Locus, December 2012

by Locus Publications

  Kosmatka’s first professional story sale was ‘‘The God Engine’’ in Asimov’s (2005). Other notable short stories include ‘‘The Prophet of Flores’’ (2007), Nebula Award finalist ‘‘Divining Light’’ (2008), and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist ‘‘Blood Dauber’’ (2009, with Michael Poore). His first novel The Games appeared in 2012 and was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of 2012. His second book Prophet of Bones is forthcoming in 2013. Kosmatka also wrote a short play, Steel, about life working in a steel mill, and has seen it produced in multiple venues.

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  ‘‘I wasn’t one of those kids who read Beowulf at age 4. Up until third grade, I was the wild kid in school, the troublemaker; then I got spinal meningitis. When I was finally conscious and could look around and interact with people again, my circumstances were changed. I’d been this hyper, ADHD kid who was bouncing off the walls, and now I was trapped in a hospital bed. Having nothing to do for hours was like torture.

  ‘‘My mother went to buy me a book in the hospital gift shop, but she couldn’t find any kids’ books. The only thing she could find were adult science fiction novels, so she bought Orion by Ben Bova and brought that to me. Up to that point, I’d never sat still for reading, but in the hospital it was my only option. So I read it, and I thought, ‘Where have books like this been all my life?’ I didn’t know that kind of storytelling existed. I think it took me the entire hospital stay to finish the novel. But after that, I was hooked.

  ‘‘Maybe because the first book I loved was science fiction, I wanted to keep going with that, so I started reading every SF book I could get my hands on. My mom happened to be a SF reader, so I began reading all her books (which up to that point I’d seen on the shelf and wanted nothing to do with). We also later had subscriptions to Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF – sometimes all three at the same time– so those became my main reading vehicles. I would tear through these magazines as soon as they came in. I could care less about the author’s name, or even the title of the stories; I just wanted to ingest the things. It was only years later that I would realize, ‘Oh, the story that stuck in my mind when I was in fourth grade was actually this super-famous story written by this famous author.’

  ‘‘My favorite short story of all time – I actually remembered the title, because I think it’s the best title in the world – is ‘The Color of Neanderthal Eyes’. (It had the best ending line ever, too.) It wasn’t until two decades later I stumbled on the fact that the author was James Tiptree, Jr., AKA Alice Sheldon.

  ‘‘When I was in middle school, I was really drawn to the sciences, and had this idea that I would one day be a genetic engineer, or a genetic counselor. Either that, I figured, or a writer. When I tried my hand at writing, I would come up with story ideas, and then only write one page; that was my limit of focus. I could do one page, but then I would lose interest and start another story, so I had all these one-page beginnings. I was the master of the beginning, but never really finished anything.

  ‘‘I’ve had many genre influences. Michael Crichton, Stephen King, a lot of Piers Anthony. Dean Koontz as well. And, of course, Ben Bova. A few years ago, I opened a trunk and, to my utter surprise, realized I still have Orion. It’s yellow, and the cover is starting to disintegrate (it’s all crumbly), but seeing that book was like flashing backward in time. Like I was a kid in the hospital bed again. That book had been my way out of that damn bed.

  ‘‘The idea for my first novel goes all the way back to a job I had when I was 15 years old, as a corn de-tasseler on a farm. Since corn has both male and female reproductive organs, there’s a danger of self-fertilization if the tassels aren’t torn off. For normal corn, this isn’t a problem. But for hybrid seed corn, the idea is to get two different strains of corn to cross-pollinate, so the company would plant alternate strains every other row. Then it was my job to sit in a basket on a tractor that they drove across the field, and I’d tear the tassels off one strain of corn. I was working for below minimum wage (in Indiana, that was legal in agriculture, at least at the time). In high summer, a cornfield like that is a very science-fictional setting: you’re on Planet Corn. As far as you can see, corn is everywhere, like nothing else exists, and your hands are going and going, tearing at the tassels. You have to throw the tassels far enough behind you or you’ll get three feet of them stacked up in the bucket with you. Your body has to be totally focused, but your mind starts to drift. Doing this twelve hours a day, you have to daydream, or you’ll go crazy. At the time, all this effort to control the genes of corn got stirred around in my head, and somehow the idea of genetically engineered plants was transformed into an idea about genetically engineered gladiators. Or maybe it was just heat stroke. But the idea stuck.

