I call it my Quaker steampunk story, although the time period is just before the Civil War (1848). More seriously, I’m interested in the question of what happens when an entity (machine, animal, human) is treated as if it had moral authority – does it then acquire the ability to make ethical decisions because of how we have treated it? And what does it do to us if we treat the entity in that way, or if we refuse to do so?

- What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?

The original impetus came from a Book View Café anthology project. Back in 2009, Café members put together an anthology called The Shadow Conspiracy, which had as its central premise that the “Frankenstein” process paved a way for the preservation of a human personality in a perfect, immortal body. After two anthologies, the timeline had advanced from around 1816, when Byron, Shelley, and Mary Shelley, among others, gathered at Lake Geneva, Switzerland, to the 1840s. As we were tossing about ideas for a third Shadow Conspiracy volume, the focus shifted to New World. I wanted to step aside from the concerns of the first two, Europe-centered volumes and the use of automata solely as a way of extending the lives of rich and powerful men. As I wrote, I found that my own tale was developing in quite a different direction, from mechanical devices as instruments of immortality to the relationship of flesh to consciousness and consciousness to what truly makes us human. The original project has persisted, like the vermiform appendix, in the reference to the Lake Geneva Trading Company.

- What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?

Research came from two sources. One was my own personal experience with modern unprogrammed Quakers, who still strive to find “that of God” in every human being. Many of the phrases I used in the story are in current usage today, and the description of settling into silence and letting ministry arise from the promptings of the inward light are as valid now as they were 150 years ago. Although I am not a Quaker myself, I’ve been awed and humbled to be part of a community with people who dedicate their lives to integrity, simplicity, equality, and peace. Their activism comes not from an intellectual belief but from valuing the divine in each person. It seems to me that in our writing as well as our society, we all too readily idealize violence as a method of problem resolution. It behooves us as lovers of speculative fiction to bring more creative strategies to our stories.

The other source of research, specific to this story, was more traditional delving into the histories of various Quakers involved in the Underground Railroad, notably Thomas Garrett. A native of Delaware, Garrett was an ally of Harriet Tubman and assisted somewhere around 2,000 escaped slaves to Pennsylvania. He and fellow Quaker John Hunn were charged and tried in very much the manner I’ve depicted, including the hour-long ministry and the apology from the jury member. I find it quite amusing that there is some question as to whether Garrett was left penniless by the resulting fine or whether his hardware business languished because he spent all his time following the leadings of the Spirit.

- What would you want a reader to take away from “Among Friends?”

I would hope, a really good story, and whatever conclusions they want to draw. I read this story aloud at one of the famous potlucks at our local Meeting and was intrigued to see how it was received an audience that was sophisticated in Quaker history and traditions but unfamiliar with science fiction. This story is a door that swings both ways, bringing a rich and challenging subculture to F & SF readers, while inviting members of that culture to explore the equally rich and challenging world of speculative fiction.
- What are you working on now?

I have two novels coming out shortly:

May: Collaborators (as Deborah Wheeler) (Dragon Moon Press): A crippled Terran spaceship makes orbit around Bandar, a planet whose gender-fluid native race teeters on the brink of international war. As misunderstandings mount, violence escalates. Ultimately, it is up to the people on both sides who have suffered the deepest losses to find a way to reconciliation. About Collaborators, acclaimed writer C. J. Cherryh wrote, “This is first-rate world-building from a writer gifted with soaring imagination and good old-fashioned Sense of Wonder.”

June: The Seven-Petaled Shield (the first volume of an original fantasy trilogy) (DAW – mass market PB): Eons ago, a great king used a magical device — the Seven-Petaled Shield — to defeat the forces of primal chaos, but now few remember that secret knowledge. When an ambitious emperor conquers the city that safeguards the Shield, the newly-widowed young Queen, guardian of the heart-stone of the Shield, flees for her life, along with her adolescent son.

- Anything else you’d like to add?

Special thanks to Gretta and Jacob Stone of Doylestown PA Monthly Meeting and all my dear friends at Santa Cruz Monthly Meeting.

“Among Friends” appears in the March/April 2013 issue of F&SF.

This story is the only piece on which Mark and I collaborated. Mark was from Arkansas, and always wanted to write about his home state. Through him I came to appreciate Arkansas’s beauty and quirky personality. We had almost finished a first draft when he wanted to go back to the two novels he had been working on, so we set the story aside. After Mark died, I found this incomplete draft in my writing files and decided to finish it for him. That was very important to me. It took me about a year to write, most of it involved making sure the voice matched. I didn’t want anyone to be able to see the seams, so to speak, and I’m pleased that so far, no one has been able to tell what he wrote from what I wrote.

- What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?

Mark and I came across Red Star (it’s a real location) traveling the Pig Trail from Fayetteville to Russellville where Mark’s family lived. We arrived at a mountain crossroad and saw an abandoned airstream, a dead raccoon, and a dirt trail disappearing into the misty woods. A sign proclaimed this to be Red Star. No population. We fell in love with the mystery of it. There are a number of locations in the Ozarks famous for ghost lights, and UFOs, and of course, the Boggy Creek monster, also called the Southern Sasquatch. It seemed natural to develop a story set in the mountains of Arkansas where anything, and more importantly, anyone, could live safe from the larger world.

- What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?

We visited Arkansas several times a year, and traveling the less-known routes became a pleasure on every trip. I don’t think we specifically thought of it as research, but our conversations as well as our feet often led us back to Red Star. We knew who lived there, and why, and the landscape was as familiar to us as Seattle. We developed many characters we intended to write about, in fact, I have an outline for Beulah Welbe’s story. She’s Midas’s mother and the supervisor of the Tyson chicken plant’s kill floor. Beulah’s a woman old as the Ozarks with some unwholesome cravings, as is discovered in the story.

- Most authors say their stories are personal. If that’s true for you in this instance, then how is “What the Red Oaks Knew” personal?

This story is a piece of Mark and my history. It’s special because we worked on it together, we traveled to Arkansas together, many of the characters are based on people Mark grew up with, and that I came to know. It’s a few thousand written words from days of conversations, and I kept our times together in mind as I wrote the story. It’s full of wood smoke and foggy drives and the scarlet leaves of the red oaks that blanket the Arkansas mountains. It’s Mark’s Arkansas, a place that was special to him and became so for me.

- What might you want a reader to take away from this story?

That life is complicated in ways we can’t anticipate and sometimes in ways we can’t comprehend. The fact that it can be painful, and surprising, and a struggle doesn’t mean anything more than that. It’s how we choose to deal with our experiences that carves us into the people we are, for good or ill. And sometimes, a shot of bourbon helps.

- What are you working on now?

