Interview: Sean McMullen on “Electrica”
‑ 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.
Interview: Michael Blumlein on “Twenty-Two and You”
- Tell us a bit about “Twenty-Two and You.”
It’s a tale about genetic engineering and a young couple head over heels in love and faced with a Mephistophelean decision. Their genetic future (and ours) is full of promise, but not only promise. As another character tells them, “progress is a god. A great god. God of the impossible, but not, alas, a god of mercy.”
The title is a riff on one of our wonderful new biotech companies, whose name, to my ears, is even more apt and beautiful than the one in the story.
- What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
In the near term, my inspiration grew out of two events. The first was a dinner I attended with friends and new acquaintances, one of whom was a young woman with a PhD in molecular biology who’d recently been hired by a prominent startup in the now mushrooming and highly competitive business of marketing personal genetic information. You know, getting your genome sequenced for a song. We had a lively conversation. The technology is truly amazing and growing by leaps and bounds. The future couldn’t be more exciting, but as a doctor, and more specifically, a clinician, I feel that it needs to be approached with discretion and care.
The second event was actually seeing my first patient who’d had his genome sequenced, and dealing with the real-life issues and consequences of that. As it turned out, for him it was no big deal. He was healthy, and all was well. But that won’t be the case for everyone. There are some thorny issues and questions. For example, how do we interpret all the information we get? What does it mean? What, if anything, do we do with it? What CAN we do with it? It’s an area of intense discussion and debate. Like atomic energy in the early days. (Come to think of it, like atomic energy now.) We can make it, we can provide it, now what? Genetic diagnosis and engineering is another instance where our technological know-how is running way ahead of our ethical, moral and practical brains.
Another answer to the question of inspiration: I’ve been interested in genetics my whole life. I worked in one of the earliest genetics labs in the sixties, and I’ve been writing and speculating about the field for nearly forty years.
- What kind of research did you do for this story?
I thought deeply about marriage and what it meant to be in love. And to love, which is slightly different. I read Science, Nature, and various trusty on-line resources. Talked to a few colleagues. This, I should add, is something I do regularly.
- Most authors say their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way was “Twenty-Two and You” personal?
I’m a scientist. I’m a doctor. I’ve been a patient. I’ve been in and out of love. I like sex. I find the human body both astounding and wonderful. I think about the outcomes of my actions. I love kids.
- Is there anything you might want a reader to take away from your story?
As a doctor I’d probably say yes. As a writer, no. That is, as a writer I have no agenda, which is not the same as having no opinions. I have many of those.
- What are you working on now?
I recently finished a novel called THE DOMINO MASTER, and I’m re-working an older one called THE CURE. But what has me, arguably, most excited is my second story collection. It’s titled WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED: Tales of the Bizarre and the Magnificent. It’s the follow-up to my award-winning first collection, THE BRAINS OF RATS, and is scheduled for release this fall. Keep an eye out for it!
- Anything else you’d like to add?
Thanks for having me.
“Twenty-Two and You” appears in the March/April 2012 issue.
Interview: Richard Bowes on “The Queen and the Cambion”
- Tell us a bit about “The Queen and the Cambion.”
TQATC is about two British legends, Queen Victoria who reigned for most of the 19th century and Merlin, said to be the son of a demon and a nun, whose story emerged in the murky centuries after the fall of Roman Britain. One was a creature of history, the other a product of Welsh folklore later embellished by medieval minstrelsy and compiled by Mallory.
In the story Merlin is obliged to come to the aid of whichever monarch in whatever year invokes the spell that binds him. The spell’s my invention and we get to see the four occasions on which Victoria summons him.
- What was the inspiration for “The Queen and the Cambion,” or what prompted you to write it?
- Why did you choose Queen Victoria as your protagonist as opposed to any other British monarch?
I’m going to answer these questions together:
I was invited to write a story for a themed anthology about magic and Queen Victoria. At least that’s what I understood it to be about. It seemed like an interesting change of pace from drugs, dark doings and gay Manhattan which I’d been writing about for the last few years.
