The Website of The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field

Locus Online
   
Sub Menu contents
Perspectives

Recent Posts

Archives

 




E-mail Locus Online
 

Tim Powers: An Unexpected Direction

— posted Thursday 9 May 2013 @ 9:38 am PDT

Timothy Thomas Powers was born in Buffalo NY on February 29, 1952 (he only gets a birthday during leap years). He moved with his family to Southern California when he was seven and has lived there ever since. He attended California State University Fullerton, graduating with a BA in English in 1976. While in college he became friends with James P. Blaylock and K.W. Jeter, and all three spent time with Philip K. Dick, who influenced their writing and careers in various ways. In college Powers co-created fictional poet William Ashbless, who first appeared as the author of a poem Powers and Blaylock collaborated on, each adding one line at a time. Ashbless has since written introductions to (and harsh critiques of) each writer’s work, and has authored various pamphlets, as well as featuring in The William Ashbless Memorial Cookbook (2001).

Powers has written some science fiction, but more often his work involves the supernatural and magic, with an emphasis on mythology and secret histories of historical figures, including Bugsy Siegel, Lord Byron, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, and, most recently, the Rossetti siblings. His first two novels were SF: The Skies Discrowned (1976; revised as Forsake the Sky 1986) and Epitaph in Rust (1976; revised as An Epitaph in Rust 1989). Fantasy The Drawing of the Dark appeared in 1979. Time-travel novel The Anubis Gates (1983) and post-holocaust SF Dinner at Deviant’s Palace (1985) each won a Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. On Stranger Tides (1987) involves pirates and voodoo, and The Stress of Her Regard (1989) concerns the supernatural exploits of poets Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Contemporary fantasy Last Call (1992) won a World Fantasy Award and a Locus Award, and began a loose trilogy that also includes Expiration Date (1995) and Earthquake Weather (1997), both Locus Award winners. Declare (2001), a supernatural secret history about Cold War spies, won a World Fantasy Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Three Days to Never (2006) involves time travel, supernatural creatures, and the secret histories of Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin. He returned to the world of The Stress of Her Regard with his latest novel Hide Me Among the Graves (2012), this time with a focus on painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister, the poet Christina Rossetti.

Powers has produced a small but exceptional body of short fiction, most collected in Night Moves and Other Stories (2001), Strange Itineraries (2004), and The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (2011). Some stories have been published as standalone books, including Night Moves (1986), Where They Are Hid (1995), The Bible Repairman (2005), A Soul in a Bottle (2006), and Salvage and Demolition (2012). Collection The Devils in the Details (2003) features a story by Powers, a story by James P. Blaylock, and a collaboration.

He lives in San Bernardino CA with his wife Serena (married 1980).


photo by Beth Gwinn


Excerpts from the interview:

‘‘With Hide Me Among the Graves, I didn’t deliberately set out to write a sequel to The Stress of Her Regard, which had been published more than 20 years earlier. I was snagged by reading somewhere that when Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s wife committed suicide, and he blamed himself and was all torn up about it, he took his notebook of poetry and laid it into her coffin, and she was buried with all his poetry. Everybody admired this gesture of extreme grief. Several years later, though, a publisher said, ‘You know, if you had a collection of poetry we could publish a book.’ And Rossetti said, ‘Ah, give me a couple of days,’ and he dug her up and retrieved the manuscript. My first thought on reading that was, ‘Oh yeah? Why did he really dig her up?’ Plainly he either needed to get something else out of the coffin, or he needed to put something else into it. That was an obvious event to use as the kernel of a fantasy novel, and so I began reading very obsessively about him and his sister Christina Rossetti and their siblings and all their various associates. I discovered that John Polidori was their maternal uncle, and Polidori had been a character in The Stress of Her Regard. Then I discovered that Edward John Trelawny, a sort of piratical figure who knew Byron and Shelley and who arranged Shelley’s funeral pyre – and who also had been a character in my older book – knew the Rossetti siblings. He was in his eighties by that time, but still a very important character. For instance, William Rossetti’s children always died in infancy, and Trelawny gave him a piece of Shelley’s charred jaw bone which he had saved as a souvenir from the funeral pyre 50 years earlier, and immediately William was able to have children that lived. This was all true!”

*

‘‘My approach is to assume that nothing in history is a coincidence – if any two things happen at the same time, then there is a connection – and to ask myself, ‘What were they up to really?’ If history says a person was in a particular place to meet somebody, or attend a funeral, or get married, you look for little details and you’ll find he threw a cigar into someone’s drink, maybe, and so you find out whose drink it was, what he was drinking, did either of them have any false limbs or a glass eye, what phase the moon was in, everything. And if you’re obsessively looking for evidence of some supernatural context, you’ll generally find something. I let the pieces of the plot suggest themselves – I connect the dots, but the dots present themselves. My system of writing is really designed for someone with no intrinsic imagination (though I suppose it does take imagination to know what is a suggestive dot and what is useless trivia).”

*

‘‘Luckily I don’t keep up with current SF and fantasy. Up until 1975 I read virtually everything, but now I don’t really know what’s being written about – case in point – vampires. I get the idea that current vampires are metrosexual guys who are kind of perversely charming. I certainly prefer the kind of vampires like Dracula – they’re more fun because the metrosexual with nice hair is going to be too much like a human character, one who probably reads the same blogs and magazines as everybody else, and probably goes to Starbucks. I want an inhuman species that will be alarmingly and disorientingly alien. I want them to only peripherally overlap with humans, so that humans can’t comprehend their emotions or their thoughts. The vampires can’t really understand very much about us, either, but to our misfortune there is an overlap. That’s more interesting to write about. Vampires shouldn’t tweet.”

*

‘‘The next novel looks likely to involve Los Angeles and Hollywood, and it will be pretty much contemporary. It involves consequences from things that happened in the ’20s and ’30s – how can you not have consequences from the ’20s and ’30s? One nice thing about the history of Hollywood and LA is, you can comprehend it. The city itself only goes so far back. If you go back to 1890, you have pretty much encompassed all the history of LA, unlike London or Rome where you have to go back thousands of years before you’ve seen everything. I find Hollywood totally fascinating. LA is my favorite city. Some people are baffled by that – they’ll say, San Francisco, New Orleans. But it only takes ten minutes to fall in love with San Francisco. You have to hang around LA and take some wrong turns and funny off-ramps and get to know it for a while before its charms become evident. The Hollywood area especially is so full of mythology and extravagance and doubtful stories, apocryphal stories that may be hugely important or might be smoke, and lots of them involve physical places that are still there – you can go stand there and look around. You can see the secret black Madonna embedded in a wall, which is only visible if you stand in a particular place across the street. What’s the story on that, really? There are stairways that let you skip long roundabout roads and climb right over a hill into an adjoining valley, and I swear you can’t get to some of those valleys except via those stairways. Weird temples in the hills, forgotten tunnels, abandoned Nike missile bases! I find Hollywood endlessly full of implications, and stories, and colorful history, all lending themselves to fantasy. We live only an hour away and research is a great excuse to go there and climb up and down the hills and spend an hour in a bar where Orson Welles threw up, or see where F. Scott Fitzgerald fell down dead. The place is full of the suggestive details that I use in lieu of imagination. The details of Hollywood are likely to be florid and sensational and full of exaggerated drama, as opposed to the history of Akron OH, which I’m sure is not less important but probably has less flamboyance and is less obsessively documented, photographed, and filmed.”

