lived in Kansas City and was working on my Ph.D. at the University of Kansas. Looking back on that time and the young man I was then from my current perspective of my late 60s made me think of the differences between youth and age, between the arrogance of the 30-year-old and the uncertainty of the 65-year-old.
Was “The Mark of Cain” personal to you in any way? If so, how?
It’s more personal than many of my other stories. I think about how easy it was for me to judge people when I was young, and how much more complicated the world seems now that I am older. I found some fertile ironies in the differences between my made-up would-be alchemist “Cal” and the ambitious writer “John,” both in 1981 and in 2019. The story mentions places and events that I saw back then, and draws on my Catholic upbringing and concern for right and wrong.
What would you want a reader to take away from this story?
Life is mysterious, we do not have control over what happens to us even when we think we are in control, and judgment of ourselves and others is difficult. Right and wrong are real, but they are not simple. Self-examination is necessary, but who is to say what our lives mean, if they mean anything, in the end?
Why do you write?
Writing is a way to explore things that interest, amuse, and bother me. It is a way of figuring out what I think about things. It also is a way to entertain myself and others who might possibly see the world from a perspective similar to mine. If it’s done right, it’s fun both to do and read.
Who do you consider to be your influences?
At this point there are so many that it’s hard to single any out. My typical list ranges from Herman Melville and Jane Austen to Gene Wolfe and Ursula Le Guin, from Nathanael West to Karen Joy Fowler. I could easily add a dozen others. I am inspired and challenged by the work of other writers, living and dead. To say nothing of music and films and the world around me.
What are you working on now?
After seeing the publication of two very different novels in two years— my big sf novel The Moon and the Other and my Jane Austen/Mary Shelley pastiche Pride and Prometheus—I am writing some short stories. I’ve always loved the short story form, but have been away from it while. I’ve finished a new novella I’m very proud of titled The Dark Ride that is seeking a publisher right now.
“The Mark of Cain” appears in the March/April 2019 issue of F&SF.
You can buy a copy of the issue here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc1903.htm
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 (non-Kindle): https://weightlessbooks.com/category/publisher/spilogale-inc/
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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Angela Yuriko Smith of Space and Time interviews Michael J. DeLuca
Tags: Angela Yuriko Smith, Interviews, Michael J. DeLucaAngela Yuriko Smith, the new publisher of Space and Time interviewed Michael on her blog about ebooks and the future of publishing:
A
YS—One of my favorite features from your site is having a MOBI sent directly to my ereader. What other features do you offer that I may have missed?
Michael—I think the big selling point, compared to the 900-pound gorilla, is that everything we sell is DRM-free and always available to you through our My Library page. We want you to be able to think of them as your books and do with them as you would with a physical book you own. Share them! Just don’t pirate them, please.
Pick up the latest issue of Space and Time:
Interview: Gregor Hartmann on “The Unbearable Lightness of Bullets”
Tags: InterviewsTell us a bit about “The Unbearable Lightness of Bullets.”
I want to show Zephyr from different perspectives. So far I’ve used a social-climbing immigrant writer, marine biologists, a lawyer for a science agency, aristocrats and proles, a hermit theologian… Why not a police detective? Why not two while I’m at it? Since murders occur everywhere, they’ll be able to take the reader into all sorts of interesting situations.
What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
Cryptocurrencies are intriguing. At the moment most of them are scams, but it’s reasonable to assume that eventually the kinks will be worked out, and that a future society like Zephyr’s would use electronic money issued by multiple entities, and the relative values would be constantly changing. So, given that basic situation, what sort of crime would occur? Predicting the exact technology is not my concern; I’m more intrigued by the human angles.
What was the most difficult aspect of writing this story, and what was the most fun?
I have to balance in-your-face action and background world-building. I’ve worked out a lot of facts about Zephyr that I haven’t shown yet. I have to remind myself that each story is entertainment, not an entry in Wikipedia Galactica, so I must give the reader a good ride.
I love doing research. Finding female goddesses for the Pathway pantheon, for example. When I came across Ma’at I instantly knew she was going to be on the shoulder patch of a uniformed officer.
Why do you write?
Same reason I breathe, I guess.
What are you working on now?
Sadly, murders keep occurring on Zephyr, so my philosophical detective and her religious sidekick are already investigating another case.
“The Unbearable Lightness of Bullets” appears in the March/April 2019 issue of F&SF.
You can buy a copy of the issue here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc1903.htm
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 (non-Kindle): https://weightlessbooks.com/category/publisher/spilogale-inc/
Interview: Jerome Stueart on “Postlude to the Afternoon of a Faun”
Tags: Interviews
Tell us a bit about “Postlude to the Afternoon of a Faun.”
A jazz-playing faun finds everything taken from him a hundred years ago could be his again, if he’s willing to take it from his own student. He struggles to find another way. These two characters are trying to change their lives for the better, and finding it almost overwhelming. It has Jazz, Mentoring, and Hope.