My first problem was that Victoria was about as devoid of magic as any monarch who ever lived. But the magic didn’t have to be hers. Apparently, I’d had the Arthurian legend on my mind because out of nowhere I’d written a very short story, “Sir Morgravain Speaks of Night Dragons and Other Things” about a rather disgraceful member of the Round Table. F&SF was nice enough to buy and publish the story last year.
Sometimes with themed anthologies I can take a story that was kicking around in my back brain and twist it to the anthology theme. Sometimes the theme comes easily to hand – it’s something I would have written anyway. Other times it’s a story that never would have been written except for the invitation.
This was one of those last. But I liked the idea of mixing Merlin and Victoria. The editors seemed to approve. However when I submitted the story the editors wanted something different – darker or lighter or dark in a lighter way. Or something. And editors, of course, are always right.
So I was left with this unsold story. Fortunately F&SF, Help of Writers, took it. This is my twentieth appearance in the magazine over the last twenty years – nineteen stories and one “Curiosities” column.
- What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?
As a young kid I was given a book (I think it was titled “King Arthur and his Knights” – not a well known version of the tales – lines of Tennyson verse were interwoven with the prose and it had lots of vagueness about Lancelot and Guinevere, Morgan La Fey and Arthur and Mordred’s relationship – a book for kids) I’ve never been able to find a copy. The art was not by one of the canonical illustrators. But I remember it well. Especially the last color plate of the last moment of Arthur’s last Battle – Camlann .Against a setting sun, with piles of dead knights all around, Mordred rushes to stick his lance through Arthur who is about to bring Excalibur down on Mordred’s – great stuff – lots of Merlin’s doings.
The Matter of Britain interested me from then on.
Alfred Duggan was a British historical novelist of the mid-20th century. His “The Conscience of the King,” which I read in my teens is the story of an unscrupulous princeling, Cedric in post-Roman 6th Century Britain. This is the world in which the Arthur legend begins. Arturus, a fictional Roman cavalry mercenary, and a plausible guess as to the basis for the Arthur legends puts in an appearance.
I read The Once and Future King a year or two after it came out in 1958. My parents thought it would fascinate me and it did. In it along with much else including a clearer idea of the sexual underpinnings of the legends was a Merlin living backwards in time. When the musical Camelot tried out in Boston in late 1960, I skipped school, went to a matinee and got caught doing so.
Those are the ways I found Merlin. Queen Victoria came to me as a figure in history. And history to me is a long twisting tale out of which you make it a story reflecting your own ideas and interests. In truth people around Victoria like her uncle King William and her first Prime Minister Melbourne, fantastical 18th century men surviving into the 19th century interested me more than she did.
Writing the story I spent a few afternoons in NYU’s Bobst Library reading about her life and especially her youth. I found a human side of what had seemed a symbol, a statue. That gave me the story.
Would you say that “The Queen and the Cambion” is a kind of love story, and if so, at what point in the writing did you realize it?
I would. I think it’s the first love story I’ve ever written.
I was looking for a connection between a 19th century girl and woman and a half human cambion from a very dark age. The trick of the tale is that Victoria goes from youth to middle age and old age – the normal track of human life. The Merlin she encounters along the way is at various stages of his life – moments when he is available and she summons him. She’s young, he’s first mature and powerful, then dynamic but still older than she. She falls in love with him. As a middle aged woman she summons and rescues a very young Merlin. He grows fond of her. Only at the end are their ages and experiences compatible. Love connects them.
- What might you want a reader to take away from your story?
Terry Weyna reviewing the story in Fantasy Literature says, “The story is nothing more than a bon bon, but it is a delicious one.”
I kind of like that but I think there’s more here – mythic wonder and historical characters and human need.
- What are you working on now?
The story of a 15 year old lesbian telepath in a dystopian New York: it does have some love.
- Anything else you’d like to add?
The two writing groups to which I belong, Altered Fluid and Tabula Rasa were a great help. Especially AF. It was the first thing I showed that group.
“The Queen and the Cambion” appears in the March/April 2012 issue.
Interview: Alexander Jablokov on “The Comfort of Strangers”
- Tell us a bit about “The Comfort of Strangers.”