There are two things actively in the works. A second world novel about the city of Titianmar, where luck is as real as money and far more valuable. Around the first anniversary of Mark’s death I began writing a guidebook to a non-existent city as a way of holding grief at bay. I soon realized that I was in love with Titianmar, and the story of Madka, a powerful onietsin, or luck artist, who can channel the city’s luck through her art. Several political factions try to kidnap her, so Madka decides to discover who she is, and why she’s important. There’s politics, and romance, and a mystery. I’m having to invent a whole world and it’s huge fun. But of course, I got distracted. I kayak Seattle’s urban waterways, which is an alien world completely unlike the day-to-day city, and a story sprung to mind about the city above, and the city below, which is inhabited by trolls, and what happens when they intersect. Originally I intended a super short story of about 1500 words, then I was asked to make it longer and write about what happens next. I thought it was going to be a short story, but it really wants to be a novella, so what can a writer do?

“What the Red Oaks Knew” by Elizabeth Bourne and Mark Bourne appears in the March/April 2013 issue of F&SF.

A man and his son have lost their way in an immense cavern. They discover another passage.  Hoping it will lead to the cave’s exit, the boy bravely volunteers to explore it while his father rests. In addition to the physical obstacles presented by this subterranean predicament – darkness, narrow crevices and drop-offs – something else seems to be taking place.  In more ways than one, time is running out.

I don’t want to undermine the experience for anyone who hasn’t read it.  In other words, “spoiler alert:”

Upon waking in the morning, I occassionally scribble in a notepad before getting out of bed.  About four years ago, I jotted something that began: “For as long as he can remember, a younger man has been following an older man through a never-ending cave. . . ”

That was the genesis.  I started developing it slowly, a few hours a month, sometimes shelving it for weeks at a time.  In the beginning, “The Cave” took place in present day North America.  Later, I changed it to an earlier period, perhaps the mid-1700s.  I wanted it to be dream-like, a fairy tale for adults.  About a third of the way through, I thought I’d never finish it.  I then had an epiphany, to break a rule I’d learned years earlier in a writing course.  The rule was that a short story, being brief, should only have one point of view.  I’d been telling the story through the father’s eyes.  I realized I needed the boy’s point of view for the second half. So, in a section in the middle (that may be transparent to the casual reader) I began telling the story through the boy’s eyes. The rest came fairly quickly.

The journey the protagonists take on some level could be representative of how time and memory work.  I have twin sons and can remember holding their hands walking down the sidewalk when they were two years old.  Or walking into their bedroom when they were four and having a conversation with them, and one of them saying, “We’re talking to daddy, now, this is interesting.” But as anyone with kids knows, the years pass quickly.  One wants to remember every laugh, every hug, every daydream our kids have, but it’s just not possible.  We remember some things and forget others.  In a way, to remember anything is to bend time, at least for the moment one is experiencing the memory.

This particular concoction– for better or worse – has mainly male characters, and exploits a relationship with my Y-chromosome.  Before my kids were born I published a short story based on an evening with my father.  It’s a dynamic that intrigues me.  Also, I’ve explored several caves, from a scary steep one in Santa Cruz to a huge beautiful cavern in Utah.

A bad night’s sleep (wink, wink).

I’ve dabbled in a few ideas over the past several months, most recently a space-ship voyage with characters that might’ve come out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel.  I’m a slow writer and also work full-time.  We’ll see what happens.

I took a writing course once from a great teacher named Clay Morgan. He read part of his novel in progress about smoke-jumpers.  Fifteen years later I ran into him and asked about it.  He said he never finished it, “Life got in the way.”  I later discovered he’d written some other books and his wife went up in the space shuttle.

I’m VERY grateful to Gordon for selecting this, and the editing staff at F&SF.  I was also delighted by Lois Tilton’s review and some other blogs I’ve read.  It humbles me to be in a mag that’s featured Bruce McAllister, David Gerrold, and other greats.  Thanks for the experience!

“The Cave” appears in the March/April 2013 issue of F&SF.

Bill and Joe are a couple of old army buddies who run a barbershop together in Harlem.  They’re good guys who genuinely care about their neighborhood (even if Joe drinks too much); their best customer is Frank, a cop who used to patrol the area and still comes by to get his hair cut.  Their attention is caught by a Chevy Celebrity (the “Celeb” of the title) that’s been abandoned in front of the shop with the keys in the ignition.  Odd things begin to happen, apparently when the car is tampered with, and our three heroes are left to puzzle it out–and just when they think they have, a new wrinkle is introduced, and the logical and moral conclusions they’ve reached are suddenly called into question.  (I’m being deliberately vague here; I’d hate to spoil it too much for those who still haven’t read it.)
This is my debut with F&SF, and is also the longest work of fiction I’ve published so far.

I have an unusually specific answer to this question: an old New York Times human interest piece by William E. Geist (which I ran across in Geist’s 1987 collection City Slickers) in which he recounts the tale of a car abandoned on the street with the keys inside, and the awe and near-reverence it inspires in the neighborhood’s residents–largely because it’s gone so long without being stolen.  That’s all well and good for New York, I suppose, but where I come from it takes more than ordinary human decency to rise to the level of the miraculous.  I got to wondering just how much more, and my imagination was off and running.

Quite.  The setting is Manhattan (Harlem, to be specific), and while I’ve had the good fortune to visit New York several times and explore it a great deal, I can’t claim any legitimate expertise (when I specify an urban setting in a story, it’s usually Cleveland–see 2010′s “Fields” or 2009′s “On a Clear Day You Can See All the Way to Conspiracy”).  The exact street or neighborhood weren’t vital to the story, so I felt free to keep it vague.  As a result, most of my research involved incidental details of New York life: the command structure of the NYPD, the specifics of trash collection and street-cleaning, the number of a particular bus route that might pass near the barbershop.  Fortunately, these days such information is a mouse-click away; I can only imagine writing this story twenty years ago, and the lengths to which I’d have had to go to ensure accuracy.  In any case, I think I got it right, and the only way anyone would know otherwise is if they lived in New York (hopefully not many people do…).
On characters: this is indeed a character-oriented story (a thing many editors claim to want, until they receive one), but it’s only on rereading the tale in the finished magazine that I realize to what an enormous degree this is so.  I was struck not only by how many of the key events take place completely offstage, but by how much of the story is simply people standing around talking.  I enjoy this sort of thing when it’s done well: see Dial M for Murder, for instance, which contains only one scene in which anything actually happens and is all the more effective for it; or see some of the strongest (in my opinion) Twilight Zone episodes–”Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”, “The Obsolete Man”, “A Game of Pool”, “Death’s-Head Revisited”, “The Masks”–which consist mainly of conversation.
In “The Blue Celeb”, Bill, Joe, and Frank bear all of the narrative weight; there’s very little we know that isn’t directly told to us by those three, which was why I strove to make them likeable characters–people with whom I myself would enjoy spending time.  That sort of thing isn’t necessarily fashionable these days, but in my opinion, that was the least I owed the reader; who wants to be trapped for thirty-three pages with a jerk?  There’s a time and place for protagonists with no redeeming qualities–and that time and place is the 1970s (after a decade of Death Wish, Dog Day Afternoon, and Taxi Driver, is it any wonder Star Wars caught on the way it did?).
I can’t really say why I chose Harlem in particular, except that in a tonier neighborhood, an unauthorized car might have been towed right away and I wouldn’t have had a story.  The main corollary to this decision is that most of the characters are black.  I didn’t set out for this to be the case, but it’s a natural consequence of the setting, and I figured I could pull it off.  I’ve yet to hear of any complaints.  You never know, though; there’s a small but vocal cadre of professional takers-of-offense whose ire one risks drawing when one writes characters outside one’s own broad racial category.  There’s no beating them–they’ve a complaint for every occasion–but, trading as they do in the unfalsifiable, there’s no need to take them seriously.  With all the real troubles in the world, who needs such tsouris over a simple little story?  In any case, my aim was to write a couple of nice guys who readers will like and remember, and if the reviews thus far are any indication, I’ve mostly succeeded.  It’s quite gratifying.