What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
Steve Berman at Lethe Press was putting together an anthology of re-imagined myths for a gay audience, and asked if I wanted to write something. I tried to re-imagine the Satyr/Faun, Pan, in a “bear” romance (read: big hairy gay men) story. The story I wrote was awful and boring. It was trying too hard to be a gay romance in a bar with some magic…and yeah, it just went nowhere, and made me depressed. So, with me being already over the deadline, I scrapped it, salvaging only a couple of things, and started over. Everything else was new. I wanted to write something uplifting. I’d been an intern twenty-five years ago for the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program pairing up artists with students who want to learn from a local master in some traditional art form–fiddling, basket-weaving, hat-making—and wanted to write a story around that instead. About healing yourself through mentoring someone else. I took out all the romance because that wasn’t important now. What was important? These two characters struggle to become someone new. The young musician who used to be a football player but who wants to play jazz is frustrated by his lack of skill and the hopelessness he feels in changing his life. “I feel like I’m a tiny tugboat trying to turn a whole life around.” That sums up this story of these two characters for me, struggling to change. Steve liked it, and planned to use it, but the anthology never quite got completed. After a little more than a year, I asked him, carefully, as you do, if the story might be available again. He was incredibly positive–knowing that the anthology might take a lot longer to be published–and he encouraged me to find the story a good home.
Was “Postlude to the Afternoon of a Faun” personal to you in any way? If so, how?
I was inspired by these two characters seeking to change their lives—and how hard that is, at any age. They try, mess up, but they keep going, and they find a way to get what they want, or at least what they need (thanks, Rolling Stones, lol) . I’ve been there, trying to change habits, ways of thinking, whole careers—so that felt personal to me. Mr. Dance and I have also both been hurt by religion but we also both found our way out of our hurt and rediscovered our joys again. And these two characters really inspired each other—and the friends that come to them to help felt like the times I’ve been carried by friends who are helping me become who I want to be.
What was the most difficult aspect of writing this story, and what was the most fun?
Writing about music was the most difficult challenge. I had a hard time knowing how you talk about music–especially jazz–outside of “that’s a nice melody!” So I looked at James Baldwin’s story “Sonny’s Blues” (which I have loved since I read it first in college) and Rafi Zabor’s jazz novel, The Bear Comes Home, and tried to talk about jazz like the songs were a conversation between musicians, or a fight scene. Which ended up being the most fun!
Why do you write?
I love my characters. I want to see where they’ll go, what they’ll want and pursue, and how hard they will work to get it. They inspire me. I like to tell stories of people who struggle but who eventually pull out a win. Those are the kinds of stories that I love to read, so that’s what I want to write. People making difficult discoveries about who they are. What they really want. I also write stories that I would want to live inside—with characters like me. I feel it’s important for me to write more gay, more queer, characters because I never saw any of those characters growing up and the absence of them had an effect on me.
Who do you consider to be your influences?
I lived a weird, magical life in my Southern Baptist-infused home that influences me today. Of course, we had to memorize a lot of the Bible, and the stories were told and retold to me–Lions’ Dens, Fiery Furnaces, and Jesus Raising the Dead. There’s a lot of magic and miracles in the Bible that can feed a fantasy-loving soul. I also used to eat up Greek mythology as a kid— all these passionate gods and goddesses–I read every myth I could find. My mom read C.S. Lewis to the three of us kids in the hallway before bedtime. My dad, my Preacher, gave me a comic book subscription to Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four when I was 9, and introduced me to Star Trek, which we watched together as reruns. My parents are awesome people and, looking back, I realize, while we were living in a restrictive and fearful version of Christianity, my folks still managed to sneak in magic somehow, and for that I’m so grateful. I feel like I still write somewhere from that weird place. As a writer, I also learned a LOT from Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L’Engle, and later, Andre Dubus, Ron Hansen, James Baldwin, and Alice Munro. I like writers who make me feel something, who make me care about their characters. These days, since we never stop being influenced, I’m probably being influenced by Martha Wells, Mary Doria Russell, and Victor LaValle. At least, I hope so.
What are you working on now?
I’m writing a novella about a chef on a starship who’s promoted to diplomat to secure a treaty, and negotiate reparations, with a culture that reveres food and cooks—but she has a lot of guilt herself over what happened, and is willing to do more than anyone knows to make it right. It’s really a story about how we say “I’m sorry.” and how we deal with guilt. It also has recipes from one of my favorite Yukon chefs, Miche Genest, the Boreal Gourmet. The chef in the story is based on my “udder mudder,” the partner of my birthmom for twenty years who was a Las Vegas chef. I miss her.
“Postlude to the Afternoon of a Faun” appears in the March/April 2019 issue of F&SF.