OK, so it’s an alien sex story. Or at least it started out that way, though it developed a bit more emotional subtext as it developed. While it seems pretty light and funny, it is also an actual hard SF story that struggles directly with the real fact that the more realistic the far-future hard Sfness of a story, the less likely it is to be emotionally engaging to a reader in 2011. So, like any writer in our genre, I bootleg current-day emotional content back in, and translate the incomprehensible emotional connections of that future into terms we can relate to, even though that translation would make no sense to the actual beings in the story. That makes the story sounds more complicated than it is. It’s supposed to be fun to read.
- What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
I’d read a few recent stories about sex with aliens. I found them too focused on human emotional reactions. I thought, “well, how different could sexual drives be and still be understandable?” Plus, I just wanted to play the game of creating aliens based on specific biological constraints.
- What kind of research, if any, did you do for “The Comfort of Strangers?”
Everything is based on actual reproduction of species here on Earth.
- What would you want a reader to take away from this story? “That was pretty funny! No, wait, there was more to it than that…and how much of my way of relating to the world is derived from my underlying biology? Do I really understand what the other participant is getting out of it?”
- What are you working on now?
I am just finishing a young adult novel with the tentative title Timeslip. It is about a teenager whose father gets shanghaied into an alternate universe, and has to travel across various realities to figure out what happened to him.
- Anything else you’d like to add?
Sex is more complicated than it seems.
“The Comfort of Strangers” appears in the Jan./Feb. 2012 issue.
Interview: Felicity Shoulders on “Small Towns”
- Tell us a bit about “Small Towns.”
“Small Towns” takes place in France in the wake of World War I; it’s the story of a particularly small and sheltered child growing into a young woman, and of a middle-aged man trying to retreat into the world of his childhood.
I’ve never set a story in France before. My family is part French and we have strong ties there, but our relatives live in the Massif Central to the south, a long way from the Western Front. I decided when I was drafting the story that I’d write no sentence for which I couldn’t imagine the equivalent in French: essentially, I was translating it into English as I wrote it. This was a bizarre, experimental process for me, and I wasn’t sure how the result would strike people. My first readers were all non-French speakers though and the language just seemed appropriately old-fashioned to them, so I forged ahead and it seems to have succeeded.
- What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
Years ago I read a story by Angela Carter called “The Lady of the House of Love.” It’s about a British soldier on leave in Europe encountering the last scion of a vampire line. While Angela Carter wrote many modern fairy tales herself, this particular story implies strongly that World War I was the end of magic, and I immediately, perversely, wanted to write a fairy tale set in the aftermath of the Great War. I had an idea that the protagonist would be literally small, but not much beyond that.
That idea remained in the back of my mind for several more years, until I was reading about some World War I battles on Wikipedia. I wasn’t doing research, just reading about battles in which my great-grandfather had fought. I was struck by British aerial photographs of the village of Passchendaele, in Belgium. They showed the village before and after the fighting there, and in the second photograph even the roads are barely discernible. The fields, the trees, every feature blasted away. That image gave me the opening paragraphs of “Small Towns” and enough of the story to start writing.
(Here are the wikipedia photos of Passchendaele which Ms. Shoulders references, if anyone cares to look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passchendaele_aerial_view.jpg )
- What kind of research, if any, did you have to do for “Small Towns?”
I haven’t written a lot of historical fantasy, and this is the oldest setting I’ve tried: with more recent settings, I can do things like call up my grandmother and interrogate her about how they disposed of trash in Oregon in 1946. With this, I didn’t have any cheats.
I did a lot of photographic research online, looking at archival photographs of French and Belgian towns. I looked at pictures of women and girls and their clothing especially, since Fleur and her mother are seamstresses. I read up on the changes in fashion, in France in particular, over the period of the War.
Trying to research the life of civilians and especially refugees in France during the war was frustrating: my Oregon libraries didn’t have a great deal of information on the topic, and general books about World War I tended to focus their French homefront chapters more on the politically relevant topics of dissension and pacifism, and military matters like munitions manufacture, than on the probable experience of a displaced family. I found enough references to sketch out the Jaillets’ stories, and that was enough: the story is, after all, set after Jacques’s return home, not during his exile.
- Was this story personal for you in any way?
My great-grandfather lied about his age to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force at 17, and saw a lot of action. Canada was in the war from the beginning, of course, and the stories I heard from my family had some contrast with the stories of the American experience of the Great War, but fundamentally, the war was still “Over There”. I wonder about the recovery, what it’s like to be a “homefront” that’s not far from the warfront. I wondered about the lives of people who weren’t in the war, but were still scarred by it.
