Locus, October 2014

by Locus Publications

  ‘‘It was funny, I had an interview last weekend and I said, ‘I consider this book to be much more hopeful and upbeat than God’s War.’ One of the interviewers looked at me and said, ‘It’s a book about genocide!’ Compared to the eight years I spent in this gritty world at war in the Bel Dame Apocrypha, there are glimmers of hope in this series. Everyone has a double. They’ll be fine. What I found interesting was the idea of what makes perfectly nice people hurt other people. These are all dark themes, but there are younger characters, and it starts out in this sort of agrarian egalitarian society, and it’s a consent-based culture. Everything’s really nice before the genocide. I’m very interested in asking, how can pacifists fight and win a war? Do they have to become everything they hate in order to survive? Can a society survive when it has to behave in ways that are absolutely against everything it believes in? Do they really have to do that? That is the big theme for the series: How can a society that’s faced with overwhelming odds retain its values in the face of annihilation?

  ‘‘The other world is a parallel timeline. In the other timeline it’s a much more hierarchical culture, and they’ve militarized themselves because they knew this calamity was coming. For the past 500 years they’ve known their world is up next for annihilation and they’ve been preparing for it. Whereas in the prime world, things went very differently, and the remnants of that culture decided to become very different to survive. They’re different people culturally, and it’ll be interesting to see who wins out. I don’t actually know. I had a conversation with my agent, and I was telling her stuff about book two. She said, ‘I don’t remember any of this from the outline.’ I was like, ‘Outline? Ha! You should have seen the synopses for Infidel and Rapture.’ She’s very analytical, whereas I just write things as they come to me. It’s pretty great. For the first book I had an image I wanted to build to, and there are certainly core scenes, but I like to have an experience like a reader’s when I write. I like to be wowed and go, ‘Oh, no you didn’t!’ I like to be surprised. Obviously there will sometimes be bad things that bubble up, but you can always edit it out later if it’s not a good idea.

  ‘‘There’s the architects vs. gardeners approach to writing novels. I’m certainly a gardener. Throw some seeds everywhere. Who knows what will grow? The architects, that would freak them out. They could not write that way. I’m the same if I’m constrained by an outline that says, and then this, and then this, and then this. I have finally gotten to the point where I can write more quickly when I sit down and think, ‘Here are the three things that need to happen in this scene.’ Even that seems like a constraint. But I have deadlines. I’ve got a day job. I need to find ways to hack my process and work faster. I work from home two days a week, which helps. That way I can make my own schedule, which is especially nice with book promotion, podcast interviews, and so on. I write from about 7:30-9:30 in the evening. Try to do that every night. Unfortunately what ends up happening is I have a 1,500 words a day goal. If I don’t hit that I need to sit down and write 4,500 words on Saturday. That sounds very difficult, but my great dream is just to sit down for six or eight hours and write. Having an hour and a half or two at night instead of having a big block of time is hard. You really just have to find ways to hack your own process, even if you’d rather be doing it in a different way.

  ‘‘This has been a rough year because The Mirror Empire books are about twice as long as the Bel Dame books. About 160,000 words, while God’s War was more like 98,000. It’s been difficult. All the vacation I take is for conventions or deadlines. Proofs are due. Arc-ready copy is due. I’ve realized I’m not going to have time off that is actually time off this year until October. But this is a special year. My hope is there will be a lot of big push this year, and then I can rest for a few months. Then we’ll kick back up again next summer. It’s a book-a-year schedule.