You can buy a copy of the issue here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc1903.htm
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 (non-Kindle): https://weightlessbooks.com/category/publisher/spilogale-inc/
The author’s website: https://jeromestueart.com/
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Lontar 7 Interview: Zen Cho
Tags: Interviews, Lontar, Zen Cho
To celebrate the seventh issue of LONTAR, we have an exclusive short interview by editor Jason Erik Lundberg with Zen Cho, whose “七星鼓 (Seven Star Drum)” is the lead-off story. Cho is the award-winning author of Sorcerer to the Crown and Spirits Abroad, and editor of Cyberpunk: Malaysia.
Jason Erik Lundberg: Your story “七星鼓 (Seven Star Drum)” is a companion piece to “起狮，行礼 (Rising Lion–The Lion Bows)”, which was published by Strange Horizons and also features lion dancers who bust ghosts. What is the cultural importance of lion dancers in Malaysia and other parts of Asia?
Zen Cho: The kind of lion dance that’s most common in Malaysia is the Chinese Southern Lion style. You see it most at Chinese New Year, but also when a new Chinese business opens. It’s meant to bring good luck, and I think maybe the lion chases away bad spirits as well. I might be mixing that up with fireworks, though. I never thought too much about the cultural importance of lion dance when I was growing up; I just liked watching it. There’s something really exciting and special about seeing a lion dance—I tried to capture some of that feeling in these two stories.
Q. You’ve mentioned that you were a member of the Cambridge University Lion Dance Troupe from 2006 to 2008. How did your experiences there inform the conceit of this story? And what role did you have in the troupe?
We performed at a hotel once for a company Christmas party they were hosting, and because it was quite a new hotel the owners, who were Chinese, had us bless some of the rooms while we were at it. There weren’t any ghosts, but that was the experience that inspired “起狮，行礼(Rising Lion–The Lion Bows)”. I wrote “七星鼓 (Seven Star Drum)” while I was chewing over that story, to explain how the ghost-busting lion dance troupe had been founded.
When I was in CULDT I was mostly on the cymbals, which are a really easy job you can give a rank beginner. I think I only played the drum in a public performance once, and I never did the lion—you have to hold that kungfu horse stance the whole time, which is really tiring! I was also the secretary of the troupe, which meant I managed the emails.
Q. Before Boris encounters lion dancers as a child, he is terrified of the spiritual world, which he can sense because of the “extra membrane around his brain that filtered in things other people didn’t see”. How integral is the everyday relationship with the supernatural to ordinary Malaysians?
I can’t answer questions on behalf of ordinary Malaysians! I can only speak for myself. I do have a friend who has an extra membrane around their brain which gives them supernatural powers. I stole their membrane for the story.
Q. Are there any plans to write more stories about these characters or within this premise?
No. I wrote the stories mainly because I thought it would be a shame not to use all this useful jargon I’d learnt from being in a lion dance troupe. Now I feel I’ve made good use of that life experience.
Q. Which authors either from Southeast Asia or writing about Southeast Asia do you enjoy reading? Could you give examples of particular works?
I like Farish Noor’s essays on Malaysian and Southeast Asian history—they’re academic but really accessible—and I’m really excited about Komik Maple’s comics. I’ve only read Mimi Mashud’s Kuala Terengganu in Seven Days and Amir Hafizi’s Scenes of the Father so far, but I’m looking forward to picking up the collection they’ve done of the webcomic Komik Ronyok, as well as Stephanie Soejono’s Tale of the Bidadari. When it comes to novels, I’m looking forward to reading Selina Siak Chin Yoke’s The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds, a historical novel about the life of a Peranakan woman in Malaya, and I admire Preeta Samarasan’s work—she’s got such a mastery of language. I’m really interested to see how she’ll follow Evening is the Whole Day.
Q. Shameless self-promotion time: what is next on the publication horizon for Zen Cho?
I’m working on my next novel! I can’t talk about it too much as it’s still at a fairly protean stage. I’m hoping it’ll be a worthy follow-up to Sorcerer to the Crown!
Four Questions for Ginn Hale
Tags: Ginn Hale, Interviews
We asked Blind Eye Books publisher Nicole Kimberling to catch up with award-winning author Ginn Hale:
Compared to the slew graphomaniacs currently populating the internets, Ginn Hale is a slow writer. She only releases a book every few years, so each time I get a manuscript from her I’m overcome with excitement. Ginn has a big imagination and a great knack for writing a nail-biter with LGBT protagonists. As I’m fascinated with the way writers think, I wanted to ask her a few questions.
1. One of the things you seem to enjoy most is breaking rules (for example, Blind Eye Books Guidelines!) and reimagining tropes. What about that do you find so pleasing?
I don’t go out of my way to break rules, really! I actually try to stick as close to guidelines as possible. But every now and then I find myself thinking about a fictional subject or situation that strikes me as absurd, annoying or cliché and wondering if there is ANY circumstance that could make it seem reasonable, clever or new. Rarely I come up with something and then I feel like, after putting in all that time and thought I really have to write about it.