- Would you say that “Small Towns” is typical of the type of fiction you write, or unusual?
Unusual! Most of my published fiction is near-future science fiction with a social bent, and much of my unpublished work is mythic fantasy. While there’s a fable element to “Small Towns”, the voice and language isn’t the language of myth, and the setting is real and researched in a way much of my fantasy deliberately isn’t.
- What are you working on now?
I’m revising a novel draft. It’s near-future science fiction, very far indeed from Fleur’s world, but perhaps still about the limitations of the body and striving to define the life you want.
“Small Towns” appears in our Jan./Feb. 2012 issue.
Interview: Ted Kosmatka on “The Color Least Used By Nature”
*Tell us a bit about “The Color Least Used by Nature.”
From start to finish, this story probably took me longer to write than anything else I’ve ever written. It took an insanely long time, in fact, for what was supposed to be a short little story. While I was working on it, I kept thinking that I was only a few weeks away from finishing, so I’d burn the midnight oil in what I thought was the final push, working on it late at night after everyone in the house was asleep. But it was like some crazy carnival fun room where the exit kept retreating from me the closer I got. I was half afraid the darn thing was going to turn into a novel by the time I was finished. It’s amazing how a small, simple idea can take on a life of its own.
*What was the inspiration for the story, or what prompted you to write it?
The story first came to me several years ago as an image: a man standing on a sandy shore watching his son sail away in a stolen boat. I knew the son had stolen the boat from the father, and I knew that the father was secretly happy about it, though it was a bittersweet happiness. I wasn’t sure what the idea meant, or how I might write a story so that the scene made sense to me, and I assumed that the need to write about it would fade eventually since I seemed to know so little about it. But my mind kept returning to that single image again and again, so I knew there was something there. Most of my story ideas don’t come to me in this way. Usually, the kinds of ideas I get are what-if stories. Or strange extrapolations from existing science. But this felt totally different—more emotional at its core, less tied to the real world than my usual fiction. Up till then I’d only written two types of stories: sci-fi, and semi-autobiographical literary stuff based on my time in the steel mills. This felt like something new, and I was about five pages into it when I realized that I was writing my first fantasy story. The idea for the walking trees came to me while I was on a hike in Hawaii, and I saw a tree with all these roots poking up out of the soil like little legs. It seemed like the tree was ready to get up and walk.
*What kind of research went into the story?
A couple of years ago I wrote a story called “Divining Light” which extrapolates from a twist on a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics. I had to do so much research for that story that my brain melted, and looking back now it seems like it might actually have been easier to become a real physicist than to write that darn story. Okay, that’s totally a lie; the math required for a physics degree would have killed me. (I still get mail from physicists and physics students, asking if the experiment in that story was actually performed.) After finishing “Divining Light” I promised myself that my next couple of stories wouldn’t require any research at all. Of course, it didn’t work out that way. I can’t really help myself, and I ended up doing a ton of research for “Color Least Used,” which is part of what contributed to me taking so long to finish it. I tried to get the details as right as I could. Even when you’re writing about a fictional island in the middle of the Pacific, it turns out that no island is an island unto itself, really, as it exists somewhere in the historical milieu of Polynesian expansion and Western colonialism. So those are forces that have to constantly be taken into account. I did a lot of historical research about island life in the late 1800’s, and I did my best to give as accurate a portrayal of the time period as I could.
*Most authors say their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way is “The Color Least Used” personal?
Oh, I’m not giving up the goods that easy.
*What would you want a reader to take away from this story?
I fall firmly in the “story belongs to the reader” camp, so I’d be disappointed if every reader came away with the same interpretation. The best stories are like life in that they can be seen from many different perspectives. No one is a villain in their own mind, right? I have my own take on the story, of course, but that’s not to say that it is any more important than anyone else’s. If a gun were put to my head, and I had to choose the thing that I personally took away from the story, it would be the idea that everyone is flawed in some way, and that our flaws are part of what makes us who we are. Sometimes our greatest qualities are our flaws, and vice versa.
*What are you working on now?
