‘‘Some writers say, ‘I’m driven to write. I have all these stories to tell.’ I have none of that, and I’m always skeptical when I hear other say it. What I do is have a certain creative urge. When I was in my twenties, I expressed this by creating a bookshop, but when the business side was stronger than the creative side, then it stopped being good. So now that urge is finding itself in writing.”

*

‘‘I’ve had some people tell me things about my own writing, and after they’d told me I thought, ‘Oh, you’re right!’ Once I was taking a walk with another writer who had read most of what I’d written, and she said, ‘You know, the biggest emotion in all of your writing, no matter what you do, is yearning.’ She was right. Here’s an interesting thing: there’s no word for yearning in French. You have to use a whole sentence to describe the feeling, and even then you don’t get the whole range. Often, thinking about my characters in a story, I ask myself, ‘What do they want most of all?’ (Though it goes beyond want.) Germanic concepts like awe and yearning are central to my writing, in fact – all these words for a rich inner life!

‘‘A lot of my stories are built around ritual, though not always explicitly. I think that’s partly because, as an atheist, I believe in the power of ritual as a social bonding agent. The problem is, as an atheist I am troubled by the dogma attached to rituals which we could have without any dogma. They could simply be rites of passage, without any supernatural gobbledygook – simply rituals to mark important social moments, in a way that would imbue them with meaning. The meaning need not be superstitious; it could simply be human. It’s obvious that, as social animals, we need these rituals. But the way most of them have become coded over the years (dogma, right and wrong, all these arbitrary rules) seems problematic.

‘‘As a writer, I’m always interested in things I don’t understand. One of the worst pieces of advice ever given to writers is, ‘Write what you know.’ That’s terrible, awful! It’s very important for me to feel that I’m writing about something other. If I already understand things, why would I want to write about them? I try to write about characters who are very different from me – teenage girls, gay married men, forgotten Jews. And I just try to get into the mindset of somebody other than me. That’s where it becomes fiction, where it becomes something that is beyond self-expression, which I sneer at. Fiction is an attempt at communing with the world, trying to bridge some gap.”

*

‘‘I do always have five projects on the go, and never know when anything is going to be finished. I’m very much a short fiction writer. A lot of people think of short fiction as a training ground for novels, but they are two very different forms. Kelly Link, for example, is amazing; she is a great short fiction writer. But what she is great at doesn’t work at the novel level. I like to end my stories at the moment of transformation. It’s like I just wrote the prologue, and that’s it. But that can be fantastic. Farmer did that, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. He didn’t care if he wasn’t quite able to do what he was trying for; he was always stretching his muscles, doing something beyond himself. I’ve had a couple of agents approach me, saying they want to represent me, but they always back down when they learn I don’t have a novel. I might write one. I’m not saying no. But right now I don’t see it.”

*

‘‘I actually think the entirety of the human experience is there for us to plunder. Really plunder. I feel no compunction that I have to be respectful. I don’t think that is the artist’s job. And I do think in these extra-sensitive, extra-PC times, we’ve kind of lost track of the fact that all artists are shit-disturbers; that’s what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to question things, supposed to make people uncomfortable, we’re not there to answer, we’re there to question. Sometimes that question will mean shaking something up so that it’s really offensive, and that will make us think.’’

I’m currently most of the way through finishing a collaborative novel with Cory Doctorow titled The Rapture of the Nerds. It’s been coming for a while. In 2003 or 2004, one of us suggested collaborating on a story, and I dug into my pile of unfinished stories and pulled out the first 1000 words of an idea and threw it at Cory. He continued with it and we came up with a strange fable about a curmudgeonly Welsh Green environmental activist type who trusts no technology more complex than his bicycle, living in a post-Singularity world. He has volunteered for ‘jury service’ to pass judgment on a random design schemata broadcast from the cloud of transcendent intelligences in orbit. His idea is to spike this new technology, but unfortunately, the cloud has other plans for him.

‘‘To our shock this novella, ‘Jury Service’, sold to Sci Fiction. Later we were commissioned to write a sequel novella, and by the end we had 40,000 words of fiction. We had this idea that we’d finish a collaborative novel called The Rapture of the Nerds by writing the final half of the story later – but we were too damn busy. Along the way Tor decided they wanted to acquire the novel if we could ever find time to write it. So for a period of a few years, every year I would e-mail Cory and say,’Do you have any spare time in your calendar this year?’ And he would say, ‘No, how about you?’ ‘No. Okay, same time next year?’ That’s how it went until last year – and I’m afraid to say it’s all your fault.

