Locus Online Perspectives

Samuel R. Delany: The Grammar of Narrative

2010-03-23T19:20:00.001-07:00

Samuel R. Delany grew up in Harlem in a middle-class black family, and attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science before going on to City College. He never graduated, though today he's a tenured English professor and Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Temple University.

His first novel The Jewels of Aptor (1962) appeared when he was 20. The Fall of the Towers trilogy -- Captives of the Flame (1963), The Towers of Toron (1964), and City of a Thousand Suns (1965) -- followed before his twenty-second birthday. Other works from the '60s include The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965), Empire Star (1966), Nebula Award winners Babel-17 (1966) and The Einstein Intersection (1967), and Nova (1968). These novels, along with several short stories, resulted in Delany's recognition as one of the brightest talents of SF's New Wave. He also won a Nebula Award for short story "Aye, and Gomorrah..." (1967); "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" won both a Nebula and a Hugo in 1970. Other notable stories include Nebula finalists "Driftglass" (1967) and "The Tale of Gorgik" (1979), Hugo finalists "The Star Pit" (1967) and "Prismatica" (1977), and Nebula and Hugo finalist "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line" (1968).

In the '70s his output dropped off, though he published Dhalgren (1975) and Triton (1976), and edited with then wife Marilyn Hacker four-volume anthology series Quark (1970–71). SF novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand appeared in 1984, but most of the decade was dedicated to his ambitious sword-and-sorcery series Return to Nevèrÿon, a collection of 11 linked stories and novels collected in four volumes: Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Nevèrÿona (1983), Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985), and Return to Nevèrÿon (The Bridge of Lost Desire) (1987). His last genre novel was fantasy adventure They Fly at Çiron (1993), though forthcoming novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, due out from Alyson Books in November 2010, contains elements of science fiction as well as gay erotica.

During the '70s and '80s years he turned increasingly to literary criticism and the study of semiotics, producing numerous non-fiction books on those and other subjects, including The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977), The American Shore (1978), The Straits of Messina (1989), Starboard Wine (1985), and Longer Views (1996). His memoir on "East Village Sex and Science Fiction Writing", The Motion of Light in Water , won the 1989 Hugo for best non-fiction. Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics (1994) was a Hugo finalist, as was About Writing: 7 Essays, 4 Letters and 5 Interviews (2006), which collects some of his writing advice and philosophy.

His short fiction has been gathered in Driftglass (1971), Distant Stars (1981), The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction (1986), Driftglass/Starshards (1993), Atlantis: Three Tales (1995, recently re-released in a corrected third printing by Wesleyan University Press), and Aye, and Gomorrah (2003).

Non-genre works of note includes psychological thriller The Mad Man (1994); pornographic novel Hogg (1995); and Dark Reflections (2007), about an aging gay African-American poet in New York City, which won a Stonewall Book Award for 2008 and was a runner-up for the Lambda Literary Book Award.

Delany won a Pilgrim Award for his scholarship in 1985, was a Worldcon guest of honor in 1995, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. He has received numerous life achievement awards from organizations honoring gay and lesbian writing, and he was the subject of documentary film The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman (2007), which tied for the jury award for best documentary at the International Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

Delany traveled extensively in the '60s, spending months in Turkey and Greece, and he lived in San Francisco and London before returning to New York. He began teaching in 1975 at the University of Buffalo, and also taught at the University of Wisconsin and Cornell University before spending 11 years as a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. His marriage to Marilyn Hacker began in 1961, with an amicable divorce in 1980. They have an adult daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany.

Excerpts from the interview:

“For the last decade I've been teaching at Temple University, as Professor Delany of English and Creative Writing. I really didn't think it would come to that! But now I've become fat and comfortable with a monthly paycheck. (Capitalism can be really evil. I know from firsthand experience.)

“From where I sit, I see the remnants -- dare I say the dregs -- of High Modernism being protected in a way that I don't know whether it's all that productive or not. With my classes, I try to use the Clarion/Milford model. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. I consider myself genre-friendly, although I'm one of those people who keep saying to the kids that want to write science fiction, once they have proven themselves absolutely incompetent to write it, 'Why don't you try to write something a little simpler first?'

“Most of the time, those failed attempts come from their not knowing their way around English or basic narrative strategies -- what I would call the grammar of narrative. If you write a page-and-a-half about somebody doing something and we don't know where you are or what you are doing yet, usually that's a sign of narrative incompetence of some sort; or the writer simply hasn't thought about how to tell a story.

“Writing good science fiction is more complex and more difficult than writing a relatively straightforward account of someone getting up in the morning, making a cup of coffee, going to the bathroom, and getting out of the house. You have to be able to describe that in a familiar earthbound kitchen before you can describe it on a spaceship in free fall.”

*

“I've finished another novel. Basically I'm very happy with it. The working title is Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. I have been working on it for the last five years, and a section of it was published a couple of years ago in a journal called Black Clock. Now it's finished, it's over 250,000 words long. In one sense, it's an attempt to write a book that sits -- formally, almost -- on the three-way genre boundary between literary impressionism, pornography, and science fiction. (I think you should use the conservative term, pornography; 'erotica' sounds too much like you're embarrassed about what you're doing, and I'm not.) It's about a working-class gay male couple who meet when they are teenagers (19 and 17), living very much out of the center of things somewhere on the Georgia coast. They meet in 2007, and spend the next 75 or 76 years together, till one of them dies. And not much else happens.”

*

“When I talk to people with MFAs who are now working as editors for literary publishers, they say, 'What we learned in college is a kind of writing that our current bosses do not want to let in the door.' They want nothing to do with 'good writing.' These are places like Random House; Harcourt Brace; Knopf; and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who are the epitomes of literary publishing in this country, yet they're willing to say, 'I'm sorry. That's not what we're interested in anymore. We have a couple of slots a year for novels like that.'

“This is not a healthy situation for writing in general. It's not healthy for science fiction, not healthy for anyone. I think we have five publishers left in New York, and 25 years ago there were 79! So when we're talking about 'commercial' versus 'art' publishing, we're using a leftover vocabulary. We're still looking at the world through 1955-colored glasses.”

Comments are welcome...

Photo by Amelia Beamer

Website: Samuel R. Delany

Wikipedia: Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

Read the complete interview, and biographical profile, in the March 2010 issue of Locus Magazine.

Cover Design: Arnie Fenner

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2010-01-07T19:53:00.001-08:00

I once gave a (now-notorious) talk at Microsoft Research about Digital Rights Management (http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt) where I said, in part, "New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at."

I'd like to take that subject up with you today. Specifically, I'd like to examine it in light of the ancient principle of "Close enough for rock 'n' roll," and all that that entails.

What, exactly, does "close enough for rock 'n' roll" mean? Does it mean that rock 'n' roll isn't very good, so it doesn't matter if the details are a little fuzzy? I say no. I say that "close enough for rock 'n' roll" means: "Rock 'n' roll's virtue is in its exuberance and its accessibility to would-be performers. If you want to play rock 'n' roll, you don't need to gather up a full orchestra and teach them all to read sheet music, drill them with a conductor and set them loose in a vaulted hall. Instead, you can gather two or three friends, teach them to play a I-IV-V progression in 4/4 time, and make some fantastic noise."

Rock 'n' roll has two important virtues relative to orchestral music:

1. It costs a lot less to make, and so it costs less to make experimental mistakes

2. More people can participate in it, and can bring more experimental ideas to the field (see 1)

As I write these words, the news of Locus editor-in-chief and co-founder Charles N. Brown's death is only a week old, and I'm still in shock. Charles has been generous and supportive of me throughout my career, and producing this column for the past three years (three years!) has been a curious kind of pleasure. These columns, written directly (more or less) to the science fiction publishing industry are very different from the other kind of writing I do, and in some way, they are all continuations of a long-ago interview I conducted with Charles at the WorldCon in San Jose, five years ago, which was typical of Charles's interviews, as John Scalzi describes them: "it largely consisted of the two of us having a conversation, me on a couch and him at his desk, and him seemingly being a bit grumpy about it." That challenging, intelligent, and wide-ranging discussion has never really ended for me.

Nor, apparently, did it ever end for Charles. In the July issue — which just arrived at my PO Box this week — Charles writes about a little print-on-demand project I'm planning called "With a Little Help" (a short story collection that tries every imaginable income-generating technique for open publishing in order to get some data about which avenues hold the most promise): "I don't know what it will prove. Remember, Stephen King was able to see an incredible number of downloads of a short story, but I've never heard of anyone duplicating that success. Cory, with his vast Internet connections, may succeed. But will it affect publishing? Probably not."

And now, I'd like to return Charles's volley, though he'll never get to see it, because, you know, it's his magazine, and he hired me to do this, and when your publisher hands you a straight line like that, you'd be nuts to pass it on.

In January 2003, my first novel came out. Called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, it was published by Tor as a hardcover original with a print-run of about 9,800, with an advance of about $7,500. Like practically every other first time novelist, I dreamed of selling a book and quitting my day job (though I had a really cool day job, working as a full-time activist for the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation); as with virtually every other first-time novelist, the advance for my first book totally failed to change my life and catapult me to financial independence. I was level-headed enough to know that this wasn't going to happen (even if I did occasionally daydream about it). I knew that if I was ever going to be a full-time writer, it would come as the result of a career of books that succeeded commercially and critically and that meant writing the best books I could and doing everything I could to help my publisher sell as many books as they could.

Down and Out was critically successful, garnering good mentions in the trade press and even the New York Times. I had already established a modest name for myself at the time, having sold about a dozen short stories and won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 WorldCon on their strength. Boing Boing, the blog I co-edit, had about 30,000 unique readers back then (now it's a couple million), which was a good-sized megaphone to be speaking through.