I’m a full-time writer at Valve, so I’m doing a lot of video game writing. I’m also working on another novel.
*Anything else you’d like to add?
My first novel, THE GAMES, comes out March 13th.. You can buy it in bookstores or here at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Games-Ted-Kosmatka/dp/0345526619/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328514398&sr=8-1
“The Color Least Used By Nature” appears in our Jan./Feb. 2012 issue.
Interview: Naomi Kritzer on “Scrap Dragon”
-Tell us a bit about “Scrap Dragon.”
Back in the spring of 2010, there was an online fundraising auction to raise money to defray the expenses of a liver transplant for a woman I know through fandom. My contribution to the auction was the offer of a short story, written about the winning bidder or the person of their choice. I would make them the hero (or the villain) of the story, I’d work in their interests and do my best to fulfill requests about storyline and genre. (So, for instance, if someone had a child who was obsessed with both unicorns and rocket ships, and they wanted a story in which their child was the captain of a rocket ship that discovered the Unicorn Planet, I’d do my best to write them a satisfying story with that premise.)
The auction was won by a college friend of mine, Fillard, who wanted me to write about his fiancee, Heather. (They’ve since gotten married.) He requested a number of themes, including dragons and scrapbooking, while leaving the actual plot and setting basically up to me.
I should note that I felt reasonably confident I could pull this off because I did something like this once before — as an 80th birthday present to my grandmother, I wrote a story in which she was the heroine. That story, “Honest Man,” was published in Realms of Fantasy and turned into a podcast by PodCastle. (The podcast is still available, if people are interested.)
- One of the most interesting aspects of this story is the interplay between the narrator and the child listening to the story. How did you conceive of this narrative choice, and how difficult or easy was it for you to write?
The interplay came out of the dialogue I had with Fillard as I was trying to come up with a framework that satisfied him and that I thought I’d be able to write. I tossed out the idea of making Heather a princess in a fairy tale and he immediately shot down the idea of a princess. I imagined telling a bedtime story to someone really detail-oriented and exacting (like Fillard), and came up with the first two lines. And those two lines hooked ME — I made myself laugh, and I knew instantly that THIS was a story I could write. It’s partly a story about Heather and a dragon, and it’s partly a story about telling a story to someone with very strong opinions.
(The second voice in the story is not Fillard’s voice; it’s much more childlike and less analytical than Fillard is in real life, while also being a little more adult than a typical ten-year-old.)
- As it was an auction prize for someone to be written into a story of yours as either the protagonist or the villain, how did you find writing “Scrap Dragon” under these unusual circumstances? Interesting or a challenge?
I found it interesting AND a challenge. This auction prize was sort of a literary blank check; I wanted the winner to be satisfied with what they got, but there are subgenres I’ve never even read much of, and others I don’t know if I could re-create, so I was relieved that the auction was not won by someone who wanted, say, a comedy of manners starring themselves and Cthulhu.
It took me some time to come up with a framework, but once I came up with the two voices, the whole story basically clicked into place, and “Scrap Dragon” became really easy and fun to write.
- Most authors say their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way was this story personal?
Part the challenge of writing this story was that I was trying to write something intensely personal — for someone else. The personal element for ME was the two voices: I have two daughters, who are currently 11 and 8 years old. Both my girls are intensely curious and opinionated, so the experience of trying to tell a story while someone repeatedly interrupts to demand more detail about a tangential topic is DEFINITELY something I drew on while working on this.
- What are you working on now?
I’m working on a series of short stories (that may turn into a novel) about a teenage girl living on a seastead. Seasteading is a real thing, or at least real-ish — there are people trying to build sort of a do-it-yourself island out in the ocean somewhere so they can found their own country. Many of these people are libertarians of the “all taxation is theft and should be illegal!” variety. The stories are set about 50 years after the establishment of the seastead, and the protagonist, Rebecca, lives there with her father. In the first story, “Liberty’s Daughter,” Rebecca gets asked to find a missing bond-worker (sort of an indentured servant) and it’s sort of a mystery with a dystopic setting. This story will also be appearing in a future issue of F&SF, possibly this spring or summer, which I’m really excited about.
- Anything else you’d like to add?
