‘‘Things brew, and if I don’t do something about them they’ll disappear. Hopeland came out of a magazine article I saw in 2000, so it’s been in there about 14 years, just waiting for me to have the courage to do something about it.
‘‘In Hopeland, most of the action takes place in Iceland, and also in the South Pacific. Enid worked for a couple of years in Tonga in the South Pacific and loved it, and there’s a place with 100,000 people about six inches above sea level. I’m interested in small cultures like Tonga and Iceland. There are 350,000 people in Iceland, it’s smaller than the city of Belfast, but it is this enormous creative vortex going on, so how do they do that with so few people? That’s the kind of thing I’m looking at, small cultures as opposed to big ones. There’s a certain fragility to it all. In the South Pacific storyline, they do have to evacuate the island in a fleet of ships, because it’s submerging. It’s going to be a good book.
‘‘I wanted slang for the Planesrunner books, so I used Polari. If you have people on airships, they have to have a slang. I thought about making one up, but it would sound stupid. I thought about using some kind of teen slang, but that would date horribly, like jive or something. Then, in a flash, Polari came back to me. Polari was a secret gay language in England from the 1940s to the 1960s. It was only after homosexuality was legalized that Polari died out, because gay men didn’t need a code to communicate with each other anymore. Most of it is Mediterranean. It has Italian roots and lingua franca roots as well. A hat is a capello in Polari. To drink is buvare, which gives rise to bevvy. A lot of Polari has entered mainstream language. Like ‘naff’ in England means bad taste or cheesy, but it was originally a Polari word as well. In the ‘50s there used to be a radio show with Kenneth Horne and Hugh Paddick, and they did these characters – it was the most out gay thing you’ve ever heard on the radio, but they hid the whole thing by doing it in Polari. It was absolute genius. I’ve kind of lost my Polari. Nanti means none. Dorcas is a term for one who cares, from the Dorcas society, a ladies church association. Omes and polones – ome is a man, from hombre, and polones are women. Blag is an old Polari word which is probably used in America, as well, to mean you get something for free, to blag something. Bijou for small. There are bits of Yiddish in it as well. I knew a fair number, and there’s a lot on Polari online. Wikipedia’s very good on it. Shush-bag: to shush is to steal something, the stuff you’ve blagged you put in the shush-bag. Zhoosh your riah is to do your hair – there’s a lot of back slang, and riah is hair backwards. It’s coming back to me now. The language comes out of the fairground tradition as well. It’s a fascinating subject, and it’s fun to put it in a kids’ book. It does actually say, ‘This is a secret gay language’ in the glossary, but nobody’s ever noticed that.’’
–Ian McDonald
Return to In This Issue listing.
Ann Leckie was born March 2, 1966 in Toledo OH and grew up in St. Louis MO. She attended Washington University, graduating with a degree in music. She has ‘‘worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, and a recording engineer.’’
Leckie attended Clarion West in 2005, where she wrote first published SF story ‘‘Hesperia and Glory’’ (2006). Over a dozen stories have appeared since, including two in collaboration with Rachel Swirsky.
Her debut novel Ancillary Justice is one of the most honored books in the field: it is a current Hugo Award finalist, won the Nebula Award, Clarke, BSFA, and Golden Tentacle awards, and was nominated for Tiptree, Campbell Memorial, Dick, and Compton Crook awards. The novel begins the Imperial Radch series, with Ancillary Sword forthcoming this fall and Ancillary Mercy planned to conclude the trilogy.
Leckie founded online magazine GigaNotoSaurus in 2010 and edited it until stepping down in 2014. She was an assistant editor at podcast magazine Podcastle until earlier this year, and served as vice president of SFWA from 2012-13.
She lives in St. Louis with her husband and two children.