In fact it was my own annoyance at fantasy books overflowing with egalitarian talking animals that led me to write the character of Ji in the Rifter books.
I think on some level I just enjoy challenging my own assumptions.
2. Your recent book, Champion of the Scarlet Wolf is a sequel to Lord of the White Hell Books One and Two, yet you’ve chosen to follow a secondary character rather than stick with the original protagonists. Why is that?
Lord of the White Hell is written from the point of view of Kiram Kir-zaki, a mathematically gifted seventeen year old, who’s a little spoiled by his wealthy parents and widely accepted by his own minority community. The first two books follow his adventures in the less open-minded society of an elite boys-school, where he builds machines, battles a curse, and wins the devotion of a duke! It was all very fun and I loved writing Kiram’s youthful insights as well as his snarky, teen-age thoughts.
But for the next two books I really wanted to show the world from a different point of view. The events of the war I planned to write about didn’t really suit Kiram’s voice or character. For that I needed some one physically stronger, more politically involved and way less likely to solve the whole conflict with a slide rule!
Fortunately I tend to massively overbuild the worlds and characters I write about. While the majority of details and backstories never make it into a manuscript, this once I realized that I’d already created the perfect character to carry the second set of books. Elezar, with his mysteriously scarred thigh, immense physical courage and internal conflict was like a small war in himself. His complex relationship with both Javier and Kiram allowed me to write about the two of them from a new perspective and perhaps most importantly, he’s the one character who’d shelter a filthy, emaciated mutt in a city of witches and wily shapeshifters.
3. Lord of the White Hell Books One and Two were picked up for Japanese release by Chuokoron Shinsha. What was it like working with a Japanese translator?
I was fortunate enough to work with a really delightful translator — Fumiyo Harashima. Not only did she know the details of my books better than I did, but she took great care in weighing what should be translated directly and what ideas, jokes and turns of phrase needed more idiomatic equivalents. Our discussions ranged from which words to write in katakana — such as the characters names — to Spanish J’s, and Arabic R’s.
She even dedicated serious thought to the many goofy puns I slipped into the manuscript. I particularly remember feeling embarrassed when she approached me about the “Goldenrod Inn”, which was the name of a brothel catering to wealthy students. When I confessed that the name was a childish play on words — Goldenrods=rich dicks — I half-expected her to roll her eyes or quit, but instead she seemed delighted, as she’d suspected something of that sort. And she set to work preserving my puerile humor.
I couldn’t have wished for a better translator!
4. What’s next for Ginn Hale?
This is a really hard question to field… I have an idea about a semi-aquatic 1920’s world rolling around in my head but I never know until I start really plotting out a story . . . There’s always a chance that I’ll see some new prohibition on a publisher’s guideline and be inspired in my usual contradictory manner!
Mary Rickert in Locus
Tags: Interviews, Locus, Mary Rickert
There’s a fascinating interview with Mary Rickert in the current issue of Locus where she talks about trying to write novels over the years and what works and does not work for her, writing in general, and her mother’s death.
I love Mary’s writing (we recently published her collection You Have Never Been Here at Small Beer) and am fascinated that she says she does not always know everything about her stories. I think it’s the gaps in the stories that make them so fascinating (or scary) and lifelike to me.
You can read part of the interview on Locus’s site and the rest (and an interview with superstar Charlie Jane Anders) in Locus.
Lontar: E. C. Myers interview
Tags: E.C. Myers, Interviews, LontarTo celebrate the second issue of LONTAR, we have two things: we added mobi formats of both issues, and we have an exclusive interview by Jason Lundberg with E. C. Myers, whose novelette, “The Tiger in the Forest Between Two Worlds” is the lead-off story. Myers is the Andre Norton Award-winning author of the novels Fair Coin and Quantum Coin and he has published short fiction in a variety of print and online magazines and anthologies.
Q. Your story takes place near the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea. What was it about this region that inspired you to write about it?
This is a case where the story was shaped a lot by my research and ended up far richer than I first imagined. I wanted to do a contemporary version of the Korean folk tale “The Tiger-Girl,” so I started reading up on Amur tigers, also known as Siberian tigers. It was rather depressing, because there are very few of them remaining in the wild, and particularly in the wilds of Korea. They can be found in the mountains of the north, but they’re absent from the southern peninsula—a shame because the tiger is such an important part of Korean culture.
The more I read about the DMZ, the more fascinated I became, and I decided that if a tiger could still exist in Korea, it would be there; because that territory is largely off-limits to humans, it essentially functions as a gigantic nature preserve. Many references in the story to the DMZ and the cameraman Lim Sun Nam are real, albeit a few years out of date. There’s a free film you can watch online called Tiger Spirit that documents Lim’s quest to find tigers in the DMZ.
Q. One of the fantastical tropes in the story is that of the weretiger, although here it’s inverted, in that the tiger takes on human form. How prevalent is this creature in Korean mythology?
