Interview: Wayne Wightman on “A Foreign Country”
Tell us a bit about the story. What’s it about?
“A Foreign Country” is about a third-party presidential candidate who inexplicably wins with huge majorities. Then he sits behind his desk and apparently does nothing but eat. He says he likes the food here. Crime stops, criminals (among others) disappear, peace and quiet descends, and a lot of people lose chunks of their memories. But they’re happy in an impaired kind of way. Of course, there’s a little romance, attempted assassination, madness… the usual. The story is told from the point of view of a very ordinary, unimaginative pool reporter who trails the candidate around, goes to the White House with him, and spends most of his time being bewildered.
What’s the genesis of the story–what was the inspiration for it, or what prompted you to write it?
Two identifiable sources: First, the question, “What if a flaky third-party no-chance candidate won?” And, second, a mean-spirited party game called “Extermination,” where the goal is to reduce the population of the earth by half (or a third or whatever—it’s all approximation) by selecting groups (with no exceptions within that group) that will cease to exist, like people who have killed other people (soldiers and policemen have to be included here), people who’ve killed anything for fun, etc. But how I got from those two things to the final story is a mystery to me. It’s no mystery to me that the ancient Greeks believed the muses whispered their poetry into their ears.
Interview: Carolyn Ives Gilman on "Arkfall"
Tell us a bit about the story. What’s it about?
“Arkfall” is a story about three inadvertent explorers who find themselves on a journey across the undersea depths of an ice-bound planet. Osaji is a dutiful young woman who secretly rebels against the social demands of her communal society; Jack is a raging individualist haunted by his past; Mota, Osaji’s grandmother, is a gentle old lady slipping into dementia after a lifetime of self-sacrifice. The three of them end up on parallel, but not identical, journeys of discovery.
What’s the genesis of the story—what was the inspiration for it, or what prompted you to write it?
Stories never have just one inspiration for me; they need several. In this case, the story evolved from a daisy chain of speculations, starting with the setting. I was reading about Europa, a planet-sized moon covered by a global sea that is capped with ice, and I naturally thought, “What if there are deep sea rift zones there, as on Earth? Couldn’t life evolve there as it did here, based on the heat and minerals from deep-sea vents rather than photosynthesis from sunlight?” This was before we knew about Enceladus, which almost certainly does have volcanic activity under the ice, since it spews out eruptions of water vapor laced with organic compounds.
That first speculation led to: “What would it be like to live in such an environment?” As I thought about it, it seemed like life under an ice-capped sea would be claustrophobic and cautious, so I invented the sort of society that would be needed to cope with such an environment. But it also seemed to me like a failure of imagination to assume that residents of such a world would stick with our mechanistic technologies. So I posited a type of technology that doesn’t start with physics, but with biology. Rather than building habitats and ships inspired by the brittle clockwork mechanism, this society would invent things modeled on the pliable living cell. That is where the idea for the arks came from. They are essentially giant cells in which human beings live like resident mitochondria, drifting on the cyclical currents of the sea.
All of this added up to an interesting setting, but not to a story. The story came from more personal experiences—watching my family members cope with the old age and death of my grandmother a number of years ago. In traditional science fiction adventures, characters are magically isolated from the normal responsibilities of family and community. I wanted to write a story where people still have obligations like caring for elderly relatives—but manage to make discoveries and have adventures all the same. Although, as I think the story makes clear, I don’t think it would be easy.
Interview: Jim Aikin, on "Run! Run!"
Tell us a bit about the story. What’s it about?
I suppose I could say “Run! Run!” is about unicorns, but that would be simplistic. I could say it’s also about family dynamics and religious oppression, but that would make it sound terrifically pedantic.
Ultimately, it’s about the opportunities you missed in life. Things happen, and you can never go back and choose differently.
The other thing, and I don’t know if this will make sense until you’ve read the story, is that in the final paragraph Mary doesn’t even know what she has missed. The culture in which she lives has so impoverished her that she only has a dim, flickering sense that maybe things could have been different. That dim, flickering sense — those are the unicorns.
Interview: Marc Laidlaw on "Childrun"
Marc Laidlaw–author of “Childrun,” which appears in our August 2008 issue–said in an interview that the story is about Gorlen Vizenfirthe, your typical wandering bard, who finds himself in a bit of a Pied Piper pickle. “Perhaps a peck of Pied Pickled Piper? Gorlen is forever on the trail of a rogue gargoyle, and this time the trail leads him into a gloomy mountain town haunted by the laughter of children who are nowhere to be seen,” Laidlaw said. “Gorlen hopes that by playing a bit of music, he can call the children out to play. But this is a village that has perhaps seen one or two Pied Pipers too many in its time.”
Laidlaw came up with Gorlen Vizenfirthe in his teens, when he was under the spell of Jack Vance. “Originally, I wrote a full Gorlen novel, a clumsy picaresque ‘Cugel the Clever’ pastiche entitled Mistress of Shadows,” he said. “This went through several iterations until, in my mid 20s, it struck me as too adolescent and derivative to deserve even a shadow life; instead of trying to fix it, I destroyed it.”