•
‘‘My parents were not interested in science fiction. They always thought I would grow out of it, and I didn’t. So they were like, ‘We’ll make sure she reads some good stuff,’ so they’d give me random books for Christmas, birthdays, or whatever. (Like Stanislaw Lem – that was when I first read him.) They were biochemists who worked at the Washington University Medical School, in different labs. They were big mystery readers, and they felt like science fiction wasn’t about human relationships, it was just about rocket ships and laser guns, and maybe some technical stuff. It’s Sturgeon’s Law: ‘99% of everything is crap.’ (You could say the same thing about mysteries, although I never actually said that to them.) My mom always felt I was going to be a writer someday, so when it became clear I was going to write SF, she told me, ‘OK, I totally support you.’ That was really nice. Everybody should have such parents!
‘‘Andre Norton was the first author where I was aware of who she was and would go looking for more books by the same person. It made the library shelves look completely different. First you find out there’s an author, then you find out there’s a series, and then you find out there’s a genre, and it blew my mind! There’s still a special place in my heart for Andre Norton, though I suspect that if you don’t come to her when you’re about 13, the appeal is invisible.
‘‘Then people told me to read Lloyd Alexander, Ringworld, Anne McCaffrey…. At first I didn’t read a lot of McCaffrey. I had to go back and catch up. My readers have (understandably) brought up The Ship Who Sang, but I never read The Ship Who Sang! I would also say that fans of C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner books would see that I had been reading those before I wrote Ancillary Justice.
‘‘I went to Washington University, largely because the university had a deal where your kids can go there for free (if they can get in). I studied music – really useful major! I ended up with a BA in music, and then got out of school and of course had no prospects for any kind of job whatsoever. I worked for seven or eight years in the faculty club serving lunches, and ended up being a floor supervisor, seating people and managing the student workers. It was a job. It could be difficult, but it was kind of cool, to see all the people. Also, I’m seriously introverted, so one of the big things I learned from that job was to have a ‘script’ for dealing with people. It’s a grueling job in many ways, but when I was done I could pretend I was extroverted. I know to listen for scripts now, so I can have topics for conversation, and that was really valuable.
‘‘Back then, I was in that state where I wanted to write, but I felt like I didn’t have any good ideas. What could I write that would be worth reading? At some point during that time at the faculty club, I submitted a story to True Confessions, and it sold. Somewhere I’ve got the check stub for that sale, but it doesn’t count because you don’t get a byline for True Confessions and they bought all rights. I didn’t do any more after that, because I had done it just to see if I could, and I had read True Confessions until my eyes bled (and it was very unpleasant), then choked the story out.
‘‘The way I finally started writing seriously was, I got married and had kids. I discovered fairly quickly that child care was going to eat up all of my take-home pay, so at that point, no matter how difficult it was to make ends meet and stay home, that was the only option. I love my kids dearly. But the thing about babies is, they don’t have very interesting conversations. I felt like my brain was leaking out of my ears. My daughter’s 17 and my son is 14, so now it’s very different. But at the time, I thought, ‘I have to do something.’ So I put up a Peter Gabriel fan page, and discovered there’s a whole Peter Gabriel fandom community going on.
‘‘That was good, and then somebody mentioned NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month, where you write a novel in a month. I always wanted to write, so I sat down and did NaNoWriMo. I traded novels with your friends, and they really liked mine. I looked at it and said, ‘This isn’t too bad. I can do this again.’ The goal is to write 50,000 words in a month, but when it was d
one it was 110,000. It’s in a drawer, and my second one is also in a drawer. My third book sold.
‘‘I joined two Internet critique groups, Critters and the Online Writing Workshop. I did my first NaNoWriMo in 2002, then again in 2003, and I took the novel to Critters. It’s free, anybody can join, and every week a packet of stories comes out and you have to critique a certain number to get points, and when you have enough points you can put your own story in for critique. It’s mostly short fiction, but they have a way to do novels – it’s called a ‘request for dedicated readers,’ and people sign on to just read your novel and it counts for X number of short story critique credits.