When I was a kid, I loved the mascot for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea: a cartoonish tiger named Hodori. At the time, I had no idea he had a deeper meaning, as a representation of the Korean people. The culture is steeped in legends and folklore about tigers, which are considered protective spirits, so they pop up in all sorts of roles. There’s also a lot of shapeshifting! Korean mythology is incredibly interesting and hasn’t received much exposure in the Western world, so I hope to play with these stories more in the future.
Q. A theme you employ is that of interstitialism; existing between two different worlds, yet not comfortably in either one alone. Chon-ji herself is split between the human and animal realms, as well as between North Korea (Choson) and South Korea (Hanguk). To what extent do you see this type of interstitial existence in other parts of current Korean society?
As a half-Korean living in America, I still have an outsider’s view of current society in South Korea, but I think there’s a real struggle there to hold onto tradition in a contemporary world. The gaeryong hanbok that Chon-ji wears is one example of that, as a modernized version of the more elaborate traditional clothing, which some (mostly older) people do still wear daily. I also think there’s a conflict between traditional expectations from parents and the personal desires of their children, as with Bong-hwa trying to fulfill the role of a dutiful son. That’s something I can relate to even in the U.S., and many others of my generation have probably had some of the same issues—but these are universal problems no matter the place or period, aren’t they? And there’s always difficulty in balancing a national identity against a global one, especially with the immediacy and influence of the internet.
Q. Where can readers go to find other examples of Korean fantastic fiction?
I am really out of touch with any contemporary fiction being published in Korea now, particularly in translation. Some films and comics are imported, either officially or online, and there’s a growing following for Korean comedies and dramas. But fantastic fiction? The University of Hawaii Press is publishing a journal called Azalea which is much like LONTAR. Their May 2013 issue was devoted to science fiction.
If you’re looking to read some Korean fables in translation, the book I read for research is Folk Tales from Korea by In-Sob Zong. Appropriately, it has a tiger on the cover! One I haven’t read yet is Korean Myths and Folk Legends by Pae-Gang Hwang, translated by Young-Hie Han.
Q. Shameless self-promotion time: what is next on the publication horizon for E.C. Myers?
I have a book coming out in the fall of 2014 about teenage hackers, currently titled The Silence of Six, to be published by Adaptive. I also have a couple of forthcoming short stories: “Lost in Natalie,” co-written with Mercurio D. Rivera, in the summer issue of Space & Time magazine; and “Kiss and Kiss and Kiss and Tell” in Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, published by Twelfth Planet Press and coming later this year.
Interview: Chris Willrich on “Grand Tour”
Tags: Interviews– Tell us a bit about “Grand Tour.”
It’s a slice-of-life story set on a future Earth that, while it may not be truly utopian, is peaceful and wealthy, such that it’s not at all crazy for a family to save up for an interstellar cruise. It’s also a future where it’s commonplace — albeit a bit controversial — for parents to choose genetic modifications for their children. Of course, as in any time period, negotiating young adulthood can be tricky, and “Grand Tour” is also about ways of claiming your independence, while staying connected to your roots.
– What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
Part of it was a strange feeling I’d gotten about time perception many years ago (see the question after next) but the immediate trigger came when I was trying to write a bunch of very short sketches about different planets and/or fantasy cities. I’d wanted to do something in the same vein as Italo Calvino’s _Invisible Cities_ or Benjamin Rosenbaum’s story cycle _Other Cities._ One idea that turned up was of a planet that every so often had a big going-away celebration for starfarers, only it would turn out that the people leaving, and the people saying goodbye, were not the ones you’d expect.
I tried refining that notion into something that looked publishable, but the story wanted to get longer than that initial sketch… Meanwhile I’d been playing around with the idea of a sequence about a very long-lived star-traveling character. At some point I realized “Grand Tour” could be that character’s opening story. The pieces seemed to fit.
– What kind of research, if any did you do for this story?
It was pretty light research. I looked at an atlas when considering I-Chen’s flight plan, and checked the distance to Barnard’s Star. And a former colleague of Chinese descent was gracious enough to lend me her name for my main character.
– Most authors say their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way was “Grand Tour” personal?
In my twenties I first moved a long way from my home town. I’d gone to school a couple of hours away, but this was a much bigger step. It was an open-ended adventure — I got a job copy-editing at a newspaper — though always with the assumption I’d return to my own neck of the woods eventually.
I noticed this awkward difference in how my family and I perceived the passage of time. The cliche situation is that a young person experiences time as passing slowly and an older person sees time passing swiftly. But the opposite happened in this case. My family felt I was off on my adventure for an awfully long time, while I kept feeling as if I’d only just arrived. The disconnect reminded me of the relativistic time dilation that features in science fiction stories about star travel — at least the ones that don’t use faster-than-light travel as a way of getting around General Relativity.