As I’ve noted, the actual plot, setting, and so forth are outside my direct experience, but a few of the tiny details are drawn from life.  Often, when I need to flesh out a character and make him seem more alive, I’ll give him a memory or characteristic of my own.  For instance, late in the story, Bill mentions having tinnitus; his affliction is my affliction, exactly as written–it’s like a continuous smoke alarm going off in my ear, but I’m so accustomed to it that I only notice it when I’m reminded of it (like right now).  I have to parcel out such tidbits sparingly, as my life isn’t that interesting.  Likewise, I’ll have to remember that I’ve already used tinnitus so I don’t repeat it in a future story.

I recently completed a sword-and-sorcery novel, loosely based on an older short story of mine, with hopes that it eventually sees the light of day in one way or another.  Since then, I’ve been completing some stories that for one reason or another have gone unfinished.  This has two benefits: it quiets the part of my mind that bristles at leaving things undone, and it buys me time and keeps me busy while I work up the nerve to begin another novel (which doesn’t seem to be any easier the second time).

Like “The Blue Celeb,” my other recent stories are also in a slightly-dark, slightly-fantastic vein, and I’d be denying my true nature if I didn’t take the opportunity to call attention to the anthologies Love and Darker Passions (Double Dragon Publishing) and Blood Rites (Blood Bound Books), and my work therein.
On a less commercial note, I’d like to thank those people (both professional reviewers and casual readers) who have read and liked the story and have taken the time to say so.  (A particular thrill was receiving the much-sought-after imprimatur of “Recommended” from Lois Tilton of Locus Online.  She also deemed me “a newer writer to watch.”  Is everyone watching?  All right, then.  See that you do.)  Thanks also to Gordon Van Gelder and his assorted cohorts, associates, and underlings for buying thirteen thousand words from a guy nobody’s ever heard of and sandwiching them in among some of the finest writers working today.  Appearing in F&SF–the home of Roland the gunslinger, Harrison Bergeron, and Algernon–means a great deal to me, and I’m elated to have made it to the show.

“The Blue Celeb” appears in the Jan./Feb. 2013 issue of F&SF.

The story is told from the POV of a fortyish reporter, Mike Ward, who is assigned to do a feature story about pet communicators.  He hates the assignment, considers the subject preposterous, but can’t wiggle out of it.  His workaround is to turn the feature into an exposé.  During the research process he meets a woman called Charlie, whom he’s very attracted to, but whose take on the subject of pet communication is more open-minded than Mike’s.  Besides these two characters we also have Hortensia Feely, the local pet psychic Mike picks out to interview, and Charlie’s scaredy-cat Labradoodle, Raven.  The treatment is lighter than is usual for me, but the subject seemed to demand to be treated humorously (mostly).

What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?

In 2010 my younger standard poodle, Feste, was diagnosed with immune mediated hemolytic anemia.  After three months of treatment, during nearly all of which it was unclear whether he would survive or succumb, he finally died.  He was a delightful dog, and only seven, and I took it very hard.  So did my surviving older poodle, Fleece.  They were very bonded.  At first she had seemed all right, but she gradually slipped into depression, virtually stopped eating, lost weight, and appeared to take pleasure in nothing.  While I was worrying about her to my massage therapist one day, she mentioned that there was a pet communicator right in town–we’re talking about a small town here, a wide place in the road–and she didn’t know whether I was open to this but would I want to consider calling her?

I didn’t know whether I was open to it either, but I was worried and stressed enough that I went to the communicator’s website to see what I could see.  What I read there was far from encouraging, and if I’d had to go to any trouble I wouldn’t have pursued it, but the woman was right there in town, didn’t cost that much, and made house calls.  So I phoned her and she came out.

The details in my story of how Mike’s pet communicator behaves and what she says about Raven’s problems are lifted directly from the notes I took after my communicator left.  (Nobody could make that stuff up!)  I won’t mention her name here, for fear that Google might alert her if I do, but trust me, it’s every bit as weird and outlandish a name as Hortensia Feely.

What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?

Beside my true-life adventure into the field (see answer to previous question), I did what Mike did:  looked at websites and perused Amazon’s list of books on the subject of pet communication.  For later in the story I revisited my CD of Jane Goodall’s When Animals Talk, to refresh my memory of what Goodall actually says there.  I also consulted Rupert Sheldrake’s website, where there’s a lot of relevant information.

What are you working on now?

For this coming spring and summer I’ll be wearing a different literary hat to revise my book-length memoir-in-manuscript of the poet James Merrill, who died in 1995.  If I finish in good time I have an idea for an alternate-history story set on my hundred-acre recovering farm in Kentucky.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Only that without planning or anticipating this, I seem to be writing hybrid stories that are essentially science fiction but with elements of fantasy woven in, as in “Space Ballet” (forthcoming from Tor.com) and my 2008 novel The Bird Shaman, or in the present case a fantasy story with elements of sf worked into it.  I know this weakening of genre boundaries is disapproved of in some quarters; but, as with most authors, the story is driving the bus when I’m writing it, and that seems to be where the bus has usually wanted to go in recent times.

Incidentally, Rupert Sheldrake is a dream source for this kind of hybrid science/fantasy fiction.  He turns up in “Space Ballet” too, a very different sort of tale.