*

I never have any points to make in a book or story beyond the events of the story itself. I never feel that I am making a statement about anything. If a writer consciously has some external point to make, the characters and events are too likely to become metaphors for something, and the story generally collapses entirely. Because suddenly they’re not real starships, they’re actually American imperialism or something. I want them to be real starships. There are exceptions to this, of course. 1984 is exactly what I’m saying I don’t approve of, but it’s a great book because Orwell made it so aggressively tangible, smellable, and palpable. The whole point of our stuff – our starships and time machines and ghosts – is disorientation and vertigo. You want the reader to be suddenly tilted into an unexpected direction, to have an experience they can’t possibly have in real life. When I read this stuff, I want to be walking through an Escher print or a Bosch landscape. I want that experience to be totally presented as real. I don’t want any hint that the writer is actually talking about the Catholic Church, or George Bush, or the size of soft-drink cups in New York.

Read the complete interview, and biographical profile, in the May 2013 issue of Locus Magazine.


Category: Interviews

Cory Doctorow: Improving Book Publicity in the 21st Century

— posted Thursday 2 May 2013 @ 10:24 am PDT

From the May 2013 issue of Locus Magazine

I’m not complaining when I say that YA book-tours are a death march. I relish the chance to go on the road, and I’m profoundly grateful to my publisher, Tor, for sending me out with my books – in February, I hit 23 cities in 25 days with my novel Homeland, and in most cities, I did multiple school presentations as well as press stops and then a public event, usually in the evening. All this is rather tiring, but it’s the exhaustion that comes from a job well done. Harder to deal with – for me, at least – is explaining to friends that while I’m coming to their hometowns for a visit, it’s a flying visit, skipping over the city’s surface like a spinning stone, lucky to come to rest long enough for a sit-down meal, let alone a proper round of socializing.

But a few lucky times, I was able to score a few free minutes for a meal or a conversation with friends, and the number-one-champion frequently-asked-question they asked me was, ‘‘How is the book doing?’’

The honest answer to this is, ‘‘We’ll know in two to six months.’’ I mean, yes, Homeland was on the NYT bestseller list for four weeks, on the Indiebound bestseller list for three, and still carries a satisfyingly high Amazon salesrank, but none of this tells you anything particularly useful. Indiebound and BookSense tell publishers a bit about where books are selling, but compared to Internet businesses, publishers are almost entirely in the dark about their books. Even e-book reporting is frustratingly opaque: e-book retailers know which sites refer customers to their purchase pages, know those readers’ demographics and other purchases, understand which search terms direct the most traffic, and which subset of those terms generates the most sales. Publishers get little to none of this data. If I was negotiating with Amazon, Apple, Google, and Kobo, my top request would be realtime access to anonymized aggregate data from these services.

So publishing has a long way to go on the retail side. But there’s also lots that can be done before the books ever go on sale, in the world of sales, marketing, and PR to make things more efficient and streamlined.

I am in a curious position because I’m a writer, a publisher, a reviewer, and a bookseller, so I get hit up for blurbs, for sales, for reviews, and for books, by various publishers all over the world. Many of these publishers are separate divisions of the same company, but one thing that is abundantly clear is that none of the different departments are coordinating with one another. Most contemporary sales, marketing, and PR organizations outside of publishing use some kind of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to coordinate their activities. Fundamentally, these are just databases that record all the different interactions that the company has with the people with whom it does business.

With a simple CRM system, a publisher’s various departments could record:

which books each reviewer has reviewed,
which books each reviewer was sent but did not review,
which reviewers’ stuff has been useful enough to pull for a quote on the cover of a book,
which people have been approached to blurb a book,
which reviewers review which categories of books.

But also, for each book and author:

who reviewed that book or author,
who was sent a copy of the author’s book and didn’t review it,
who blurbed that author’s books.

Right now, this stuff all lives in separate word-processing files and spreadsheets in different departments’ hands, which results in all sorts of bizarre occurrences that I see firsthand.

There’s the trilogy whose first volume I blurbed, and whose first two volumes I glowingly reviewed – and I sold a ton of each. The publisher didn’t send me book three for review, even though it had a quote of mine on the front cover, the back cover, and the jacket-flap. They didn’t even tell me it was out – by the time I saw it in a store, it had been out for a month, and my review showed up weeks after the book’s publicity push was over.

I know how that happened: the cover quotes came from editorial and were sent to marketing, which had them in a word-processing document. When PR brainstormed people to send review copies to, they forgot to include me, so it fell through the cracks.

There’s the graphic novel series, now in up to something like 17 volumes. I’ve given every book a positive review, and all the new volumes have quotes from me on the cover. I never get review copies of this one – I don’t even get a notice from the PR department when a new volume is out. But the same PR department has sent me something like nine volumes of another series, none of which I’ve ever reviewed. If I don’t review book one, that means I either didn’t like it, or didn’t even bother with it because it looked so unpromising. Having skipped book one, you can be certain I won’t review book two. This same publisher sends me mountains of single-issue comics, even though I’ve never reviewed one of those.

There are publishers who send me everything, mountains of books, none of them remotely appropriate to me.

All of this breaks my heart. I get literally 100 times more review material than I could possibly read, and almost all of it ends up at my local literacy charity, which is nice for them, but a terrible waste for the publishers. After all, I live in the UK, and almost all of these publishers are in the USA, and the postage is ruinous. Many of these books are grotesquely expensive Advance Review Copies, which are produced in very short runs that editorial and marketing have to fight like hell to get budgets allocated to. What’s more, I have to pay for a PO Box to store all this stuff, and taxis just to haul it all around. This system benefits no one.

