Locus, October 2014

by Locus Publications

  ‘‘In one metafictional device, I started teaching the class by coming in and saying, ‘I had the strangest dream.’ Before we started the class I would make up ridiculous but troubling imagery. After about a month I stopped doing that, and I gave them this story, again anonymously, about a professor who’s suffering from terrible dreams that turn into a maniacal delusion, making him very angry and giving him violent fantasies about his various students. Three-quarters of the way through the semester I make them write a series of imitations of H.P. Lovecraft, and one of those I read aloud, a piece about somebody going mad and attacking somebody. I quoted that piece in the story, and the idea was that the professor feels this story is speaking to him and bringing terrible things out of him, and he has a plan that on a certain date he’s going to attack the class. That date is in the future, and I’m wondering whether they’re actually going to show up to class that particular morning….

  ‘‘One example of metafiction I give them in class is the Vladimir Nabokov story ‘Signs and Symbols’. It’s about a young man who becomes convinced, like many paranoiacs do, that everything he sees is a hidden language of messages that are about him and refer to him. He’s frightened and terrified, and he ends up killing himself. He’s paranoid and delusional, but he’s also utterly correct – because he’s the character in a story. There’s not a syllable in the story that is irrelevant to him. That’s why the story exists. The whole thing becomes a metaphor for our experiences.

  ‘‘For those people who read fantasy fiction for certain familiar elements, I wanted to give them those things. But I also wanted to write a novel that cuts against the grain of those expectations, so that while simultaneously stroking their desire for those elements (which I myself enjoy), it was also presenting them with contrasts that would make them think about those elements in a new way, because, in the context of the story, they are clearly constructs rather than what’s actually happening. Nobody is going to start this story and think, ‘Oh, I was expecting it to be a conventional novel.’

  ‘‘I’ve always wanted to write a post-collapse story. I don’t like the way most of them are done – they’re just terrible cataclysms of disaster. We got used to this approach in The Road or The Parable of the Sower. I feel that’s a betrayal of the reality of the world and what human beings can do. In so many of these stories, within a few chapters you’ve got feral children roasting body parts by the side of the road. I’m trying to write a post-collapse story that feels more hopeful. When I was a kid I was struck by Engine Summer, which is far future but has a lovely lightness to it, even though you can see the character is living in the remnants of the modern world.

  ‘‘There are sections of All Those Vanished Engines that people will either think are wonderful, or consider annoying games. There’s one section written in simplified spelling. One of my great-grandfathers was the president of the American Simplified Spelling society in the 1920s. It was like Esperanto or something. If we could just get rid of these absurd usages and spellings, everything would be easier! Part of the first section of the novel is written in that style. Late in the novel there’s an 18th-century sermon voice which is phonetic as well. The idea is they kind of mirror each other, but one is 18th century before the spellings are codified, and the other is this invented, deliberately simplified spelling.

  ‘‘One of the things I find liberating now that I work for this institution that treats me very nicely, is I don’t have to worry much about whether people who liked my other books are going to like this book. Maybe that’s a bad thing. Maybe it’s a good thing for fiction writers to always think about the people who like their work. But I find if liberating. If I didn’t have this job at Williams College, I’d be halfway through writing A Princess of Bulgaria!

  ‘‘All Those Vanished Engines is very much a one-off for me. There were a number of formal things I wanted to do. I wanted to involve actual stories of my family’s life, and in some sense my own life, to incorporate characters from my own life in an artificial piece of fiction. I’ve always loved the interlocking three-novella design, but I don’t think I’m going in this direction again. The story I’m working on now is much more conventional science fiction. Even in the most bizarrely metafictional sections of All Those Vanished Engines, there’s praise for the idea of the simple story simply told. That really is a desire of mine. I feel maybe I’ve exorcised the metafictional demons here.