  ‘‘I began actually finishing short stories at around 19, and my work first saw print in college magazines. Much later, after finally breaking into the professional ranks at Asimov’s and F&SF, I had a story in Seeds of Change, edited by John Joseph Adams. Around this time Gardner Dozois started reprinting my stories in his Year’s Bests, and I ended up selling to four of his anthologies in a row. I’ve also sold stories to Year’s Best anthologies edited by Jonathan Strahan, Rich Horton, and Hartwell & Cramer. As time passed, I felt more confident with short stories, but when I wanted to see if I could do a novel (I half-expected to fall on my face), I went back to that ‘kernel’ of an idea from the cornfield.

  ‘‘The original title was The Helix Game, but later it became just The Games. The novel lived in slush piles for years, during which time I went from having no agent, to having an agent who couldn’t sell it, to having no agent again. My novel had birthdays in slush piles. I got a rejection from one publisher after 18 months or so in the slush pile, and I thought, ‘That’s it. I must not be any good at novels. I’ll just keep writing short stories.’

  ‘‘Then I received an e-mail out of the blue from an agent, Seth Fishman, saying he’d been told about my short stories and was curious if I had a novel. I told him he probably wouldn’t want it, that it had already been rejected. But he wanted to see it anyway. He read it, and said he thought he could sell it. I told him, ‘Okay, if you think you can sell it, good luck.’ To my total shock, he sold it immediately. The novel wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t gotten that e-mail from Seth.

  ‘‘The original idea was that a computer designed these genetically engineered gladiators but misunderstood its own directives. I have always been a huge fan of the Olympics, and somehow that element also worked its way into the plot. Once that last piece fell into place, the structure of the story became obvious. A novel gives you room to breathe, and unlike short stories, every single thing doesn’t have to have this huge weight of justification behind it. By a page-per-page comparison, writing novels is faster.

  ‘‘I’m interested in the idea of redemption, so I wanted to explore that with my villains. I’m also interested in people who are naturally good at things, and the price that must sometimes be paid for that talent. The villain of the story is the villain because so many of the bad things that happen trace back to him, but in the real world – our world – there aren’t a lot of true villains. Everyone thinks they’re doing the reasonable thing. The right thing. I wanted to explore how people could contribute to this disaster, yet from their own viewpoints, all the choices they made were the right ones.

  ‘‘I just finished something completely different. The Bone Prophet is a what-if thriller set in a world where the Earth is young. The elevator pitch is this: in the 1950s carbon-14 dating proved the world to be only 5,800 years old. But the catch is, none of the fossils get to change. The inciting incident involves the ‘hobbit’ fossils found in Indonesia. In our timeline, Homo floresiensis– a strange, dwarf population only three feet tall– lived until about 17,000 years ago on the island of Flores. These ‘hobbits’ had a small brain capacity, about the size of chimpanzees, yet they’re found in context with stone tools. In our own timeline, there’s been a lot of aca
demic argument in regard to what these fossils might say about what it means to be human. Some researchers have argued that the fossils are just pathological modern humans– sickly microcephalic dwarfs who just happened to have been preserved in the fossil record. Others feel they’re a new species of tool user. In the creationist world of the novel, the discussion takes on a whole different intensity.

  ‘‘I thought, ‘As much as scientists are fighting about what these fossils might mean now, imagine how much worse the fighting would be in a world where arguments like this aren’t just scientific, but also religious.

  In our world, zealots don’t tend to become scientists, but in a Creationist world, it might be much different. Everything is flipped on its head: evolution has been debunked, creationism is the scientific orthodoxy. Yet the fossils remain, unchanged, and the novel was a way for me to try to apply some scientific rigor to the fossil record in the context of Creationism.