Now, that wasn’t really a story idea, just a metaphor — but it stuck with me, waiting for a story to show up later. Over twenty years later, as it turned out!
– Is there anything in particular you would want a reader to take away from “Grand Tour?”
There is some stuff in there about human relationships, but the story verges on being preachy as it is, so I’ll let it do the talking. I will say I was glad to finally manage a non-violent science fiction story.
– What are you working on now?
I’m revising a novel about my sword-and-sorcery characters Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone, who owe their existence to F&SF (they last appeared here in “A Wizard of the Old School,” in the August 2007 issue.)
“Grand Tour” appears in the May/June 2012 issue of F&SF.
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Interview: Andy Stewart on “Typhoid Jack”
Tags: Interviews– Tell us a bit about “Typhoid Jack.”
In a future where society has relinquished most control to cybernetic custodians known as “Farmers,” Jack Lowe, former Chief of Peace, pursues the not-quite-legal profession of a germ peddler. In this future, almost all sicknesses have been eradicated (except for the common cold, of course). But when Bernadette Maude, CEO of a major corporation under house arrest for mysterious reasons, employs Jack for the challenging task of infecting her, he must make further compromises to get the job done. Along with the technical difficulties required of this job, Jack must overcome a more personal obstacle: Seventeen, a Farmer with whom he has a tricky past.
– What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
I had a bad cold. I looked in the mirror and asked myself, “Who in the hell would want this?” And bingo, there you have it. A world where germs are a commodity, where people need to be sick sometimes in order to slow down. I was reading a good bit of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett at the time for another noir project, and everything sort of came together.
– What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?
I didn’t do as much research on this story as I usually do because I was less interested in the science and more interested in the character development and situation. That being said, I brushed up a bit on virulent disease and bacteria, especially regarding the speed in which germs replicate in the human body.
– This sci-fi story is your first sale to F&SF. What have you written in the past, and what draws you to the science fiction genre?
I’ve always loved science fiction. I remember reading F&SF and Asimov’s as a young teen. I especially loved Bradbury (R.I.P., good sir), and later Le Guin and Delaney. Even in my undergraduate and graduate experiences, I gravitated toward sci-fi, surreal, and slipstream. My first publications, which appear in Big Bridge (an online literary journal), are in these styles.
“Typhoid Jack” is my first short story in print, and is obviously very sci-fi. I also have a slipsteam short story, “Synesthesia,” forthcoming in the west coast literary journal ZYZZYVA. I wrote “Synesthesia” in my last week at Clarion 2011, which was a key experience for my writing. I wrote “Typhoid Jack” before Clarion, but polished it up after.
– What might you want someone reading “Typhoid Jack” to take away from the story?
It’s tough to look objectively at my work in this way, but I do know that “Typhoid Jack” deals primarily with the balance between self-interest and the good of the community. It’s a complex equilibrium, and pervasive in our own society. I mean, look at the dichotomy between Democratic and Republican ideals (or, how they are perceived by the talking heads on the 24 hour news networks). Self-preservation may be our strongest drive, but what about our fellow man? It’s all very tricky. But I like to write about tricky things, and sci-fi is a great genre for exploring them.
– What are you working on now?
Currently, I’m polishing up an alternative history sci-fi novella that focuses on events in and around Chernobyl in the early 90s. I’ve recently finished a speculative fiction novel tentatively titled All the Night a Song, represented by Jason Yarn with the Paradigm Agency. It’s getting shopped later in July, so wish me luck!
“Typhoid Jack” appears in the May/June 2012 issue.
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Interview: Matthew Corradi on “City League”
Tags: Interviews– Tell us a bit about “City League.”
“City League” is a story about memories, baseball, and being shy. The
setting is a near future in which memories can be isolated and
manipulated as commodities, sometimes for personal use, sometimes for
commercial use. The story vehicle is a father/son relationship that
revolves around baseball. In some ways it is a mystery, as the son
tries to find out why one of his baseball memories doesn’t match the
history books. But ultimately the story is an exploration of how the
son’s outlook on life is influenced not just indirectly, but with
complete, pre-meditated intent, by the father.
– What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
The idea for this story came from some of my experiences as a father
to my three children. My own taste in music was greatly influenced by
my father, and we shared a bond because of that. When my kids were
young, I found myself intentionally trying to play the same music for
my kids in an attempt to get them to like it as well, hoping to create
the same bond. (This has achieved varying degrees of success and
non-success so far, of course). The same thing applied to science
fiction–I gave them the science fiction and fantasy books I read as a
kid, and we watched my favorite sci-fi movies and tv shows, and I
brought out all my posters and old toys, etc., all in an attempt to
pass along my own personal fascination with the genre. Sometimes I
felt extremely guilty, however, for trying to influence them so
overtly.