  ‘‘But even so, even in a more conventionally-plotted narrative, I can tell I’ll find some room for ambiguity. One of the ways in which science fiction tends to depart from our own experience of the world is that often in a science fiction world the facts are too clear. We go to some planet and there’s an expository section that tells about the history of the place and how it works, because we need a clear sense of it in order for the story to develop correctly and make sense. But that’s different from the way we perceive the real world. The worlds of any two different people don’t really resemble each other. This is the problem with politics too. The perception of causes and effects are entirely different, there’s no agreement on what causes the same events, what the ramifications are, there is no sort of narrative that we can depend on. A lot of science fiction feels like it’s missing a level simply because we’re supposed to be able to understand the world of the story as it truly is. But there’s room for readers who question that, readers who want to add a level of perception where the characters in the story perceive the world in a way the reader of the story does not. That becomes part of the way the story is written. Not all genre readers are going to be interested in that because it requires a bit of separation from the delights of the narrative. But there is a type of reader who will appreciate something that feels closer to the way they look at their own lives. If readers are looking to science fiction as escapism, they like it because it’s separate from the way they perceive the world, or the way the world is. If they’re looking at science fiction as a series of signs and symbols that intersect with the world they actually know, then they’re open to other approaches. They’re open to metafiction.’’

  –Paul Park

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  Kameron Hurley was born January 12, 1980 in Battleground WA. She attended college at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, then attended graduate school in Durban, South Africa, where she studied the history of resistance movements against Apartheid. After returning to the states, she lived in Chicago for four years before settling in Dayton OH. She did ‘‘all of the usual things that folks do as they’re struggling to get a real job,’’ including working at a movie theater, cleaning dog kennels, and working various admin positions. She began writing copy for a financial services company, moved into marketing copy, and is now senior copywriter at a software company. She attended the Clarion writer’s workshop in 2000.

  First story ‘‘Brutal Women’’ appeared in 1998, and she has published a handful of stories since, including British Science Fiction Association finalist ‘‘Afterbirth’’ (2012). Gritty debut SF novel God’s War appeared in 2011, and was nominated for Clarke, Tiptree, BSFA, and Nebula Awards, and won a Golden Tentacle for best debut novel in the Kitschies as well as a Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. God’s War began the Bel Dame Apocrypha series, which continued in Infidel (2011) and Rapture (2012). Her new Worldbreaker Saga, a weird epic fantasy, began with The Mirror Empire (2014) and will continue in Empire Ascendant (2015).

  Hurley is also well known for her essays, which appear in numerous venues, including Locus. ‘‘We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative’’ (2013) recently won a Hugo Award for Best Related Work, and Hurley won the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award this year on the strength of her essays.

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  ‘‘All writing is practice. There’s this funny thing that ends up happening once you get published: a lot of editors and publishers will tell their authors, ‘You should blog, it’s great for your career and it’s good visibility.’ W
hat people don’t realize is these are very different types of writing. Novel writing, blog writing, corporate copy writing. Writing a website is very different from writing a marketing e-mail. They’re specific types of writing done for specific purposes and they have their unique formulas. A lot of people think, ‘I’m a writer, I can write everything!’ Well, no, you gotta sit down and do the work. I wrote 800 marketing e-mails before I thought, ‘I’ve got this down!’ I’ve been writing novels since I was very young, for 20 years. I’m finally like, ‘Okay, I think I’ve got this down.’

  ‘‘A lot of people have problems getting up the energy to write their novels after working on their marketing or corporate work all day. That hasn’t been an issue for me because they’re incredibly different kinds of writing. People at my day job will ask me, ‘Why do you do this novel thing if it pays you no money, you hardly make anything?’ And I say, ‘As a novelist I own every word.’ They can tell me, change this, copy edit this, structurally edit this, but for the most part, every word is mine, and they can’t change any of them without my permission. When you do corporate work, or when you go to Hollywood, your words are owned by a bunch of stakeholders. You can write the bones of something, and it’s wonderful when a lot of your stuff stays in there, but you will never see your full vision. Some of that’s cool, because if it’s a failure you can always say it’s their fault, and if it’s a success, it’s a team success. With novels you have all of the success and failure – you are responsible for 100% of both. That really appeals to me, because on my deathbed I want to be able to say, ‘I created that.’ I’m proud of a lot of the corporate work I’ve done. It can be beautiful, and you work with a team to do amazing things. There’s a little of that in publishing, depending on how involved your publisher is. My agent does a lot of editing, she’s fantastic. But novels are much more yours than any sort of marketing or corporate work.