  ‘‘I went to college as a biology major with a minor in chemistry, but at some point I accumulated a gap where I could take a creative writing class. That was a great class. I still remember that I turned something in, and my professor wrote on the margin, ‘This is marketable.’ It was nice to get that kind of validation. We also read a book on self-editing. Before that, I put a lot of extra words into sentences. After that, I realized how important it was to delete. You have to convey the ideas in a way that people actually want to read.

  ‘‘There is still one big blind spot I have in my writing. I can go on and on about the details and intricacies of genetics, to the point where any sane person would be bored out of their minds, so I absolutely need an editor to come along and say, ‘What the hell are you doing? Stop that.’

  ‘‘When I was a junior in college, my father died, and going to school just wasn’t possible anymore. I needed to get a job. I needed to bring in money. So I went to the counselor and said, ‘I have X number of credits. There’s got to be something I can translate these into.’ I ended up leaving school with an associates degree in biology. It was enough for me to become a zookeeper. I loved being a zookeeper, but it didn’t pay me enough to live on. Even when I took a second job as a tutor at night, I still didn’t make enough to survive. For many months, I had this dilemma: ‘I can pay rent on the trailer or I can buy car insurance, but I can’t do both.’ It was a struggle. Around that time, my oldest son was born, and that was part of what I needed money for. I could barely keep a roof over our heads. So I decided to quit my zoo job and looked around for anything that would pay.

  ‘‘I come from a long line of steelworkers, so when they offered me a job in the mill, I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll take it.’ During the week-long orientation, they tell you all the ways that you can die, and show you all these gory pictures of people who have died. Then they told me I was being sent to the blast furnace department. I remember being told, ‘Don’t worry. The blast furnace isn’t the worst. At least you’re not going to the sinter plant.’ The next day, I came back for the final day of orientation, and the guy said, ‘There’s been a change. It looks like three of you are going to have to go to the sinter plant.’ I was one of those guys.

  ‘‘Sinter is the by-product of the blast furnace. You take a lot of different materials, mix them together and heat them in a furnace, and it comes out looking a lot like asphalt. It’s really hot, really heavy, and it produces this limitless amount of dust. The whole building would literally fill up with dust if laborers weren’t constantly shoveling it up. Basically, you stand there and shovel the heavy iron dust and load it on the conveyor belt for your entire shift. My first day, I was shoveling like crazy, trying to impress the foreman. The next day, when I tried to get out of bed I was in so much pain in my back and shoulders, I couldn’t even lift my arms.

  ‘‘I worked in the sinter plant for about six months, and then I saw an opening in the chem lab. I passed a test, but once I got into the lab, they stuck me at the bottom. It was my job to get coke samples from the blast furnace and drive them back to the lab so they could test how much moisture was in them. I ended up moving up, and took a bunch of other jobs in the lab. I finished my degree while working midnights. I caught my finger in a grinder one night when the sample slipped the magnet, and I remember as the foreman took me to the hospital, he said, ‘Yeah, that grinder gets everybody eventually.’ I worked in the steel mill chem lab until that mill went bankrupt, and then I worked in another mill’s chem lab for about four years. Then I found out about a research position that was open. So I somehow made my way from working as a laborer in a steel mill to working in a cutting-edge metallurgical research lab where I used electron microscopes. It was an odd sort of movement, to be sure, as there weren’t many ex-laborers working on the theoretical side of operations. Working with electron microscopes was fascinating. I assumed I’d do that for the rest of my life – writing short stories, working in a lab.

  ‘‘Then one day I was talking to an editor friend, and I mentioned that I thought video games were going to be an important and exciting mode of storytelling in the future. I think I must have gone on and on about it, telling him some of my ideas. It just so happened that this editor knew Marc Laidlaw, who worked at Valve, so he introduced us. I sent a bunch of my short stories to Valve, and they must not have hated them, because they ended up flying me out for an interview. After the interview, Valve offered me a job as a writer. All I could think was, how did this happen? It is surreal how quickly your life can change. So I quit my lab job and moved across country.

  ‘‘I wouldn’t know what to write about if I hadn’t worked all these jobs, because for me work has always been the way into a story. You can’t really understand your characters unless you know how they’re paying the lot rent on their trailer. Sometimes it seems like I’ve never been in a situation where I needed a character or a background, and I didn’t already have a person or situation that I was fascinated by and wanted to explore.’’