‘‘Last year Locus ran an April Fool’s article announcing that Stross & Doctorow had accepted a seven-figure commission to write an authorised sequel to Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I e-mailed Cory and said, ‘Have you seen this?’ He said, ‘‘Yeah – have you got any time?’ Because, in fact, a creative Objectivist does feature in the second novella, and the ghost of Ayn Rand puts in an appearance towards the end of The Rapture of the Nerds. We haven’t finished writing it, and I shouldn’t say more, because it’s a joint novel, and you’re only interviewing one of us right now.”

*

“I get contrary. One of the things that has made a big impact on my writing in the past five years was Geoff Ryman and his students’ idea of Mundane SF. A lot of people have misunderstood Mundane SF as being a sort of hair shirt – the ‘We can’t have nice toys’ school of thought in SF. But what Mundane SF is really about is pointing out that, if we’re trying to write SF that extrapolates believably about the future, we’ve gotten lazy. We’ve gotten into the habit of using stock tropes from our central supplies department: things like faster-than-light travel, or time travel, or AI, or alien contact – which are all, to greater or lesser extent, plausible, but which may not actually ever exist. We don’t have those things, we have no direct experience of them, and it may all be impossible. Like it or lump it, having faster-than-light starships or aliens in a novel makes it approximately as credible as having fire-breathing dragons and magic swords.”

*

‘‘Neptune’s Brood is going to be a mundane SF space opera about atomic-powered robot mermaids in space. Why? Because I can. We’re living through the golden age of exo-planetography and I have a yen to write something set on a water world, hence the mermaids. They’re robots because humans don’t adapt to other planets. I also have some interesting ideas about the economics of interstellar colonization that I don’t want to share with you just yet.

‘‘It’s basic worldbuilding. We’ve been to the moon, but we haven’t found an economically valid reason for going to the moon, so we haven’t been back there since Apollo. This does not mean we’re never going back, but it won’t be for the same reasons, and certainly not because it’s someone’s manifest destiny – unless of course it’s the Chinese demonstrating that they are the economic 500-pound gorilla on the block. Or the Indonesians, or whoever comes next.”

“Mundane SF is set on Earth or the nearby solar system. It was based on a few simple rules, no time travel, no aliens – it’s total social change. Mundanity is about change. You can’t have all super hyper flying between star systems and not have social change. The reason TV science fiction is so disappointing is that if they followed the advice of their scientific consultants they’d have to reimagine the whole social background, and they’re not willing to do that for a popular audience. So there are still fighter pilots and hierarchical military discipline on Battlestar Galactica.

“Mundane SF may be over as a functional movement, but if you look at the submission guidelines to some journals, they now say, ‘Please don’t make space travel as easy as it is on TV.’ There are two reasons for mundanity. The good-faith argument says, ‘This is supposed to be science fiction; let’s stick to the rules a bit more.’ But the other one was the moral argument, that when the science gets twisted too much, you can end up sending strange messages or creating metaphors with unintended readings. You end up with peculiar moral messages like, ‘It’s OK. We can burn through this planet and then fly off to another one.’ Or Aliens the sequel. Ripley would have signed knowing she’d never be back for her 11-year-old daughter’s birthday. But in this sequel she’s shocked to lose her daughter, and it’s her outraged maternal instinct which drives the story and its subtext, paralleling Ripley with the Alien queen. Feminists are aliens? That was surely not the intention.

‘‘Drama is about change. In science fiction, we have the potential to be the most dramatic popular genre, because we potentially are writing about real social change: about the death of everything you believe in, everything you thought you knew. In my lifetime, there has been a complete change in how people view relationships.”

*

“The anthology I edited back in 2009, When It Changed, was named after a Joanna Russ story where she used the immensity of space to give a culture time to grow and develop in isolation. There are no infodumps, and the story wasn’t beholden to an ideology. The ending phrase opens the whole story out into a contemplation of time and the certainty of change: For-A-While. This is SF of the highest order, but I can teach it to mainstream students with no sense that they don’t get the SF elements. It’s just a story about a culture at that moment of maximum change, and it’s brilliant. At the time it was published Joanna’s novel We Who Are About To… was made to sound like it was a ‘let’s shoot men’ novel, but it’s trying to get science fiction to look death in the face. Suns die, galaxies die. We’re not immortal as individuals or as a species. At its core, a good deal of this genre is about immortality and individual immortality. Russ’s novel just asked why do we want to be immortal?”

