by Ken Liu
After years of having built in time limits and restraints, responsibilities as a caregiver, how do you keep from just . . . you know, watching the TV without doing the writing?
All these years, I haven’t been making time to watch TV, I’ve been making time so I can write. I’m never not connected to my writing. That’s just how it works for me.
Is there a part of a story, long or short, that tends to give you the most difficulty?
Yes. There are difficulties inherent in every part of a story. Which will give me the most trouble depends on the story. They’re all different. It just depends on the story.
Do you feel more at home in the short form or the long form?
For the last ten years, I’ve been writing short fiction because caring for my elderly mother was so demanding it was impossible to find enough time and space to think at novel-length. She passed away just before Christmas in 2012 and now I’m able to plan novels again.
The short story is my first love because that’s where I started out. Well, technically, the novelette, according to SFWA word-counts. Back when I was working a full-time day job (and looking after a new baby), I could do anything in five thousand words or less. It was all I had time for. My first novel was actually a fix-up of a few novelettes and a short story, with added interstitial material—Shawna McCarthy, who was at Bantam then, had read the stories and thought they’d make a good book. My second novel, Synners, was actually the first novel I wrote from beginning to end without any pre-existing material (it sort of jumped off from my short story “Rock On,” but the story wasn’t part of the novel).
Since then, I’ve been wordier—my shortest fiction seldom runs much below eight thousand words, and it’s usually closer to ten thousand words even after rigorous cutting. Ellen Datlow taught me how to trim the fat and kill my darlings. (Although I don’t really kill them—I cut them and put them in an out-takes file. That way I can have my cake and eat it, too.)
Generally, the story, whatever it may be, tells me whether it’s the start of a novel or a stand-alone piece of short fiction.
How do you KNOW?
That’s one I can’t answer. I don’t know how I know. I recognize it when I see it.
“The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi,” which won a Hugo in 2013, (please pardon my immodesty for bragging), was meant to be a one-off. It was only after it came out—in Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan—that I consciously began thinking about a novel.
I was definitely working outside my comfort zone with “Girl-Thing.” I had never written this kind of story before and I had to do a lot of research to get all the nuts-and-bolts right. It was hard but it was also great fun figuring out what the characters could and couldn’t do, what could and couldn’t happen. These things are not a matter of opinion and I knew I had to be really careful because, as I have pointed out elsewhere many times in the past, science fiction readers are smart. If you don’t know the difference between centripetal force and centrifugal force, if you don’t know the difference between weight and mass, if you don’t know how things like angular momentum, orbital resonance, and gravity boosts work, you’ll look like a moron. The readers will tell you and you’ll feel like a moron.
And incidentally, now I’m sixty. You’re never too old to try something different or learn something new.
About the Author
Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.
Another Word:
Will Aliens be Alien?
Craig DeLancey
It’s a common complaint against science fiction: the aliens aren’t really alien. They’re humans in disguise.
Often enough it’s a fair observation, especially in film. No one finds the motives of Klingons or Yoda or ET inscrutable. But in our novels too, extraterrestrial intelligences often appear very human-like—indeed, they’re even often humanoid in form. We typically encounter them not as beings with motives that are completely new to us, but rather as demonstrating extremes on familiar means (for example, being more war-like, or more intelligent, or more peaceful than your average human).
This familiarity is often a product of the demands of telling a tale. If an extraterrestrial intelligence is going to be a character in your novel, then the reader must understand it for the narrative to be compelling. If your alien is incomprehensible, then its mysteriousness will come to be a theme, which may not serve your narrative goals. It is for this reason that our best SF stories about inscrutable aliens are specifically about this inscrutability: it stands out as an impediment to action, demanding attention.
But set aside the demands of story telling, and implicit in the humans-in-disguise criticism is the claim that extraterrestrial intelligences would be very—perhaps incomprehensibly—strange to us. Which begs the question: is this right? Should we expect that the distance between our home worlds were a kind of distance between our conceptions of the universe? Will we have so little in common that we cannot find shared semantic ground?
Perhaps not. For all (or nearly all) the organisms of the universe will share this common history: they will have evolved. Evolution results in boundless complexity, expressed in wild varieties of forms and behaviors, but its basic principles are simple and universal. A population has variation in it, augmented periodically by mutation. Populations grow to carrying capacity, and the result is fierce competition for survival. Some individuals succeed better than others in this competition, and have more offspring. These offspring will live to carry on some of the beneficial traits of their progenitors.
Consider: few of us expect that unintelligent extraterrestrial organisms will be incomprehensible. We arrive on planet X, and certain organisms are building hives, others are eating the hive makers, others are rapidly moving away from the organisms that eat the hive makers.