Don’t get me wrong. I love getting great books to review. But the geek in me cringes as the sheer unsystematic chaos of it all. Even though there are publishers who are very selective, whose PR people seem to have a gift for knowing what sort of thing I’m likely to review, that should be the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. A comparatively tiny investment in a CRM system would tie together the efforts of editorial, marketing, sales and publicity so that people who should get books really get them, and people who will just throw the book into the reject pile don’t get them.

But whenever I talk to publishing people about this, it seems like no one is bothering to build what amounts to a structured system for keeping track of what works and what doesn’t – who to send what to, in other words.

And don’t get me started on electronic advance reading copies (eARCs). I once had lunch with a Big 5 publicity person who said, ‘‘We’ve figured out our company eARC strategy.’’

Aha! I thought. Now we’re talking – I bet the whole thing is database-driven, sending out laser-targeted multiformat e-books to reviewers and buyers via their Dropboxes, Instapapers, and e-mail.

But no: ‘‘We’re going to send out DRMed PDFs.’’

Facepalm.

eARCs are the next frontier of indiscriminate review-copy spamming. A golden opportunity to refine PR, marketing, and sales with highly selective, targeted pitching will, instead, almost certainly turn into a pointless exercise in flooding reviewers’ inboxes with badly behaved, crippled DRM files. On the other hand, DRMed eARCs will help me with my winnowing task: when you’ve got 100 times more books than you can read (and with eARCs, that will quickly balloon into a one-thousandfold surplus), one way to whittle down the pile to manageable size is to simply delete all the DRM-locked files.

If I was in charge of this, I’d buy a bunch of Salesforce.com CRM licenses across the business and give everyone a crash-course in producing cheap, xerographic ARCs in the manner of Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Teresa produces ARCs on demand for her writers by laying up their books as two-column, 11-point type on a vertical 8.5″ x 11″ sheet, double-sided, with a 1″ gutter on the left side. You can put 100,000 words into about 50 pages this way, and all it takes to bind it is a couple of staples up the left side. These can be produced on demand for cheap and mailed in standard business envelopes. Investing in these two, simple measures would do more to improve the sales, marketing, and publicity of major publishers than a thousand harebrained DRM eARC schemes.


Category: Cory Doctorow

Spotlight on: Caniglia, Artist

— posted Saturday 27 April 2013 @ 1:26 pm PDT


Caniglia’s work is in private collections around the world and is published worldwide on a regular basis, and has been exhibited at museums and galleries including the Society of Illustrators (NY), Allentown Art Museum, Walters Art Museum, and the Joslyn Art Museum. He currently teaches at Creighton University and The Kent Bellow Center for Visual Arts in Omaha NE. Caniglia gives art lectures at museums, universities, and galleries around the United States. He received his BFA in drawing, painting, and printmaking from Iowa State University in 1993, and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1995.

Caniglia’s art has been featured in the Washing­ton Post, CNN, Spectrum Fantastic Art Annuals, magazines, books, and CD covers. He has worked with Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Max Brooks, Peter Straub, William Peter Blatty, Michael Moorcock, and other great fantasy and horror writers. He was nominated in 2003 for the International Horror Guild Award for best artist in dark fantasy and horror, and he won in 2004. In 2005 he received his first World Fantasy nomination for Best Artist in Fantasy.

To see more of Caniglia’s work visit his website at www.caniglia-art.com.


 

How did you get your start as an illustrator? What artists most influenced you?
My approach to illustration was not the normal path that most artists take. I graduated with my MFA in painting in 1995. I thought I would show my art in New York, but what I found was it was really commercialized and contrived on many levels. They were giving the public what they thought they wanted in modern art, and realists had to take a backseat.

So I decided to forge my own path. I immediately started doing gallery shows around the United States and approached it like an independent band on a tour. I felt the only way people were going to get to know my art was to see it. I really took my time and sought out the galleries that were willing to show fantasy, surrealism, and art that dealt with the human condition. I started showing in Santa Barbara at a gallery called Darks Art Parlour, in L.A. at La Luz De Jesus with Billy Shire, and in Minneapolis at Gallery 360. Omaha had Visions Darkroom and Chicago Echo Gal­lery, etc. Every city around the United States had underground gal­leries that were selling my kind of art and doing really well at it. There had been this belief that realism was dead, but that was not the case.

I also decided to create a website around 1994, and took HTML and Javascript classes. It was in the early days of the web, but it was a good way to get my art and ideas to the public. In 2000, after a long night of painting, I sat down at the computer to check my comment/blog page and found a note from author Doug­las Clegg, asking if he could buy rights to use one of my paintings on his latest book cover. I wrote him back and the rest is history, as they say. Publishers and movie companies contacted me, and I really enjoyed working on the projects that they had.

I feel fortunate in that almost every movie com­pany, publisher, and art director I have worked with has given me the freedom to create without compromising my art, personal vision, and inter­pretation. As I start my 13th year in the field, I now realize how lucky I have been that they trust my creative vision.

I have a lot of artists who have influenced me, but by far the five that really blow me away are Cara­vaggio, Kathe Kollwitz, Thomas Eakins, Howard Pyle, and NC Wyeth. These artists all possess the drama, horror, fantasy, and redemption that I love in painting.

What’s more important – inspiration or perspiration? Is being an artist a higher calling, or a craft like any other?
My art has always been about inspiration and perseverance. I have always painted subject matter and worlds that inspire me emotionally on differ­ent levels. Sometimes those elements were found in the books that I read, experiences that I witnessed firsthand, or in my family.

The way that I fell into the arts or that the arts fell into me was a higher calling. Certain things led me to this path, and as I look back over 20 years of painting, I know it was a road that I was meant to forge. When I am in my studio I feel inspired to bring worlds to life. My work rises on the thick brushstrokes of wind­swept earth tone palettes that show humanity’s hardships and strengths.

Why did you choose to focus on horror/fantasy?
People always ask me why a majority of my art centers around horror/fantasy, birth, and death. It helps me understand the impermanence of life on this planet.

My work has always been about the human condition, and the hardships and triumphs that life gives us. I grew up in a real blue collar family. My grandfather had immigrated to America from Sic­ily to try to give us a better life. My father was a carpenter who was often out of work in the winter. I watched my parents struggle to take care of us in the most impossible conditions, always sacrificing the little they had for us to survive. Those were tough times, and really felt like I lived in a surreal Dickens world. When I first started painting I wanted to bring some of the things I witnessed to life.