‘‘Some readers told me to go to Clarion, and I thought, ‘I wonder if I can swing it.’ So I got all the childcare arranged (between my mom and my husband’s mom), applied, got in, and made it work. I think my son was about to go into kindergarten, and my daughter’s three or four years older. Thank goodness my mom was still alive, and my mother-in-law was able to help out!
‘‘I submitted the second and third short SF stories I ever wrote to both Clarions, got into both, and decided to go to Clarion West. Octavia E. Butler was there (that was the year before she died). Andy Duncan, L. Timmel Duchamp, Gordon Van Gelder, Connie Willis, and Michael Swanwick also taught us. There were a great bunch of people in my class, and I had a really wonderful experience. Before, I was like, ‘I think I’m going to try to write.’ I came home, and I was a writer!
‘‘While I was there, John Scalzi put out his call for the issue of Subterranean that he was guest editing: the Science Fiction Cliché issue. I thought, ‘I’ve got to do something for that,’ so that was one of the things I wrote at Clarion West. That ended up being my first real short fiction sale. Michael Swanwick gave me all kinds of advice for that story. He was the week six instructor, but he read all the stories that you’d written, plus your submission story, and then sat down and gave you a personal critique on every single one of them. That’s amazing, and he did that for everybody. (I can’t even imagine the energy that must take.) He gave me all this advice on the story, and at the end my response was, ‘That’s a lot of really valuable advice, and I’m not gonna take any of it,’ because he had misread the story. The more I thought about it, the more I realized, ‘I have to rewrite this so it can’t be misread.’ It took me a long time, but I did it, and the story sold. It’s kind of strange to say ‘Michael Swanwick taught me this really valuable lesson,’ and I didn’t take any of his advice!
‘‘When you’re bored, you make up little stories and start hooking them together and constructing a universe out of them. (I tend to think everybody does this, though maybe they don’t.) That’s the universe where I set the first NaNoWriMo novel. In constructing that, I saw the possibility of the main character in Ancillary Justice, but I said to myself, ‘There’s no way I can write that character. I don’t know how to do it.’ It seemed like the story needed to be written in first-person, and I couldn’t see how I could possibly pull that off. A year after Clarion West, I sat down to try to do it and didn’t get very far. It took a while for me to be able to manage it. In the meantime, I was just doing short fiction.
‘‘The more I tried to write first-person, the more weird it became, because I started asking, ‘What is a person, anyway? When you say I, what is that?’ My theory (I have no support for it) is, you’re the story that you tell about yourself. That’s why story is so important and so powerful – because it’s the way you organize your identity, your whole world. If you look close enough, there really isn’t any ‘I.’ What you think of as ‘you’ is just a middleman, telling a story about what’s happening. I started to really dig into that idea, to try to figure out how to approach a character that way, but it didn’t help. Finally I was like, ‘I’m just going to have to hold my nose and jump – to lay it down on the paper, and figure out what’s wrong afterwards. I’m just going to say this happened, and at the same time this happened, and at the same time this happened.’
‘‘At first, I was just playing with the universe for fun. I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a society that genuinely didn’t care about gender?’ During Clarion West, I wrote a story set in that universe, and I used ‘he’ for everybody. I was totally unhappy with that. Why is male the default? Let’s make female the default! Of course, there are problems with that – serious problems. Using ‘she’ for everybody doesn’t genuinely give the impression of a society where gender doesn’t matter. (But it worked.)
‘‘The way you can’t deal with somebody without putting them into that gender pigeonhole is so strong! When you take a baby to the supermarket, everybody wants to lean over and coo at your baby, because babies are adorable. But sometimes, people lean over to coo at the baby and they stop, because they don’t know how to coo if they don’t know what gender the baby is. That blew my mind, when I had babies. They’d assume that my daughter was a boy, or my son was a girl, and I wouldn’t say anything, but at some point the truth would come out, and they’d go ‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’, like they ran over my dog or something. The baby doesn’t care, and how can you tell? There’s no reason to gender a baby.