A final note.  The main question I wanted to put to my pet communicator was:  Did Fleece want us to get her another dog?  The answer, predictably, was yes.  Feste, said the PC, had already taken care of that from heaven and we would find the dog he had picked out for us when the time was right.  She described this dog:  he would be older, 7 or 8, and silver-gray.  She also recounted what Fleece was telling her about how Fleece herself would die (none of that dragged-out shit for Fleece, she would be fine one day and gone the next, after having taught the new dog how to take care of me).  Not one word of what’s verifiable in all this turned out to be true.  Getting another dog was the cure for Fleece’s depression–she did a 180 almost as soon as we got him–but I shouldn’t have needed a psychic to tell me that.  She died of cancer this past December, aged 13 years 5 months, seemingly without having taught Corbie thing one about how to take care of me.  What she did, and she did a great job of it, was teach me how to take care of Corbie and herself.  We miss her terribly.

“Ten Lights and Darks” appears in the Jan/Feb 2013 issue of F&SF.

Whenever I travel, I take a laptop so I can keep up with important email. But I’ve also found that when I travel, I also get energized with story ideas, so I open the laptop and start typing.

About ten years ago, I drove back roads from Los Angeles to Canada to visit Spider and Jeanne Robinson. The result was “The Strange Disappearance Of David Gerrold” (also published in F&SF). The story was inspired by a sign I saw on a private hunting reserve, and I started wondering what they were hunting. While staying with Spider and Jeanne, I wrote the story, finishing it in three or four days.

“Night Train To Paris”was the same kind of lucky accident. I was in Italy for a Star Trek convention. Italy is a country that has so much great art and architecture and history that you could spend a lifetime there and still not see it all. The best you can ever do is take a lick of icing off the side of this deliciously beautiful cake. After the convention, I planned to stay in Europe for another three weeks, just soaking up as much as I could.

One of the things I love about Europe is the convenience of the train systems. I love trains and Europe has some of the best train rides in the world. But this time, I miscalculated. As described in the story, there’s no convenient train from Milan to anywhere in the south of France. I could only catch the night train to Paris if I wanted to go on. So the descriptions of the Milan train station (and the beggars) are taken from what I experienced.

There have been some great horror stories set on trains. It’s a kind of ‘locked room’ on wheels, this great dark tube rattling through the night, with unknown mysteries inside and out. What’s really lurking in the darkness?

I don’t remember the exact moment when I started thinking that there might be something stalking the train, but I remember that I started the story in my hotel room in Paris.
I was exhausted from the long train ride without proper sleep, so I slept half the morning after arriving, woke up bleary-eyed, went out for some food and cold medicine, walked around a dark moody part of Paris I’d never seen before, came back to my hotel eventually, and not yet tired enough to sleep, sat down and started writing. I had a vaguely-formed idea of the train ride, a character named Claudio, and the mystery of people disappearing from the train. And I had a sense of a scary ending.

I worked on the story a little bit every day, but I didn’t finish it until I got to England. When I got to the very last paragraph, the very last line—I typed a very different punch line than the one I had been imagining. In fact, I don’t even remember the original intention anymore.

A lot of my writing is autobiographical. “The Martian Child” in particular is 95% based on actual events. “The Kennedy Enterprise” is a satirical narrative of my life set in an alternate time line. “The Strange Disappearance…” (mentioned above) happened because of a sign I saw on a California backwoods road. “Chester” and “A Shaggy Dog Story” were both about dogs who’ve shared my life. I can point to a lot of other moments in various stories that came out of various moments in my life.
When I started writing professionally and began meeting other science fiction writers, I was delighted at the smorgasbord of ideas that writers talk about —but disappointed that these same people didn’t also have the time machines and starships and robots that they wrote about so believably. That’s how much I wanted to believe that all these marvelous worlds were real and that the authors were really just reporters. Because that’s the kind of writer I want to be.
When I write a story, I want to climb into it, wrap it all around myself, live inside it so completely that when I’m writing, I’m reporting what it feels like from the inside. The way the train clatters and rocks, the flickering of light and shadow on the windows, the smell of diesel and old sweat, the bottle of cheap wine. When I write like that, the story feels real to me.  It feels alive. And ultimately, I think that’s the real job of the storyteller—to create these vivid little moments that come alive for the reader as a way of illuminating another small piece of the universe.

I’ve only written two stories that I consider horror. One is “Chester”, the other is “Night Train To Paris.” Both published in F&SF. “Chester” is a very deceptive story. The last line is a joke — only until you start thinking about the implications. Not what the little girl says, but why she says it.
To me, a horror story is about something unknown and possibly unknowable. Because as soon as you know it and understand it, it’s not horrific anymore. I’ve written some monster stories, like the books in the The War Against The Chtorr series, but as horrific as some of the events in those books might be, I don’t see that as horror—suspense, yes. But not horror. To me, horror has a supernatural element. Other writers may feel differently, but that’s how I distinguish it.

I don’t think in “horror”terms, so if and when I write a horror story, it’s a happy accident. Because I really do appreciate that cold chill that creeps up the spine when confronted with the inexplicable. I got it with the last line of “Night Train to Paris.” I still get it when I think about Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” —when Eleanor Vance asks, “Whose hand was I holding?”  <shudder!>

I just completed a one-act play, which at the moment is called “Uncle Daddy Isn’t Invited” — but it might be called something else when it finally gets on stage. It’s not science fiction or fantasy, and it’s not horror, although there are some horrific revelations in it. It’s about two men trying to plan their wedding and discovering that there’s still a lot they don’t know about each other.

At the request of Marty Krofft, I’ve also written the first hundred pages of a novel that takes us back to the LAND OF THE LOST, the classic television series. This time around, Will and Holly’s younger brother, the one who was too little to go on the original expedition, is all grown up, he’s a real scientist now and he’s equipped an expedition to go looking for his lost family. We want to use it to springboard a reboot of the LAND OF THE LOST. There are parts of the story that I never got to tell way back when….

I’m rereading the first four books in The War Against The Chtorr series, updating the technology and fixing things that are now known to be obsolete. And I’m fighting my way through the last 30,000 words of book five, A Method For Madness.
After that, I have a couple of novellas that deserve to be expanded into novels, and another autobiographical work, called *Footnote.  So my writing schedule for the rest of the year is pretty full up.

But sometimes I interrupt myself for a really good short story idea.

Writing is a paradoxical exercise. You’re alone in a room, talking to yourself, typing the stuff that you think is worthwhile. You’re alone, but with the intention of communicating to others—others who are removed in time and space and who may or may not ever receive that communication. It’s an act of hope, it’s an act of defiance against the obstinacy of the universe, it’s like waving a small flag that says “here I am” before the avalanche of time wipes everything away.

I can’t speak for other writers, I don’t know what goes on inside their heads, but for me, the whole thing boils down to an act of love for other human beings. I think that a lot of us start out simply wanting to understand ourselves, but I think the very best writers, the truly great writers, end up wanting to understand everyone and everything around them and then the writing becomes an attempt to explore and understand the essential foundations of the human experience as a way of becoming more human.