We interpret these organisms readily, without hesitation: that organism is cooperating with kin; that organism is hunting; that organism is fleeing. But such an expectation is no small matter, because intelligent aliens will be organisms too. They will have an evolutionary history shared with the other organisms of their planet. And this will provide the foundation for their skills, their motivations, and ultimately their intelligence.
For all the complexity that arises in the details, the universals of evolution mean that all organisms will share certain features. They will have evolved in competition.
Helping kin will increase the likelihood of the helpful trait being spread in the population. Since intelligence is likely to result in control of the environment, it is likely to result in the adoption of a K-strategy, in which the organisms have fewer offspring and invest more time and resources into the survival of those offspring; and if the organisms adopt a K-strategy, then they will have a deep interest in the success of their offspring. These constraints, and thousands of others, will lead naturally to certain dispositions and motivations—including what we call emotions.
These include a readiness to cooperate but an eagerness to find and punish cheaters; a love for kin; and a host of motives to protect one’s own offspring. Surely, these could provide a foundation for mutual understanding.
There is an interesting parallel here with a debate in paleontology. The question concerns what Steven J. Gould called “running the tape over.” He argued that if we could repeat the history of Earth over and over, allowing variations where they naturally occur, we would see wildly different outcomes across these different histories.
The alternative theory, championed most notably by Simon Conway Morris, is that evolution is more rigorously optimizing than this. On Conway Morris’s
account, history of life on Earth would have to produce bipedal, bilaterally symmetric intelligent beings after about as much time as it took for us to show up (accounting for events like asteroids falling on us, and re-setting the clock). Evolution, on this view, is highly constrained. It will reliably result in similar outcomes for similar conditions.
This debate about “running the tape over again” may represent two extremes to how difficult it will be to understand an extraterrestrial intelligence. I suspect Gould would have thought that extraterrestrial intelligences would be quite understandable, if we could just know something about their evolutionary history. But for him, the greater disparity of possible evolutionary outcomes would mean that extra work will be required to discern the evolutionary constraints that are relevant to a species.
On the other hand, the more optimal evolution turns out to be, the more readily identifiable we can expect the foundation for mutual understanding to be. If an organism’s strategy is best for its environment, and any old starting place will get its lineage there, then this should hold true for an extraterrestrial in a similar environment.
We might expect the alien to have eyes, recognizable as like our eyes, because we expect that eyes like our own are a relatively effective way to seize the benefits of visual perception. We might expect the alien to have an analog of fear, since a general motivation to avoid predators and other dangers, and remember them as threatening, appears to be a very effective. And so on.
The heritage of a single organism is one thing. Cultures are another. We are well familiar with failures of human beings to understand each other. Surely the situation will be worse with respect to an extraterrestrial culture. Culture adds something new, something that changes quickly and varies widely across individuals of a single genotype. Won’t this make our extraterrestrials incomprehensible?
The case of human cultural variation is easily exaggerated. We tend to focus upon differences, but the fact remains that no matter how alien a human culture, it remains possible to understand much of it. We read the Illiad or the Mahabarata or the Popul Vuh, and though the writers of those works are far from some of us in time and space, we find nothing incomprehensible in the motives and actions of their protagonists.
Culture builds upon what evolution provides. In language and customs we find explosive variety. But these varieties are less successful, and more difficult to maintain, precisely to the degree that they oppose what evolution has instilled in the species.
Culture adds complexity, but it cannot (at first, anyway) extinguish the goals and motives we inherit. You can ask that your warriors not fear death, but we can predict that they normally will.
This allows us to make a modest prediction. Extraterrestrial intelligences will resist understanding to the degree that their culture is complex. Nothing about their evolutionary history would be incomprehensibly strange to us, and thus nothing about the motives and abilities that they inherit would be incomprehensibly strange to us. Rather, what will allow for strangeness is the ways in which intelligence and culture take those basic motives and combine and reformulate them into surprising new forms. Aliens will have an evolutionary history like those we find here on Earth, and surprising cultural complexity to alter and reinterpret and redirect the abilities and motives that this history gave them. That means a biological understanding can serve as the basis for cultural understanding. We have a Rosetta Stone: it’s called Darwinism.
So extraterrestrial intelligences won’t be humans in disguise. But they’ll be something quite similar to that: they’ll be an evolutionary history, dressed up in culture.
Now, if only they’d call us.
About the Author
Craig DeLancey is a philosopher and writer. His novels include Gods of Earth, available from 47North Press. His short stories include “Julie is Three,” which won the Anlab reader’s choice award and has been reprinted, in translation, in Russia and China. He also writes plays, and his plays have had performances and staged readings in New York, Sydney, Melbourne, and in other cities. He has been a finalist for the Heideman Award. He teaches philosophy at the State University of New York at Oswego.