To make things more interesting, I became the first novelist to use the brand-new Creative Commons licenses on a book, releasing the electronic text on terms that allowed for its free, noncommercial sharing. Thirty thousand people downloaded the book in the first 24 hours (several million copies have been downloaded to date), and the hardcover did well, too — by the time the trade paperback came out a year later, we'd hit about 85 percent sell-through, a good number that pleased Tor, my agent, and me.

It's amazing to think, in retrospect, of the amount of foofaraw this garnered. At the time, the prevailing wisdom was that as soon as an electronic book leaked onto the Internet, its commercial life was over, first because readers would never pay for it; and second because publishers and booksellers wouldn't stock it. Even though Bruce Sterling had sold a ton of copies of his 1992 The Hacker Crackdown while simultaneously releasing the book as "literary freeware," even though Orson Scott Card had released several of his books on AOL; even though the nascent "bookwarez" scene had put thousands of current and classic titles online as text-files without obliterating their commercial fortunes.

The Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom experiment really pissed people off. It was denounced as a breaking of ranks with authors as a class, and as a stunt that I could only afford because I had so little to lose, being such a nobody in the field with my handful of short story sales and my tiny print run — at least when compared to the big guys. Free samples were good news if no one had heard of you, but for successful writers, free downloads were poison.

To "prove" this, critics often pointed to Stephen King's experiment in online publishing, "The Plant," which King gave up as a bad job after earning a mere hundreds of thousands of dollars in voluntary payments, and which he never returned to. A genuinely successful writer like King had nothing to gain from the publicity value of free downloads, they said (ironically, this appears to be the story that Charles referred to in the July Locus, citing it as proof of the success of free downloads).

Over the next six years, a funny thing happened. After publishing three more novels, two books of short stories, a collection of essays, a graphic novel, and a million or so words' worth of nonfiction, speeches, essays, and blog posts, I seem to have made it, more or less. I quit working for EFF on January 1, 2006, in order to write full time, though I've found that interesting diversions rise up to fill the vacuum left by the day job, from my 18-month-old daughter to a year's stay in Los Angeles on faculty at the University of Southern California under the auspices of the Fulbright program, to a little screen writing to some lectures.

And of course, there's Boing Boing, now grown into a modestly successful business that provides a nice supplemental income and provides some security, as well as a means of keeping my readers excited about my work between books.

The other thing that's changed is the criticism. Six years ago, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom couldn't be counted as a real success for open publishing because I was too obscure to feel the cost of the lost sales. Now, I'm too successful, someone whose name is so widely known that I am uniquely situated to benefit from open publishing, since the micro net-fame I enjoy provides the vital push necessary to wrest sales from freebies. Hilariously, some of the people who say this go back in time and revise history, claiming that I was only able to sell as many copies of Down and Out as I have over the years (nine printings and still selling great!) because I was such a big shot famous writer in 2003, on the strength of a dozen short story sales.

There's a name for this rhetorical tactic: "special pleading." Special pleading is when you claim that some example doesn't merit consideration because it lacks, or contains, some special characteristic that makes it unique, not part of the general discussion. I hear a lot of special pleading, taking one of two forms:

Your books only sell because you're such a popular blogger. No one else can do what you do unless they, too, are popular in some other field.

It's true that being widely read in one area is a good way to sell books in another area. Nationally syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry does well with his novels; folk legend Janis Ian has a good reputation for her excellent short fiction and poetry. More broadly, any kind of fame is a plus when it comes to marketing a book, as director Guillermo del Toro and his publisher knew before his novel The Strain went to press.

But some well-known people sell a book and then move on after the critics have their way with them, and some keep on writing and selling. These latter are writers who happen to do something else — just as Geoff Landis works for NASA and writes; just as Kim Stanley Robinson and Rudy Rucker taught at university while writing; just as a thousand other writers find that having a day job is too much fun or too satisfying or too necessary to give up.

You have sources of income other than science fiction, so you can afford to give your books away. Not everyone can found a successful company or get paid for speaking while working on novels.

It's true that I co-founded and co-run Boing Boing and that the income from it and from a few talks a year help to supplement my income, and it's true that not every writer can do this (by the same token, not every writer can be a shrewd investor like Robert Silverberg, an MIT faculty member like Joe Haldeman, or the great-grandson of an oil tycoon like Larry Niven). Many's the writer who found that — free downloads or no — having another source of income made good sense.

But the fact is that writing is a substantial and crucial part of my family's income. I'm not going to publish my tax return here, but you can do the math for yourself for my last novel: about 100,000 hardcovers of Little Brother in print at about $2 royalty each; 17 foreign rights deals ranging from a few thousand to mid-five-figures; audio rights; film option; etc. Then there's 26 columns a year for the Guardian, six a year in Locus, half a dozen short stories, and royalties from my backlist. While I'm awfully glad of my Boing Boing and lectures and incidental income, I've got plenty of skin in the game and sell plenty of books. I don't give away downloads because I'm just a swell guy — I do it because I'm a self-employed entrepreneur who needs to make as much as he can to support his family.

Marketing and business are not science. Despite the conceits of quantitative economists, there's precious few good double-blind experiments to be run on commercial propositions. At the end of the day, all we know about any business-model is whether it appears to be working for the people who've tried it (and even then, we don't know what the future holds, as any number of once-enthusiastic derivatives hedgers can tell you from bitter experience).

Writers are all different, and the success stories are all unique. Some SF writers enrich themselves with grants, or film deals, or by writing ten books for every book that their peers manage to write. Some edit, some have wealthy spouses. Gene Wolfe co-invented the machine that Pringles come out of (true fact!). An artist's income is very much an a la carte proposition, in which writers choose some items from one or more columns in order to find the fit that suits them best. "That won't work for every writer," is as weird and pointless as "those directions might get you to the corner store, but if you're trying to get to the greengrocer's, they're useless."

All we can know, in the end, is what worked for some writers, so that we can see if they worked for us. Here's what I think I know about online publishing and free downloads:

The conversion rate is low; when the price is $0, a lot of people will come and kick the tires, but only a few will buy (just as lots of people pick up a book in a store and riffle the pages without buying the book)
Free downloads work amazingly well to magnify existing publicity, enabling friends to tell each other about books they love by sending them the e-book; among these people the conversion rate is much higher
Free downloads don't generate much publicity in and of themselves — they need to be part of a larger campaign that gets people excited about the project.

Here are some things I'd really like to find out:

Will people donate to support a free book? How much? Will they donate more to support an audiobook or a print edition?
How much work does it take to replicate a professional publisher's contribution to publicizing and distributing your book?
How much demand is there for premium editions, and what characteristics make those premium editions more valuable?

This is the kind of thing I hope to explore in the With a Little Help project. I'll be reporting in on what I learn. I'm sure there'll be plenty of people who'll be ready to dismiss it by asserting that something that works for one writer doesn't automatically work for every other writer. This is true, obvious, and unimportant. The important thing is what writers might try, based on the experiences of their peers.

Cory Doctorow's website is Craphound.com, and he is co-editor of Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things.

Previous Cory Doctorow columns posted on Locus Online:

Comments are welcome, but are moderated.

From the September 2009 issue of Locus Magazine

History & Fantasy: A Roundtable Discussion...

2009-08-28T20:43:00.000-07:00

with Guy Gavriel Kay, Cecelia Holland, Gary K. Wolfe, and Charles N. Brown

Cecelia Holland began publishing historical novels with The Firedrake (1961). She has published more than 25 books, most historical, occasionally with fantasy elements. She also wrote one SF novel, Floating Worlds (1975), and modern-day novel Home Ground (1981). Her most recent work is a fantasy series about 10th-century Vikings: The Soul Thief (2002), Witches' Kitchen (2004), The Serpent Dreamer (2005), Varanger (2008), The High City (2009), and The Kings of the North (2010).

Guy Gavriel Kay's first novels were set in the invented world of the Fionavar Tapestry, but Sailing to Sarantium (1998) and Lord of Emperors (2000) were set in an alternate version of ancient Byzantium, and other novels that make use of quasi-historical settings with fantasy elements include Tigana (1990), A Song for Arbonne (1992), The Lions of Al-Rassan (1995), and The Last Light of the Sun (2004). His latest novel, Ysabel (2007), won the World Fantasy Award.

Excerpts from the interview:

Gary K. Wolfe: This is a roundtable discussion concerning the relationship of fiction and history, with Cecelia Holland and Guy Gavriel Kay, each of whom uses history in different ways in fiction....

*

[A long discussion about historical fiction follows; the conclusion, which focuses on the distinction between SF and fantasy perspectives, is excerpted below.]

*

Charles N. Brown: Cecelia's idea of historical fiction is closer to science fiction, and Guy's idea is closer to fantasy. I'd like you to talk about that for the last few minutes. As Gary says, Cecelia's extrapolating to the past, but it's the same way you write about the future. Guy's looking at it from the fantasy viewpoint of characters. You don't have a science fiction mind. You have a fantasy mind, and she has a science fiction mind.

Cecelia Holland: No, it's that people who construct science fiction are trying to visualize a future in which we know who we are -- that says who we are now. When you look at good historical fiction, you reconstruct the past in a way which will let you know the possibilities of people so we know who we are now. It's one end to the other. First of all, science fiction assures us that there's going to be a tomorrow. It's harder and harder for people to realize there was a yesterday. And it wasn't like now, and yet it worked, or it worked as well as now does. There was a past, it happened to people who were like us, whose understanding was incomplete and biased and yet who muddled along and created or destroyed things as they went. It wasn't done by marble heads; it wasn't handed down by God. That it didn't have to happen the way it happened; it happened the way it happened because of the decisions that all these people back there made. And they made those decisions based on who they were at the time, not on 21st-century ideas but on 9th-century ideas. Therefore you strip away the 21st-century ideas in the process of trying to load up some 9th-century ideas.

