Interview: David Gerrold on “Night Train to Paris”
- Tell us a bit about “Night Train to Paris.”
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.
- What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
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.
- “Night Train to Paris” seems to have an autobiographical feel to it. Is writing yourself into your work something you do often?
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.
- Is horror a genre that you write in regularly?
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!>
- What are you working on now?
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.
- Anything else you’d like to add?
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.
Interview: Alter Reiss on “If the Stars Reverse Their Courses, If the Rivers Run Back from the Sea”
Tell us a bit about “If the Stars Reverse their Courses, If the Rivers Run Back from the Sea.”
After his side wins a long and bloody war, Andier Evas follows an old rival back to before the war began, to try to undo what had happened in the years between. It’s about escaping from and changing the past, and the difference between who someone was and who they are. Also, there’s a swordfight, which I think turned out reasonably well.
What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
This is one of the stories that came together from a collection of images—the man in the boat, leaving a bombed-out city, the dinner and the duel, the lights of fishing ships seen from a long way off—but it took a while for those images to connect to a story line. Early
attempts had the guy in the boat being a necromancer and a deposed king, both of which were entirely wrong.
One of those images was a couplet–”If the stars reverse their courses, if the rivers run back from the sea / could I be true to you, my love, and would you be true to me?” and thinking about that led me to the story. Being able to go back and fix mistakes, to do everything right the first time would be a hell of a satisfying thing to do, at least for a while. But if someone who kept playing through, kept starting from the same point, it would inevitably shape him, even though the worlds he inhabited would all seem the same after a while. And that was the main thread, the challenge failed by the villain and passed by the hero.
Would you say that “If the Stars Reverse Their Courses…” is typical of the fiction that you write?
I’m not sure if I’m really the right person to answer that—that sort of thing is more easily seen from outside than from inside. I can say that there are a few things that show up in this story that I tend to come back to: I like postwar settings, as I find that some of the most interesting stories start after the big stories end. I also like settings with both magic and 20th century levels of technology.
What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?
Most of the research for this story, if you can call it that, was done before I had the idea of writing the story. I fenced a bit in college, and casually after that, and some of the details of the setting come from reading various bits and pieces of 20th century history, largely around the periods of the world wars.
What are you working on now?
Unfortunately, I’ve been suffering from mononucleosis for the last couple of months, which has rendered me incapable of getting basically any writing done at all. I’ve been feeling a bit better lately (hence my ability to answer these questions!), and I’m hoping to dive back into some of the projects I’ve put on hold, including an urban fantasy novel set in the underworld of New York in the 1920s, and centering on the murder of Arnold Rothstein.
“If the Stars Reverse Their Courses…” appears in the Nov./Dec. 2012 issue of F&SF.
Interview: Robert Reed on “Katabasis”
- Tell us a bit about “Katabasis.”
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.
Interview: Steven Popkes on “Breathe”
- Tell us a bit about “Breathe.”
“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.
- What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
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.
- What kind of research, if any, did you do for “Breathe?”
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.
- Most authors say their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way was your story personal?
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.
- What are you working on now?
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.
- Anything else you’d like to add?
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.
Interview: Lynda Rucker on “Where the Summer Dwells”
- Tell us a little bit about the story.
Oh dear! I’m never very good at talking about stuff I write. I’d much rather have someone tell me about the story. Okay. Here goes. Although an atheist, I am fascinated with the idea of encounters with the numinous. In fact, it would not be wrong to say that nearly everything I write is dealing with that on some level. I am especially intrigued with how people cope with the rest of their lives in the wake of such an encounter. “Where the Summer Dwells” is, in part, about that. It’s also about memory, and loss, and longing, and growing up.
- What was the inspiration for “Where the Summer Dwells,” or what prompted you to write it?
This is a story that came from lots of little bits and pieces over a long period of time. It actually started living in my head sometime in the mid-to-late oughts; I was working on a graduate degree in medieval English literature and taking what I thought might be a permanent break from fiction writing. Of course, I was still scribbling down bits of stories now and again, because they kept taking shape in my brain and refusing to leave me alone. At the time, I was living in Portland, Oregon, and I watched a documentary about the South called Searching for the One-Eyed Jesus, a romanticized but evocative portrait of the region where I’d been born and raised. Although I hadn’t lived there for well over a decade, it was one of several things I encountered around the same time that made me homesick, and somewhere along the way I started thinking of a summer I’d spent with my best friend in high school exploring abandoned houses and cemeteries and endless back roads in rural Georgia—oddly, because I’m not nostalgic about being a teenager or where I grew up (and the story’s not about my friend!). And I liked the documentary but from it came the idea of a dilettantish filmmaker imagining the South as a sort of exotic theme park. (And that doesn’t offend me—I’m endlessly fascinated with all the different ways that outsiders and insiders, visitors and locals, view their environments.)
The feeling of the story, the recollections of those long-ago explorations, the characters, and the train tracks were all more or less in my head from the start, although for a long time the story simply lived on my hard drive as some vignettes and some photos grabbed online of abandoned train tracks. Eventually I found my way back to writing fiction again and the story was there, waiting.
- What kind of research, if any, did you do for this story?
None. Well, I did look up the kind of camera Seth might have. That information’s already out of date by now, though!
- This is your F&SF debut, correct? How long have you been writing, and would you say that “Where the Summer Dwells” is typical of what you write?
Yes, this is my F&SF debut. In fact, I’ve only submitted to F&SF a couple of times in the past because I rarely write fiction that I think is right for the magazine—I mostly write horror fiction.
I’ve been writing, literally, since I could hold a pencil and print or peck out letters on a typewriter. I started seriously submitting fiction in the late 90s, although I took four or five years off, as I mentioned above.
I think the style and some of the preoccupations of “Where the Summer Dwells” are fairly typical of what I write, but as I also mentioned above, I mostly write what I think is horror fiction. However, sometimes people tell me they don’t like horror but they like what I write. I think that has more to do with misconceptions about the scope of good horror fiction and what it can do than my writing, specifically. But I’m also pretty bad at saying what my own fiction is, and it turns out that at least some people consider this to be a horror story as well.
- What might you want a reader to take away from your story?
I don’t tell the reader what to do, or even what I want them to do. That’s dangerous territory. When I release a story into the wild, the story becomes a part of anyone who wants it. Maybe that’s what I want a reader to take away. The story is yours now, whatever it means to you, if you’d like to have it.
- What are you working on now?
I’m working on several short stories. I’d like to put a collection together and people keep asking me about one and so I’m going to try to focus on that in the year ahead. I’ve got a YA novel circulating which is, to quote from my blog, a “dark fantasy novel about bereavement, family secrets, and the great god Pan.” I’m also working very hard on a book for adults—a horror novel? shall we call it a ‘supernatural thriller’?—set in the present, but in part about thirties/forties pulp writers and secret societies and other things I’m not yet ready to talk about.
“Where the Summer Dwells” appears in the Sept./Oct. 2012 issue.