Editor’s Desk:
Anthologies, Patreon, and
the 2013 Reader’s Poll & Contest
Neil Clarke
Happy New Year!
If you are new to the Clarkesworld family, you may not know that we also publish an annual anthology series that collects all the original fiction published over the course of a year. The first two volumes went by the name Realms 1 and 2, but since then they’ve carried the Clarkesworld name. The print editions look great on your bookshelf, but the ebook editions are good too.
Our latest volume, Clarkesworld: Year Five, was released just before the holidays. (Yes, we are a bit behind, but have been making a valiant effort to get caught up.) At present, Year Six is scheduled for the end of the first quarter and Year Seven is on-track for release at Readercon in July.
Working on these volumes has been a fun look back at some of the amazing stories our authors have written for us over the years. I hope you all consider purchasing one or more. Every penny made from these volumes goes back into our fiction budget.
Read about our anthologies here:
clarkesworldmagazine.com/staff/#realms
Have you heard of Patreon?
Patreon is best described as a cross between Kickstarter and subscriptions. Instead of focusing on a big project, like a book or a movie, Patreon is for people who produce recurring content, like podcasts, YouTube channels, web comics, or a magazine. Patrons make pledges to give a monthly amount for each month that new content is released. Similar to Kickstarter, there are community giving goals and individual rewards for your support.
To make ends meet, we sell our books and electronic subscriptions, but over the years, people have repeatedly asked for other alternatives to support us financially. To that end, we’ve established a Patreon page and just like our promise to increase the number of stories we publish when we hit a specific subscriber count, we’ve added a similar goal to our Patreon page. We could have two additional stories per issue if both of these goals are met and as I mentioned previously, it would only take a small percentage of our readers/listeners to get us there.
Check out our Patreon page at:
www.patreon.com/clarkesworld
January means it’s time for our annual Clarkesworld Reader’s Poll. Each year, we ask our readers to pick their favorite cover art and original stories from the past year. Here’s a quick list to refresh your memory:
Fiction
“Driftings” by Ian McDonald
“Variations on Bluebeard and Dalton’s Law Along the Event Horizon” by Helena Bell
“Effigy Nights” by Yoon Ha Lee
“Gravity” by Erzebet YellowBoy
“The Wanderers” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
“Vacant Spaces” by Greg Kurzawa
“The Weight of a Blessing” by Aliette de Bodard
“The Last Survivor of the Great Sexbot Revolution” by A.C. Wise
“86, 87, 88, 89” by Genevieve Valentine
“Annex” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
“No Portraits on the Sky” by Kali Wallace
“Melt With You” by Emily C. Skaftun
“Soulcatcher” by James Patrick Kelly
“Tachy Psyche” by Andy Dudak
“(R + D) /I = M” by E. Catherine Tobler
“The Urashima Effect” by E. Lily Yu
“This is Why We Jump” by Jacob Clifton
“Free-Fall” by Graham Templeton
“Pockets Full of Stones” by Vajra Chandrasekera
“I Tell Thee All, I Can No More” by Sunny Moraine
“Across the Terminator” by David Tallerman
“Cry of the Kharchal” by Vandana Singh
“Shepherds” by Greg Kurzawa
“Found” by Alex Dally MacFarlane
“Mar Pacifico” by Greg Mellor
“The Promise of Space” by James Patrick Kelly
“One Flesh” by Mark Bourne and Elizabeth Bourne
“The Symphony of Ice and Dust” by Julie Novakova
“Bits” by Naomi Kritzer
“The Creature Recants” by Dale Bailey
“Mystic Falls” by Robert Reed
“The Aftermath” by Maggie Clark
“Never Dreaming (In Four Burns)” by Seth Dickinson
“Daedalum, the Devil’s Wheel” by E. Lily Yu
“Of Alternate Adventures and Memory” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
“Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Cover Art
“Winding Down” by Alex Ries
“Concrete 9” by Yang Xueguo
“The Emperor’s Arrival” by David Demaret
“The Awakening” by Alexandru Popescu
“Desert Dragon” by Julie Dillon
“Rainforest God” by David Melvin
“The Land of Lost Dreams” by Dan Osborne
“Launch Point” by Julie Dillon
“Silent Oracle by Matt Dixon
“Neo Maya” by Raúl Cruz
“Lost in Space” by Piotr Foksowicz
“Elliptic” by Julie Dillon
To participate, go to:
clarkesworld2013.questionpro.com
Please fill in the optional name and email address questions if you’d like to be entered into a contest where you can win either one of three copies of Clarkesworld: Year Five or, for one lucky winner, the complete 2013 print run of Clarkesworld.
Our survey is open now and will continue through February 10th, 2014. Winners will be revealed in our March 2014 issue.