Guy Gavriel Kay: How do you load up 9th-century ideas?

CH: You read a lot of the stuff. One of the things I love about the Icelandic Sagas is that they seem so modern, as compared to Le Roman de la Rose, where you have talking flowers. In the Sagas, people have the same kind of passions we have, and they seem to be like us. At the same time, they have ghosts, and they have gods.

GGK: That's why I did Last Light with the ghosts and faeries as real. That's what I argued before, if you were comfortable doing an Icelandic Saga in a historical evocation of the time that actually made real the ghosts and the faerie world. I was able to do that; it's the reader's job to decide if I did it successfully or not.

Let's go back to where Gary began with me on the actuality issue. Part of it is a measure of awareness of limitation, an awareness of constraint on how sharply or accurately we can capture something. I've found that the use of the fantastic is a shared alert between the reader and the writer of those constraints and limitations. That works for me, ethically and creatively, to avoid the illusion that I am reaching my way back to the 9th century accurately. That's a compact that I've set up with my reader that belies the usual compact, which is that with a good writer the reader believes they're getting accurate data.

The hesitation I have with the distinction drawn between science fiction and fantasy is that what I'm doing is making use of the fantastic as a tool to explore history, not writing fantasy about the past. The reason I put it that way is that if you look at the books, the degree of magic, of fantasy elements and tropes, varies widely. In a book like The Lions of Al Rassan, or A Song for Arbonne, there is essentially none of what one might call magic. There are hints of precognition or somebody with a psychic ability. The point I'm making is that it's not so much writing fantasy about the past, it's using elements of the fantastic in measures that seem suited to that story. That's key for me. I have never introduced magic because that would be a market-appealing -- or even avoided using it because it might be a market-impeding -- element. Cecelia said, and I completely agree, you're working for yourself and your story. The degree to which you use certain tools is driven by the needs of that story.

CH: There was a book called Historical Fallacies from 30 years ago. One of the fallacies was to look back at the past as if the only things that were relevant were the things that turned out to matter now. What is relevant to now isn't necessarily what was relevant then. To find what was relevant then is the work here. I think it's the only work: to try to recover the past, recover who we were then so that we have depth and resonance. I do not understand people who want to live their whole lives with their faces pressed up against the present, when all they have to do is turn around and they have this whole great playground. History is, or the past was, and we can find our way back there if we use the imagination. We can at least find something that resonates well enough that we can escape from the prison of the now.”

Comments are welcome...

Photo by Amelia Beamer

Mary Robinette Kowal: Puppetmaster

2009-08-27T23:03:00.001-07:00

Mary Robinette Kowal was born in Raleigh NC and attended Eastern Carolina University, majoring in Art Education, with a minor in Theater and Speech. In 1991 she left for an internship at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta GA, and never went back. She has been a professional puppeteer ever since. Kowal spent a year and a half working in Iceland on the children's show Lazytown, has worked for various other shows and theaters, and runs her own company, Other Hand Productions.

Kowal began publishing fiction in literary journals in 2004, and in SF magazines with "Portrait of Ari" in Strange Horizons (2006). Her work has since appeared in various genre magazines and anthologies. Notable stories include "For Solo Cello, op. 12" (2007) and current Hugo nominee "Evil Robot Monkey" (2008). Some of her short fiction will be collected in Scenting the Dark and Other Stories from Subterranean Press later this year.

Kowal is also a novelist, with two Jane Austen-flavored fantasies forthcoming from Tor, starting in 2010: Shades of Milk and Honey and Glamour in Glass.

She is currently the Secretary for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and was the art director for small-press magazine Shimmer. She attended Orson Scott Card's Literary Boot Camp in 2005, and won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2008. She lives in New York with husband Robert Kowal, married 2001, though they are relocating to Portland at the end of August.

Excerpts from the interview:

“One of the things that pulled me to both puppetry and writing speculative fiction is the world building. And certainly the technology: I know exactly what it's like to live on a daily basis in VR goggles. When I was working on Lazytown, I was often wearing VR goggles and watching a virtual world. It was shot on green screen, so you had real puppets, real people, shot against green, and then they created a real-time environment, so we were seeing exactly what the audience would see. You always watch a monitor, with television puppetry. So I would watch with VR goggles. Take them off -- 'Oh, right. Big green set.'”

*

“One of the other things that has definitely shaped me as a writer is coming from an art background, where you start by doing a 'gesture drawing.' It's a very fast sketch, and you go from that to a more fully rendered one. Then, if you're going into paint, you'll do the under painting and then the final painting. So that experience informs the choices I make.

“The amount of detail you put into a painting is directly related to the size of the canvas. If something's very small, you're probably not packing it with detail because you can't see it. And one of the choices you make is, 'How far away is my audience going to be standing?' With theater, that means 'How big is my audience?'

“For my collection A Scent in the Dark, I picked my shortest stories -- in most cases so I could give a broader sampling. Writing short fiction is very much like doing a sketch. These are the ideas, these are the relationships I want to talk about. If a detail isn't needed and it's not adding anything to the story, I'm likely to pull it out. Sometimes a detail can add to it, based on enhancing the environment, since for me a story isn't just plot; it's also character and setting.”

*

“Shades of Milk and Honey is a Regency Romance fantasy, and I tried to write it as if Jane Austen were writing it. We're going through this bizarre Jane Austen resurgence, so I may have timed it exactly right! I'm very fond of it and I've written a sequel, Glamour in Glass. I could happily write more in this world, and I've already begun a short story about one of the main characters.

“The magic system is called Glamour, and the basic idea is that a young woman learns painting, music, and glamour as 'womanly arts.' It's an illusionary art (basically, you're dealing with wavelengths), but doing it takes energy just like running up a hill takes energy. So if a young woman does too much glamour, she might faint. But once you've created this illusion, you can tie it off and it stays fixed in place. (It will gradually degrade over time, like a painting would fade.)

“One of the characters is a glamourist who comes into town to do a mural for a wealthy woman. He's also sort of an inventor. One of the things that bothers me with magic in fantasy is that there are very few experimenters. Who's making the innovations? If magic really existed, it wouldn't be static and then stop; there would constantly be people pushing the boundaries. So this fellow is actively trying to create new techniques.”

Comments are welcome...

Photo by Amelia Beamer

Official Website

Gary Westfahl: The Addled Archaeology of the Future

2009-08-05T11:51:00.000-07:00

Ever since the concept was introduced at the 1939 New York World's Fair, Americans have periodically prepared and buried "time capsules," collections of artifacts and documents from their own time designed to be unearthed and studied by people at some future date. These assemblages testify to two powerful human emotions: a desire that our descendants understand who we are and what our lives were like, and a palpable fear that, without the assistance of such prepared packets of information, they might fail to properly understand us if they are instead obliged to rely on whatever random objects from our culture happen to survive. At some point, it would be a fascinating project for a science fiction scholar to examine the eclectic contents of various time capsules and consider the story about their creators which they were designed to tell; for, just as I once argued in an Interzone article that the messages to aliens placed on American deep-space probes can be considered a form of science fiction in which imagined aliens are not the subject, but the presumed audience, of the story, time capsules might in similar fashion be considered a form of science fiction in which imagined future humans are not the subject, but the presumed audience, of the story.

But here I wish to consider a different question: are these fears that people of the future will lack sufficient knowledge of their ancestors justified? In the absence of especially prepared evidence in the form of time capsules and the like, are they really likely to badly misinterpret their own past? As it happens, there is a sporadic tradition of science fiction stories about future archaeology which endeavor to argue, albeit in a humorous manner, that this is a genuine danger; however, these texts are rare, they are written by people who are not considered science fiction authors; and they are generally unsuccessful, both financially and aesthetically. As I proceed to examine four of these works, I should note that my title is purely descriptive of this essay's contents and is not intended as a comment on noted scholar Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future (2005), a profound and far-ranging study of utopia and science fiction which understandably fails to discuss those undistinguished texts which a more literal-minded scholar would think of when pondering the phrase "archaeologies of the future."

*****

Speculations about the misadventures of future archaeologists probably began with one of Edgar Allan Poe's lesser-known stories, "Mellonta Tauta" (1849), which is Greek for "things of the future." The text is purportedly a letter written by a man of the future named Pundita (the first entry is dated "April 1, 2848," to let readers know immediately that this is all a sort of April Fool's joke) which was placed in a bottle, tossed into the ocean, and somehow transported back into the past so that Poe could retrieve and publish it. Its author is taking a long balloon trip with hundreds of other passengers , and while he does provide some information about what was, in 1849, an amazingly futuristic means of transportation, he spends most of his time talking about what were, for him, ancient philosophers (all well known in Poet's day), and he anticipates the sparkling wit we shall encounter in later texts by introducing the practice of creatively misspelling the names of past luminaries (Aries Tottle, Neuclid, Cant, etc.) to appropriately accompany his garbled accounts of their ideas.