  ‘‘I’ve been blogging since 2004. I started out as a feminist blogger, specifically blogging about science fiction. The stuff I see about how such-and-such author went on a rant – I could give a crap. I’ve seen all that. I’ve been through the trenches. People get upset about online harassment today, but things are much improved because people are finally saying, ‘This is not okay.’ It’s not, ‘Hey, woman, get a thicker skin’ anymore. Our skin’s plenty thick. We get this every day. People are finally seeing what that harassment looks like and saying, ‘How is this remotely okay?’ Men and women across political persuasions are saying, ‘This is not a way that humans should interact.’ When I started, you would get horrific comments and death threats and rape threats, the whole nine yards, even with a tiny little blog with hardly any traffic. That was just a weekly thing, sometimes daily if you got picked up by a particular site. We’d just delete it. I talked to other feminist bloggers at the time and everyone said, ‘Let’s not talk about it. We’re just going to delete it.’ There were several women writers that I knew who had such a horrific time, their personal information got out there, and they were silenced. There finally came a shift in that particular community where we decided to talk about the problem. Women started coming out and saying, ‘These are the things that are being said to us, and here are some examples.’ Everyone said, ‘Oh, my gosh, we thought you were exaggerating.’

  ‘‘Worse is the invisible harassment. When I came into science fiction and fantasy, people would say, ‘Everybody knows that so and so harasses people.’ I was 20 when I went to Clarion. Nobody told me. If someone comes to a convention or has a book picked up by an editor who has a history of harassment, they don’t know. I worry about that. I worry that it’s a huge thing that keeps people out of the genre, especially women who are not from the US or the UK, because we are so insular. We warn our friends, but nobody else knows these things. That goes for opportunities, too. My husband encourages me to go to conventions because that’s where the opportunities are. People want to work with their friends, right? It’s cool because I’m online and I like Twitter, and I’ve met a lot of people that way. But that facetime is important at conventions. This is a business. I come to conventions, and while I’m a fan of things I’m not a hardcore fan, so I come for business. It’s always very fascinating when those two ideas of cons collide: ‘We’re just here to drink with our friends!’ And I’m like, okay, well, I’m not.

  ‘‘To me, there’s a social contract. When we go out in public, we don’t paint ourselves orange and go around naked and screaming obscenities. (If you’re at Burning Man, that’s totally fine.) As a community, I hope we get better as we go, and that people can say, ‘This is not acceptable.’ I was just at CONvergence, and they have big signs up: ‘Cosplay is not consent. Here’s what consent is. If you want to take a picture of someone, ask.’ They have big TV monitors up with someone asking questions of their mascot, which is a robot, telling them ways to interact and how to have a good time and how to report harassment. ‘Here’s the acceptable way for us to interact with each other.’ Will horrible things happen anyway? Of course horrible things will happen. But there will be a mutually shared idea of acceptable behavior. Let’s have fun. Let’s all be nice. I think people are desperate for that, to be honest. In these geek circles, we’re so bad at a lot of social stuff. If you would like to take a picture of someone, please ask them. If you would like to sit down and have a drink with them, please ask them. Explicitly laying that out is helpful for people.

  ‘‘I haven’t gotten a lot of negative feedback for my self-promotion. People talk a lot about self-promotion and how it’s horrible, but I never once had anyone say, ‘You’re a blatant self-promoter.’ I market for a living. I know what I’m doing. I know the conversation I’m having and the career that I’m building. I’m very cognizant of that. As far as transparency in the industry, everyone wants that. Everyone has always wanted that. The only ones who don’t want that are the ones benefiting from our ignorance. I think when the Night Shade thing went down and a bunch of us got on a listserv together, mostly it was just us patting each other�
��s backs, helping each other. It was also a sharing of information. Withholding information from you, that’s a way of leveraging power over you. There’s a reason that unions exist. That Night Shade thing was a horrible situation that we were all put into. It had nothing to do with anything we did wrong. It was just a bad hand we got dealt. For a lot of people it was very refreshing, to have that support network when things got bad – it was a good reminder of what we can do if we can all come together.’’

  –Kameron Hurley

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  Author GRAHAM JOYCE, 59, died September 9, 2014 in a British hospital. He was diagnosed with aggressive lymphoma in 2013 and was undergoing treatment. Joyce is best known for his acclaimed award-winning novels, which cross the borderlines of fantasy, horror, dark fantasy, and the paranormal.

