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edition, including a long prologue originally published only in the 1950 British edition, together with some previously unpublished chapters from another witchcraft novel, will be coming out in 2012 from Centipede Press.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.
Interview: Chris DeVito on “Anise”
Tell us a bit about the story.
If I had to categorize “Anise,” I’d label it “inner-space opera” — the internal blood and thunder of the mind (with some thud and blunder for comic relief). But the story could also, in a certain conceptual sense, be considered a zombie story. Or at another extreme, it’s basically a mainstream story set in the future. From another angle it’s a kind of domestic cyberpunk. Basically, though, it’s primarily about the final dissolution of a marriage.
The story’s history has some intrinsic interest of its own. I wrote “Anise” almost 20 years ago, around 1992. No one would touch it. It got rejected all over the place until Scott Edelman bought it for Science Fiction Age, but then his publisher refused to print it (see Scott’s blog for an account of this at http://www.scottedelman.com/2011/09/16/read-the-story-that-almost-made-me-quit-science-fiction-age/). The manuscript, along with my other unpublished fiction, eventually went into a box for 15 years or so while I moved on to other things. Earlier this year — for reasons I still don’t fully understand — I excavated the story, dusted it off, and sent it to Gordon Van Gelder. To my absolute, disbelieving astonishment, he accepted “Anise” for F&SF. Life is sometimes strange beyond telling.
What was the inspiration for “Anise,” or what prompted you to write it?
To be honest, I don’t remember — it was a long time ago! But I’ll say this, F&SF has some perceptive readers. On the F&SF forum, Miles McNerney recently pointed out that “Anise” is a kind of reworking of Robert Silverberg’s “Born with the Dead,” originally published in F&SF (April 1974). That made me go “Huh — I’d forgotten that!” I went into the basement and dug out the issue — which I had bought, at age 13, back when it was published, and still own after all these years — and reread “Born with the Dead.” McNerney was right; I even took my main character’s name (and the story’s title) from a description of one of the characters in “Born with the Dead.” But I’ll add that there’s also a few notes of Cordwainer Smith in there (as you might guess from the opening quote); and maybe even, I’d like to flatter myself, a smidgen of Roger Zelazny (specifically, “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai”). I don’t mean to drop names in an attempt to puff up my stature — I know that my writing doesn’t approach what those writers have created — but these three writers are among my primary inspirations, and those three stories specifically influenced “Anise.”
In the end, though, I’d like to think that “Anise” is unique and stands on its own.
What kind of research did you do for this story?
None, best as I can recall, which is very unusual for me — I’m a research junky. This is one of the few stories I’ve written without so much as a single trip to the library.
Most authors say their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way was “Anise” personal?
Writing an account of the end of a relationship is too personal on too many levels to know where to begin, especially as a man who struggled to tell the story from the woman’s viewpoint. I do recall that a lot of the details in “Anise” were things that I either observed or were told to me by women I knew.
Over the last two decades, though, “Anise” has become something else, as well, something intensely personal to me; it was, I felt, the best thing I’d ever written, and it was pretty much dismissed as unpublishable. You can imagine how that might weigh on a writer’s mind. I’m grateful that Gordon Van Gelder didn’t agree with that assessment.
I’m still not sure exactly how I got back in the game. After abandoning fiction I spent nearly a decade on an extremely difficult writing project, The John Coltrane Reference, which involved thousands of hours of research. A follow-up book, Coltrane on Coltrane, took another year or so and was published in 2010. After that I sort of felt an itch. I began reading fiction again — I’d read virtually no fiction of any kind for more than a decade — and at some point, for reasons I don’t recall, dug out my old collection of Roger Zelazny books. Around the same time I discovered a comprehensive Zelazny blog (http://where-there-had-been-darkness.blogspot.com/p/joshs-roger-zelazny-commentaries.html) and the beautiful and essential six-volume Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny. After a few months of Zelazny immersion I descended into the basement and dug out my old manuscripts. “Anise” was still there, and still, I felt, sufficient.
What would you want a reader to take away from this story?
Intense emotion (preferably positive!).
What are you working on now?