From such discussions, we get the general idea that the people of the future do not have a good understanding of their distant past, but only at the end of the story is the problem explicitly linked to faulty archaeology. Pundita is excited to learn about the unearthing of an artifact from the ancient residents of New York, termed "the Knickerbocker tribe of savages," who are mysterious to contemporaries because of "The disastrous earthquake... of the year 2050," which "so totally uprooted and overwhelmed the town (for it was almost too large to be called a village) that the most indefatigable of our antiquarians have never yet been able to obtain from the site any sufficient data (in the shape of coins, medals or inscriptions) wherewith to build up even the ghost of a theory concerning the manners, customs, &c., &c., &c., of the aboriginal inhabitants." He describes the discovery of "a cubical and evidently chiseled block of granite" featuring "a marble slab with (only think of it) an inscription — a legible inscription" and provides what assures his reader is an accurate translation of that inscription:

THIS CORNER STONE OF A MONUMENT TO
THE MEMORY OF
GEORGE WASHINGTON
WAS LAID WITH APPROPRIATE CEREMONIES
ON THE
19TH DAY OF OCTOBER, 1847
THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE SURRENDER OF
LORD CORNWALLIS
TO GENERAL WASHINGTON AT YORKTOWN,
A.D. 1781,
UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE
WASHINGTON MONUMENT ASSOCIATION OF
THE CITY OF NEW YORK

He then proceeds to completely misinterpret this artifact:

From the few words thus preserved, we glean several important items of knowledge, not the least interesting of which is the fact that a thousand years ago actual monuments had fallen into disuse — as was all very proper — the people contenting themselves, as we do now, with a mere indication of the design to erect a monument at some future time; a cornerstone being cautiously laid by itself "solitary and alone" (excuse me for quoting the great Amriccan poet Benton!) as a guarantee of the magnanimous intention. We ascertain, too, very distinctly, from this admirable inscription, the how, as well as the where and the what, of the great surrender in question. As to the where, it was Yorktown (wherever that was), and as to the what, it was General Cornwallis (no doubt some wealthy dealer in corn). He was surrendered. The inscription commemorates the surrender of — what? — why, "of Lord Cornwallis." The only question is, what could the savages wish him surrendered for. But when we remember that these savages were undoubtedly cannibals, we are led to the conclusion that they intended him for sausage. As to the how of the surrender, no language could be more explicit. Lord Cornwallis was surrendered (for sausage) "under the auspices of the Washington Monument Association" — no doubt a charitable institution for the depositing of cornerstones.

Immediately after this passage, significantly, Poe brings his story to an abrupt stop: "Heaven bless me! what is the matter? Ah, I see — the balloon has collapsed, and we shall have a tumble into the sea." With time for only one more joke — a reference to two famous Americans of the nineteenth century as "John, a smith, and Zacckary, a tailor" — Pundita hastily concludes his letter by announcing that he will be placing it in a bottle. One suspects that Poe, a superb storyteller, recognized by now that this particular narrative was not going anywhere and thus resolved to end it as quickly as possible.
While neither the workers who unearthed this object nor the man interpreting it were formally archaeologists (quite naturally, since the profession did not really exist in Poe's era), Poe is establishing some basic conventions that will be observed in later stories about future archaeologists. First, to explain why our present might represent a mystery to our descendants, there is the assumption of some catastrophic event — here, an earthquake — which creates a discontinuity in the smooth flow of information from generation to generation. Second, because so much about their ancestors is unknown, the people of the future will be intensely interested in unearthing and studying whatever artifacts from their remote past they might happen upon. Third, they will invariably bungle the job of deducing the purpose and meaning of these artifacts, usually in a manner which is insulting or condescending.

*****

Further investigation of ancient New York City occurs in another tale of the future, John Ames Mitchell's The Last American, which first appeared in Scribner's magazine in 1889 and was published as a book in 1902. There are slight suggestions that Mitchell — a novelist and publisher best known for launching Life magazine (which then specialized in humor, not photographs) — was consciously following in the footsteps of Poe: while "Mellonta Tauta" is supposedly a letter divided into eight dated entries from April 1 to April 8, 2848, Mitchell's book is supposedly an excerpt from a journal with twelve dated entries from May 10 to May 21, 2951, followed by six entries from scattered dates in June and July of the same year. Yet, anticipating scientific regression instead of progress, Mitchell's far-future travelers come to America not in a balloon but a traditional sailing ship, and they are interestingly residents of Persia (modern Iran), perhaps making this book one of the first predictions of a future dominated by the Middle East. As in Poe, the diarist who explores and studies the New York ruins with several colleagues is not a professional archaeologist, though the introduction notes the "enthusiasm his discoveries would arouse among Persian archaeologists." While some of the Persians' exotic-looking names are difficult to figure out, at least for modern readers, most of them represent lame efforts to be amusing, such as Nōfūhl = no fool, Nōz-yt-ahl = knows it all, Ad-el-pate = addlepate, Jā-khāz = jackass, and Lev-el-Hedyd = level-headed.

Thrilled to have stumbled upon the legendary city of "Nhū-Yok," the Persians explore several of its noteworthy locales, including the Statue of Liberty, the New York Stock Exchange, the once-elegant hotel Astor House, and Central Park. It is noted that the Americans perished because, beginning in 1945, the nation was afflicted by "Climatic changes, the like of which no other land ever experienced . . . The temperature would skip in a single day from burning heat to winter's cold. No constitution could withstand it, and this vast continent became once more an empty wilderness." This is, some reports to the contrary, not exactly a pioneering vision of the devastating effects of global warming, but it does anticipate the increasingly common view among historians that shifting weather patterns have played a much larger role in the rise and fall of past civilizations than previously believed. It also functions as Mitchell's way to explain why the future Persians know so little about the United States. Coming upon a map, the Persians resolve to explore another famous city, Washington D.C., where they surprisingly find three living Americans — an elderly man and a young couple. Unfortunately, when one Persian attempts to kiss the woman, violent conflict breaks out, and along with some members of the Persian crew, all of the Americans are killed — hence Mitchell's title. In a postscript, it is reported that the surviving Persians are sailing back to their home country, intending to deliver the skull of the last American to a Tehran museum.

Like Poe's letter-writer, the Persians often misinterpret what they find in these cities. Seeing a sign on the hotel Astor House, the narrator assumes that Astor is "the name of a deity, and here is his temple." They assume that the purpose of the Statue of Liberty was to cast light on the city and cannot believe one of their men who visits it and reports that there are no signs of lighting devices. They come upon the surviving pillars that once supported one of the great bridges of New York, but noting how far apart they are, they conclude that this could not possibly represent the ruins of a bridge. Observing the statues of Native Americans that once stood outside cigar stores, the writer's comment is, "How these idols were worshipped, and why they are found in little shops and never in the great temples is a mystery." It is significant that these future Persians, like later archaeologists we will encounter, have a tendency to interpret enigmatic buildings and objects as aspects of a primitive, polytheistic religion; clearly, it never occurs to these Moslems that the ancient Americans might have practiced their own form of monotheism.

Beyond these specific deductions, however, the Persians actually spend more of their time discussing what their culture had already known about the Americans before their journey, their comments hovering uncertainly between biting social commentary and further evidence of the Persians' inability to properly understand the past. The Persians concede that the Americans had superior technology: "The very elements seem to have been their slaves. Cities were illuminated at night by artificial moons, whose radiance eclipsed the moon above. Strange devices were in use by which they conversed together when separated by a journey of many days.... The superstitions of our ancestors allowed their secrets to be lost during those dark centuries from which at last we are waking." But in all other respects, they regard America as a contemptible, uncivilized society, as these remarks will indicate:

The Mehrikans possessed neither literature, art, nor music of their own. Everything was borrowed. The very clothes they wore were copied with ludicrous precision from the models of other nations. They were a sharp, restless, quick-witted, greedy race, given body and soul to the gathering of riches. Their chiefest passion was to buy and sell.

They thought alike, worked alike, ate, dressed and conversed alike . . . . It was their desire to be like others. A natural feeling in a vulgar people.

Those families who possessed riches for a generation or two became the substitute for aristocracy. This upper class was given to sports and pastimes, spending their wealth freely, being prodigiously fond of display. Their intellectual development was feeble, and they wielded but little influence save in social matters. They followed closely the fashions of foreign aristocracies.

Vast sheets of paper were published daily in which all crimes were recorded in detail. The more revolting the deed, the more minute the description. Horrors were their chief delight. Scandals were drunk in with thirstful eyes. These chronicles of crime and filth were issued by hundreds of thousands.

To some extent, Mitchell is surely expressing his own concerns about his fellow citizens' excessive devotion to European models, greed, conformity, superficiality, and fascination with crime in a satirical fashion, in the manner of his own Life magazine, as is also suggested by the book's dedication: "To those thoughtful Persians who can read a warning in the sudden rise and swift extinction of a foolish people." But since all these comments can also be characterized as crude, biased overgeneralizations, he is also conveying the narrow-mindedness and arrogance of the Persians, who are obviously determined to view their own culture as superior and ancient American culture as inferior despite evidence to the contrary. In other words, it may be not simply a lack of data, but a certain rigid mindset, that will prevent our future descendants from properly understanding what we were really like.

*****

Possibly the first effort to portray actual archaeologists of the future as bumblers came from Robert Nathan — a novelist best known for writing the fantasy The Bishop's Wife (1928), later the basis for a 1947 film — who first introduced his clueless investigators in two stories published in Harper's magazine, "Digging the Weans" (November, 1956) and "A Further Report on the Weans" (April, 1959); later, these pieces were combined and expanded as a slender book entitled The Weans (1960). Nathan also introduces the practice of telling such stories in the form of reports purportedly written by future archaeologists, in this case African archaeologists who travel to the now-deserted North American continent to study the ancient people they call "the Weans" — because they so frequently referred to their land as "US." As another innovation, Nathan places his investigators about 6000 years in the future, not 1000 years, so that unlike Poe's and Mitchell's explorers, they approach their work with virtually no knowledge or preconceptions about the ancient culture they are excavating, and thus are forced to draw broad conclusions from whatever scraps of information they can unearth.