  Graham William Joyce was born October 22, 1954 in Keresley, England, a mining village near Coventry, and grew up there. He received a B.Ed. from Bishop Lonsdale College in 1977, an MA in Modern English and American Literature from Leicester University in 1980, and a Ph.D from Nottingham University. (He wrote his Master’s dissertation on Thomas Pynchon.) Though he submitted a few stories and wrote poems after college (winning the George Fraser Poetry Award in 1981), he mostly concentrated on earning a living. He devoted himself to youth work for seven years, working for the National Association of Youth Clubs, until he burned out and decided to concentrate on writing. He married Suzanne Johnsen in 1988 and left England to spend a year on the Greek isle of Lesbos, living in a shack on the beach while writing first novel Dreamside.

  Graham Joyce (2008)

  After the book sold, they used the advance money to travel to the Middle East before returning to England. Dreamside appeared in 1991, followed by British Fantasy Award winner Dark Sister (1992); House of Lost Dreams (1993), set in Greece; British Fantasy Award winner Requiem (1995), set in Jerusalem; British Fantasy Award winner The Tooth Fairy (1996); British Fantasy Award winner The Stormwatcher (1998); Indigo (1999); Smoking Poppy (2001); World Fantasy Award winner The Facts of Life (2002); World Fantasy nominee The Limits of Enchantment (2005); British Fantasy Award winner Memoirs of a Master Forger (2008), published in the UK under the pseudonym William Heaney (also the book’s narrator), and under his own name in the US as How To Make Friends With Demons (2009); World Fantasy and British Fantasy Award finalist The Silent Land (2011); British Fantasy Award winner and World Fantasy Award finalist Some Kind of Fairy Tale (2012); and British Fantasy Award finalist The Year of the Ladybird (2013; in the US as The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit, 2014).

  He wrote children’s book Spiderbite (1997) for the Web series, and about ten years ago he began writing books for teens, including TWOC (2005 winner of the Angus Award), Do the Creepy Thing (2006; in the US as The Exchange, 2008), Three Ways to Snog an Alien (2008), and The Devil’s Ladder (2009).

  Joyce wrote several notable short stories, including British fantasy finalist ‘‘Black Dust’’ (2001); Tiptree Award finalists ‘‘Eat Reecebread’’ (1994, with Peter F. Hamilton) and ‘‘Pinkland’’ (1998); British Fantasy and International Horror Guild Award finalist ‘‘Leningrad Nights’’ (1999); International Horror Guild Award nominee ‘‘Candia’’ (2000); and O. Henry prize winner ‘‘An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen’’ (2008). Some of his short fiction was collected in Partial Eclipse and Other Stories (2003), and retrospective collection 25 Years in the Word Mines is forthcoming.

  Joyce taught creative writing to graduate students at Nottingham Trent University, and also taught at Clarion West. He lived in Leicester with his wife and their two teenage children, who survive him.

  GRAHAM by Pete Crowther

  Hey, you know what? I sit here looking at these photos (that’s me, Graham, Paula Guran, and John Berlyne at a World Fantasy in Canada) and I can’t help thinking about the intransigence of damn near everything.

  Darren Nash, Peter Crowther, Graham Joyce, Paula Guran, John Berlyne (2008)

  Graham and I were good friends, spending just a little too long at many a convention bar but always springing up (albeit rather bleary-eyed) the following morning to tackle the inevitable convention breakfast along with other sufferers such as Ramsey Campbell, Mark Morris, Conrad Williams, Nick Royle, Mike Marshall Smith, Stephen Jones, and yada yada yada. Graham was family. I am family. And, to paraphrase Sister Sledge, we’re all of us family, dammit. And Graham has been struck down way before you could say he’s had ‘a good innings’. Hell, the guy was still strapping on his shin-pads, for crissakes.

  Regrets? Well, just one really and it’s a big one. Graham didn’t get to see his new PS book, 25 Years in the Word Mines, and that’s a damn shame.

  Things to be thankful for? Again, just the one. The cancer that finally took him out enabled the two of us to spend hours on the telephone and, finally, to meet up at the hospital in his hometown of Leicester for the BBC Radio 4 programme (Word of Mouth) where we discussed the language and wordplay of the so-called Big C and, together with the show’s producer and Graham’s oncologist, have a few laughs.