I did some experimentation with self-publishing last year: I put together two short story collections and made them available for both Kindle and Nook. They’re cheap! If people liked my story, they might check them out. (Most of the stories in them were previously published but there are also a couple of never-before-published stories in both.) “Honest Man,” which is the story I wrote about my grandmother, is in the one called “Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories.”
“Scrap Dragon” appears in the Jan./Feb. 2012 issue of F&SF.
Interview: Douglas A. Anderson on Evangeline Walton
- Tell us a little about Evangeline Walton.
Evangeline Walton was born Evangeline Ensley—the “Walton” came from a family name which she used to form her penname. She was an only child, with a very large and close family on her mother’s side. She was born in 1907 in Indianapolis, and raised there. Her parents divorced when she was in her teens, and after WWII she and her mother moved permanently to Tucson, Arizona, where Evangeline lived until her death in 1996.
- In what ways would you say that Ms. Walton has left her mark on fantasy fiction?
She is perhaps best remembered for her four-volume reworking of the Mabinogion, the Welsh mythological cycle. The first volume was originally published as The Virgin and the Swine (1936), but was retitled Island of the Mighty when it was republished in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in 1970. The subsequent volumes are The Children of Llyr (1971), The Song of Rhiannon (1972) and Prince of Annwn (1974).
Walton also published a fine novel of witchcraft, Witch House, the first original novel published by August Derleth’s Arkham House in 1945. A new expanded edition, including a long prologue originally published only in the 1950 British edition, together with some previously unpublished chapters from another witchcraft novel, will be coming out in 2012 from Centipede Press.
Another of Walton’s books, The Cross and the Sword (1956), is a very fine novel about the about the clash of the Vikings and Christians a thousand years ago. It has had an unfortunate publishing history. The manuscript was considerably chopped and altered by the publisher without her consent. Even the title was changed (her original title was Dark Runs the Road). We hope to see the complete novel published.
- How did “They That Have Wings” come to light, and why was it only now discovered, fifteen years after her passing?
Walton’s papers were left in disorder at her death in 1996, and after being roughly sorted they were stored in California by her family. More recently the large number of boxes have been sent to Walton’s literary heir in Chicago, Debra Hammond, and I’ve worked with Debra in further sorting and reading, based on the pioneering categorization done by Debra’s mother. With some manuscripts the whole process was easy, but with others the difficulties have been great. For instance, in the mid-1940s Evangeline wrote a trilogy of novels about Theseus. In the mid-1950s she wrote entirely new versions of all three books, but then put them on hold after Mary Renault starting publishing her Theseus books. In the 1970s, after the success of the Ballantine editions of her four volumes of the Mabinogion, Walton visited Greece and started reworking the trilogy. So imagine taking three different versions of three related novels, plus various carbon copies, and mixing all of the pages in a metaphorical blender. I think there is something like eighteen or twenty linear feet of papers related to Theseus, so the sorting of these papers has been the most difficult. Walton published a revision of the first volume, The Sword Is Forged, in 1983, and that serves as a basic point of reference. But there remains a lot of work to be done with all the Theseus papers.
- Does this story have any connection with Walton’s own experiences? Did she, for example, know someone who fought in the Greek Theater of WWII?
No connections or personal experiences that I know of, but Evangeline was widely read and had a close circle of friends with whom she discussed the events of the day as well as her own writings, so there possibly could have been some related thread or inspiration. More likely, though, was her wide reading in mythological studies, and thus the idea of putting modern clothes on an old mythological legend.
- Would you say that “They That Have Wings” is typical of Ms. Walton’s writing in subject matter, style, etc., or is it an unusual example of her work?
What makes it very typical is that it takes a mythological (or fantastical) concept and puts living flesh to the idea, making it especially real. In the most general sense that is what many of her stories do, and do so well. With regard to details of this particular story, it may seem uncharacteristic because Walton is best-known for using Celtic materials, but the Greek stories were very important to her too, and she did work on her Theseus books for something like five decades.
- As Ms. Walton’s literary agent and in going through her papers, is there anything else you would like to add?