  ‘‘As a kid I made up worlds. I wrote my first book that I consider a book when I was 12 – it was 150 pages. That was huge to me. I submitted my first piece of fiction to a market when I was 15. I had a nonfiction sale at 16 and a fiction sale at 17. I was in the game pretty early, and very much committed to it. I went to Clarion in 2000 when I was 20, and it only took 11 years after Clarion for my first novel to appear! I had some short story sales and stuff in there, too. It was the third novel I tried to sell that finally hit. It’s a long game.

  ‘‘Bantam originally bought God’s War in early 2008, and then there was the whole publishing meltdown. A lot of contracts got canceled and God’s War was one of those. It’s cool, we got paid, I’m not going to knock it. We went out to sell it again and got an offer from Night Shade Books. There were some rumblings about problems at the time – they were selling e-books when they didn’t have the rights to sell e-books, stuff like that. I remember when I posted publicly that I had made the sale, I had a writer friend e-mail me and say, ‘You know they’re not paying people?’ I was like, ‘What?’ This is why I’m a big champion of people speaking to each other in the genre. Because that problem snuck up on me. The situation got worse and worse. By the time I finished my draft of the third book, I said, ‘You need to pay me what you owe me or I’m not delivering this book.’

  ‘‘As news of the trouble at Night Shade started to bubble out, people started talking to each other – this is not a one-off, this is not one or two people; there is definitely something rotten in Denmark. Then that whole implosion happened, with their near-bankruptcy and their sale to Skyhorse and Start, and it was a special time for about 82 authors. I had delivered all three books. The third book came out in October and in January we knew something was up because the publisher just stopped responding. In March the news of the sale to Skyhorse and Start came through. God’s War did very well, Infidel less so. Rapture was just decimated. You look at Bookscan and it’s clear someone had a pamphlet on a table somewhere, and that was all the marketing that happened for it. There was no infrastructure. I think Night Shade was just getting stuff out the door there at the end. There was not a lot of support behind any of those final titles. An incredible number of first novelists came out from Night Shade in that last year and a half, and they just got snowed under. It’s a bloody battlefield of Bookscan numbers. The business was tanking. The company was run by two guys who didn’t know the business very well. It was a rough year. Still, small presses like Night Shade used to be are good for the health of the genre. It’s where a lot of us can prove to bigger publishers that there’s a market for this. Without that, we’re shouting at clouds.

  ‘‘If anyone wonders what tradition the Bel Dame books came out of, it’s definitely New Weird. A couple of folks have pegged that. I read a lot of Angela Carter, K.J. Bishop, China Miéville. Those amazingly lush worlds, where you feel like you’re there. You’re stepping into something, God only knows what that is. Everything’s filthy and dirty and horrible, but it takes you there. I want to take you there.

  ‘‘There’s an author, Mary Renault, who writes historical fiction. She takes you back to ancient Greece and re-imagines these Greek myths as if they’d really happened. You feel like you’re there. You see the wine dark sea. It’s this gorgeous, evocative language she uses. If I’m going to write fantasy and science fiction, my job is to imagine how things can be different. I want to show it to you in all its horror and glory. That’s my job.

  ‘‘My background is the history of resistance movements, particularly women in resistance movements. That really fascinates me – how do we build different cultures that remember to put women in these positions? In the Bel Dame books, there is a lot of toxic masculinity that you recognize as toxic because women are doing those things. When you put that ‘80s action-hero mantle onto a woman, you can see the damage it does more easily. A lot of science fiction takes you out of your normal experience, and says, ‘Look. Look at how this is different.’ Maybe not the best, maybe not the worst, depending on what it is they’re reflecting back.