  –Ted Kosmatka

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  World Fantasy Awards Winners and Accepters: Jeff & Ann VanderMeer, Jonathan Strahan (for K.J. Parker), Lavie Tidhar, John Clute (for Eric Lane), Elizabeth Hand (GoH), David D. Levine (for Kevin Liu), Michael Dirda (for Raymond Russell & Rosalie Parker), Tim Powers, Guy Gavriel Kay (for Alan Garner)

  NOVEL

  Osama, Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)

  NOVELLA

  ‘‘A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong’’, K.J. Parker (Subterranean Winter 2011)

  SHORT FICTION

  ‘‘The Paper Menagerie’’, Ken Liu (F&SF 3-4/11)

  ANTHOLOGY

  The Weird, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, eds. (Corvus; Tor)

  COLLECTION

  The Bible Repairman and Other Stories, Tim Powers (Tachyon)

  ARTIST

  John Coulthart

  SPECIAL AWARD, PROFESSIONAL

  Eric Lane, for publishing in translation – Dedalus Books

  SPECIAL AWARD, NON-PROFESSIONAL

  Raymond Russell & Rosalie Parker (for Tartarus Press)

  LIFE ACHIEVEMENT

  Alan Garner; George R.R. Martin

  WORLD FANTASY CONVENTION 2012

  The 38th World Fantasy Convention was held November 1-4, 2012 at the Sheraton Parkway Toronto North Hotel, Suites & Conference Centre in chilly, grey Toronto, Canada. Guests of honour were Elizabeth Hand, John Clute, and Richard A. Kirk, with toastmaster Gary K. Wolfe. Special guests were Charles de Lint, Tanya Huff, Patricia Briggs, Mercedes Lackey, and Larry Dixon. Life Achievement winners were Alan Garner and George R.R. Martin.

  GoHs: Richard A. Kirk, Elizabeth Hand, John Clute, Tanya Huff, Patricia Briggs, Charles de Lint, Toastmaster Gary K. Wolfe

  With Hurricane Sandy sweeping through the East Coast, it was touch-and-go for a number of people coming up to Toronto, and for a little while it looked like the attendance would be seriously affected by the storm. In the end, some had to cancel, but most, at worst, were delayed due to airport closures during the w
orst of the weather. There were 921 attending registrations of the 950 cap; about 30 of those bailed out entirely because of Sandy. Beyond that, there were 10% who didn’t arrive, about the average for a World Fantasy, and 19 supporting memberships.

  According to publisher liaison Rina Weisman, 1,000 bookbags were put together by a team of 25 volunteers. A mix of 30 Canadian and US publishers donated titles for the bags, and an additional 20 donated e-content for the ‘‘digital bookbag,’’ comprised of postcards with links to free or discounted content. All in all there were over 20,000 items, with about 15 books and 4-5 related materials per bag. Dozens of other publishers and authors supplied materials for the literature table as well. The leftover, ‘‘unstuffed’’ books were donated to Variety Children’s Charity of Ontario.

  The souvenir book was a handsomely put-together, perfect-bound, glossy full-size publication, with slick interior paper, full-color pages, and a clever Cthulhu-clutching-books cover and other interior plates by GoH Richard A. Kirk. Edited by Christopher and Barbara Roden, and produced by Ash-Tree Press, the souvenir book contained bio-bibliograpies, appreciations and interviews of the guests, color plates by Larry Dixon, an ‘‘In Remembrance’’ section prepared by Weisman and Steven H Silver, the history of the World Fantasy Convention, 11 pieces of short fiction from various authors including guests Hand and Lackey, and more.

  CONVENTION NOTES

  The weather in Toronto was a brisk 40 degrees Fahrenheit. There were a number of restaurants within walking distance in Richmond Hill for those willing to brave the elements, as well as in the underground mall attached to the hotel. The hotel itself was an hour drive from Toronto proper, and freeway construction made the trip even longer, so those who did attempt to get into town warned others away from trying the same.