It’s been a fascinating endeavor, because going into it you have no idea what might be there. Walton did not write for a living, and did not have a pressure to publish what she wrote. So among the surprises have been a complete Gothic novel that she wrote in the 1960s, and a fine children’s fantasy novel that she wrote in the early 1940s called The Forest That Would Not Be Cut Down. There are two related mystery novels (and two more novels that I haven’t read yet). A verse-play titled Swan-Wife (about the Norse King Harald’s passion for a witch), some of Walton’s own translations of Wagner (Parsifal and Siegfried), and various shorter works. I’ve put together a collection of her ten completed fantasy stories. This includes her brilliant Breton tales that first saw publication in some anthologies in the early 1980s (though they were written many years earlier), as well as her sole story in the legendary Weird Tales magazine from 1950, and the newly-published “They That Have Wings”, along with a few other unpublished tales. We’re also working doing the full version of The Cross and the Sword, and considering what is the best way to share the Theseus novels. We’ve just begun a website (evangelinewalton.com) where we’ll post news as things become settled. It’s all very exciting.
Ms. Walton’s posthumous short story, “They That Have Wings,” appears in the November/December 2011 issue of F&SF.
Interview: Carolyn Ives Gilman on “The Ice Owl”
Tell us a bit about the story.
“The Ice Owl” is about a smart, slightly alienated teenager named Thorn who has grown up traveling from planet to planet along with her charming but irresponsible mother, Maya. They are members of a class of people called Wasters, who have given up the sequential, rooted existence on planets for a roaming lifestyle that takes them all over human-inhabited space. In this story, they are living in the iron city of Glory to God, where a fundamentalist revolt is brewing. When extremists burn Thorn’s school, she is forced to find a tutor. But the tutor she chooses, Magister Pregaldin, turns out to be hiding a secret that Thorn has to become a detective to find out. The answer is more than she bargained for.
What was the inspiration for “The Ice Owl,” or what prompted you to write it?
Truly, this was an accidental story. I set out to write the story of what happens to Thorn and Maya on the next planet they land on, but I felt I needed a flashback to explain the situation they just escaped from. Then the flashback took over and became the story.
As Gordon noted in his introduction, “The Ice Owl” is set in the same universe as my novella “Arkfall,” but it’s also the same universe as a number of other stories I’ve written. My novel Halfway Human is set in this universe, and the ice owl comes from the planet where “The Honeycrafters” takes place. I’ve started calling this universe the Twenty Planets; I sure hope I don’t use them all up. I never planned to write linked stories; I just keep coming back to this universe because the rules are congenial. They have light-speed transport and (by the time this story takes place) primitive instantaneous communication. This creates some interesting situations I like to play with. For example, in this story I wanted to explore what it would be like to grow up as an interplanetary vagabond—a childhood similar to what military kids have today, but with the time delays of space travel built in.
Another ingredient of the story came from my work in a museum. The professional literature is just now full of stories about the repatriation of art looted by the Nazis, which a lot of museums have inadvertently ended up owning. The situation has created legal problems that will long outlive the survivors of World War II. It has always seemed to me there was a story there.
What kind of research, if any, did you do for this novella?
I am virtually always doing research, though I don’t think of it that way—I think of it as keeping up with the world. I’m an avid reader of science magazines and scientific news. I never know what sort of tidbit is going to come in handy, so I just shovel it all in, and something is sure to come out. In this case, I admit I had to spend a day doing some directed research on chemistry to get one part of the story right enough to be convincing.
The setting of “The Ice Owl” is very vividly imagined and described, to the point that it’s almost a character itself. Could you speak further about Glory to God: its genesis, etc.?
As in “Arkfall,” I started with a type of planet found in our own solar system, in this case a tidally locked planet like Mercury, where one face is permanently turned toward the sun, making half the planet too hot to inhabit and the other half too cold. Life would only be feasible in the narrow strip between permanent day and permanent night. Such a planet is unlikely to have an atmosphere, so my city had to be domed. The inhabitants would have plenty of solar and geothermal energy, so they could get their oxygen from the iron oxides that are plentiful on this planet, and use the iron for building. Living in an iron city on an airless planet seemed a rather grim and desperate existence to me, so I gave them a grim and desperate culture. Fundamentalist religion, authoritarian power structures, and extremism are all reactions to the sheer difficulty of surviving in a place like this.