Another reason was the influence of my cousin Angelo Rossitto (1908-1991). Angelo’s mother Carmela Caniglia left Sicily when my grandfather did and came to Omaha, Nebraska. Angelo decided when he was in his twenties to make a living in Hol­lywood. He met John Barrymore, who brought him into the business, and made films with Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi. He also starred in the famous 1932 Tod Browning film Freaks. He would come back to Omaha and tell us about his career and working with great writers like Ray Bradbury in the film Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Is there one work you’d particularly like our readers to see, either because it’s most representative, or because you’re especially proud of it?
At the moment I am very proud of the last three projects that I have worked on.

The first is William Peter Blatty’s 40th Anniversary edition of The Exorcist. I read the book when I was in high school. My uncle, Father Joseph Haller S.J. had been a Jesuit priest at the time in St. Louis MO in 1949. I remember him talking about the incident. So I felt very honored when Blatty and Cemetery Dance chose my artwork for his 40th anniversary for the limited edition hardcover.

The second project that I was honored to work on was Max Brooks’s World War Z (soon to be a major motion picture). Max created a brilliant surreal story of the ‘‘Zompocalypse’’ at its finest. When I was brainstorming his cover for the new limited edition, I wanted it to be a painting that was gripping and visceral. My idea was to have a single powerful image on the cover of an animated screaming zombie corpse that has come back from the dead. I wanted the image to feel aggressive, harsh, and full of terror. In my oil painting, I tried to make my corpse a truly living dead soul that has the qualities of heaven and hell, hence the halo (gold leaf) above the creature’s head.

The last and latest project that I am currently working on is Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol 170th anniversary edition from Easton Press. Working with Easton Press has been an amazing experience. Their company really gets into the art­ist’s vision and lets you take the books and stories as far as your imagination allows you to go. So far I have created over 25 drawings and 10 paintings that will be featured in this rare edition. Dickens was one of my literary heroes, and to have the chance to tell the story through my art has been a dream come true for me. I have already started working with some museums and galleries to create a show to coincide with the release of the book. I will show the entire process of the project from preliminary sketches to drawings and the final artwork.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about you or your work?
I feel very blessed to have made a living at something that I love to do. Painting is my life and blood. For years people would tell me that my art was sick and demented without purpose. So many times I was left behind on the downside of up. Instead of giving into their insults and views of my art, I dug deeper and persevered. I channeled that energy into my art, and I stayed in the realm of what made me whole and who I am. I knew that it would come around someday and even if it didn’t that would be okay, because I was so happy living the worlds that I created.

As artists, it is up to us to create our own sense of reality. In an age of social and political upheaval, the artist is an anomaly. My art searches for the new spirit in modern figurative painting. Like the old masters, I have found vitality and life hidden amongst the layers of the human condition and have started breathing new life into the human form with visceral brushstrokes that are intimate, piercing, mesmerizing, and at times distressing.

Do you have any art shows, lectures coming up?
Yes, I will be giving a lecture and art demo at Creighton University in Omaha Nebraska on April 12. Then I travel to Iowa State University (April-17-21) for a lecture and solo art show. July 18-22 I will be heading out to NECON (Camp Necon). I am the artist guest of honor at this year’s event. I will also be at the Allentown Art Museum for this years IlluXcon (September 11-15). That is going to be one amazing show.

This Spotlight feature appeared in the April 2013 issue of Locus Magazine.

april cover

Cover Design: Francesca Myman

US/Canada readers may purchase this print issue for $7.50 + $3 shipping — click on this PayPal button to order.


Digital Edition

You can purchase a digital edition of this issue here:


 

Overseas readers — please query Locus@locusmag.com, or phone at (510) 339-9198, to send a check or place a credit card order for a print version of this issue. (Or, Subscribe.)


Category: Interviews

Spotlight on: Ken Liu, Author

— posted Wednesday 24 April 2013 @ 3:49 am PDT

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Light­speed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula Award, a Hugo Award, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.


Esther Liu, Ken Liu – photo by Lisa Tang Liu

You’ve been publishing stories for a decade, but have become notably more prolific and successful in the past couple of years, racking up award wins and nominations. What do you think about this sudden success? Do you feel pressure, or has it boosted your confidence – or affected you in some other way?
My own sense is that everything you mentioned is related to an increase in my output around 2010 or so. To simplify somewhat, I made a conscious decision to write more and to engage in deliberate practice. The more I wrote, the more ideas I seemed to get, and that led to a nice positive dynamic.
The reaction to my work has surprised me, and I feel, by turns, gratified, elated, humbled. The ex­periences of the last few years taught me a lot about my own strengths and weaknesses as a writer, and I think that knowl­edge is going to help me produce better work.

Any plans to write a novel, or do you see yourself exclusively as a short fiction writer? If you do have novel plans, what can you tell us about them?
My first novel is an epic fantasy set in a world that my wife and I created together – we both have plans to do more with the world. Briefly, the setting is an archipelago with East Asia-inspired cultural elements. The technology is pre-steam silkpunk, and there are gods and magical creatures and other aspects of the fantastic. The plot is based on a re-imagining of the founding of the Han Dynasty. I have a draft but a lot remains to be done. I’m both nervous and excited about how it will turn out.

You’ve had a story collection published – but only in Chinese. How did that come about? Any plans for an English-language collection?
Science Fiction World, the publisher of China’s largest speculative fiction magazine, has published a large number of my stories in translation the last few years. We thought it a good idea to put all of them together into a collection to reach new read­ers who didn’t get to read them in the magazine. I’ve been very pleased with how it turned out, and it seems to be well received by readers in China.

Right now, my focus is on finishing the novel. So I don’t have any plans for another collection (in any language).

Tell us about your work translating Chinese fiction into English. How and why did you get started doing that? Are there any authors our readers should particularly look for in translation?
It started largely as an accident. My friend Chen Qiufan (he also uses the English name Stanley Chan), one of China’s most prominent science fiction writers, asked me to take a look at an English transla­tion of one of his stories for quality assurance. Since I’m a big fan of his work, I wanted to make sure that his unique voice came through in the translation. I started by making some sugges­tions and edits, but after a while, it became clear that I really needed to redo the translation from scratch. That story, ‘‘The Fish of Lijiang’’, was eventually published in Clarkesworld and earned Chen and me a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award in 2011.

I realized that although there is a lot of great science fiction and fantasy being written in Chinese, almost none of it is known in the West due to the lack of quality translations. Translating speculative fiction imposes unique challenges that are best handled by a translator who is also a writer. I was in a good position to perform this role, and so, for the last few years, I’ve been working at introducing more of China’s best speculative fiction writers to English readers. I’ve also branched out to do some literary translations, which I also find rewarding.

