Interview: Alexander Jablokov on "The Boarder"
Alexander Jablokov–author of “The Boarder,†which appears in our March 2008 issue–said in an interview that the story is a character study in the form of a memoir. “The story reflects on our drive to space, including the compromises at the foundations of the entire enterprise, as well as science fiction, the very different compromises of our contemporary world, and why you don’t see many Russians in yard work,” Jablokov said.
Jablokov said that in fiction, wise older people often mentor promising younger people. “The older people teach, the younger people learn, and it’s an important relationship to both of them,” he said. “That’s emotionally satisfying—but I wanted to think about a more common scenario, where the older person and younger person have a lot to offer each other, but have their own lives to focus on, and so never define themselves by this relationship.”
“And, I suppose, Vassily, like any slightly befuddled elderly Russian at sea in America, owes something to Nabokov’s character, Timofey Pnin,” Jablokov continued. “The two have little in common, really, but I suspect that original model lies back there somewhere. Nabokov is a favorite of mine, though not because I have an interest in writing like him.”
Related to both of the above was a deliberate attempt on Jablokov’s part to write a story that reads like a memoir, not like a story. “There are specific narrative choices I made to reinforce this impression,” he said. “We’ll see if readers agree.”
The primary character in the story is a man named Vassily–a Russian émigré, metallurgist, veteran of the Soviet space program and desperate to participate in the great US program of the Apollo years. “An intriguing, irritating man, who never reveals himself, does not unburden himself, and has his own needs and ambitions,” Jablokov said. “[The narrator,] Andrew, observes him as one would an alien dropped into a human family.”
Jablokov thought the challenge of writing this story would be how to write a story without the armature of a plot to hang it on, but that actually proved the easier part, he said. “The harder was, not writing, but selecting. Which scenes, incidents, and observations are the right ones, and which should be left out? Each scene should be a part of the same hologram. If it isn’t, it blurs the image rather than sharpening it,” he said.
The story was personal to Jablokov, but not in the way it might seem. “I have never known anyone like Vassily,” he said. “I might have liked to, but he is wholly a fictional creation. But two features, the fate of émigré Russians in postwar America, and the parallel enterprises of space exploration and space fiction, which have less to do with each other than it might at first seem, proved to touch something fundamental in the way I see, and more importantly, write things.”
Jablokov recently completed a new novel–which doesn’t have a name yet–and turned it in to his editor, David Hartwell, at Tor. “The book involves an adviser to a cultural venture capitalist whose boss disappears, and, in trying to find her, finds himself involved with AIs, conspiracies, planetary rovers, serial killers, and very special cowgirl-topped burger joint somewhere among the industrial towns of east central Massachusetts,” Jablokov said. “An earlier version of the book spun off my recent story, ‘Brain Raid’, but the book as it turned out is much different. You can regard ‘Brain Raid’ as a story written by Bernal, the boss-losing factotum of the book.”
He is currently at work on another book, “about a ruined Earth in the wake of a barely successful defense against alien invasion, where a young woman leads a group of Invasion orphans in pursuit of what might just be the last surviving alien invader,” he said. “Right now it’s called After the Victory, but who knows how it will end up?”
For more information, visit Jablokov’s website at www.sff.net/people/Jablokov.
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