As one example of their faulty conclusions, the archaeologists assert that "The Weans were probably not at all a friendly or hospitable people" based solely on two pieces of evidence. First is New York City's Statue of Liberty, whose "one arm upraised" is interpreted as a sign of "a threatening attitude." Second is the discovery of an "inscription" reading "the dodgers were shut out." This reference suggests that Nathan's explorers are examining not only buildings and artifacts but also written documents: a table of baseball statistics, evidently found in a newspaper, is regarded as "a primitive form of banking," and there are a number of garbled references to literary writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Dylan Thomas. Their other errors include: rendering the name of the city of Washington as "Pound-Laundry"; interpreting the name of labor leader Jimmy Hoffa as a common noun, "hofa"; and assuming from the term "hot dog" that the Americans "ate dogs, roasted." Again, the archaeologists are overly anxious to see evidence of primitive, polytheistic religions: they assert that "each city-state worshipped a different Divinity"; a fragmentary description of a rock'n'roll concert is thought to concern a religious event; and the once-influential gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons are conflated as "a powerful Divinity named Hedda, or Lolly."

Nathan's approach is so scattershot that it is sometimes hard to discern a satirical intent behind his barbs; for example, the archaeologists misinterpret an abstract sculpture of an elongated human figure as a "huge praying mantis" and speculate that the demise of the Weans might have been caused by an "invasion of mantislike insects." Perhaps this is intended as a commentary on the silliness of modern art, just as other comments might be regarded as criticisms of the policy of parity (paying farmers to not grow crops) or exorbitant divorce settlements paid to ex-wives. However, the only safe conclusion to draw from such absurd theorizing is that Nathan's archaeologists are easily the least competent investigators we have so far encountered; somehow, they even manage to interpret a portion of the famous motto on the New York City's central postal office — "Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" — as evidence that the Weans perished in a "disaster of some kind," possibly a war with a rival group of tribes, "the More We" (USSR). Perhaps the real point is that, from a distance of six thousand years, it may be impossible for our descendants to really understand our culture — which Nathan's archaeologist essentially confesses at the end of his account: "So far we have been unable to do little more than scratch the surface of life in WE or US. There is no answer to the riddle: who were the Weans? And there is no solution to the mystery of their disappearance." Unlike the confident blunderers created by Poe and Mitchell, then, at least Nathan's misinterpreters are willing to acknowledge that their conclusions are superficial and possibly erroneous.

(Ironically, one unintended effect of Nathan's book is to demonstrate that it, in some cases, it may be impossible to understand a culture when observed from a distance of fifty years — since some of Nathan's jokes will be incomprehensible to modern readers who do not recall Schweppes Cola, the television program Queen for a Day, or the term "payola"; and despite extended rumination, other jokes in the text involving dated references remain incomprehensible to me. In the unlikely event that a contemporary press decides to republish The Weans, it would be necessary to include explanatory footnotes, written by a scholar who had completed the necessary archaeological research into the popular culture of 1950s America.)

*****

David Macaulay is an internationally renowned author and illustrator, well known for producing books that combine meticulous architectural drawings and lucid explanations on topics like the construction of the pyramids, a medieval cathedral, a castle, or the myriad structures found beneath a modern city; several of his books have been adapted as television specials, hosted by Macaulay himself. Thus, one would never expect to see one of his books in a bookstore's bargain bin. Yet there is precisely where I found his Motel of the Mysteries (1979), a book that obviously had not enjoyed much success. In this singular case, where had Macaulay gone wrong? The answer was that Macaulay had unwisely resolved to venture into the benighted subgenre of purportedly humorous accounts of blundering future archaeologists.

Macaulay's book begins by noting that America was destroyed in 1985 when it was suddenly covered by a huge flood of junk mail, unleashed by an accidental reduction in postal rates, followed by the sudden fall of solid pollutants from the atmosphere, placing another layer over the buried country. This may be intended to recall the way that the Roman city of Pompeii was suddenly covered by volcanic ash and thus preserved for posterity; yet the rest of the story is closely modeled on another famous archaeological discovery, Howard Carter's 1922 uncovering of the lost tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamen. In the year 4022, it is "Howard Carson" who accidentally stumbles upon the entrance to an ancient American structure, peers inside, and proclaims like Carter that he can see "wonderful things." As he proceeds to misinterpret his find as an ancient American tomb like Tutankhamen's, readers instantly recognize that he has actually come upon a room in a contemporary motel — farcically named the "Motel Toot'n'C'mon."

In this room, at the moment of the catastrophe, a man was lying on the double bed, watching television and holding a remote control, while his wife was in the bathroom relaxing in the bathtub, wearing a shower cap. But to Carson, the bed is the "ceremonial platform" where the deceased dignitary was placed; he is facing "the Great Altar" that was so important to his religion; the lamp on the nightstand is "a statue of the deity WATT"; the telephone is a "highly complex percussion instrument"; and the ice bucket is "the ICE," or "Internal Component Enclosure," which "was designed to preserve, at least symbolically, the major internal organs of the deceased for eternity." The "Do Not Disturb" sign on the front door is the "Sacred Seal," guarding the tomb from tomb robbers, and in the "Inner Chamber," the wife is lying in "a highly polished white sarcophagus," wearing "the Ceremonial Head Dress."

Indeed, Macaulay takes special delight in what is literally bathroom humor: the bathtub stopper on a chain is regarded as "the Sacred Pendant" to be worn around one's neck, a plunger and faucet are "musical instruments," and a scrub brush is "the Sacred Aspergillum" purportedly shaken over the bodies of the deceased. Yet the center of his amused attention is the toilet, or "the Sacred Urn." The toilet seat and cover are termed "the Sacred Collar," and both Carson and his wife at one point reverently place this holy object around their necks, Carson doing so as he endeavors to emulate his ancestors by reverently bowing down before "the Sacred Urn." And the water container over the toilet is "the Music Box."

Macaulay also goes beyond his predecessors in satirizing not only archaeologists, but the businesses that develop out of their finds. Carson and his wife arrange to place artifacts from the Motel of the Mysteries in what appears to be a highly profitable Museum; as was the case with objects from Tutankhamen's tomb, they arrange for the motel's treasures to go on tour; and they attract audiences to the site with "a dramatic living spectacle based on a number of ancient theatrical productions." They also create a "Museum Shop" offering tacky items of merchandise modeled on items from their excavation, which are shown in the book's final section, "Souvenirs and Quality Reproductions"; these include a "Coffee Set" with cups shaped like miniature toilets, a "Wall Fragment" displaying bathroom-wall graffiti like "For a good time call Val," and a belt with a buckle shaped like the "Sacred Seal." In effect, Macaulay is not only criticizing the talents of archaeologists, but he is also questioning their motives.

And, in the context of Macaulay's career, all of this seems very strange, since one imagines that Macaulay would have the utmost respect for the work of archaeologists, given that he so heavily relied upon their findings in writing books like City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction (1974) and Pyramid (1975). In a sense, portraying archaeologists as greedy idiots represents a betrayal of the principles embedded in his other works, which might be another reason why his regular readers shunned Motel of the Mysteries, allowing a casual buyer to pick up a copy in a bargain bin.

*****

Of course, Motel of the Mysteries is not the only text we have encountered which fell short of overwhelming success: "Mellonta Tauta" is rarely reprinted, The Weans has apparently never been republished, and excluding e-books, The Last American has reappeared only in a completely overlooked 2005 paperback edition. Strangely, despite the fact that Poe, Mitchell, Nathan, and Macaulay were all talented and commercially successful writers, they all conspicuously failed in their struggles to bring to life this strangely stillborn subcategory of science fiction literature. And, as a warning to the next author who might be contemplating such an effort, a few conclusions about why these stories simply do not work are in order.

In the first place, whenever someone plans to write a story about archaeologists of the future examining our present-day life, they will be forced to portray them as incompetent; for surely, nothing could be more boring than to read a future archaeologist's completely accurate account of everything we already know about contemporary society. One can, however, interestingly write about capable future archaeologists who are studying the ruins of an alien culture, since they will be finding out something that is new to us; in two noteworthy stories of this type, George O. Smith's "Lost Art" (1943) and H. Beam Piper's "Omnilingual" (1957), human explorers on Mars investigating the ruins of the extinct Martian race reach accurate conclusions about that vanished civilization. One can also fruitfully expand one's perspective to imagine alien archaeologists of the far future studying an extinct human race, since they will also be answering a novel question: what will drive humanity to extinction? Thus, in Edmond Hamilton's "The Dead Planet" (1946), alien visitors to a barren Earth learn from a recorded message that future humans sacrificed themselves in order to save the Galaxy from a sinister race of energy beings, and in Arthur C. Clarke's sardonic "History Lesson" (1949), reptilian aliens from Venus haplessly attempting to understand humanity from only one surviving artifact — a Walt Disney cartoon — actually manage to make one shrewd deduction from its violent shenanigans: "it is theoretically possible to have wars in a society possessing mechanical power, flight, and even radio. Such a conception is alien to our thoughts, but we must admit its possibility, and it would certainly account for the downfall of the lost race." If someone is ever asked to assemble an anthology of classic science fiction stories about archaeology, these are the sorts of works that should be considered, not the less satisfying texts I have analyzed here.

Second, obliged to present future archaeologists as bumbling buffoons, writers are also driven to convey an implicit criticism of present-day science; for, if future humans are making wild mistakes in their studies of our present, it is equally likely that today's humans are making similarly wild mistakes in their studies of our past. The stories of Poe, Mitchell, Nathan, and Macaulay raise doubts not only about the accuracy of what archaeologists are telling us about past civilizations, but also about the accuracy of what geologists and biologists are telling us about Earth's more distant past. These visions, then, give aid and comfort to those who would prefer to believe that everything contemporary science teaches us about the past is essentially a lie, as the experts blindly ignore evidence of the obvious truth that the Earth was actually created in its present form six thousand years ago, or that every significant human accomplishment of the past was actually inspired and achieved by helpful visitors from outer space.

