Lightspeed Magazine - October 2016

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  I’m writing short stories for the moment: I have a couple forthcoming in anthologies like The Starlit Wood and Legendry, and I’m in the beginning process of outlining a space opera based on a genderbent Count of Monte Cristo in a Vietnamese dynastic setting.

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  ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

  Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, Associate Publisher for Lightspeed and Nightmare, and guest editor of Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction special issue. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines including Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 (Horton), Armored, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, io9, Wired.com, and China’s Science Fiction World. Her work has received honorable mentions in Year’s Best Science Fiction (Dozois) and Best Horror of the Year (Datlow), and has been long-listed for StorySouth’s Million Writers Award. She lives on the central coast of California with two writers, an editor, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @christieyant.

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  Author Spotlight: Fran Wilde

  Robyn Lupo | 671 words

  The world captured in “A Moment of Gravity, Circumscribed” is a complex hierarchy, evocatively built on a city of living bone high above the clouds; what an image! There’s a lot of family secrets and deceptions, what drove you to tell us about such young protagonists with such gothic themes? You’ve written several novels set in this amazing setting, but is there a chance you’d revisit these particular characters again?

  There many more stories and characters in the Bone Universe than can fit in the novels. I love writing some of those as short stories—especially this one—and exploring the connections, seen and unseen, between the eras and characters. For instance, Djonn’s brothers from “A Moment of Gravity” appear in another Bone Universe short story, “Bent the Wing, Dark the Cloud,” set a few years earlier, and other characters from Updraft appear in “Bent the Wing” as well. And Djonn appears, much older, in Cloudbound. “A Moment of Gravity” was the first story to appear outside of the novels. In it, I was exploring a character’s history when I already knew he’d be important, and much changed, later.

  As for the gothic themes—I think awareness of surroundings, truths, and deceptions are part of a young person’s survival kit—even if it’s subconscious. Djonn’s just becoming aware that there are multiple layers of truths, and that’s a really interesting moment to explore.

  I think I’ll probably come back to some of these characters, as well as exploring others. Not quite sure how, yet, but I’ll keep everyone posted.

  Where can we find other stories set in the Bone Universe?

  “Bent the Wing, Dark the Cloud,” is available at Beneath Ceaseless Skies (bit.ly/2cyOcAB), as well as in the Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Year Seven Anthology.

  Tor.com has published excerpts from both Updraft (bit.ly/1EwcDdA) and Cloudbound (bit.ly/2bWdDgQ). And the 2016 Nebula anthology will include an excerpt from Updraft.

  Is there anything new or forthcoming?

  Cloudbound came out September 27 at all the bookstores and online! I’m struggling to keep away from the capslock, but it’s REALLY hard! I’m finishing the next book in the Bone Universe, tentatively titled “Horizon” right now.

  I read you’ve gone indoor skydiving; how much difference was there between how you pictured flying versus experiencing it?

  I did go indoor skydiving at SkyVenture New Hampshire while I was working on Updraft. I’m an experienced sailor, and I wanted to make sure I wrote my wings and flying physics as best I could. So I talked with a lot of engineers, hang-gliders, and became a little obsessed with base jumpers and wing suit flyers like Jeb Corliss and Ellen Brennan. I also did a lot of research into man-made wings throughout history, which I wrote about at iO9 (bit.ly/2cyOCXH) and spoke about at the Library of Congress (that was a blast).

  What I noticed most when I got into the wind tunnel to try it out myself was how much impact event the smallest movement had on motion. And how fast things changed. That was really cool, and also very dizzying!

  You’ve written in a variety of media; do you have a preference for a style? How far along in the creative process do you discern the project’s length?

  I love both short and long lengths, and style tends to emerge as the story does. I like to play with formats too, so it’s always a discovery process. Sometimes, though, the story drops fully formed, and that’s even better.

  What’s next for you?

  I’m working on several very different projects, including Horizon. In October, I’ll also be busy launching Cloudbound for a little bit, and I’m guest writing an episode of the Serial Box series The Witch Who Came In From The Cold. I’m also continuing my interview series, Cooking the Books (bit.ly/2bWfm61), with a new co-host, Aliette de Bodard. Probably there will also some new short stories that may or may not turn into novels, because sometimes they do that …

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  ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

  Robyn Lupo lives in Southwestern Ontario with her not-that-kind-of-doctor partner and three cats. She enjoys tiny things, and has wrangled flash for Women Destroy Science Fiction! as well as selected poetry for Queers Destroy Horror! She aspires to one day write many things.

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  Author Spotlight: Kat Howard

  Sandra Odell | 779 words

  You have a knack for writing works that grab a reader’s full attention from the first paragraph, and “The Key to St. Medusa’s” is no exception. Tell us of the inspiration behind the story.