  Graham loved to laugh. So, amidst this enormous and understandable explosion of grief, let’s think back hard about the times we spent in his company, and I’d bet you any money, the memories will make you smile. Here’s my favorite ofthe things he and I got up to together:

  Alison Baker & Chris Roberson, Graham Joyce, Adam Roberts (2005)

  Graham and I were coming back from a World Fantasy Convention in, I believe, Chicago. We desperately fancied the nicer (and more expensive, of course) seats in Business Class and so I hit on a ruse of explaining to the woman at the ticket desk that we were coming back from a convention (‘‘…here’s the programme booklet,’’ etc.) and outlining how I had been hired to adapt one of Graham’s novels (‘‘…this one,’’ and I held up The Tooth Fairy). But the problem was, I explained, that we needed to spend the seven-or eight-hour-flight discussing the finer points of the emerging script so might she find it in her power to upgrade us?

  Amazingly, it worked. (We’re going back a few years, of course. Wouldn’t work now. Now, you’re lucky if they’ll let you have the seat you actually paid for!)

  Anyway, a short while later, we were spreading ourselves out on these huge palatial seats, piling up the books and mags we’d bought and digging into the first free drink when, suddenly, who should appear walking up the aisle but the woman from the ticket desk. Aaarrrgghhh! I felt my blood run cold and half expected the pair of us to be booted off but the woman looked even more nervous than I felt.

  It turned out she hated her job and desperately wanted to be an actress… so, she wondered, might she be considered for a walk-on part for when the movie was made? Naturally, I assured her that we’d do our best but that there were no guarantees. After that, neither of us felt quite so giddy about what we’d – sorry… I’d! – done and I’ve thought about that woman in the intervening years and about all folks stuck in jobs they don’t much care for while their heart yearns for something completely different.

  But, heck, never look a gift horse in the mouth, right? And as the woman walked back up the aisle to the exit, I turned to Graham and he had that cocky mischievous smile that lit up his entire face. He raised his drink and as we clinked glasses, Graham said, real soft, so nobody else could hear, ‘‘From here on in, I want you to come with me and Sue on all of our holiday flights.’’

  So that’s it. A good man has gone. Let’s raise our own glasses and while you’re doing it, read the heart-wrenching final entry in Graham’s blog () and the closing few sentences of pretty much any of his many fine pieces of work – such as ‘‘Candia’’, for instance. Storytelling does not get any better than this, kids, and don’t let anyone tell you different.

  Now go find the person who means the most to you and spend the day together. We don’t get that many we can afford to waste ’em.

  And Graham, if you’re reading this…. Happ
y Trails, mate.

  –Pete Crowther

  Amelia Beamer, Liza Groen Trombi, Graham Joyce (2008)

  AN APPRECIATION OF GRAHAM JOYCE by Mark Morris

  How do you encapsulate 23 years of friendship with the force of nature that was Graham Joyce into a couple of pages? How do you adequately convey the man’s charisma, charm, warmth, humour, and fierce intelligence to someone who has never met him?

  If Graham were here now, he’d probably say, ‘‘Just start at the beginning, you daft fucker.’’ He was one of the most articulate men I’ve ever met, but he was not averse to using colourful language for emphasis and effect.

  So. The beginning.

  In 1991 I was writing a regular horror review column for Interzone’s short-lived sister magazine, Million. One day I received a debut novel called Dreamside by a writer I’d never heard of. I used to receive a great many novels by unknown writers back then, and most of them were instantly forgettable. I started Dreamside wondering if this was going to be one of those novels – and was gratified to discover that it was not. Within a few pages I was gripped, captivated. I gave the book a glowing review and a few weeks later received a lovely postcard from its author, Graham Joyce, thanking me for my kind words. I wrote back (no e-mail in those days) and we started to correspond. It may have been during this correspondence that I told Graham about the British Fantasy Society and suggested he attend its annual convention in Birmingham. Anyway, he came along for the first time in 1991 or 1992, and although my memory is hazy I think he may have sought me out in the bar to thank me in person for my review, whereupon, naturally, we became instant friends.