| A Conversation With Nancy Kress | ||||||||||||||||
| interview courtesy of Fictionwise.com -- an eBook Website | ||||||||||||||||
| (Fictionwise.com is an eBook retailer of short SF fiction.) | ||||||||||||||||
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Thank you.
I knew that quite late. I know friends who decided they were going to be a writer at seven or eight years old,
which always astonishes me, because I was almost thirty before I started writing and I had no intention of doing
it seriously. I was pregnant with my second child and stuck way out in the country with a toddler and a pregnancy
and no car and I was going quietly nuts. So I started writing while the baby was napping. It was either that or
soap operas and there are some things to which one does not descend.
Well, I guess I was five years early!
It was called "The Earth Dwellers" and the only reason I was able to sell it is that I was not plugged into any
of the SF community. I didn't know there were conventions. I didn't know there was fandom. I barely knew there were
magazines. So I sent it out to Galaxy, not knowing that Galaxy at that point was
trembling on the verge of bankruptcy and had stopped paying its writers and as a result no one was sending them
any material. Since I didn't know this and they were desperate for material they took my story which was not a
very good one and published it and it took me three years to get my hundred and five dollars.
Finally I got it.
I've heard other people say the same thing. I was very persistent in my letter writing.
The story came out in 1976.
Well, again, I was raising two small children and I wasn't writing very much. I was also going to graduate school
at night to earn my masters in English. So it was another year before I sold another story. And another year before
I sold a third story. And then eventually both the pace of my writing as the kids got older and the acceptance level
went up. But as I say, when I started I didn't really plan on doing this seriously.
That was gradual. Some time in the eighties. And it was 1990 that I actually went full time. I had been working as a
copy writer for an ad agency that did work mostly for Xerox Corporation in Rochester, New York. And I decided that it
was taking far too much time and far too much energy, and so I left that job and became a full time writer in 1990. It
was a sort of frightening step.
Well, that was my first Nebula and of course I was extremely pleased to have it, but I went out again, naïve, knowing
almost nothing, out to San Francisco for the Nebula presentations. And it turned out that in those days security was
not as tight as it is now. And it was rumored that some people knew who had already won. And in fact it was rumored
that Joe Haldeman had already won. So I went to the banquet thoroughly expecting that I had lost and it turned out
that I hadn't. And if Connie Willis hadn't told me at lunch, quite severely, to prepare some remarks anyway...
even if I thought I had lost, I would have had nothing to say except "Gee, this is heavy." I'm grateful to Connie.
Pretty much, yes.
It had no effect whatsoever.
Awards for short fiction don't really affect sales of novels.
And although it's very nice to have the award, and the story will then be reprinted practically forever somewhere or other.
Yes, on Fictionwise.com! But it doesn't seem to influence novel sales very much.
It is. And there is a different audience that actually follows the awards and a much larger audience that reads
science fiction but again is completely ignorant of awards, fandom, SFWA, and all the paraphernalia that goes along with it.
No, I wasn't disappointed. Too much emphasis is actually placed on the Nebulas and Hugos in my opinion. Every year
there are wonderful stories nominated and only one of them can win in a category. And we have made such a large thing
about it that I actually know writers, whom I will not name, who have gone through therapy to deal with the issue that
they've never won a Hugo or a Nebula. This is putting far too much emphasis on it. Because part of it is a question
of 'where did your story appear,' which means 'who got to see it'... part of it is a popularity contest, and I
don't mean that the stories that win are not good... almost always they are.
Usually, yes. But sheer quality is not the only criterion, and if you lose, it doesn't mean that your story was of lesser quality.
Yes, it was.
"Beggars in Spain" was one of my first stories dealing with genetic engineering, a topic that has absorbed me ever
since. And it has to do with the engineering of people who don't have to sleep. This came out of sheer jealousy. I
need nine hours of sleep a night and I resent it bitterly, because I see people getting by with four or five and
they can accomplish so much more. And the first time I tried to write about people who didn't need to sleep was
actually thirteen years earlier, in the seventies, and the story was a mess. Everybody in the field rejected it. In
fact Robert Silverberg rejected it twice, once for a magazine he was editing and once for an anthology he was
editing. So I put the story away and I didn't work on it for six or seven years and then I took it out and wrote a
different version and even I could see that this was dreadful, so I never sent that one out. But after thirteen
years of gestation and some reading about various theories of sleep, I guess in 1990 the story was finally ready to be written.