  Thank you so much! I’m a writer who very much writes sequentially, and who doesn’t often do a lot of planning before I write. For short fiction in particular, I often just start with a phrase or an image or a feeling, so those first moments are often me trying to grab my own attention as a writer—trying to set up enough that I can feel like there’s a story there.

  This story in particular came about because of the different ways the word “witch” gets thrown around. In some cases, it’s a specific word used to describe a woman with magic—a woman with power. In others, it’s used as a pejorative term, used to describe a woman who isn’t liked. Who doesn’t behave as people think she should. So I wanted to play with the idea of being a witch as being a status crime.

  The story has its roots in all women’s stories, those told before and after the rise of written language, up to and including the silencing of women by the rise of a patriarchal culture. There are also elements of the story of Bluebeard and his multiple, ghostly wives. Many of your works hearken back to myth and legend, calling on folklore to enrich the narrative. What is it about the older stories that appeals to you as a writer and reader?

  Some of it is that these stories are the ones I grew up on. I remember getting out so many collections of fairy tale and myth at the library, just hungering for that sort of story, trying to find as many version of each as I could. I think there’s a power in a story that lasts, and when we retell those stories, when we write new versions, we as writers draw on that power.

  But also: yes. Sometimes these stories make me angry. The way, just as an example, that women get treated—silenced, stereotyped, erased from the narrative. And so sometimes a retelling is a way for me to address that anger. A way for me to say, “Here is what the story could have been.” So I am writing as a type of correction.

  We saw the release of Roses and Rot earlier this year (and I will admit a fangirlish moment of glee) and you have another novel slated for release in 2017. You are also a vocal proponent of women writers in SF/F/H, as well as speaking out against those who insist women writers are few and far between. If you could speak to all the aspiring women writers out there, what would you tell them about taking pride in, and supporting, their own works?

  Your voice matters, and there’s power in it. Tell your story, even if they call you a witch.

  All good writers read. Who tickles your fancy when you want to get a good book or story on?

  Okay, I’m going to limi
t myself to ten, because otherwise I could be here all day. I’ve been recently stunned by the elegance of Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories. Ken Liu’s collection, The Paper Menagerie, was an exquisite example of the power of short fiction. Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night was beautiful and immersive and rich. I’ve just flat-out loved Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown, Maria Dahvana Headley’s Magonia, Fran Wilde’s Updraft, and Cat Valente’s Radiance —they’re all on my reread pile right now. I read Seamus Heaney’s poetry when I need to clear my head, Kelly Link’s short fiction when I need to remind myself to be weird, and Sarah McCarry to remind myself of how the old stories can be changed.

  Writers also can’t spend all of their time behind a keyboard (or hunched over a notebook). What do you like to do when you step away from words on a page? How does Kat Howard recharge her writing batteries?

  The thing that’s most inspirational to me, in terms of refilling the creative well, is other art. If I feel like I’m stuck or sputtering, I try to got to a museum, or hear some great music, or watch dance. I also find a lot of inspiration in learning about things—I try to always be reading some sort of nonfiction. Really, anything that helps my brain see things, and feel things differently, I love.

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  ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

  Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

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  Author Spotlight: Will Kaufman

  Arley Sorg | 806 words

  Seriously, what a cool story. The structure is simplistic and the subject is fantastic, but the tale itself has clever, well-presented, emotionally resonant elements, and (for me at least) becomes something quite touching and real. In your writing process, what sorts of techniques or practices do you use to so effectively marry the “weird”/ fantastic with well-grounded, easily relatable moments and circumstances?

  Honestly, I pillaged my real life pretty mercilessly. After my wife read this she said, “So you want me to die giving birth to a pumpkin?”

  Of course, I made up most of it, but a handful of the things are True, and once a writer is willing to put a little True on the page—without flinching—it becomes that much easier to make the rest feel true. It helps you find that place of naked ambivalence that’s the core of lived experience. At least for me … I guess there are maybe people in the world who can look at their lives without ambivalence.

  I love when the main character carves up the pumpkin-son and it just doesn’t quite turn out how he thinks it should. This is almost always the case with carving pumpkins, so it has the weight of the probable; but it also feels like a powerful metaphor. Am I reading too much into this? Or do you see this moment as pregnant (yes, I went there) with meaning, and what does it mean to you?

  My dad used to sit me down at the kitchen table so he could tutor me in math and science. He never understood how I couldn’t grasp concepts, which immediately created some friction. I also had a habit of jumping to conclusions (a very writerly trait, I think: looking at a problem and trying to intuit all the ways it might work out) and skipping all those fiddly, important intermediary steps. It drove him nuts.