The stories I have discussed also call into question the very idea of human progress, the comforting belief that we are superior both scientifically and socially to the cultures that preceded us, and that future cultures will in turn be superior to our own. For one thing, Mitchell explicitly posits that our descendants will be less advanced than we are, and the investigators in other stories do not appear to have achieved any vast improvements in their own technology, suggesting at least that a certain stagnation might characterize the future. Further, if these observers are inclined to arrogantly dismiss our impressive civilization as a hodgepodge of silly superstitions and rituals, it would appear possible that we are also unfairly denigrating the civilizations of our ancestors. Consider the ancient Egyptians, expressly compared to contemporary Americans in Macaulay's book. Certainly, most modern observers would be inclined to regard ancient Egypt as an unenlightened society that practiced slavery, repressed women and minorities, practiced a crude form of polytheistic religion featuring gods that looked like animals, and lacked any significant technology. Yet one might respond that Egyptian culture was kinder to its underclasses than is generally supposed; actually had at least two women as rulers (something America has yet to achieve); briefly practiced a monotheistic religion often regarded as an anticipation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; and in a few areas, such as working in stone or human embalming, displayed technological abilities that were equal to, or superior to, our own. One could argue, then, that Egyptian culture was just as admirable as our own culture, and it is only our own narrow-mindedness that leads us to view such past civilizations as hopelessly inferior to our present-day civilization. It is a view that would be heartily endorsed by contemporary anthropologists, who have long railed against the notion that the indigenous people they study are "primitive," insisting instead that all societies have their own complexities and should be accorded an equal amount of respect; and it is the view that is implicitly being promoted in these stories.

We now begin to see, as a third conclusion, why science fiction writers are not writing these sorts of stories, since the arguments that naturally emerge from them contradict the genre's usual attitudes. Science fiction is inclined to heartily support the scientific community, and thus to accept current archaeological descriptions and theories as essentially accurate, and to expect that whatever errors or omissions might exist in today's archaeology will, sooner or later, be corrected by ongoing improvements in our ability to study and understand the past. Science fiction also firmly believes in human progress, fueled by constant scientific advances, a basic impulse toward continuing improvement that even a nuclear holocaust would only briefly disrupt. Bungling future archaeologists simply do not fit into the picture.

This leads to my final conclusion as to why these stories are unsuccessful: as a longtime reader of science fiction, I generally share its core tenets: I do accept the basic accuracy of contemporary science, and I do believe that human society has improved over the years and will continue to improve in the future. Even if they do not seem designed to be taken seriously, I suspect, we reject these stories about errant archaeology because they are implicitly presenting serious arguments that we regard as fundamentally untenable. The stories being told by the science fiction stories we respect and admire, in other words, are truer than the stories that these works are telling, and that is why classic science fiction stories endure while these works are forgotten. For, even when we are reading science fiction, we tend to embrace the truth and abhor the false.

Therefore, I have absolutely no desire to assemble time capsules or prepare any detailed messages for my distant descendants, because I am completely confident that they will always be able to figure out pretty much exactly what their ancestors were like, even if some global disaster destroys most of the records, artifacts, and buildings that we are now depositing in vast numbers all over the world. Frankly, I have too much respect for everything that humanity has accomplished to date, and is likely to accomplish in the future, to ever imagine that the people of the future will someday sneer at our statues as religious idols, or bow down in front of our toilets.

Gary Westfahl's works include the Hugo-nominated Science Fiction Quotations: From the Inner Mind to the Outer Limits (2005) and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2005); samples from these and his other works are available at his World of Westfahl website. His most recent books are two collections of essays: Science Fiction and the Two Cultures, co-edited with George Slusser, by various hands, and The Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science, by the late Frank McConnell. His forthcoming works include the second edition of his book about space stations in science fiction, Islands in the Sky, and a study of films about space travel.

Comments are welcome, but are moderated.

Deborah Beale: The Arc of Life

2009-07-28T20:32:00.000-07:00

Deborah Beale was born near Birmingham England. She attended Manchester University, graduating in 1981 with an honors degree in English and American Literature. She spent 15 years working in London publishing, much of it devoted to SF and fantasy, including time at Pan Books, running the Legend imprint at Century Hutchinson, and later co-founding the Orion Publishing Group and the Millennium imprint.

With her husband Tad Williams, she is writing the "Ordinary Farm" YA fantasy series, with first book The Dragons of Ordinary Farm released in June 2009, and A Witch at Ordinary Farm and several others forthcoming.

She married Williams in 1994. They have two children and live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Excerpts from the interview:

“I was brought up with a notion that was battered into me that anything to do with ideas or creativity or the imagination was inconsequential; not only inconsequential but massively suspect, and the 'upstanding nail' (as the Dutch say) had to be hammered down. I had young parents, and they were lost: couldn't make sense of their own lives. And it was a very 1950s childhood -- Birmingham was in the '50s until about 1977 -- very conformist, very right-wing. It killed me from the start. There was a dark side to things whereby I just went down a long, long tunnel, and it was hard. I had to learn to fight off the family depression and that was extremely painful and time-consuming. There are some things that have taken me a long time to sort out.

“I am a product of the socialist education programs of England in the 1960s. The socialization of fine education happened, and it gave kids like me -- lower-middle-class, never on the edge, but we were always on the edge existentially in my family -- a chance to escape an oppressive home town, which I duly did. I passed the Eleven Plus, which was the big class barrier when one was 11 years old and of my generation. You passed the Eleven Plus and you went to the grammar school, and the grammar school gave you a classical education. It was phenomenal: pure sciences, pure arts, Greek, Latin, the world of ideas. It was absolutely brilliant. And it saved my soul.”

*

“When I got into publishing, I had a brief period (thankfully) when I wanted to work with literary fiction. I read for Sonny Mehta when was the head of Pan, and when he was acquiring for the Picador list, and I quickly learned that not very good literary fiction is just really bad fiction, and that by contrast, I was really interested in stuff like young adult fiction and popular fiction. I was the lowliest of a number of editors working on So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish, and that was a trip. It was actually the first Douglas Adams I'd read, and I literally fell out of my seat laughing, and then all these anxious sales people, plus Sonny, came to cross-examine me about how funny was it really, and was it truly going to work.”

*

“That old childhood haunt was back, wanting to write and not having a clue how to do it -- that old secret self that hadn't found anything to hook onto. From the start, I didn't want to be a writer; I wanted to write, and there's a crucial difference. When you start out writing, you dream, 'I can have this life, and I won't have to work in an office, and it will solve my life problems.' Well, that's the actual antithesis of what happens. What you have to do first and foremost is write. And continuing to do it will shape everything in your life. You have to put it at the center. You have to follow it. While I was publishing, I put writing aside. I couldn't figure out a way with it. But I started again as soon as I had a little bit of success in publishing.

*

“When I write, I'm in touch with the mystery. In a New Yorker piece about writing that I quote in my blog, Ian McEwan describes it as slipping into a timeless zone. All of it -- writing, science fiction, fantasy, contemporary physics, child rearing, the experience of life over a large arc of history, or a series of arcs of personal history -- all of it comes back to this mystery, and I think about it every day in one form or another. Sometimes it's a bit like it is thinking me.

“Another aspect of the mystery for me is the question of identity. There's mystery external and there's mystery internal. Of course they're the same, but it takes you a lifetime to discover that. And that's like the interaction of character and plot. Character has to evolve out of plot, but plot has to evolve out of character, and resolving the two of them is an external/internal process. When I'm actually doing it day by day, and I'm working in things that not only just sort of come up from my mind but that I source from my everyday -- from my conversations with Tad, and from my own reading -- then it becomes this living thing that's really beyond me. That's what we're writing for: it's the connection with the mystery. And it's the arc of life.”

Comments are welcome...

Photo by Amelia Beamer

Tad Williams: Things Go Away, Things Come Back

2009-07-28T20:05:00.001-07:00

Robert Paul "Tad" Williams was born in San Jose, California, and grew up around Palo Alto. He has worked as a rock 'n' roll singer and songwriter, talk show host, paperboy, shoe salesman, insurance agent, journalist, technical writer, teacher, illustrator cartoonist, and employee of Apple computers.

First novel Tailchaser's Song appeared in 1985. Williams is best known for his series novels: the "Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn" trilogy The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Stone of Farewell (1990), and To Green Angel Tower (1993); the "Otherland" quartet City of Golden Shadow (1996), River of Blue Fire (1999), Mountain of Black Glass (1999), and Sea of Silver Light (2002); and the "Shadowmarch" epic fantasy series Shadowmarch (2005), Shadowplay (2007), and the forthcoming Shadowrise (2010).

With wife Deborah Beale he is writing the "Ordinary Farm" YA fantasy series, with first book The Dragons at Ordinary Farm released in June 2009, and A Witch at Ordinary Farm and several others forthcoming.

With Nina Kiriki Hoffman he co-wrote Child of an Ancient City (1992), and his other standalone novels are Caliban's Hour (1994) and The War of the Flowers (2003). Some of his stories have been collected in Rite: Short Work (2006), and he has written several comic books, mostly for DC Comics.