I just completed a translation of volume one of Liu Cixin’s SANTI trilogy (English title: The Three Body Problem). This is China’s most popular sci­ence fiction novel, and when the English edition comes out later this year, I hope readers here enjoy it.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about you or your work?
Dear readers, please buy my book when it comes out – Ha, just kidding. To all the readers and writers who have encouraged me over the years and liked my work, thank you. I feel very lucky to get to tell the stories I want to tell and to find that they reso­nate with others. A writer really can’t ask for more.

This Spotlight feature appeared in the April 2013 issue of Locus Magazine.

april cover

Cover Design: Francesca Myman

US/Canada readers may purchase this print issue for $7.50 + $3 shipping — click on this PayPal button to order.


Digital Edition

You can purchase a digital edition of this issue here:


 

Overseas readers — please query Locus@locusmag.com, or phone at (510) 339-9198, to send a check or place a credit card order for a print version of this issue. (Or, Subscribe.)


Category: Interviews

Terry Bisson: Personal Alternate History

— posted Wednesday 10 April 2013 @ 9:44 am PDT

Terry Ballantine Bisson was born February 12, 1942 in Kentucky. After attending Grinnell College in Iowa from 1960-62, and batting around LA and NY, he received a BA from the University of Louisville in 1964. In 1962, he married Deirde Holst, mother of his two sons and daughter; they divorced in 1966. From 1966-70 he lived in New York with second wife Mary Corey, scripting comics and saucer tales for tabloids and serving as editor of Web of Horror and True Intimate Confessions. He left the city to join the Red Rockers commune in the Colorado mountains (world’s largest hippy-built geodesic dome!) and other communes in the West and South while working as an auto mechanic. He returned to New York in 1976, serving as an editor and copy chief at Berkley and Ace until 1985, when he became a full-time writer. Meanwhile he was active in the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee with his current wife Judy Jensen (with whom he raised another son and two daughters). In the mid-’90s he was a consultant at HarperCollins and Avon, and taught in the writing program at The New School in New York and at Clarion and Odyssey. He and Jensen moved to the Bay Area in 2002, where he edits the ‘‘Outspoken Authors’’ series for PM Press, and hosts the SF in SF reading series.

First novel Wyrldmaker appeared in 1981, followed by World Fantasy finalist Talking Man (1986) and Fire on the Mountain (1988). Other novels include Voyage to the Red Planet (1990), Pirates of the Universe (1990), The Pickup Artist (2001), and Any Day Now (2012). He completed the late Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (1997), and has co-written YA novels with Stephanie Spinner, written children’s books about NASCAR racing as ‘‘T.B. Calhoun,’’ produced numerous film and TV novelizations and media tie-ins, and written non-fiction titles, notably On A Move: The Story of Mumia Abu-Jamal (2001).

Bisson rose to prominence in the SF field with Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Nebula Award-winning story ‘‘Bears Discover Fire’’ (1990). Other notable short stories include Hugo finalists ‘‘Press Ann’’ (1991), ‘‘The Shadow Knows’’ (1993), ‘‘Dead Man’s Curve’’ (1994), ‘‘Get Me to the Church on Time’’ (1998); Nebula Award nominees ‘‘They’re Made out of Meat’’ (1991) and ‘‘Necronauts’’ (1995); Hugo, World Fantasy, and Nebula Award finalist ‘‘England Underway’’ (1993); Nebula Award winner and Hugo and Sturgeon finalist ‘‘macs’’ (1999); and novellas Dear Abbey (2003) and Planet of Mystery (2008). His short fiction has been collected in Bears Discover Fire (1993), In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories (2000), Numbers Don’t Lie (2003), Greetings & Other Stories (2005), Billy’s Book (2009), and TVA Baby (2011). The Left Left Behind (2009) includes the title story, a play, and an interview and autobiography.

Official site


photo by Liza Groen Trombi


Excerpts from the interview:

‘‘People used to say to me, ‘You were involved in the ’60s, the counterculture, the commune scene, the anti-war movement, the New Left and all that. You should write something about it.’ My answer was, ‘Me and a million others. Plus everybody knows how it all turned out, so what’s the point?’ Then one day I thought: What if it turned out differently? Any Day Now is definitely a science fiction novel, an alternate history, even though it’s more about political than technological change. The only device in the book is the geodesic dome. It’s set in 1968, the ‘hinge of the ’60s,’ you might say (though the ’60s really started in the ’50s, the breaking wave of the postwar boom), and the ‘hinge’ of the novel is a disputed presidential succession. The idea was actually swiped from Philip Roth, who apparently never knew The Plot Against America was alternate history. He thought he invented the form!

‘‘Any Day Now started as an alternate history, and then took on a little more weight for me personally as the back story developed, since the protagonist (the Dorothy, if you will) starts in small-town middle America, then scoots off to college, veers through boho New York, then lands in the hippy Southwest. He’s part of the whole ’60s mix of radical politics and counterculture. I began to feel that this was the book I should write, the more personal story I usually manage to avoid. At the same time I realized it was sort of paradigmatic, not really my own story but a common, archetypal story, not just of that era but in all of Western literature: the kid goes from the boonies to the metropolis (Paris, London, New York) and flies or flops or whatever. But mostly it’s the story of a whole generation of young people. Where did 1968 come from? I got there on the same train as 150,000 others and I described the ride.”

*

‘‘I don’t read a lot of modern novels. I read historicals or go back and read Victorian stuff. The modern novelists I admire most are what they call ‘women’s mid-list’, where the old rules of fiction are still in play. Writers like Jane Smiley, Cecelia Holland, and Ann Tyler still have that greater level of sincerity and involvement, instead of trying to stay aloof.”

*

‘‘I’m doing quite a bit of editing for PM Press, the ‘Outspoken Authors’ series, too. We do two or three books a year, all the same format: a short story or two, a lefty or at least progressive rant, and an extended interview. Science fiction authors only. PM is a small anarchist press in Oakland, and Ramsey Kanaan, the publisher, wanted to get into SF, so I got tagged, since I have a history editing with small lefty presses.

‘‘The first book I published in the series was actually my own, The Left Left Behind, which was a satire of the Left Behind series – Christian novels about the Rapture, (which are, by the way, probably the best selling fantasy books in America today). Then I did The Lucky Strike by Kim Stanley Robinson. Of course Stan is a big name. That’s what Ramsey wanted: identifiable big names in science fiction. The third book I did was by Eleanor Arnason, who is not a big name (she’s more like me) but a heavyweight writer. Huge names like Le Guin or Moorcock were easy to work with. Ursula was great, and Moorcock was just a sweetheart, very generous with his time. I put the material together, and I also do the interviews. With Le Guin, I would ask a long question and get a short answer, but it was great! With Moorcock, all I had to do was ask a very short question, and I’d get a long, beautiful answer.”