  He had very specific ideas about the kind of person he wanted me to be, and I know, even at the stage where I’m only considering having children, that I have very specific ideas about the kind of person I want my child to be. I like to think that my ideas are qualitatively different than my own father’s, and somehow better. Obviously, though, it is not so easy to shape our children, or know exactly what impact our actions will have on them.

  Beyond that, though, I think it’s a metaphor for creative processes in general. We sit down with our tools and our hopes, but it doesn’t always work out.

  This piece is full of surprises and frank, unsettling images, which is part of what makes it so effective. To me, it never goes too far or becomes gratuitous. What, for you, are the benefits and the hazards, or perhaps the challenges, of surprise and shock?

  In a short story, visceral imagery can be a great tool. Short stories don’t give the writer a lot of time to work a wedge into the reader’s brain so you can split it open and fiddle around inside. A solid visceral image is a very fast, effective way to do that. Reading is often portrayed as an intellectual activity, but it can also be very bodily. Nothing reminds people of that, or grounds them in their bodies and short-wires the defenses that separate mind from body, quite like a little body horror.

  It is risky, though. Go about it the wrong way, fail to understand the nature or consequences of the violence you’re doing, fall into the trap of paying pornographic attention to the violence, and your wedge becomes a wall the reader will just bounce right off.

  A lot of works, movies in particular, have a real affection for violence. Sometimes that’s okay, especially in something that’s making a commentary or exploring a certain type of humor. But in a lot of work, you see an affection for the suffering of others, reveling in the specific ways and means by which people are hurt and killed. I dislike that. So if I’m not being gratuitous, then I’m succeeding at what I set out to do, which is to grab the reader and ground them in their body, not to titillate or excite.

  Is there anything else you want to people to know about this piece? What are you working on now that we can look forward to?

  Right now, I’m working on a novel. I don’t have anything else in the pipeline at the moment, aside from those few hundred pages of very rough draft.

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  ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

  Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

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  Author Spotlight: Mary Anne Mohanraj

  Arley Sorg | 1025 words

  At heart, for me, this piece is as much about the nature of human violence as it is about family. It challenges the ways we define violence, and asks whether or not we can exist without it. How does the concept of nonviolence factor into your own life, and how is that represented in your stories?

  The seed of this story actually came from watching my young son navigate kindergarten. Anand was having a really difficult time for much of the year; his instinctive response to frustration was often to lash out, and while he rarely actually hurt anyone (he’s quite small), that kind of behavior is obviously challenging in a public classroom setting, when you don’t have enough adults to easily manage the number of kids they’re being asked to supervise. The challenge of trying to help him moderate his natural impulses towards physical violence intersected with my ongoing obsession with the civil war in Sri Lanka (starting most directly with the ’83 Black July riots that caused many of my Tamil relatives to flee the country after thousands of Tamils were killed in the capital). Many of my relatives gave money and support to the Tamil Tigers—people who some considered freedom fighters, and whom others (especially after 9/11 and the U.S. government’s restructuring of its categories) considered terrorists. I’m generally a peaceful person, but I couldn’t call myself a pure pacifist—if it came down to defending myself, my family, my community—I think I’d pick up a weapon if necessary. So it’s those questions of when violence is justified, when it’s appropriate, when it’s unavoidable or even desirable—those questions fascinate and disturb me.

  I really enjoyed the ideas and visuals around amphibious colonization, and the resulting modifications. Where did the inspirations for these elements come from?

  Facebook! Seriously, all of my research seems to start on Facebook these days—I throw out a question, and my clever friends (and
total strangers) give me a host of ideas and information to consider. They gave me many possibilities for the genetic modifications in this story, and I narrowed it down to the ones I wanted to work with.

  At the end, as Rose and Gwen are separated physically, they are also (possibly) separated philosophically, perhaps even ideologically, as Gwen is about to (potentially) enter into a life of violence—suggested by the line “others stayed and fought”—and Rose is about to enter into a life of total pacifism. Despite the circumstances, the ending has a hopeful, positive tone. Does this suggest that happiness can be achieved despite being thrust into violent circumstances? Or do you see this more as Gwen’s courage in the face of adversity, not to mention a determination to raise her child a certain way?

  I’m not sure I’d read the ending as hopeful, exactly—that might be more bravado, and a determination not to frighten the child, to make the best of a terrible, heartbreaking situation. Though that said, I do think Gwen was, perhaps, always a little ambivalent about this flight to a pacifist refuge. She would have done it, for her children’s sake, but when circumstances force her to stay, there’s at least a small part of her that wants to stay and fight for her home. Is she right to want that? I don’t know.

  The concepts of nonviolence, pacifism, justified violence, and so on, are important parts of the discourse of SF. Who are some of the authors, or what are some of the pieces you’ve discovered, that really resonate with you along these lines?