Excerpts from the interview:

“I don't set out to write long books, and the next set of books is expressly meant to be much shorter. But in the big fantasies (I consider Otherland to be another big fantasy, even though it's nominally science fiction), I tend to write lots and lots of characters. I have my own reasons for that, but one of the results is I feel honor-bound to give them all arcs. If you're going to make readers invest in these smaller characters, you have to give them a payoff as well, so instead of having one or two major character arcs I have 25 or 30 character arcs in my books. People are not just spear-carriers. I like to do that, because it gives me a much more kaleidoscopic view of these big, world-changing events.

“The other reason my books tend to be long is that I have my own ideas about how you make people immerse themselves in an environment, and one of the ways is that you have to give the environment a certain amount of credibility in itself, and that means you have to spend a certain amount of time introducing it and acquainting people with it as you go along.

“But, as any writer knows, if you just stop and say 'blah blah blah' and dump a bunch of description (it's called the expository lump), that doesn't work well, and if you do this all the time it gets irritating. The scenic or historical expository lumps have to happen in the background of interactions between characters. So instead of writing a ten-page chapter with a paragraph explaining where they are, you end up writing a 12- or 15-page chapter that digresses from the foreground action to give you some feeling of the background. And maybe it introduces an extra small character into the scene who can help lead the reader to understand certain things about the environment, so you're adding more complexity.

“If anything, that's my greatest sin. I'm not afraid of complexity, and there are probably times when some readers just throw my books across the room. To them it feels like self-indulgence, and to me it's how I want to tell the story.”

*

“A long time ago, I realized the only reader whose reactions I can actually rely on is me. Anybody else, I'm just creating an 'average reader' and trying to guess what they'd like. But I know how I feel, so what I'm essentially doing is gambling that there are a certain number of people out there who are similar to me in my reading. I may want more detail, more subtlety, more complexity, or have more patience for the irritating sides of those things than the average reader. I may have more patience for my own long-windedness than the average reader would. So I have to find readers who are patient with long-winded writers!

“One of the big revelations I had in the field when I began to meet people is that while some of them may seem to be doing cynical commercial writing, they're usually not: this writer is totally sincere, writing the best book that he or she can write. It's just that to my way of thinking, what they're interested in is very middlebrow. Jacqueline Susann was not cynical; she was not going, 'Oh, this will get the dummies all worked up.' She was writing the books she wanted to read, and it just happened that what she was interested in coincided with a huge part of the market who wanted thinly veiled allegories about Hollywood stars and starlets on drugs and raping each other. That was her idea of fun, and you could see that in her work. Maybe the publishers were cynical, but the writers were not!”

*

“One of the things I'm most interested in is games, and one of the places where I would love to be able to influence a game even more in the long run than I have already, is beginning to work with the idea of how you incorporate story or storyline values into a gaming situation. The reason this fascinates me is not simply the nuts and bolts mechanical problem (although that's interesting too), but how you tell a story in an environment much more present than a book. In a sense, you've got fewer options. You can write anything in a book, but you have to program it if you're going to make a game out of it.

“That fascinates me by itself, but it fascinates me even more because I think it's probably one of the great next creative frontiers. Everybody knows how phenomenally popular gaming is, but where it's going to be really interesting is as it expands, as gaming begins to impinge more and more on the territory of film and written fiction and things like that. It can only do that if story becomes a greater part.”

Comments are welcome...

Photo by Amelia Beamer

Cory Doctorow: Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise

2009-07-05T15:44:00.001-07:00

I was 15 when I got my hands on a grubby copy of Steal This Book, Abbie Hoffman's classic how-to manual for dropping out, living for free, and "ripping off the system." It was chock-a-block with fascinating tidbits like how to generate the tone that would get you free long-distance calls, how to organize a co-operative store, how to recycle tires into sandals and how to dumpster-dive dinner from your local supermarket. I was hooked — I read that book a dozen times that summer.

Steal This Book began my life-long love affair with secret knowledge: from texts on con-artistry like Maurer's seminal The Big Con (the basis for the film The Sting) and Lovell's How to Cheat at Everything: A Con Man Reveals the Secrets of the Esoteric Trade of Cheating, Scams, and Hustles to dubious demolitions manuals like The Anarchist Cookbook, to the streetlore that explained how to short out the contacts on the back of a payphone speaker to get an open dial-tone and what magic words will cause a collection agent to stop calling you for fear of prosecution for harassment.

At one point, I had quite a collection of this stuff: anarchy files from BBSes; grubby Paladin Press paperbacks on creating new identities and urban caching techniques; ancient phone-switch manuals from the old Bellcore research outreach department; and catalogs like Amok and The Whole Earth Catalog, which promised bottomless "access to tools and ideas." (It's a good thing I only dabbled in conspiracy theories, UFOlogy, and cryptozoology or I would have gone bankrupt).

Apart from prurient interest, this stuff is pure gold for science fiction writers — it lets you fake a pretty good spycraft, spin interesting scenarios that hatch in the crevasses of straight society, and provides texture and background on the woo-woo edges of reason and sanity.

I also grew up on science fiction novels that were full of this stuff: competent heroes and lovable rogues who worked the angles, solved the cons, and uncovered the truth that the shadowy forces of conspiracy wished to keep us mortals from discovering. These two literatures — the fiction and the how-tos — fed one another, because it wasn't enough to read about something being done, I wanted to find out how to do it. Not because I had any interest in blowing stuff up or hacking the phone company, but because it made the story better, and it gave me that frisson that genuinely forbidden knowledge can convey.

These facts were a currency in my social circle. We'd trade them like baseball cards. I'd show you my payphone trick and you'd show me your gag for turning the cellophane on a cigarette pack into a smoke-ring machine. Social capital accrued to everyone who could show or explain something that gave you power and insight into the mysterious workings of the world.

Like all currency, these facts were scarce. They were expensive. You needed access to esoteric books, secret BBS file-depositories, shady characters who knew knife-tricks and could roll joints one-handed (drug lore was a big part of secret knowledge, of course, our own version of the sacred rituals of a secret society).

Well, the market for facts has crashed. The Web has reduced the marginal cost of discovering a fact to $0.00. And that means that the two literatures — how-to and fiction — have effectively merged into one master story, the "plausible premise."

New warfare expert John Robb coined the term "plausible premise" to describe the new reality of "open source insurgencies" ("insurgency composed of many small groups without any hierarchical leadership or organizational structure that typifies 20th century practice"). Open source insurgencies don't run on detailed instructional manuals that describe tactics and techniques. Rather, they run on a master narrative about how insurgency may be conducted — as screenwriter John Rogers put it:

What you really need is a plausible premise. i.e. "You can kill US soldiers with IEDs." and then the new Interconnected Marketplace Of Shitty Evil Ideas will solve the problem for anyone looking to kill US soldiers with IEDs.

Or, more succinctly, in order to get the marketplace off its ass to solve the impossible, you have to just pull off the highly improbable and make sure everybody knows about it. Show it can be done, show how you did it, and watch the "marketplace" attack because you've made the "premise" "plausible."

But this doesn't just work for insurgents — it works for anyone working to effect change or take control of her life. Tell someone that her car has a chip-based controller that can be hacked to improve gas mileage, and you give her the keywords to feed into Google to find out how to do this, where to find the equipment to do it — even the firms that specialize in doing it for you.

In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it.

This means that invention is now a lot more like collage than like discovery. Bruce Sterling's new Imaginary Inventions project is seeking to catalog the imaginary inventions of fiction, hucksters, failed entrepreneurs, and other imaginers. I sent him some excerpts from my forthcoming novel Makers (Tor, HarperCollins UK, Fall 2009), which concerns hardware hackers whose principle activity is thinking up stuff that would be cool, then googling to figure out how to build it, and Bruce replied,

There's hardly any engineering. Almost all of this is mash-up tinkering. It's like the Burroughs cut-up method applied to objects. These guys are assembling hardware in the same crowd-pleasing spaghetti at the wall approach that Web 2.0 web designers use in assembling features and applications.

That's exactly right. That's the plausible premise right there — spaghetti-at-the-wall hacking that assembles, rather than invents. It's not that every invention has been invented, but we sure have a lot of basic parts just hanging around, waiting to be configured. Pick up a $200 FPGA chip-toaster and you can burn your own microchips. Drag and drop some code-objects around and you can generate some software to run on it. None of this will be as efficient or effective as a bespoke solution, but it's all close enough for rock-n-roll.

Plausible premise invention is everywhere. Look at the incredible games flying out of Seattle's Valve Corporation: Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Left 4 Dead — all built on the same engine with radically different narratives and play mechanics and atmosphere, a GURPS approach to game design that shrugs off the macho business of creating your own 3D engine from scratch in favor of pulling something down off the shelf and remixing it.

What does this all mean for science fiction? Well, it probably means that SF writers are going to get credited with a lot more invention than we're accustomed to. The formerly rare occurrence of technology jumping off the page and into the world (Heinlein's waterbeds, Clarke's geosynchronous orbits) are about to become a lot more common. When readers can download or mail-order off-the-shelf components and instructions for integrating them, it becomes much simpler to turn fiction into reality.

For better or for worse.

Cory Doctorow's website is Craphound.com, and he is co-editor of Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things.

Previous Cory Doctorow columns posted on Locus Online:

Comments are welcome, but are moderated.

From the July 2009 issue of Locus Magazine

Kay Kenyon: No Apologies

2009-06-30T21:28:00.001-07:00

Kay Kenyon grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, attended the University of Minnesota, and earned an English degree from the University of Washington in 1979. She has worked as a model, actress for TV and radio commercials, copywriter, and urban planner. First novel The Seeds of Time appeared in 1997. Other standalone novels are Leap Point (1998), Rift (1999), Tropic of Creation (2000), Philip K. Dick Award finalist Maximum Ice (2002), and John W. Campbell Memorial Award finalist The Braided World (2003). New series The Entire and the Rose, "SF with a fantasy feel," began with Endeavour Award nominee Bright of the Sky (2007) and continues with A World Too Near (2008) and City Without End (2009). A concluding volume, Prince of Storms, is forthcoming. She has also published a dozen short stories in various anthologies.