In editing the story, Gordon suggested I put in more nonhuman life forms, which was an interesting challenge. I wanted to put in cicadas because they would have given the story a rather maddening sound track; but they couldn’t survive without foliage to eat, so I have to give them up. But there are two life forms that are going to go everywhere human beings go—rats and cockroaches. We’re vectors for their spread. So they are the dominant nonhuman residents of Glory to God.
Most authors say their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way is “The Ice Owl” personal?
The main personal element in this story is one just about anyone has experienced—the moment when you realize that your parents are not really adult. Or rather, that being adult doesn’t make a person any wiser, more powerful, or more competent at life. I remember how disillusioned I felt when I found that my parents were just muddling along, and didn’t really know any more about coping with the world than I did—in some ways, less. It takes a long time to forgive them for that.
This is also a story about the moment when you first realize that life is a series of deliberate choices for which you are going to be responsible. When we’re children, all the important choices are made for us by adults; we might not like them, but the onus of deciding is out of our hands. But that phase of life ends. I am frustrated by how many stories indulge in the wish-fulfillment fantasy of a life that is guided by outside forces. Think of all the stories where the protagonist is fated to become king, or to save the world, or is thrust into a situation where there is only one right course of action. It’s all about the author’s longing for a return to an infantile existence. But life is not like that. We aren’t just acted upon by events; we have to create our own futures through our own decisions, for better or worse. What’s more, we create other people’s futures. This is the main lesson Thorn learns from Magister Pregaldin.
What are you working on now?
I have just finished final revisions on my next fantasy novel, Ison of the Isles, the sequel to Isles of the Forsaken, which came out in August. It’s a very intense book. And for all the people who were frustrated when the first book ended with “to be continued,” the second book does wrap up the story! It comes out in spring of 2012.
“The Ice Owl” appears in the November/December 2011 issue.
Interview: Daniel Marcus on “Bright Moment”
- Tell us a bit about the story.
Arun is a scientist working on project to terraform a Jovian moon in a distant solar system. While on R and R, surfing the moon’s ammonia ocean, he catches a brief glimpse of a large, squid-like life form. After he determines that the ocean-dwellers are sentient, he must choose between continuing the terraforming project, which will wipe them out, or tying to stop it.
- What was the inspiration for “Bright Moment,” or what prompted you to write it?
I had an image of someone surfing kilometer-high waves on the ammonia ocean of a Jovian moon, the giant ringed primary filling half the sky. That’s all I had — this very striking visual. So I wrote the scene and started asking questions. Who is this guy? What is he doing there? What happens next? Once I started pulling on the terraforming and first contact threads, the rest of the story pretty much wrote itself.
- What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?
Not much. I validated my recollection that some Jovian moons are believed to have subsurface ammonia oceans; putting them on the surface didn’t seem too much of a stretch. The terraforming scheme seems viable, requiring only a few centuries of advancement in plasma physics and nanotechnology!
- Most authors say their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way was this story personal?
I worked for many years as an applied mathematician at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, designing algorithms for very large scale scientific computing applications. Some of this work was ethically challenging and I have since been very interested in the interplay between the practice of science and the moral compass of its practitioners. How does one reconcile work that is supported and sanctioned at a societal level with one’s own beliefs when these do not align? I’m not interested in preaching a particular position, but in exploring the spiritual condition of individuals at such crossroads and how they bend under duress.
- What are you working on now?
My second novel, a contemporary fantasy called “A Crack in Everything,” was just released and I am working on promotional stuff in support of the launch. I am nearly finished with a horror-sf mashup called “Eater,” about an entity so old it spans Big Bang iterations stumbling on Earth and finding it delicious. It takes place in a small town in Northern California and shamelessly riffs on elements from Finney’s “The Body Snatchers,” King’s “Salem’s Lot,” and a variety of other sources that a lifetime of genre consumption has burned into my DNA. When “Eater” is finished, I will begin work on a far future space opera that has been accumulating notes and fragments for awhile. I am also continuing to work on my short fiction.
- Anything else you’d like to add?
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about my work. I hope your readers like “Bright Moment” and I encourage them to check out the other great stories in this issue.
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www.cherrylogroad.com - Daniel’s blog.
“Bright Moment” appears in the September/October 2011 issue.