At the same time I also saw some of my own personality weaknesses
(such as shyness) beginning to manifest themselves in my kids. On the
one hand I felt bad and somewhat responsible for that, but on the
other hand, I also felt a heightened connection to them because of
it–I could understand exactly what they were feeling, even if other
people couldn’t.
The question that came to my mind, then, was–if I could wave a magic
wand and simply get rid of that weakness for my child, would I do it,
even if it meant losing that bond we shared because of it? And I
wasn’t sure how I would answer that question. I’m all for sparing my
kids heartache, but on the other hand, adversity is how we learn best,
and what shapes us the most.
Those questions led to other questions–what if that magic wand
allowed me to carry those changes to an extreme? And at what point
would I cross the line from gentle influence to unethical,
manipulative plotting? “City League” was the story that came out of
those questions. Memories just happened to be the plot tool, and I
used baseball as the connecting thread simply because I love baseball
and have always wanted to use it as a framework for a story. But the
core inspiration was always that father/child relationship.
– Most authors say their stories are personal. If that’s true for
you, in what way was “City League” personal?
Some stories that I write I call “throw-away” stories. In other
words, a story might have some good ideas, but the personal
connection is minimal, and it is written with external, business needs
in mind–i.e., better to keep this under 7500 words, or this type of
fantasy will be tough to sell, so maybe change it to this, or I love
this character but he’s not essential, so best to cut him out, and so
forth.
“City League”, however, was a story I wrote for myself. The main
characters (both father and son) are me in many ways, and their
journey (in all of 6500 words) has been my journey to a large degree.
Encapsulating it in this story has allowed me to understand myself a
little bit better. I was fully prepared for it not to sell, or take a
few knocks as being overly sentimental. But this was one story where
I was okay with that. Luckily Mr. Van Gelder was kind enough to buy
it anyway.
– What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?
Most of the research I did centered around the science of memories and
memory recall. When I initially envisioned the story I did not
realize how many different kinds of memories there are, not just in
abstract classification but in the different ways the brain processes
memory information. Different areas of the brain are used for
different kinds of memory (short term, long term, conscious,
unconscious, visual, sensory, motor skills, etc.) and for different
stages of recall (encoding, storage, retrieval, etc.) While I took
some liberties in extrapolating the future science of memory recall
for the story, I hope the fact that it is all rooted in a small degree
of true science lends it some sense of believability.
– What would you want someone to take away from reading “City League?”
We are all dealt a hand in the game of life. Some very few lucky
people are dealt a wining hand right off the top. Others are dealt
crap and fold without ever playing. Most of the rest of us are dealt
something in the middle. We often wish we had a different set of
cards, or somebody else’s cards. But all we can do is play the hand
we have, and in most cases we put in endless blood, sweat and tears to
still win the game with it. In “City League” the main character
struggles with the knowledge that the deck was stacked against him by
his own father. And yet, in the end, does it really matter?
Ultimately I’m not trying to send any profound message with “City
League” but rather trying to create a universal struggle that the
reader can relate to. We all have our demons. If it’s not shyness
it’s something else, and my hope is that the sense of survival the
main character achieves in the end can inspire others.
Of course, as much as “City League” is the son’s story, and is told
from the son’s POV, it is also very much the dad’s story. And though
what he did was reprehensible, I’d like to think that readers can
still sympathize with some of his motivations as a father–and also
perhaps sympathize with the fine line parents sometimes have to walk
with their children.
– What are you working on now?
Right now I’m working on remembering which kid has what dance recital
on what day, who finished their math homework and who just “pretended”
to, and why are they asking for allowance again when I coulda swore I
just paid them yesterday? Aside from that I’m revising my next short
story, a rather abstract/experimental piece for me, and pecking away
at the background for a potential novel set in the same venue as “The
Ghiling Blade” (from the Jan./Feb. 2011 F&SF).
On a side note, as I write this my 10 year old daughter is sitting
right next to me reading “The Fellowship of the Ring.” So screw it
all, I’m stacking the deck anyway! My dastardly plan is working, ha,
ha!
“City League” appears in the May/June 2012 issue.
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Interview: Sean McMullen on “Electrica”
Tags: Interviews‑ Tell us a bit about “Electrica.”
The idea behind Electrica is that an intelligence from the geologically distant past has been preserved in amber. While experimenting with a form of electrostatic semaphore using amber, the eccentric Sir Charles Calder realizes that the signals he is detecting are not coming from a distant transmitter, but from within the block of amber in his receiver. He manages to communicate with the time-travelling mind. Meantime, Lieutenant Fletcher, a young code breaker from Lord Wellington’s staff, is called back from the war against Napoleon in Spain to check the military potential of Sir Charles’s semaphore. Fletcher soon gets drawn into some very murky intrigues involving sex, jealousy and obsession between Sir Charles and his wife. Electrica is set against the real scientific arms race during the Napoleonic Wars. The opposing sides had almost uncrackable secret codes, semaphore signaling systems stretching over hundreds of miles, observation balloons, and plans for steamships and submarines. There was even a scheme to invade England by digging a tunnel under the English Channel. In more general science, Luigi Galvini had established the link between electricity and biology with his famous twitching frogs’ legs in 1771, and by 1802 Giovani Aldini was applying electricity to dismembered human body parts and getting similar effects. While in London in 1803, Aldini even tried to bring the corpse of an executed man back to life, although without success.