‘‘My concept of non-binary genders was very rudimentary, but that’s where I started. I learned a lot about gender as I was working on the book. ‘It’ has that not-a-person feel to it. Gender-neutral pronouns feel awkward and blunt, because we’re not used to them, so I think it’s important to do that. At the same time, you don’t get that kind of visceral impact currently. Some people have asked, ‘These other characters – what gender are they?’ I’d say, ‘Well, first of all, it doesn’t matter. But second, in my very first iteration of the book I was using he or she for everybody, but by the time I was done with the first draft, the genders had just kind of slipped around.’ Originally I wrote the novel just using ‘he’ and ‘she,’ but was not getting the effect I wanted. (It creates too many expectations. In a plot where your main character is a woman and a guy shows up – ‘Oh, here we go. That’s the romantic interest.’) In the final version of Ancillary Justice, the first chapter is completely unreliable about gender.
‘‘I’ve seen some folks complain that they can’t visualize any of the characters. Part of that is because I don’t generally do heavy-duty physical description anyway. You start out with an ‘I,’ and it’s almost like Schroedinger’s cat. When I read a first-person story and the gender isn’t marked really soon, I settle on one or the other, because I live in this culture and I speak this language. But I think I prefer a blank silhouette to an overly described one.
‘‘When I was showing my writing group the chapters, I did not think that book would sell. And yet I thought, ‘This feels like it wants to be a trilogy’ (though I hadn’t outlined the next two books). Then Orbit bought it as part of a three-book deal! The first novel was scary, but writing the others is scary in a different way. During the process of finishing the second book, I could see people on the Internet talking about what they thought might happen next, or what they hoped would happen.
‘‘I don’t know what’s coming up after the trilogy. I’ll figure something out. I have an entire fantasy universe where most of my short fiction is set (because I couldn’t sell the short science fiction I wrote). I love world-building – love it a lot. I don’t mind reading quick, sketchy world-building, but I need that really heavy foundation to build the characters and hook everything together. Theoretically, I could do a novel in that fantasy world if I needed to.
‘‘While I’m writing the trilogy, I’ve been turning over in my head whether there’s some way I can expand on it for the future. That would be great, though maybe I don’t want to tie myself down to working with gender stuff in the same way. For the future, I might take it a little further, or play with it in a different way. That’s one of the things I’m definitely interested in, but I don’t want to be stuck doing an endless series.’’
–Ann Leckie
Return to In This Issue listing.
&nb
sp; MAIN STORIES
2014 World Fantasy Awards Nominations • 2014 Science Fiction Hall of Fame Inductees • 2013 Shirley Jackson Awards Winners • 2014 Prometheus Awards Winners • Amazon/Hachette Battle Continues • New Allegations About MZB
2014 WORLD FANTASY AWARDS NOMINATIONS
BEST NOVEL
Dust Devil on a Quiet Street, Richard Bowes (Lethe)
A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent, Marie Brennan (Tor)
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman (Morrow; Headline Review)
A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar (Small Beer)
The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker (Harper)
The Land Across, Gene Wolfe (Tor)
BEST NOVELLA
‘‘Wakulla Springs’’, Andy Duncan & Ellen Klages (Tor.com 10/2/13)
Black Helicopters, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Subterranean)
‘‘The Sun and I’’, K.J. Parker (Subterranean Summer ’13)
‘‘Burning Girls’’, Veronica Schanoes (Tor.com 6/19/13)
Six-Gun Snow White, Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean)
BEST SHORT FICTION
‘‘The Ink Readers of Doi Saket’’, Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Tor.com 4/24/13)
‘‘The Prayer of Ninety Cats’’, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Subterranean Spring ’13)
‘‘Effigy Nights’’, Yoon Ha Lee (Clarkesworld 1/13)
‘‘Selkie Stories Are for Losers’’, Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons 1/7/13)
‘‘If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love’’, Rachel Swirsky (Apex 3/13)
BEST ANTHOLOGY
xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, Kate Bernheimer, ed. (Penguin)
Locus, August 2014 Page 2