And science fiction—to me, that’s evidence of an even more inspiring need to become more than human, the next step toward true sentience. Sometimes we see glimmers of that condition, just enough to make us hunger and reach and sometimes for a moment to get a slippery grasp on a small piece of it. That’s the real human adventure.

“Night Train to Paris” appears in the Jan./Feb. 2013 issue of F&SF.

When I bought my NOOK, one of my early purchases was an Adobe copy of ANABASIS–the
absolutely astonishing tale of Greek hoplites going into the heart of Persia to
aid one would-be king, and then their difficult retreat when their benefactor
gets himself dead. I liked that word, and then I stumbled on its sister,
“Katabasis”. That probably happened at Wikipedia, which is where many
of the world’s great ideas are waiting for bored writers.

-What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?

“Katabasis” was my protagonist’s name, which wasn’t her given name. She took it for herself
from human history. She probably grabbed it from a future version of Wikipedia,
I suppose.

I knew very little about her. She was strong and poor, and I had some sense of
the high-gravity habitat, and I hoped that she had an interesting back story.
But my characters were well underway before I got a sense of her lost home and
her various tragedies.

Why write it? I thought it would earn me money.

- What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?

I would like to say that I have software that allows me to model worlds to a high
degree of scientific plausibility. I’d also like to be six foot two and fifteen
years into my reign as Emperor of Europa. The simple truth is that past the
character’s name and a long history of making my own body cover distances, I
did very little in the way of targeted research.

- What might you want a reader to take away from “Katabasis?”

Sometimes the writer accomplishes that minimum set of goals. But there are other times
when he or she gets to watch some aspect of the story take over. When
Katabasis’ lover is dying in stages…when she and he and their doomed people
are in the last throes of their very foolish march…I felt that my girl became
her own girl. She is one of those rare characters that seems to cast a shadow.
Or at least I hope that’s what a reader might take away from the story.
- Could you tell us some more about the setting of the story, the Great Ship:
details, your inspiration for it, etc?

The Great Ship was built as a stage to serve a tale about Quee Lee and her
charming, mildly roguish husband Perri. This was nearly twenty years ago in
F&SF, and since that story was published, I have learned quite a lot more
about the Ship and its crew and its destination and its critical importance to
the universe and to my own non-epic life.

- What are you working on now?

And that leads us to here: I am working on a trilogy of Great Ship novels for Prime
Books. They were originally intended to be published separately, in short
intervals. But publishing in its endless wisdom has decided a single volume
with all three tales is more likely to succeed. And so I’m working on the third
portion of a novel or the third book in a grand volume. Either way, the working
title is THE MEMORY OF SKY, and the last I heard, a quarter million words will
arrive in the spring of 2014.
“Katabasis” appears in the Nov./Dec. 2012 issue of F&SF.

“Breathe” is the story of a vampire that views himself as a parasite. I took some liberties with the idea of a vampire for purposes of the story. Vampires are those creatures that can absorb qualities from other people.

Some stories are comments on other things. This is one. I found myself irritated with the romanticization of vampires. I find nothing attractive or sexy about an individual who’s only source of strength is stealing from other people. I had been annoyed for a while but the pedophilic characteristics in some recent work is probably what pushed me over the edge.

A little. I’m well acquainted with biotech and biological research—my wife is a biochemist and I used to be a physiologist. Mass General Hospital is right down the road. I worked in hospitals for most of my time in college and in the Boston area. Most of the material was just outside the window.

The choices of asthma and emphysema were personal. I used to suffer from what had been misdiagnosed as asthma and I had several smoking relatives that died of emphysema.

I just finished a novel version of my novella Jackie’s Boy. Now I’m working on a novel that takes place in a fictional Missouri location called Nuthatch County.

I have no good judgment on how stories are going to be received. It’s nice to see this one get some traction.

“Breathe” appears in the Nov./Dec. 2012 issue of F&SF.

“Where the Summer Dwells” appears in the Sept./Oct. 2012 issue.

Twenty plus years ago my wife, Robin McKinley, was asked to write a short illustratable story about a mermaid.  She had no ideas so since we were living then in a small English village, we walked down to the village pub to see if we could dream up some kind of a plot over supper.  By the time we’d finished eating we’d come up with half a dozen possibilities, and before we got home we had a grandiose plan to write a sequence of four collections of stories about the mythical creatures if the four elements, each of us contributing three stories per book.  It took longer than we expected as our stories kept (particularly in Robin’s case) turning into full-length novels.  The Water volume took us seven years, and Fire another seven. Then PEGASUS, which she’d started for the Air volume, expanded into a sequel; and .  when it showed signs of becoming a trilogy we decided to bite the bullet and let me publish my Earth and Air stories as a single separate volume, which will be coming out under the auspices of Small Beer Press later this year.  By then TROLL BLOOD must have been sitting in my bottom drawer for several years.

- What was the inspiration for this story, and how did you come to write it?

        I don’t like the word “inspiration”.  Of the fifty-odd books I’ve written I don’t think more than half a dozen began with any kind of “Wow!” moment.  Usually I’ve had a vague feeling that there might be a book there and have sat down at my desk at the regular time of day and written an experimental page or two, and with luck other pages have followed naturally.  I probably did that with TROLL BLOOD — needing to write a story about trolls — there aren’t a lot of usable earth creatures — that phrase slipping into my mind — someone with troll blood in his/her veins — how did it get there? — and we’re off!

- What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?

Read some books.  I don’t remember which ones.  Most of the apparently scholarly stuff about the burnt manuscript I made up.

- Some authors say that their stories are personal to them.  If that’s true for you in this case, then how so?

I don’t understand this question.  I can’t imagine any worthwhile writer being happy about the idea that somebody else could have written one of his/her stories.

- Would you say “Troll Blood” is typical of the kind of story that you write?

Well, I’ve written a good deal of fantasy of various kinds, but a lot of other stuff as well. 

- What are you working on now?

Nothing new.  I’m almost eighty-five and the wells are empty. I’m  currently getting my pre-digital books into a form in which they can be published on-line. 

“Troll Blood” appears in the Sept./Oct. 2012 issue of F&SF.

Lena Auzenne, the protagonist, is an artist who works with plastinated bodies (like the Body Worlds exhibits). Then she learns about a new medical procedure that puts the aging process on hold. For her, the two become inextricably entwined in her life.

- What was the inspiration for this story, and how did you come to write it?

I wrote this after reading Sonia Arrison’s _100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity …_ (the book has a very long, search-engine-friendly subtitle which I’ve cut short here for the sake of aesthetics). To simplify somewhat, the book is a discussion of the many implications—social, legal, psychological, and otherwise—of the longevity revolution, when many individuals in the West will be able to live long past the age of 100 and stay healthy and vigorous for the bulk of that span. It’s very interesting; I recommend it.