*

‘‘I’ve also been working on movies. A fool’s errand, but hey. Two guys in Brooklyn have optioned ‘The Hole in the Hole’, a junkyard-on-the-moon story that’s about 20 years old. ‘Necronauts’, my first Playboy story, got optioned by the guys who did Reanimator, but that’s gone on for about four years and they can’t get any traction. I’ve written a few independent screenplays where I get paid, but not Hollywood (WGA) money. I did a screenplay about Paul Robeson that looks like it’s going to get made next year. To see your name in Variety is a thrill. (Variety is the Locus of Hollywood.) Have we mentioned comics? I’m also doing a script for a graphic novel version of Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. And hoping it finds a home. If all this sounds like fun, well, it is. Writers chase lots of dreams – like fame, fortune, immortality – that may or may not come true. But what you do get if you’re lucky, like me, is a life in literature. And that’s a great privilege.’’

Read the complete interview, and biographical profile, in the April 2013 issue of Locus Magazine.


Category: Interviews

Libba Bray: Eco-Friendly Fembot Who Survives on the Tears of Teen Girls

— posted Wednesday 3 April 2013 @ 9:38 am PDT

Martha Elizabeth Bray was born March 11, 1964 in Montgomery AL, and grew up in Texas. She studied theater at the University of Texas at Austin, graduating in 1988. At age 26 she moved to New York, where she wrote plays (three of which were produced), worked in book publicity and advertising, and wrote three pseudonymous novels for a book packager. She met her husband, literary agent Barry Goldblatt, during her first year in the city, and they eloped two years later to Florence Italy. They have a teenage son.

Bray’s first novel, historical fantasy A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003), began the Gemma Doyle trilogy, which also includes Rebel Angels (2005) and The Sweet Far Thing (2007). Her other novels include Going Bovine (2009), about a boy with Mad Cow disease who goes on a mythic journey, and Beauty Queens (2011), about teen beauty pageant queens stranded on an island. Her latest novel is 1920s-era fantasy The Diviners (2012); a sequel is forthcoming.

She lives in Brooklyn NY with her family.

Official site


photo by Vania Stoyanova


Excerpts from the interview:

‘‘I wrote The Diviners because I wanted to write another series, something historical, but also supernatural. I’m a huge horror fan. That was my reading of choice when I was young – I read everything from horror comics to Stephen King and Shirley Jackson. I love history, too, and I wanted to dive into the 1920s era. That period seems to me as if it came out of central casting. I’m a fan of Gatsby. You’ve got The Ziegfeld Follies, bathtub gin, the Harlem Renaissance, organized crime, and women just getting the vote.

‘‘I was also very disturbed by what was going on in our country post 9/11. There’s a long history of using horror as a means of talking about present-day scenarios. Rod Serling did it a lot on The Twilight Zone. I wanted to talk about post-9/11 America, and as I was watching terrible things happen I thought, ‘Why is everybody rolling over and playing dead about this?’

‘‘I began to do some preliminary research on the 1920s and I saw these overlapping parallels between what had happened then and what happened after 9/11. Post-WWI, there were anarchist bombings, the Red Scare, the rounding up and deporting of ‘undesirables,’ and the rise of evangelicalism – radio evangelists like Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, etc. There was the Scopes trial, which represented so much, too, and Sacco and Vanzetti, the labor struggles. There was just so much! We don’t learn anything.”

*

‘‘How I got into writing, in general, was that I had never thought about getting into writing. I was always writing, though. Three weeks after I graduated high school, I had a very serious car accident, which I was lucky to live through. I spent two weeks in intensive care. The wreck demolished my face and I lost my left eye, so I insisted on going to college in the fall, which was probably not a smart idea. Of course then it all hit me, and the depression ensued. I just felt completely broken. I was so despondent I was suicidal. The only thing that kept me alive was that as a high school graduation gift, someone had given me this little yellow journal and I began to write down everything in it.

‘‘It took me a while to get serious about writing. I fought it. I went to UT in Austin. I wanted to be a radio/TV/film major, to write for television. But I loved theatre so much I ended up transferring. I knew I wanted to do some kind of writing, but it took me a while to realize what it was. I remember a friend of mine, Christopher, saying to me, ‘If you got serious, and made writing your life’s work, this is what you could do.’ I thought, ‘I’m not good enough to do this, I’ll never be good enough to do this.’ I still feel that way. But they’re paying me. Joke’s on them.”

*

‘‘I’ve had a lot of LGBT teen readers who talk about the stories that are meaningful to them, because they support their identity, and they thank me for those. I’ve also had readers who are very displeased with me for various things, especially with the way I ended the Gemma Doyle trilogy. My favorite was the girl who wrote to me about the ending of The Sweet Far Thing. She said, ‘I know why you did it. You are an eco-friendly fembot who survives on the tears of teen girls. With the tears I have shed, you will live forever.’ I’m totally embroidering that on a pillow. That is awesome.”

Read the complete interview, and biographical profile, in the April 2013 issue of Locus Magazine.


Category: Interviews

An Apology

— posted Monday 1 April 2013 @ 3:14 pm PDT

We would like to offer our apology for the offensive April Fool’s post that was published on the site today. The April Fool’s pieces were not seen by the Locus HQ staff before being posted — it was an ugly moment this morning when we saw the post already online, and we immediately took steps to remove it. Of course, being after the fact, it was too late, and the offense had already happened.

We did not find the post funny at all, and it does not reflect in any way the opinions of the magazine staff. We apologize for it appearing under our auspices.

Updated 4/2/13:

From Liza Groen Trombi, editor-in-chief of Locus magazine: The writer who penned the offensive Wiscon post will no longer be contributing to or associated with Locus in any way, online or in print. The Locus Online editor will retain his editorial autonomy, with the understanding that nothing like this can or will be permitted to happen again.

I’ve worked very hard in the past three years to build a better, more modern Locus, with greater parity, social awareness, and more inclusive coverage. I will continue to work to that end, despite obstacles. I am mortified that this happened on my watch; my apologies to you all.

-LT

Category: April 1st

Hal Graftswey Reviews William Gibson’s
Realm of the Enchanted Unicorn

— posted Monday 1 April 2013 @ 12:06 pm PDT

Throughout his career, renowned science fiction writer William Gibson has often shifted direction in unexpected ways, so in a sense longtime readers should not be surprised by his latest novel, Realm of the Enchanted Unicorn, his first venture into heroic fantasy. In the opening chapter, we are introduced to young Tom, apprentice to a cobbler in a rustic village of the faraway land of Rigamarrole, whose life changes on the day he receives a visit from the renowned wizard Sagebeard. He tells Tom that he is actually the son of the late King Stalwart, who had been executed by the country’s current ruler, the evil Ulrich the Usurper. According to ancient lore, Tom is the only man who will be able to defeat the powerful Ulrich and, by taking the throne that is rightfully his, restore peace and harmony to the land.