Kenyon lives now in Wenatchee, Washington. She chairs the Write on the River writers' conference, now in its fourth year.

Excerpts from the interview:

“I come from an outsider background. My parents were avid Socialists and atheists in a community that was very organized around religion and church, as a lot of communities are, especially in the Midwest. I don't know how much this upbringing influenced me; probably profoundly! My parents were social idealists, and they felt (in their atheism and Socialism) that they were blazing a path of truth in a forest of superstition. Their idea of proper books for children were Somerset Maugham, Sartre, and perhaps Charles Dickens (but maybe not). Politics was the center of our lives.

“I have reacted against that and become wary of politics, though the sense of idealism in Socialism led me to become a bit of an idealist myself, discontented with the status quo. It may have been David Hartwell who said 'Science fiction tends to appeal to people who aren't quite satisfied with how things are.' If we're looking for roots, I could go there.”

*

“I learned in high school that I loved to write book reports and essays, though people would look at me funny: 'What? You're an atheist and Socialist and you love to write?' But it had never yet occurred to me that I could write fiction, and I'd never written any short stories before I started on a novel in the mid-'90s.

“Socialism is a wonderful idealistic framework for a future world that one might devoutly wish to have, but I was never convinced by it. And after that the Republican/Democrat dichotomy seemed useless; they began to seem (as my father would say) like Tweedledee and Tweedledum! So I drifted. And when I finally hit 40, I asked myself, 'Well, what do I want to do with my life?' It was a big-decade birthday, and I decided I wanted to do something more exciting than wrangle with local politics, which is what urban planning had become in the Seattle area.

“I had always loved science fiction. I grew up reading it, and fantasy to a lesser extent. In my various jobs, I'd been writing so many different things -- I could write long, I could write short, give me a big manual and I'd be happy to do it -- writing a novel just didn't seem like a huge task. It didn't intimidate me at all.

“Except, I was so wrong!”

*

“I always write to a large canvas, so it was a natural progression for me to want to write a series -- something with a story arc spanning several books. My ongoing project, The Entire and The Rose, has a story arc that begins and ends in four books, so it's a closed series. Beginning with Bright of the Sky, the series hits what Rudy Rucker calls the 'power chords' of science fiction. I use the power chords, but they're pretty much in the background. The milieu has world-shattering nanotechnology, higher dimensions, alternate universes, aliens; at the same time I drill down into the central characters, so it's got that marriage of character and adventure that is somewhat uncommon in our field.

“In this series, once again, the milieu came first. I love bizarre landscapes, so I asked, 'What is the strangest world I can imagine?' And I came up with this: 'What would happen if there was a tunnel universe that burrowed through our own? How would it look? Well, you'd need a lid and walls, for starters. You could move around in our universe through theirs, and avoid faster-than-light travel. And if the tunnel universe is vast, you need a space-time folding mechanism for a transport system. So I built in the River Nigh, which flows down the five arms of this tunnel galaxy.”

*

“The future we're headed toward is a little disconcerting to me (as it should be to you!) -- the idea of the Singularity, and how far technology is going to go. So I'm writing stories that tend to beat back that wave, to assert humanity and to imagine a world where our human emotions still deeply matter. But there's a competing side to his issue: when I'm writing about Titus Quinn I'm wondering, 'Can his personal life matter, in the context of the big issues that he's carrying on his shoulders?' Even he has to ask that question. It's a major theme of those books, and one I'm very interested in.”

*

“Science fiction is always apologizing for itself. We have to stop that. Like Janis Ian said, SF is the jazz of literature. It takes delight in its topics and its narratives, and when we start talking about it having a purpose, it's like apologizing. That whole dialogue starts when we talk to people who don't like science fiction, and we try to convince them that SF is useful.”

Comments are welcome...

Photo by Beth Gwinn

Robert Charles Wilson: The Cosmic and the Intimate

2009-06-24T20:24:00.000-07:00

Robert Charles Wilson was born in Whittier California and has lived in Canada since he was nine. He sold stories to Analog in 1974, then to Asimov's and F&SF in 1985. His first novel, alternate world A Hidden Place, followed in 1986, and was a Philip K. Dick Award finalist. His other novels are Memory Wire (1987), Gypsies (1989), The Divide (1990), A Bridge of Years (1991), Philip K. Dick Award Winner Mysterium (1994), Aurora Award winner and Hugo finalist Darwinia (1998), Bios (1999), Hugo nominee and John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner The Chronoliths (2001), Blind Lake (2003), Hugo Award winner Spin (2005) and sequel Axis (2007), a Campbell Memorial Award finalist. Just published, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America is an expansion of his Sturgeon and Hugo Award-nominated novella Julian: A Christmas Story (2006).

Wilson's notable short fiction includes "The Perseids" (1995), a World Fantasy and Nebula Award finalist and an Aurora Award winner; World Fantasy nominee "The Inner Inner City" (1997), Hugo finalist "Divided by Infinity" (1998), Aurora finalist "Plato's Mirror" (1999), and Sturgeon Award winner "The Cartesian Theater" (2007). Collection The Perseids and Other Stories (2000) was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. He co-edited Tesseracts Ten with Edo van Belkom (2006).

Excerpts from the interview:

“Maybe I don't see the boundary between science fiction and mainstream as distinctly as some people do. I've read science fiction all my life and loved it, but it's never been something I read exclusively. To me these things are continuous. We're not just talking about ideas in science fiction; we're talking about ideas as a facet of human experience -- ideas as they're lived, rather than in the abstract. And if you're writing that way, then necessarily you have to keep popping back and forth on the scale from the cosmic to the intimate.

“I always loved science fiction that gave you an intimate view of the apocalypse. We say that science fiction asks the question, 'What if?' But I think what we're really asking is, 'What would it be like if? What would it mean to you or me if?' That's a literary question, and I hope I'm appealing to readers like myself, who don't see a discontinuity between science fiction and literature in general.”

*

“There are three pillars to my latest novel Julian Comstock, three things that coincided for me. One was reading 19th-century popular literature. The second was the story of the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, which I first came across years ago in the Gore Vidal novel Julian and came across again in a history of monotheism that dealt extensively with it -- that fascinated me. And the third pillar was obviously all the cultural-collapse stuff. There's a book by James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency, that talks about the unsustainability of the kind of civilization we have and posits a return to 19th-century technology levels as a best-case outcome for the 21st century.

“All those ideas converged on me, and I thought, 'Wouldn't it be fun to write the story of Julian the Apostate in this post-collapse America and do it in the voice of a 19th-century children's novel?' It was hard to pitch that idea to anyone! But in my head it all made sense and I thought, 'What the hell, I will write this book.'

“For me, part of the process of writing science fiction is continually asking yourself why you're doing it. Because I grew up loving science fiction, there's a tendency to accept it as a given -- that I love it because it is what it is. But as a writer you have to go beyond that and ask, 'What is it about science fiction that appeals to me so much? Why am I so obsessed with it?' If you can identify that core fascination, you can give it back to a reader in a single powerful dose. You're not just adopting tropes and images at random because you happen to like them or think they're cool. So that's what I've been trying to do in the course of my career: to get closer and closer to the thing about science fiction that electrifies me, the thing that drew me go to that shelf when I was ten years old at the library.”

*

“People have a set of default futures in their heads now, which is odd. Back in the '80s, a group of college students was asked, 'How do you see the world in 40 years?', and the answers were really pessimistic -- they tended toward nuclear wastelands patrolled by killer robots, that sort of thing. Then they were asked, 'Where do you see yourself in 40 years?' and the answers tended toward 'Well, I'll be ready for retirement.' So there's a cognitive disconnect, but I think it's because our culture is now pervaded with these default notions of the future derived from science fiction.

“Sometimes I think the purpose of modern science fiction should be to challenge those notions, not to further indulge them. One of the things I wanted to do in Julian Comstock was to write a post-apocalypse novel that (a) wasn't about survival and (b) was a kind of dystopia that wasn't just an Evil Empire run by the worst human beings -- a dystopia more like European monarchies or aristocratic institutions, where there are cracks in the wall; an oppressive set of governmental bodies, but at the same time a lively popular culture. In other words, I wanted something with contradictions built into it. I was tired of dystopias that were triumphant Evil and oppressed Good. Real life isn't like that.”

*

“I don't think there's anything intrinsically elitist about what we do as science fiction writers. It can be hard to address scientific or cosmological questions in a way that speaks to people who aren't immersed in science fiction or in the sciences . But that's a problem every writer has: who are you talking to? Who's your audience? The nice thing about the science fiction genre is we have an expansive space in which all these things can coexist.

“And it was science fiction that introduced me to other, arguably more sophisticated kinds of writing. As a kid coming to science fiction with a perfectly naive interest in spaceships and robots, I was introduced through science fiction to all the broader possibilities of language and literature.

“The quality of writing in science fiction now is higher than it's ever been. The danger is that we sometimes get seduced into a kind of self-loathing, where we will write a book of science fiction that minimizes the science-fictional element because it might not be acceptable to a broader audience. My response would be,' 'No, don't let go of that! Write a better book, a more profound book, a more interesting book, but don't cut out the heart of it.'

“Science fiction can talk about scientific and cosmological issues in a way science itself would never permit you to do. I certainly don't consider myself to be somebody who's dispensing wisdom, but if I can provoke people into thinking about these big issues on a personal level, I'm satisfied.”

Comments are welcome...

Photo by Amelia Beamer