A second source of inspiration comes from US Patent 4205059, “Animal and Vegetal Tissues Permanently Preserved by Synthetic Resin Impregnation,” and US Patent 4302157, “Method for Preserving Large Sections of Biological Tissue With Polymers.” These are the “plastination” patents issued to Gunther von Hagens of Body Worlds.

I saw a kind of parallel between making death appear like life and stretching life out to defer death — both seem to be about suspending time. And I wanted to write a story to explore them.

- What research, if any, did you do for “Arc?”

Besides following up on some of the scientific sources cited in Arrison’s book (I try to always go to primary sources), I watched some videos on the plastination process.

I really think YouTube may be one of the greatest research tools for a writer.

- Many, if not all, of your stories have an emotional poignancy to them, and I was wondering if you could speak to that at all; perhaps why/how you find yourself drawn to write serious material.

Some of the thematic shifts in my work no doubt have to do with the births of my two daughters. Being a father has changed my emotional center of gravity, made me pay attention to things I haven’t thought much about before, and altered the way I feel about what is meaningful in my life.

Since I use writing as a way of thinking, it’s probably inevitable that my recent fiction would reflect my changing thoughts.

- What might you want someone to take away from reading “Arc?”

It’s a cliché in fiction for someone offered a chance at immortality to either suffer terrible consequences or to refuse it — indeed Arrison ridicules this pattern in her book. The notion that death gives life meaning is a failure of imagination.

So I rewrote this story many times, trying to get Lena to be content with living forever, but the story just would not work.

In the end, Lena decides to shape her life into an arc, because giving our lives a pattern is what we mortals yearn to do. We want to make our life into a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

(This is not to say that this is the only kind of story that can be told. I’ve since tried to write another story where the heroine, faced with the same choice, chooses differently, and I think I succeeded. But that required a very different kind of character from Lena.)

Whether the narrative drive _should_ be how we think about our own life is something I invite the reader to think through with me.

- Is this story personal in any way to you in its subject matter or in the writing of it, and if so, how?

While writing the story, I wondered if my daughters will indeed live to see the human race conquer death. And I realized that I was okay with possibly belonging to the last generation to die. Lena and I are not so different, after all.

“Arc” appears in the Sept./Oct. 2012 issue of F&SF.

          “A Natural History of Autumn” is a supernatural horror story set in Japan, specifically on the Izu Peninsula.  It’s also a noir story in that it’s about love and betrayal, double crossing with a pulpy twist.  It’s a story about autumn and a monster story, featuring a mythic Japanese creature known as Jinmenkin. 

- What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?

          This story is an homage to those aspects of Japanese literature and film that have inspired my writing over the past 30 years.  I wanted to try to emulate some of the effects of these works in the story — those aspects of them that ignited my imagination when I first came upon them.  For one instance, the character of Riku is loosely based on the protagonist of Kurosawa’s film, “Stray Dog.”  The structure of the story is reminiscent of the film Matango, a flick my brother and I, back in the day, would comb the TV guide for possible showings of in a savagely butchered form on 2 AM Saturday night fare from channel 11 or 9 out of New York City.  This film was then known to us as — “Attack of the Mushroom People.”  I did my best in the scenes that try to capture the autumn to emulate the subtlety of Tanizaki’s description in his short novel, The Reed Cutter.  It’s difficult, though, to boil particular aspects of the story down to specific instances of influence.  There are too many and they are too pervasive — from Mothra to Morio Kita’s Ghosts to Miyazaki’s amazing animations to Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo — The Iron Man.  My process is a kind of mash-up of American noir and Japanese influences and obviously has inherent limitations in that I’ve only ever been able to access those aspects of Japanese culture that have been translated into English — a meager scratching of the tip of the iceberg — but since Tanizaki was greatly influenced by Western writers (Murakami by Kafka, etc.) as were a host of other great Japanese writers, I see it as a dialogue of literature that has been ongoing for a very long time.   Just for fun, here’s a list of my top ten favorite works of fiction (at this moment) from Japan.  No doubt the list will change next week. F&SF readers have more than likely read a lot of these.  Hopefully they will find something here that might interest them, and if they are kind enough perhaps they will post a few I haven’t mentioned so that I can check them out. 

The Woman in the Dunes — Kobo Abe (there are at least a half dozen great ones by Abe, but this is a near perfect novel).

Strangers — Taichi Yamada (the creepiness of this book is so idiosyncratically quiet it’s startling)

Shipwrecks — Akira Yoshimura

Diary of a Mad Old Man — Junichiro Tanizaki (as with Abe, so many great ones)

The Stories of Edogawa Rampo

Inspector Imanishi Investigates — Seicho Matsumoto

After Dark — Haruki Murakami (as with Abe and Tanizaki, the hits keep coming.  Not to mention remarkable short stories).

Kusamakura – Netsume Soseki (off the hook)

“The Hell Screen” — Ryunosuke Akutagawa (the only short story on the list, not that the literature doesn’t hold armfulls of other great ones, but this has to be one of the best horror stories ever written.  For a new translation of it, check Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s anthology, The Weird. )

The Ring — Koji Suzuki

The Reed Cutter — Junichiro Tanizaki (this short novel’s evocation of autumn was key to my story). 

- Would you say that “A Natural History of Autumn” is typical of your work, or is it out of the ordinary from what you usually write?

          It’s hard to say what’s typical of my work these days.  When I just look back over the last five or six stories I’ve written for publication, I can’t find any two that are similar.  In that sense, it’s not typical, or it is typical in that it’s not typical.  It’s definitely not typical in that I have never written a story set in Japan before and probably never will again.  It is typical in that I have written supernatural stories containing weird creatures with undercurrents of noir and/or pulp. 

- What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?

          Any time you decide to set a story in a different country, especially one you’ve never been to, with characters from a different culture, it’s a real dicey affair.  The potential for screw-ups grows exponentially as you push further into the story.  The research was extensive on this one — internet and books and checking things with a Japanese friend who’s a translator.  Still there are gaffs and they are all my own.  I caught some before publication, and the F&SF copy editor caught two (one of which I corrected and the other couldn’t as I felt it was too much of an intrusion on the plot for such a very minor detail). I read this story aloud before it was published at the ICFA conference in Orlando, and a Japanese woman in the audience came up to me after the reading and pointed out another issue with a piece of furniture I mentioned.  I have no doubt an adept eye might turn up more.   Ultimately, the research on the story was very gratifying to have done.  I learned a lot.  The song that is mentioned as coming on the car radio in the story is “Just You, Just Me,” an old standard I listened to every night while writing it.  The version I listened to was by Pianica Maeda, a Japanese musician.  It used to be on youtube, but as soon as I finished the story, they took the video down for some reason.  Too bad.    