However, Sagebeard continues, Tom will first have to recruit several Destined Companions, and locate a number of Magical Tokens, since these will be absolutely essential to the success of his quest. This enables Gibson, even within this new setting, to follow his traditional strategy of keeping the plot in motion by having all of his protagonists pursue some desired object. In this particular novel, Tom and Sagebeard must venture into the dreaded Sinister Swamp in order to capture the mythical creature that is the first item on the list of Tokens they must acquire: the Muck Griffin.

As Gibson’s heroes battle ogres, dodge dragons, admire unicorns, and consult with elves while seeking their elusive goal, his fans may sometimes feel that they are reading the work of an entirely different author. But Gibson reminds us that he is no ordinary fantasy writer with flashes of his distinctive prose style. He begins his novel with the evocative opening line, “The sky above the portal was the color of porridge, spooned into a lead vessel.” Then, after Tom and his companion discover that a magical potion designed to ward off evildoers also has an appealing, intoxicating effect, the narrator knowingly comments, “The quest finds its own uses for things.” Gibson coins a cunning new term for Sagebeard’s very limited power to see into the future: “pattern precognition.” And, following the genre’s traditions, Gibson includes a detailed map of his fantasy realm displaying the evocative names of places not yet visited, like the Pixie Flatlands, the Goblin Continuum, and Sprite Country.

While some may end this novel hoping that Gibson will soon return to the modern stories of cutting-edge technology that he is famous for, he clearly plans to linger in this new fantasy world for a considerable time, as evidenced by the novel’s final line: “The dodecology will continue with Lair of the Accursed Dragon.” Thus, it seems, there will be additional Gibson fantasies to review in many Aprils to come.


Hal Graftswey, Adjunct Professor of Unpublished Literature at Miskatonic University, is the author of The Science Fiction of William Faulkner, The Encyclopedia of Mythical Household Appliances, and The Cambridge Companion to My Little Pony.

Category: April 1st

Underpopulated, Bankrupt Detroit Renames Itself
“Boilertown,” Goes Into Full Steampunk Mode

— posted Monday 1 April 2013 @ 12:05 pm PDT

by Paoli du Flippi

Detroit, April 1, 2013—Break out your goggles and corsets! It’s goodbye to twenty-first-century Detroit and hello to Victorian Boilertown!

Today Mayor Dave Bing of Detroit summoned the media to a scheduled press conference at City Hall for the purpose of detailing the strategy devised with the Michigan state government for restructuring the finances of the ailing municipality, once an industrial powerhouse of the United States, but today merely a hollow, mismanaged, undercapitalized shell of its former self. Present at the start of the conference along with Mayor Bing was Governor Rick Snyder. But there was no immediate sign of the unnamed individual appointed as the city’s Emergency Manager, a powerful figure whose identity would become apparent only at the end of the conference.

Mayor Bing began his speech with a statement of the city’s well-known dilemma: corruption and a loss of jobs and population had resulted in an urban wasteland with an inability to fund government services at the very time they were most needed, leading to a sense of despair and hopelessness among the citizenry. The Mayor concluded by saying, “We must follow a careful yet daring plan into the future, one that will restore Detroit’s glory days. And that roadmap to the future ironically features a trip back to the past. But not to the past of the 1950s. No, those days of gas-guzzling automobiles as the foundation of our economy will never be practical again. In fact, I’m sure you will be surprised to learn that we’re not even going back to a real past. Rather, we are reaching for a wonderful fantasy past that will allow Detroit to paradoxically become a harbinger of the future!”

At this point Governor Snyder stepped forward with details of the program.

“As of today, the city of Detroit is no more. In its place is born Boilertown, the first all-steampunk city in America!

“Those of you unfamiliar with the phenomenon of steampunk should simply know that it’s a return to all the virtues and ambitions, technology and dreams, inequalities and opportunities that made the world of the nineteenth century such a vibrant, exciting and Darwinian era. But the past is not merely returning to us in pristine historical form. No, steamunk adds a fanciful dimension of fun and games to days of the Boer War, cholera and Jack the Ripper in a way that has been proven, time and time again, to excite people and stimulate the economy.

“First up, the city of Boilertown is going to embark on a massive program of civic reconstruction, turning all modern buildings into Victorian edifices, powered and illuminated by America’s plentiful supply of natural gas. Luckily, we have a large stock of period structures already in place. But the teardowns on modern buildings alone will provide thousands of jobs, and the construction of vast train stations, blimp hangars, academies of mesmerism, slums, and difference-engine factories will deliver thousands more.

“Additionally, every citizen of Boilertown will be outfitted with a complete wardrobe of steampunk clothing that must be worn at all times—even those scratchy flannels in bed. Visitors to the city will be required to rent appropriate costumes during their stay. This will introduce another revenue stream to the city, offering employment to hundreds of drygoods merchants, milliners, corsetieres, leatherworkers and goggle-lens polishers.

“Blacksmiths, ironmongers, maids, butlers, bathyscaphe barnacle scrapers and steam technicians will find endless job opportunities. These are all jobs that require minimal training, with any necessary formal schooling falling well short of even a GED, thus allowing the city to free up funds formerly spent on education and also negating any national stigma attached to our high dropout rates. Another benefit is that these jobs involve long days of wearisome manual labor, leaving young adults too tired for any night time acts of juvenile delinquency. And of course, as another period touch, unions will be nonexistent in Boilertown, a forward-thinking, utilitarian policy I have been trying to implement for some time now.

“To attract steampunk creators such as musicians, puppeteers, swordsmen, writers and artists, all of whom who will add much value to our city’s entertainment life, we will offer tax breaks and free living quarters, as well as exclusive privileges at any of the many fine stews, fancyhouses, Hellfire Clubs, saloons and brothels we intend to install. So far we have solid commitments for relocation to Boilertown from James Blaylock, Tim Powers, Cassandra Clare, Cherie Priest, Gail Carriger, Jake von Slatt, Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, the Decemberists and Paul Guinan.