Yes. In my early twenties, like many people, I became fascinated with Ayn Rand. And I read a lot of
Ayn Rand... in fact I read everything... and I thought about these ideas, which I found very troubling, but I also
found very compelling. So I thought about these and they stayed in my mind even after I had decided that objectivism
was simply not a workable or a morally admirable social system. Then I discovered Ursula Le Guin. And Ursula Le Guin
is at the direct polar opposite from Ayn Rand. Her societies are communal, property is de-emphasized, sharing forms
a basis in all of them. If you were going to form a continuum, Ayn Rand and Ursula Le Guin would be at opposite ends of it.
So this gave me somebody else to think about in terms of economics. And part of "Beggars in Spain," especially the
novel version, is an attempt to think about these things on paper and not to reconcile the two views because they
can't be reconciled, but to try to pick my way along the continuum to see where I might reside along it.
Yes, somewhere in between. That's where I seem to always end up... 'middle of the roader.'
Leisha T[ ], the heroine of the story, has been thinking about these same issues, although for her they are far more
important since her father is a leading Yugaist, which is something like Ayn Rand's theory and she herself has a
lot of money, which needs to have some severe thinking about what she is going to do with it.
I was never really in that position so mine would be theoretical.
It's a wholly artificial length that has been put up and set up for the purpose of the awards. For the purpose of the
Hugo and Nebula a novella is a story between seventeen and a half and forty thousand words. And I prefer them as
a length to write because it is long enough to set up another world with a lot of interesting detail but short
enough that you only need to have one plot line whereas the novel usually has several different plot lines and
you have to juggle them all. So you get an intensity of effect in a novella that you simply can't get in a novel
but you also have enough room to work in.
It's really a different form. If I could make a living writing nothing but novellas, that's what I would do.
But one cannot.
Yes, it is. And when I finished "Beggars in Spain" I had a nagging feeling that there was a lot more to the story, so
I wrote the first book and then I had a nagging feeling that there was a lot more to the story so I wrote the second
book, and then my publisher had a nagging feeling that there was a lot more to the story so I wrote the third book.
Yes. I see that a television series has suddenly appeared with Beggars and Choosers as its title but this has nothing
to do with my book.
No, not really. I would like to have it a television series.
Yes. This is going to be the century in which bio-engineering fully comes into its own in the way that physics did in
the last century. And this is certainly not an original observation with me, but I think it's profoundly true.
Yes it was. And now that we have all the letters we have to find out what they mean.
And I think that the story possibilities in this coming biological revolution... actually it's not coming,
we're in the middle of it... are just tremendous. "The Mountain to Mohammed" deals with the... which is another one
of my stories in genetic engineering... deals with the insurance aspects of this. "Evolution" deals with the
evolution of microbes in response to our keeping engineering different drugs. We find more and more of them are
becoming resistant to the drugs, and it's a race to see who can stay ahead of whom.
Yes. It's very frightening. A lot of the information in "Evolution" is actual, which again is
frightening. "Dancing on Air" is the application of genetics to a specific profession, which is ballet. And I wrote
that because I love ballet. And unfortunately the intersection of the audience for ballet and the audience for
science fiction is vanishingly small.
I think there's three people in it. So it's necessary if you are going to write about ballet in science fiction,
to write about it in a science fictional way and genetic engineering is a natural way.
Well, thank you. If I am ever reincarnated I hope it's as a dancer. Since I'm never going to be one in this life.
Yes. Ellen Datlow had wanted something for Omni under 2000 words because she was publishing a bunch
of short stories all at once -- very short ones. And I found it an enormous challenge to write under two thousand
words, in fact I failed -- the thing is two thousand and two hundred words. I simply cannot write short. I admire
people who can, but it's not something that comes naturally to me.
(laughs) It'll give it away.