- Some authors say that their stories are personal.  If that’s true for you, then in what way was “A Natural History of Autumn” personal?

          I agree that all stories are personal to some degree and this one is obviously no exception, but beyond the fact that it is an homage to my Japanese influences I can’t think of another.  The feature that both Riku and Michi have on their phones that turns the screen into a flashlight is an app my son put on my phone, so there is that.  This story, though, has fast driving and running — two things I’m allergic to. 

- What are you working on now?

          There are a number of projects I’m into at the moment, but only one I care to talk about openly.  I am writing a pulp serial in installments on my livejournal, Crackpot Palace  – http://jeffford2010.livejournal.com/  The story begins in a Noir vein but will eventually evolve into a science fiction/horror/dark fantasy whim wham about transdimensional invasion.  It’s called The Companions of Fear.  By the end of this week, there should be close to 20,000 words.  It’s broken down into nice bite size installments.  Check it out. 

          Also, I have some stuff coming out or out right now. 

          My new short story collection, Crackpot Palace, 20 stories with story notes for all but one story, from Morrow Harper Collins, is out now in either trade paperback or e-book format. 

          I have a story, “The Drowned Life,” in the Oxford Book of American Short Stories new 2nd edition, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, which just came out. 

          There are new stories coming soon in a number of anthologies — Dark Faith Invocations, edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon for Apex, After, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling for TOR, Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling for TOR, and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, edited by John Joseph Adams for TOR.  

“A Natural History of Autumn” appears in the July/August 2012 issue of F&SF.

“Wizard” is about the reckless courage of adolescence and the unknowability of the future .  My, that sounds pompous!  But it is as simple a description as I can manage.  Rachel is fourteen, and as crazy as any other fourteen-year-old.  The future she dives blindly into is as unknowable as I could make it.
 

-       What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?

I started with an image that popped into my head: Rachel (although I didn’t know her name yet) standing stunned on a street corner, staring at a great-looking guy.  Kids get desperate crushes all the time, as I remember all too well, and they can act very goofy when it happens. In my original mental image, Rachel dropped an armload of schoolbooks, but almost immediately upon writing that down, I realized that she had to drop something a) more valuable to her than school books, and b) easier to pick up again.  By then, I had started to do some thinking about the great looking guy, wondering who he was.  I didn’t know, and eventually figured out that I could never know because it was that moment of seeing something so desirable and yet incomprehensible, so intimately alien, that I was writing about.
 

-       What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?

On this one, thankfully, none.  That’s a refreshing first for me.
 

-       A lot of stories have been written with wizards as the subject matter.  How were you able to find a fresh take to write about in this well-worn area?

It’s not so much that I achieved a fresh take, as that I never really sat down to write about a wizard.  That was just a label I added on later to describe (very inadequately) what he was—as if I knew what he was, anyway.
 

-       Is there anything you might want a reader to take from “Wizard’?

There’s no single articulate idea that I was trying to communicate.  Rather I was trying to pass on an image, with all its emotional connotations.  I would like to hope that readers will find themselves coming back to the story, teasing at it, wondering about it.  But I don’t care that much what they end up deciding it means.
 

-       What are you working on now?

Most of my energies right now (barring the occasional short story when a picture crawls into my mind) are going into my next novel Jocasta and the Indians which is about two thirds done.  It’s a light-hearted steam-punk romp (but with excruciatingly authentic Victoriana, barring the bold heroines, and their shiny toys). It’s very satisfying because I’ve done a lot of dark work recently, and really needed something more cheerful.

“Wizard” appears in the July/August 2012 issue of F&SF.

“The Afflicted” appears in the July/August 2012 issue of F&SF.

“Jack Shade in the Forest of Souls” appears in the July/August 2012 issue of F&SF.

It’s a slice-of-life story set on a future Earth that, while it may not be truly utopian, is peaceful and wealthy, such that it’s not at all crazy for a family to save up for an interstellar cruise. It’s also a future where it’s commonplace — albeit a bit controversial — for parents to choose genetic modifications for their children. Of course, as in any time period, negotiating young adulthood can be tricky, and “Grand Tour” is also about ways of claiming your independence, while staying connected to your roots.

- What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
 
Part of it was a strange feeling I’d gotten about time perception many years ago (see the question after next) but the immediate trigger came when I was trying to write a bunch of very short sketches about different planets and/or fantasy cities. I’d wanted to do something in the same vein as Italo Calvino’s _Invisible Cities_ or Benjamin Rosenbaum’s story cycle _Other Cities._ One idea that turned up was of a planet that every so often had a big going-away celebration for starfarers, only it would turn out that the people leaving, and the people saying goodbye, were not the ones you’d expect.

I tried refining that notion into something that looked publishable, but the story wanted to get longer than that initial sketch… Meanwhile I’d been playing around with the idea of a sequence about a very long-lived star-traveling character. At some point I realized “Grand Tour” could be that character’s opening story. The pieces seemed to fit.

- What kind of research, if any did you do for this story?

It was pretty light research. I looked at an atlas when considering I-Chen’s flight plan, and checked the distance to Barnard’s Star. And a former colleague of Chinese descent was gracious enough to lend me her name for my main character.
 
- Most authors say their stories are personal.  If that’s true for you, in what way was “Grand Tour” personal?

In my twenties I first moved a long way from my home town. I’d gone to school a couple of hours away, but this was a much bigger step. It was an open-ended adventure — I got a job copy-editing at a newspaper — though always with the assumption I’d return to my own neck of the woods eventually.

I noticed this awkward difference in how my family and I perceived the passage of time. The cliche situation is that a young person experiences time as passing slowly and an older person sees time passing swiftly. But the opposite happened in this case. My family felt I was off on my adventure for an awfully long time, while I kept feeling as if I’d only just arrived. The disconnect reminded me of the relativistic time dilation that features in science fiction stories about star travel — at least the ones that don’t use faster-than-light travel as a way of getting around General Relativity.

Now, that wasn’t really a story idea, just a metaphor — but it stuck with me, waiting for a story to show up later. Over twenty years later, as it turned out!
 
- Is there anything in particular you would want a reader to take away from “Grand Tour?”

There is some stuff in there about human relationships, but the story verges on being preachy as it is, so I’ll let it do the talking. I will say I was glad to finally manage a non-violent science fiction story.
 
- What are you working on now?
 
I’m revising a novel about my sword-and-sorcery characters Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone, who owe their existence to F&SF (they last appeared here in “A Wizard of the Old School,” in the August 2007 issue.)

“Grand Tour” appears in the May/June 2012 issue of F&SF.

- What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?

I had a bad cold. I looked in the mirror and asked myself, “Who in the hell would want this?” And bingo, there you have it. A world where germs are a commodity, where people need to be sick sometimes in order to slow down. I was reading a good bit of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett at the time for another noir project, and everything sort of came together.