  ‘‘I like to imagine readers who are put off by my heroine Nyx, and then imagine a Joe Abercrombie character doing the same things. I’ve had people say, ‘Your books aren’t grimdark because there are aliens in spaceships.’ I say, ‘There are magicians and shapeshifters, it’s dark, it’s gritty.’ It’s about the horror of living, and of war. I certainly feel my work fits in the tradition of gritty fantasy. So do a lot of my readers. Certainly some of my readers are like, ‘That’s sci-fi, and that’s fantasy.’ I’m like, ‘It’s Thundercats.’ Everyone gets so invested, like, is it science fiction, or is it fantasy? And I’m like, ‘Who cares?’

  ‘‘People were really upset about how I could call it science fiction without explaining things, like, ‘How does the mass work with those shapeshifters?’ I’m not going to write a glossary. It’s an adventure story. Someone else do the science, I’m busy. I’m writing a story. Genre wars are cool, people like them – it gives people on the Internet something to do. I want to tell a story. I want to be weird and crazy and far out. If I go into a story limiting myself in any way, saying, ‘I can’t have shapeshifters because where does the mass go?’ I’m not going to write as good a story. Mine is much more of a New Weird, anything is possible, who knows what it could be? sort of approach. We forget you can have a secondary world fantasy with aliens and spaceships. The problem is, people don’t understand the difference between a secondary world fantasy with magic and spaceships, and science fiction. Because they always want an explanation. ‘Oh, what happened in our world to bring about this future?’ It’s interesting to watch people do those contortions.

  ‘‘I learned a lot about plot and structure writing the Bel Dame books. Those are not my strong suits. The plots get better in Infidel and Rapture. After I learned all of that I thought, ‘Ah, that’s how this is broken.’ I had a strong concept and a good idea, but I didn’t take it far enough. My worldbuilding wasn’t good enough. You take the things you’ve learned and say, ‘Is this a salvageable project?’ If you think God’s War is we
ird, the one that I’ve trunked for a while is really weird. It’s a Hindu-inspired space opera with all women. It’s womb tech. They give birth to spaceships. It’s wild. I told my agent, ‘I want a book that people will actually buy and read.’ She said, ‘This might not be the book. We’ll sit on that, and wait for the market to catch up.’ Maybe by the time you read this, it will have.

  ‘‘I actually tried to sell Mirror Empire before God’s War, but it was not up to the standards necessary to break through. I got with my new agent Hannah Bowman, and we had two proposals for two projects. She said, ‘Mirror Empire is your most saleable project.’ So we went through and edited, and then I basically burned the entire thing down and rewrote the whole thing. It’s a whole new novel. There are some characters that are kind of the same. There was a central theme to that novel – the big bad is about us fighting each other, fighting ourselves. That was a really interesting theme to play out. What happens when the massive evil attackers are, in fact, just mirror versions of you?

  ‘‘Mirror Empire is about a world where people draw their magic from the stars, from orbiting satellites. As stars wax and wane, powers in the world wax and wane. We have this dark star that comes around every 2,000 years. With that dark star comes invasions from parallel worlds. Their worlds are dying, and in order to live, they have to come into this prime world. In order for them to come over, they have to kill their doubles on this side. So you literally have to kill yourself to survive. That is the conceit of the novel, and I think if you read the prologue you’ll figure it out, so that’s not a huge spoiler or anything. The story focuses on several main characters. The primary one is Lilia, orphan of a slain blood witch in a mirror world who ends up in the prime world, and she’s on this mission to find her mother while all this stuff is going down around her. Invaders are coming in, assassinating the leaders of a lot of countries. They completely decimated the people on this continent to the north. She has a personal mission. As she does that, she starts interacting with everyone on their own missions. The series is three books. We’re contracted for the first two. ‘One world will rise and one will perish.’ I call it ‘Game of Thrones meets Fringe,’ because in Fringe, the parallel universes fight. That’s what ends up happening. Of course, everything has to be Game of Thrones now. Might as well jump on that bandwagon.