‑ What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
I knew that electrostatics was quite well developed by the late Eighteenth Century, and about Galvani’s experiments with electricity and frogs legs, but Mary Shelley had beaten me to the most obvious theme by a couple of hundred years. Then I came across a book on code breaking in the Napoleonic Wars, and it reminded me that science and mathematics were valued very highly by the military authorities of the time. Where you have advanced science, you can have advanced science fiction. The idea of sending an intelligence across space as data had been used in A for Andromeda, but I had an idea to send the data for an intelligence through time. I thought about setting it in the modern world, but then I realized that I could make it a lot more interesting with an historical setting. I considered World War II, then World War I, then Victorian England, and finally I realized that Regency England had all the technology that the story needed. It was about now that a story idea for code breaking in 1812 merged with the story of Electrica’s trip through time. All I needed to do was a little research into a few details. This turned out to be a very large amount of research into nearly everything.
‑ What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?
As I have said, quite a lot. I had already studied the late Eighteenth Century semaphore towers for my 1999 novel Souls in the Great Machine, but I also needed a background in Regency electrostatics, steam engines, and suchlike. I have already mentioned reading Mark Urban’s The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes, and I also re-read selected bits of Mary Shelley and Jane Austin, re-watched the Sharpe television series, checked with Trench’s A History of Marksmanship and Holland’s Gentlemen’s Blood to get the dueling scene right, and read some general history books like Richard Holmes’s Redcoats. At a practical level I did a few basic experiments with electrostatics and amber, and discovered that harpsichord wire is annoyingly awkward to use in electronic devices. It was also very important to get the meals and clothing right. Apparently the British were very patriotic about their food during the Napoleonic Wars. They excluded French dishes from their tables and had theme dishes like desserts with the Union Jack’s colours and every possible variation on roast beef. Thanks to Beau Brummel and others, clothing was undergoing major changes at this time, so fashions were pretty volatile for both sexes. I did the best I could to cope with this, but the experts will probably point out what I got wrong. Then there was work on ravens, scalp electrodes, and even anatomy (where to get shot and seriously wounded without getting killed). By now you probably think I wrote Electrica while mapping out the scenario for a novel (which I am now writing), but I started writing the story without having a novel in mind. In general I think science fiction has a greater impact if the reader thinks “Wow, this sounds like it could actually work”, so I take a lot of trouble to get the science and history as right as I can before taking a leap into the unknown.
‑ Most authors say their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, then in what way was “Electrica” personal?
The duel scene was highly personal. Many years ago I was in a fencing tournament, and found myself facing an opponent with whom I had a girlfriend in common. What followed was the most ugly and hard fought bout of my three decades in martial arts! I like to think I got the general feeling into the Electrica duel. Weaving my computer career into a Regency story was another personal touch. Soon after I graduated and joined the workforce, I actually did some work on decoding data strings. In my case it was checking aviation weather reports for formatting errors, but in a sense I was – like Lieutenant Fletcher in Electrica – looking for hidden words and figures in strings of characters. This allowed me to develop him as a character who was a sort of fellow professional. The rather highly charged dinner scenes go all the way back to my undergraduate years. A girl who I was dating invited me home for dinner, and she turned out to come from a very, very rich family that had ties to the English aristocracy. My relatively poor family had rather more distant ties to the English aristocracy, so the conversation was not quite as awkward as it might have been, but I had a strong feeling that I was being treated as an amusing novelty rather than a prospective son-in-law. Memories of that night are certainly in Electrica.
‑ What are you working on now?
Currently a short film is pretty high on my agenda. I have working in script writing for some years alongside my books and stories, and companies have taken out options taken out on several works. On the other hand, options are cheap, and actually getting anything on screen is super hard. Even a low-budget movie costs a thousand times more to produce than a book, so getting a book published and getting a movie shot is like the difference between a Viking longship and the Titanic. Still, the screen version of my soon-to-be published story Hard Cases looks like being shot within a couple of months, so that is extremely exciting. My daughter and I are also planning my first two e-book collections, both for later this year. Measuring Eternity is due to be released around August, and the other about four months later. The latter will contain a couple of stories set before my novel Souls in the Great Machine, and chronicles the building of the huge, human-powered computer, the Calculor by the dynamic and deadly Dragon Librarian Zarvora. For the fans of the ne’er do well and lecherous John Glasken, he does indeed make an appearance. Aside from all that, there is the novel based on the events in Electrica, but that will definitely not be coming out this year.
“Electrica” appears in the March/April 2012 issue.
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