- What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?

I didn’t do as much research on this story as I usually do because I was less interested in the science and more interested in the character development and situation. That being said, I brushed up a bit on virulent disease and bacteria, especially regarding the speed in which germs replicate in the human body.

- This sci-fi story is your first sale to F&SF.  What have you written in the past, and what draws you to the science fiction genre?

I’ve always loved science fiction. I remember reading F&SF and Asimov’s as a young teen. I especially loved Bradbury (R.I.P., good sir), and later Le Guin and Delaney. Even in my undergraduate and graduate experiences, I gravitated toward sci-fi, surreal, and slipstream. My first publications, which appear in Big Bridge (an online literary journal), are in these styles.
 
“Typhoid Jack” is my first short story in print, and is obviously very sci-fi. I also have a slipsteam short story, “Synesthesia,” forthcoming in the west coast literary journal ZYZZYVA. I wrote “Synesthesia” in my last week at Clarion 2011, which was a key experience for my writing. I wrote “Typhoid Jack” before Clarion, but polished it up after.  

- What might you want someone reading “Typhoid Jack” to take away from the story?
It’s tough to look objectively at my work in this way, but I do know that “Typhoid Jack” deals primarily with the balance between self-interest and the good of the community. It’s a complex equilibrium, and pervasive in our own society. I mean, look at the dichotomy between Democratic and Republican ideals (or, how they are perceived by the talking heads on the 24 hour news networks). Self-preservation may be our strongest drive, but what about our fellow man? It’s all very tricky. But I like to write about tricky things, and sci-fi is a great genre for exploring them.

- What are you working on now?
Currently, I’m polishing up an alternative history sci-fi novella that focuses on events in and around Chernobyl in the early 90s. I’ve recently finished a speculative fiction novel tentatively titled All the Night a Song, represented by Jason Yarn with the Paradigm Agency. It’s getting shopped later in July, so wish me luck!

“Typhoid Jack” appears in the May/June 2012 issue.

- What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
The idea for this story came from some of my experiences as a father
to my three children.  My own taste in music was greatly influenced by
my father, and we shared a bond because of that.  When my kids were
young, I found myself intentionally trying to play the same music for
my kids in an attempt to get them to like it as well, hoping to create
the same bond.  (This has achieved varying degrees of success and
non-success so far, of course).  The same thing applied to science
fiction–I gave them the science fiction and fantasy books I read as a
kid, and we watched my favorite sci-fi movies and tv shows, and I
brought out all my posters and old toys, etc., all in an attempt to
pass along my own personal fascination with the genre.  Sometimes I
felt extremely guilty, however, for trying to influence them so
overtly.

At the same time I also saw some of my own personality weaknesses
(such as shyness) beginning to manifest themselves in my kids.  On the
one hand I felt bad and somewhat responsible for that, but on the
other hand, I also felt a heightened connection to them because of
it–I could understand exactly what they were feeling, even if other
people couldn’t.

The question that came to my mind, then, was–if I could wave a magic
wand and simply get rid of that weakness for my child, would I do it,
even if it meant losing that bond we shared because of it?  And I
wasn’t sure how I would answer that question.  I’m all for sparing my
kids heartache, but on the other hand, adversity is how we learn best,
and what shapes us the most.

Those questions led to other questions–what if that magic wand
allowed me to carry those changes to an extreme?  And at what point
would I cross the line from gentle influence to unethical,
manipulative plotting?  “City League” was the story that came out of
those questions.  Memories just happened to be the plot tool, and I
used baseball as the connecting thread simply because I love baseball
and have always wanted to use it as a framework for a story.  But the
core inspiration was always that father/child relationship.

- Most authors say their stories are personal.  If that’s true for
you, in what way was “City League” personal?
Some stories that I write I call “throw-away” stories.  In other
words, a story  might have some good ideas, but the personal
connection is minimal, and it is written with external, business needs
in mind–i.e., better to keep this under 7500 words, or this type of
fantasy will be tough to sell, so maybe change it to this, or I love
this character but he’s not essential, so best to cut him out, and so
forth.

“City League”, however, was a story I wrote for myself.  The main
characters (both father and son) are me in many ways, and their
journey (in all of 6500 words) has been my journey to a large degree.
Encapsulating it in this story has allowed me to understand myself a
little bit better.  I was fully prepared for it not to sell, or take a
few knocks as being overly sentimental.  But this was one story where
I was okay with that.  Luckily Mr. Van Gelder was kind enough to buy
it anyway.

- What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?
Most of the research I did centered around the science of memories and
memory recall.  When I initially envisioned the story I did not
realize how many different kinds of memories there are, not just in
abstract classification but in the different ways the brain processes
memory information.  Different areas of the brain are used for
different kinds of memory (short term, long term, conscious,
unconscious, visual, sensory, motor skills, etc.) and for different
stages of recall (encoding, storage, retrieval, etc.)  While I took
some liberties in extrapolating the future science of memory recall
for the story, I hope the fact that it is all rooted in a small degree
of true science lends it some sense of believability.

- What would you want someone to take away from reading “City League?”
We are all dealt a hand in the game of life.  Some very few lucky
people are dealt a wining hand right off the top.  Others are dealt
crap and fold without ever playing.  Most of the rest of us are dealt
something in the middle.  We often wish we had a different set of
cards, or somebody else’s cards.  But all we can do is play the hand
we have, and in most cases we put in endless blood, sweat and tears to
still win the game with it.  In “City League” the main character
struggles with the knowledge that the deck was stacked against him by
his own father.  And yet, in the end, does it really matter?

Ultimately I’m not trying to send any profound message with “City
League” but rather trying to create a universal struggle that the
reader can relate to.  We all have our demons.  If it’s not shyness
it’s something else, and my hope is that the sense of survival the
main character achieves in the end can inspire others.

Of course, as much as “City League” is the son’s story, and is told
from the son’s POV, it is also very much the dad’s story.  And though
what he did was reprehensible, I’d like to think that readers can
still sympathize with some of his motivations as a father–and also
perhaps sympathize with the fine line parents sometimes have to walk
with their children.
- What are you working on now?
Right now I’m working on remembering which kid has what dance recital
on what day, who finished their math homework and who just “pretended”
to, and why are they asking for allowance again when I coulda swore I
just paid them yesterday?   Aside from that I’m revising my next short
story, a rather abstract/experimental piece for me, and pecking away
at the background for a potential novel set in the same venue as “The
Ghiling Blade” (from the Jan./Feb. 2011 F&SF).

On a side note, as I write this my 10 year old daughter is sitting
right next to me reading “The Fellowship of the Ring.”  So screw it
all, I’m stacking the deck anyway!  My dastardly plan is working, ha,
ha!

“City League” appears in the May/June 2012 issue.

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.