*

“My big problem with writing new work is that I made the mistake of going into British education, and it’s taking up all my time. I think it’s because you cannot teach people to write unless you put as much into their work as you put into your own. But you really can teach people how to write. I can take undergraduates who have poor prose style, and at the end of year two they have a prose style; at the end of year three, they’re smooth. It’s like bringing the Clarion system into university. The peer-critiquing is where a lot of the learning happens, looking at what each other are doing and learning from them. As simple as that.”

*

“As SF people, we’re so used to having to defend ourselves, I sometimes wonder if it means we are defensive or overpraise ourselves. I actually think science fiction is a much nicer place for a writer to be than the mainstream, because of that collegiality – that wonderful sense of, ‘Your success is my success.’ But on the other hand, it does sometimes mean that we close ranks and defend ourselves when outsiders have a valid point.”

Tell us about the history of Mysterious Galaxy. What is the attraction to running a bookshop?
Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore was established in 1993 in San Diego by Terry Gilman, Jeff Mariotte, and me. Since then, we have become well known for our love of our genres, great author events, and a passion for the business of books. The founding partners have also moved outside of San Diego! Terry and I work full time supporting the two storefronts and working outside events in our communities (South Bay, Los Angeles, and sundry AZ locales).

Jeff and I came from bookselling backgrounds – he from Books Inc. and Hunter’s Books, and I from B. Dalton. Terry worked in desktop publishing and was a passionate and voracious reader. In the early 1990s, we felt there was a need for a genre bookstore in southern California, specifically in our hometown of San Diego. The attraction of being a bookseller is simple – connecting readers and books, in this case with a focus on the genre titles we are personally fond of.

At a time when bookstores are closing in droves, Mysterious Galaxy has just opened a second location. What’s your secret?
Actually, we are one of many booksellers around the country opening… something that doesn’t make the news as often as the ones that are closing. I’m not saying that we aren’t facing challenges – notably recently online retailers that spend millions of dollars in California and other states to fight e-tax fairness laws – but our reason and process for opening the second location is the same as it was for opening our San Diego location 18 years ago. We believe that there is a reading community that is ready to welcome us. And, in some ways, the climate is better than it was nearly two decades ago, with numerous ‘‘shop local’’ movements and increased consumer awareness of the importance of where they spend their shopping dollars. We are also fortunate to be able to connect with readers in two kinds of communities: our geographically local ones, and our widespread genre ones.

How has the role of the brick-and-mortar bookshop (and the booksellers who work there) changed now that people can buy any book online? It is more about building community than simply selling books?
For Mysterious Galaxy, the bookstore has always been about community and connections, and providing a compelling experience in the store – including recognizing the occasional customer who just wants to select her own books and be self-sufficient! As the huge national growth in book clubs has illustrated, people don’t just want to engage with their books, they want to interact with other readers as well. As 21st-century booksellers, we provide ways for readers to do that electronically and in person, and to interact with authors, and occasionally editors, reviewers, and other publishing professionals.

Mysterious Galaxy does a lot of special events – signings, readings, and the like. What’s the most memorable event you’ve had lately?
I’d say our San Diego location signing with George R.R. Martin, after four-plus days of Comic-Con, was memorable – excited and exuberant fans. And then George was nice enough to drop-by the Redondo Beach store post-Emmys, including making the booksellers’ day by asking them for recommendations.
And I’m sure we will have tales from future events, as we host some 50-odd authors in San Diego for our World Fantasy Convention Meet & Greet event, and Mysterious Galaxy Redondo Beach kicks off our Grand Opening month. October is a huge and exciting month on the calendar for both locations!

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about you or the work you do?
Just that after nearly three decades of book retailing, it’s still a labor of love, and that I still thrill to the daily discoveries of new arrivals, book announcements, publisher catalogs, etc. The only thing better than receiving a new book I’m excited about is sharing that excitement with others – and that’s something shared by all of the Mysterious Galaxy staff.