Women are always faced, as I was, with the conflict between family and work. And I don't want to say only women
because I know a great many men now who are house husbands and who are the people who are taking care of small
children. But if you go out to work and you put yourself seriously out there into a career, then you're worrying
about the children at home. Someone else is raising them... unless your husband is doing it... somebody else is taking
care of them. If you stay at home you worry that you are missing your place in the world, and there really doesn't
seem to be a good solution to this, if there is one I never found it. And so that story deals with this issue, it
deals with genetic engineering, but it also wrestles with that issue, which is a very real one for women.
Some people ask me, "Do you have a sister and if so do you like her?" Yes I do have a sister and I like her a great deal.
Yes. But I do like my sister a great deal. It's just that it's a natural relationship for fiction... there are
really only 4 or 5 very strong personal relationships you can build fiction around. If you build them around a
man-woman relationship or a man-man woman-woman relationship, you're flopping over into the area of romance, and
it's very hard to avoid some of the cliches and sentimentality that goes along with the romance genre. So that
leaves parent-child and siblings. And so siblings... and I'd also worked with parent-child relationships a
lot... but siblings is a natural choice.
And in "Beggars in Spain" Leisha is in conflict with her father.
Thank you. I think characters are the most important aspect of fiction... any type of fiction... and that
includes science fiction. Then on the other hand I find myself, as the years go on, writing more and more... well,
I don't want to call it hard SF, I think I'll borrow a term from Michael Swin and say that I write
high-viscosity SF. Because again the genetic engineering revolution is so fascinating to me that I move into it,
trying to get the science as right as I possibly can. But the characters to me are still to me the most important
thing, because science happens to people, because if science falls in the forest and there's no one
around, does it make a sound? I don't think so.
Yes, my first three novels were fantasy and then after that they came out science fiction and I have no explanation
for this. Like so much else in my career, it just sort of happened.
Yes I did. That's happens a lot, I have no idea why.
Initially I went to the library. I lived at that time in a University town so I had a very fine library at my
disposal. Now I do more and more of it over the Internet.
One of the things that a science fiction writer who is not a scientist, as I am not, has to do, is take a small
amount of information and make it look like you know an awful lot about the topic.
You have to sound as though you were presenting this information with authority.
Well, since I married Charles Scheffield two and a half years ago, yes. He goes over my stories and corrects those
things of science that have to do with physics, or with general principles. He's not particularly interested in
genetic engineering so I'm on my own there. But again I have started to build up a network of people who are kind
enough to answer questions for me while I'm still in the research stage.
Both of them are retellings of old stories. One of them was done for Ellen Datlow's fantasy series of fairy tale
retellings. That was "Summer Wind," and it's a version of "Sleeping Beauty". The other one is a version of the Genesis
story. And I think there is a lot of value in retellings if they are genuinely different.
(laughs) The value lies in that these stories wouldn't have lasted if they didn't touch something very deep in the
human mind. And so when we rework them we're taking something that already has a great deal of resonance and we're
trying to present it in a way that takes into account the truth of our particular time. It's a great deal of fun to do that.
Yes, both of them were commissioned.
No. I find it difficult to write to a theme usually. If a theme is very broad like retell a fairy tale, that's
not hard, but if it becomes too specific I find that I just can't seem to get the juices flowing. I have to
write stories I care about.
Well, compared to cyberpunk stories anybody would look hopeful!
That's interesting you should say that, Steve, because I've actually been accused of being very grim myself. Because
I almost never have a universally happy ending.
Well, it's my experience that no situation in life... well I don't want to say no... but very few are completely
bad. Some people gain, some people lose, that's just the way life is. And it seems to me that fiction has to reflect
that so that some characters come out ahead and some characters come out behind. Rather than the universally
happy ending where everybody gets everything that they want. I don't know what that world is like or where
it is. I don't live there.
Actually no.
Neither do I think people are generally bad. I think people are generally a very ambiguous mix. What I don't
think that there are very any genuinely evil people. Yes there are some. Not nearly as many as populate most
fiction. Most people, when they make mistakes, make them out of stupidity or short-sightedness or
selfishness, but not genuine evil. That's why I almost never have real "dyed-in-the-wool" villains.
He's driven but I didn't find him evil at all. I think in many ways he's admirable.
His politics are not mine.
Well, thank you. I hope so too!
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