A few things that might or might not go anywhere. I’m still working on Metal Machine Music, my attempt at the great American anti-novel — or, as I like to call it, an avant-garde pornographic pulp-gumshoe space-opera/time-travel sf-comedy anti-novel. (I think I’ll be lucky if I only have to wait another 20 years to get that one published.) A slightly less fractured novel called Strategies Against Frank Coffer’s Often Promulgated Wine Coolers & Fish Tins Inc. Plus a variety of shorter pieces, if they come off.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Kate Wilhelm taught me how to write. They say you can’t teach someone how to write, but I know that’s bull because Kate Wilhelm taught me how to write. I went to Clarion a million years ago and mostly it was what you’d expect, except for this one afternoon when Kate Wilhelm took one of my stories — and it was a dreadful story, complete drivel, something she shouldn’t have wasted a second of her life on — she took that pathetic story and went through it line by line, word by word, and showed me every writing sin I’d committed, every wasted word and silly image, all the clunky and meandering and meaningless detours around what I’d wanted to say, every wrong word and cringe-worthy pretension and embarrassing amateurish offense to the language. It was like a vast array of bright lights being switched on in my mind, one after another; it was dazzling. Kate Wilhelm taught me how to write.
“Anise” appears in the September/October 2011 issue.
Interview: Karl Bunker on “Overtaken”
– Tell us a bit about the story.
A “sleeper ship” carrying a human crew in suspended animation on a centuries-long journey between stars, is overtaken by a much faster and newer ship from Earth. The newer ship’s occupant is a post-human — a non-biological intelligence descended from human beings. The “old school” artificial intelligence that controls the sleeper ship and the post-human intelligence on the newer ship proceed to have a little discussion, with interesting consequences.
– What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
The basic idea for this story came to me years ago, and I don’t remember the circumstances under which that original germ popped into my head. I know I made a note of it in my “ideas notebook” (actually a notepad app on my phone) that read something like “A post-human NAFAL ship overtakes a sleeper ship carrying old-style humans, and communicates with the sleeper ship’s AI. A lot has changed on Earth since the sleeper ship left…” I carried that note around with me for a long time; it was when I had the idea of the old AI telling a story about a heroic act by one of its human crew that the piece finally came together in my mind. But the hook of the story for me was the idea of these two not-quite-human entities discussing the nature of humanity.
Usually I find writing a story a slow and painful process, with me “giving up” on an idea or putting it on a back burner several times over before I finally drag it kicking and screaming out of my printer. This story was remarkably easy; a few days of writing and some minimal revision and it was done.
– Most authors say their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way was “Overtaken” personal?
I suppose the question of what it means to be human is a recurring theme with me. Of course, depending on how you use your terms, most serious fiction can be said to be about “what it means to be human.” But SF writers have the good fortune to be able to approach that question from some unique angles. The theme of the singularity — a coming time when advances in technology will give us the option to fundamentally change what human beings are — is one such angle.
– What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?
It’s not a science-heavy story, so not much research was required for any specifics. More generally, like any SF writer working today, I had to be familiar with current speculations about what sorts of changes the singularity might bring about. The singularity is the ten-ton elephant in the living room of current science fiction. If you’re writing a story that takes place more than a few decades in the future, you have to address the singularity in one way or another; if you don’t, you may as well have your starship captain writing his log entries on a manual typewriter. But at the same time, it’s wickedly difficult to write a post-singularity story; it’s inherent to the definition of the term that the post-singularity world will be different in ways we may not even be able to imagine.
– The introduction to “Overtaken” states that this story and “Bodyguard,” also published in F&SF, are written in the literary tradition of the Golden Age of SF. What is it about that era that inspires you to write in a similar fashion?
Some old science fiction paperbacks from the 1950s were among the first “grown up” reading material I was exposed to as a kid; I pretty much went from Dr. Seuss to Clifford Simak. Ever since then, that sub-genre of SF has resonated with me. I read a lot of contemporary SF and a lot of contemporary non-SF, but when I really want reading to relax with, I still go back to SF of the 50s and 40s. So I suppose it’s inevitable that some of that style would rub off on me.
It’s interesting to note that a couple of years ago a story of mine won the Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Story Contest, “for stories reflecting the spirit, ideas, and philosophies of Robert Heinlein.” So taken with Gordon’s F&SF introduction, there seems to be a consensus that my writing harkens back to that old stuff.
– What would you want a reader to take away from this story?
Ideally of course, I’d like readers to come away from the piece with a few questions, rather than a feeling that everything is settled and pat. The Aotea (the old ship) was making a point about human nature with the story it told; exactly what was that point, and how valid is it? What reaction was the Aotea looking for from the post-human? Was the Aotea correct and justified in the judgment it made or the action it took?
– What are you working on now?
More short stories. I haven’t written any novels or even started any, and I’m not sure when or if I will. For the time being at least, my writing mind seems to be fixed on the short story form.
“Overtaken” appears in the September/October 2011 issue.