“Since its codification in 1987 by K. W. Jeter—who, by the way, has just been appointed as Boilertown’s Aetheric Communications Poobah—steampunk has proven enormously popular with an ever-expanding group of readers, musicians, cosplayers, makers, artists, moviegoers and fashion designers. Its mix of antiques and anachronisms facilitates a solidly conservative political strategy which we are proud to be the first to implement on a large scale. Even our criminal justice system will benefit from policies similar to those in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age—although summary executions by nanotech are, regrettably, not yet a possibility. By aligning our fair city with this burgeoning, unstoppable movement, we are hitching our wagon to a tireless robot horse that will carry Boilertown into a rich future that looks just like Queen Victoria’s reign as imagined by Hollywood, Hasbro, Lady Gaga and the Koch Family Foundations.”

As Governor Snyder concluded his speech, Mayor Bing stepped forward. “And now we introduce our Emergency Manager, the one man who can be counted on to make this bold program work. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the author of The Steampunk Bible, that fine document that will serve as Boilertown’s new charter—Mr. Jeff VanderMeer!”

Emerging from backstage, the noted writer, bedecked in Edwardian finery, carried with him a copy of his famous guide to all things steampunk. At the microphone, Mr. VanderMeer said, “I won’t take much more of your time today. We have an enormous amount of work to do, and I’d like to begin right away. Let me just leave you with this thought. While ‘the past through tomorrow’ might have been good enough for Robert Heinlein at a time when Detroit was first doing big things, only the philosophy of ‘tomorrow through the past’ will serve us today!”


Category: April 1st

Lavie Tidhar: Stranger than Pulp

— posted Friday 15 March 2013 @ 10:21 am PDT

Lavie Tidhar was born November 16, 1976 and raised on a kibbutz in Israel. He has traveled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu.

Tidhar began publishing with a poetry collection in Hebrew in 1998, but soon moved to fiction, becoming a prolific author of short stories early in the 21st century. Story ‘‘Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs’’ won the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury competition, sponsored by the European Space Agency, and ‘‘The Night Train’’ (2010) was a Sturgeon Award finalist. Linked story collection HebrewPunk (2007) contains stories of Jewish pulp fantasy.

He co-wrote dark fantasy novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009) with Nir Yaniv. The Bookman Histories series, combining literary and historical characters with steampunk elements, includes The Bookman (2010), Camera Obscura (2011), and The Great Game (2012).

Standalone novel Osama (2011) combines pulp adventure with a sophisticated look at the impact of terrorism. It won the World Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, British Science Fiction Award, and a Kitschie. Novels Martian Sands and The Violent Century are forthcoming.

Much of Tidhar’s best work is done at novella length, including An Occupation of Angels (2005), Cloud Permutations (2010), British Fantasy Award winner Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God (2011), and Jesus & the Eightfold Path (2011).

Tidhar advocates bringing international SF to a wider audience, and has edited The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012); he is also editor-in-chief of the World SF Blog , and in 2011 was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award for his work there. He also edited A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults (2008); wrote Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography (2004); wrote weird picture book Going to The Moon (2012, with artist Paul McCaffery); and scripted one-shot comic Adolf Hitler’s ‘‘I Dream of Ants!’’ (2012, with artist Neil Struthers).

Tidhar lives with his wife in London.

Official site


photo by Beth Gwinn


Excerpts from the interview:

‘‘I was born on a kibbutz in Israel. I was the last generation to really grow up in communal society. People think it’s like a socialist, agricultural commune. Well, that’s the way it used to be. My grandfather came from Transylvania in the 1930s, and they were literally living in tents and picking oranges – it was all very Wild West, very socialist and Zionist and all the rest. By the time I came along, things were slowly falling apart. Still, I grew up in communal housing, where you don’t live with your parents – you live with the other children. Even as babies, you’re kind of in a baby room. (The mothers come over and breast feed, and then they go home.) The thing was designed to liberate women, to allow them to work and not have to look after the children.

‘‘I grew up with the other kids, essentially. You went to see your parents for four hours, between 4 and 8 p.m., and then you went back to the children’s house. After my time, that kind of finished. They had massive ideological battles about family housing and communal housing, and now the kibbutz doesn’t really exist the way it once did.

‘‘I don’t think it was a particularly bad way to grow up. It’s a strange sort of environment. I remember telling a friend of mine about it, and she was horrified! It seems science-fictional. One of the things that fascinates me is the concept of a kibbutz in space. Philip K. Dick had the kibbutz on Mars – it’s not a big thing in his books, but there’s reference to the Israelis building a kibbutz on Mars. That’s the only time I ever saw myself in American science fiction books (‘That’s me!’).”

*

‘‘I have an odd trajectory for an Israeli writer, because Israeli writers are only allowed to write about a few things. Holocaust novels and WWII novels are regarded as two different things. Then there’s the kibbutz novel, which I really feel like I should do one day – the Great Kibbutz Novel. And obviously terrorism. I’ve already done that one.

‘‘Osama was a very honest book, because it’s really about me and my wife, even though it starts in Vientiane. The narrative tone alternates between noir and reportage, and the pulp bits are supposed to be pulp. I’m obsessed with Israeli pulp fiction. When I was growing up on the kibbutz, we’d occasionally go to the ‘nearby’ city of Haifa (an hour’s drive), and there were these wonderful secondhand bookshops with a lot of science fiction.

‘‘But I was also writing about real people and real events. For Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, I spent over a day desperately trying to find out what brand of shoes he was wearing! (Apparently, it’s a bit of a fashion industry secret you can’t easily find out. I think they covered it up.) The hardest part was the ghost stories from the points of view of people who died in the various attacks.”

*

‘‘Both of the two novels I have coming out this year – Martian Sands and The Violent Century – are partly set in WWII. I realize that people don’t necessarily know the history, but for me, it is a very personal thing. I come from a Holocaust-surviving family (my Mum was born in a refugee camp after the war). Martian Sands is a very odd novel, it’s got sort-of time travel and the Holocaust and Martian pulp. And The Violent Century is a WWII love story and murder mystery and a sort of meditation on superheroes.

‘‘For some reason, faith as a drug just keeps coming up in my work. I’m kind of jealous of people who do have faith. I don’t think it’s something you can control, so the whole argument about religion’s a bit silly – you either believe something or you don’t believe. In Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God, the novella that won the British Fantasy Award, it’s a fantasy world where you have gods, and gods are literally addictive. In my SF stories, you can take faith as a drug, artificially stimulate it: just pop a pill. I’ve been working on this kind of religion in all the science fiction short stories. My guess is that quite a few people would be mainlining faith.”

Read the complete interview, and biographical profile, in the March 2013 issue of Locus Magazine.


Category: Interviews

« Previous entries


© 2010-2012 by Locus Publications. All rights reserved. Powered by WordPress, modified from a theme design by Lorem Ipsum