| A Conversation With Karl Schroeder | ||||||||||
| An interview with Alexander von Thorn | ||||||||||
| June 2002 | ||||||||||
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I had the pleasure of taking your class in "Writing Science Fiction", and more recently you wrote The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Science Fiction. What did you learn from explaining the genre to other writers? 
I think one of the best lessons from the Idiot's Guide, which I collaborated on with
Cory Doctorow, was that it's very easy to over-think and over-intellectualize about all the different
aspects of writing. The Idiot's Guides have a standard format which requires that you
be very brief. What we discovered as we went along is that anything that you might care to know could be
described or explained in less than a hundred words, but there were hundreds and hundreds of different
little items like that, and we had no trouble finding new things to say. But everything was very easy
to explain once we sat down to do it.
One of the best jobs for a science fiction writer, or any kind of fiction writer really, is technical
writer, and I've done a lot of technical writing. I've worked in computers, and for seven years I worked
as a group secretary at the Theoretical Nuclear Physics and Condensed Matter Group of the University of
Toronto. I am not a physicist. However, I did spend a lot of time in the environment, and learned a lot
about the way they think, which for writing science fiction was very useful.
It can definitely be like that. It depends on where you're working and whether you're doing contract work or
long-term work. I've tended to take long contracts where I spend a lot of time on one thing. But also I thrive
in creative chaos, so for me it's much better to be on a steep learning curve all the time.
Well, the Mennonites have always viewed themselves as a group apart, and have always engaged in a long-distance
critique of society, as part of building the Mennonite community. So I think I grew up doing that naturally,
which certainly helps when I'm designing societies. Also, both my parents were somewhat radical by orthodox
Mennonite standards. My mother won a Governor-General's award for a science project in high school, and went
on to write two novels, and she's been quite a radical feminist in her own way. My father had a strong interest
in electronics in the early Fifties, and got into television and things like that before anyone else was doing
it. So they both have this tremendous fascination with science, technology, and intellectual matters all the
time that I was growing up, which again you wouldn't really associate with the Mennonites.
At the moment I'm very interested in "augmented reality", which will be the next big thing after the Internet
as we now know it. But I'm pretty well scientifically omnivorous; I absorb everything from South American
archaeology to astrophysics, because I never know where the next idea is going to come from. I can't say for
sure what the next book is going to be, because it could be far future, or it could be quasi-historical,
or it could be set in current day. It just depends on which set of ideas excite my interest.
Humor is a very important way of humanizing your characters, and also of making a situation more
real. I really believe that, in writing, humor is part of realism. But it's also, of course, a way of
entertaining and engaging the audience too, and I don't want to be seen as taking myself too seriously. I
do deal with very serious ideas a lot of the time when I write. But the best way to say something serious
is with humor, much of the time.
First of all, you have to have a good relationship with your co-author, and trust them. With both Cory and David
it was very, very easy; there were never any arguments. I don't know whether that's because I'm simply
a pushover and roll over at every possible moment, or whether we organized it well. But we did definitely
divide the work carefully, and we each had our own domain of expertise or authority for both of the
projects. With David and I, we divided the storylines, so that he dealt with one character and I dealt
with another, and he would be writing Chapter One while I wrote Chapter Two, because we wrote it
during a three-day novel competition...
{laughing... nods] over a 72-hour period. And with Cory, we divided again by
subjects. It would be a lot more difficult to be dealing with a single protagonist and
a single scenario, because then the easy demarcation of authority would be gone.
Well, again it's part of knowing your collaborator and knowing their particular tics and
habits. What David and I did was converge on a kind of common style. We ended up with a voice that
was neither his voice nor my voice, it was something in between. It came from both of us trying
consciously to imitate the other, which we could never do completely successfully. But people have
tried to guess which chapters he wrote and which I wrote, and they often get it completely wrong,
perhaps because we're exaggerating one another's styles.
Having a regular writing workshop has been invaluable for the progress of my writing. I don't think
I could be where I am now without it. As with most writers, I don't think I'm sufficiently objective
about my own work, and objectivity is what a writer's workshop teaches you, although, as in my case,
it may take many years to get it pounded into your head. But the other writers in the Cecil Street writer's
workshop are all of an extremely high calibre, and over the years have been either active
collaborators or very good critics and editors for everything I've done.
I don't know that we do anything that's special in our workshop, but we have been in the habit
of meeting weekly for fifteen years, and that is something that is very unusual. One of the truisms
of a writing workshop is that you always feel charged up to write for a few days after, but most
workshops meet on a biweekly or even monthly basis. It was one of Judith Merril's strong suggestions
at the beginning of the process that we meet weekly, if we could. And it's turned out to be one of
the best things she could have suggested.
Using fantasy tropes in Ventus was a very deliberate strategy on my part, although admittedly it
was also colored by a desire to put in everything that I enjoyed about fantasy and science fiction into one
book. So I didn't see any reason to distinguish between the style and character of high fantasy, which I've
always enjoyed, and the ideas and hard-nosed approach to hard SF that I've also enjoyed. I was lucky with
the whole scenario for Ventus that I could do that easily. But I find it's become an enjoyable game
for me to mix genres, so that in Permanence I deliberately mixed, or perhaps updated, the space opera genre
with the slower-than-light, hard-nosed, science-based fiction of hard SF. It was deliberate,
but it was a game for me, it was fun.
Well thank you. Every bit helps, whether giving or taking in talking about writing.
Alexander von Thorn is actively involved in many aspects of science fiction fandom. He is deputy head of programming for Torcon III, the 61st World Science Fiction Convention, and vice-chair of the Seattle in '05 bid for the North American Science Fiction Convention. He is nominated for the 2002 Aurora Award, the Canadian science fiction awards, for fan writing. In his day job he is a manager of technical support at WorldCom, a global data communications organization. He is also a member of the Ink*Specs writing circle in Toronto and is an avid watcher of (digitally enhanced) bad television. |
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