Interview: Charles Coleman Finlay on "The Political Prisoner"
Charles Coleman Finlay–author of “The Political Prisoner,” the cover story of our August 2008 issue–said in an interview that the story is about what happens to Maxim Nikomedes when he gets caught in the wheels of political repression he helped create. “Because genetic change and space colonization raise questions about who is and isn’t human anymore, Max is forced to deal with the underlying issue of his own humanity if he wants to survive,” Finlay said.
The story is a sequel to Finlay’s Hugo and Nebula Award-finalist “The Political Officer,” a space opera spy novella originally published in our April 2002 issue. “Even before I finished the first story, I knew I wanted to write more about Max, but take it out of spaceships and down to the planet Jesusalem where he lived,” Finlay said. “What would a culture look like that feared change, trying to hold on to parts of the 20th century the same way the Amish hold on to the 17th century? Especially after the religious power structure breaks down.”
Interview: Scott Dalrymple, on "Enfant Terrible" and "An Open Letter to Earth"
Scott Dalrymple, author of “Enfant Terrible” (from our July 2008 issue) and "An Open Letter to Earth" (from our August 2008 issue), said in an interview that it was an honor to have these two stories–his first published works of fiction–appear in F&SF. "I first subscribed to the magazine as a teenager back in the early 80s," he said. "I’m looking right now at the April 1983 issue, which includes an awesome story by Gene Wolfe– in my view the greatest living writer, period, and also a truly nice man. The back cover is missing the part I cut out to join the Science Fiction Book Club, which I did often."
"Enfant Terrible" is the story of really bright kids and what makes them really bright. "The story started with an image, as most of my stories do," Dalrymple said. "In this case, it had to do with a typical brainstorming exercise I’ve seen given to kids: tell them that two cars are speeding toward each other at 60 mph. Quick– what happens? The idea is to get them thinking creatively, beyond the obvious (they crash). A bright kid might suggest that the cars fly off into the air, or something like that."
Interview: Al Michaud, on "The Salting and Canning of Benevolence D."
Al Michaud–author of “The Salting and Canning of Benevolence D.,” which appears in our June 2008 issue–said in an interview that the story is the tale of a hapless lobsterman who finds himself the subject of a horribly objective haunting. "His haunter isn’t just any old ghost, either — she’s the most fabled phantom of local legend, a centuries-old decapitated young lady known in folkloric circles as ‘the Silent Woman,’" Michaud said. "For reasons that elude him, Clem discovers that he and the headless gal have virtually tied the knot, so with the help of his best man — a clam-digging buddy of his from way back — he begins the quest to annul this blissless wedlock and permanently uncouple himself from his otherworldly significant other. Along the way he makes new friends and incurs new enemies, some with agendas misaligned with his own."
Interview: Ted Kosmatka, on "The Art of Alchemy"
Ted Kosmatka–author of "The Art of Alchemy," which appears in our June 2008 issue–said in an interview that it’s a story about corporations that have become so huge that they’re not about making anything anymore, but instead exist as climax predators in the global economic food chain.
"Here in the West, we think of capitalism as a driving force behind scientific advancement, but what happens when advancement is at odds with corporate profits?" Kosmatka said. "In this story, Veronica, a high-level corporate bureaucrat for a huge, multi-national steel company, is contacted by a man who carries a secret that could change the world. It’s the holy grail of materials science– the secret to producing structural-quality carbon nanotubes on massive scale. But why bring that information to a steel company? The answer: for the same reason you’d bring an engine that could run on water to an oil company. Because they’d be sure to buy it. Veronica knows her company will bury the discovery, so she enlists the help of one of the corporate scientists, and together they take steps to release the information to the public. But the company finds out and sends a problem solver to deal with the issue once and for all."
Interview: Rand B. Lee, on "Litany"
Rand B. Lee–author of "Litany," the cover story of our June 2008 issue–said in an interview that the story began simply as an image of a tall, grey-eyed man knocking on the door of a real estate office in a small village in Northern New Mexico. "I had no idea who the man was when I began writing, except that he had come to the village looking for something," Lee said. "The key characters in the story likewise appeared vivid and full-blown without conscious efforts on my part. Particularly vivid was the image of the three-legged mixed breed black-and-white dog whom the stranger rescues. One week after I completed the story and submitted it to F&SF, a man walked into the Santa Fe nursery where I worked with a three-legged, black-and-white dog. The dog came right up to me and licked me vigorously on the face, causing his owner to remark in great surprise, ‘He usually is not demonstrative with men.’"
Interview: P.E. Cunningham on "Monkey See…"
P.E. Cunningham, author of "Monkey See…," which appears in our June 2008 issue–said in an interview that the story was originally written for an anthology with a tight deadline. "Normally it takes me forever to write something — I’ve got book and story fragments and chapters in the closet that go back 10 years or longer — but because of the deadline I had to go to work," she said. "I came up with the basic idea literally overnight, and went from first draft to final sub in two weeks, a land-speed record for me. I sent it out with time to spare … and it got rejected. In truth, I didn’t think F&SF would be interested in a pure sword-and-sorcery story, but then I figured, what the heck. And you guys surprised me and bought it. I didn’t think [F&SF would] like ‘Car 17′ either. Shows what I know. If I could just figure out what editors like, I’d sell a lot more. Hey, wouldn’t we all."
