An Interview with Karen Joy Fowler
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and three short story collections. Her 2004 novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, was listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Her most recent novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.
DB: Your work has always existed in this kind of liminal area between science fiction, fantasy, literary, historical, slipstream . . . a good place for secret history to exist. What fascinates you so much about the liminal space between genres?
KJF: This is not something I think about as I work, so my attraction to the liminal spaces is not so much a conscious choice as a gravitational pull. If I try to step back and see it from the outside, my best guess is that I find the most freedom there. Solidly in the center of genre are conventions and expectations and contracts with the reader and other annoying constraints. Those demands tend to weaken as you head to the edges. In my opinion, genuine science fiction is really, really hard to do well. My gifts are better suited to the slippery slopes.
DB: Your story “What I Didn’t See” sparked a controversy when it won the Nebula in 2003—because it was so liminal, some readers didn’t see it as science fiction at all. In fact, the words “What I Didn’t See” feel like a perfect summation of much of your work, which often withholds information or draws on an unreliable narrator. As a writer, how do you find a balance between what is revealed and what is the engine behind the scenes?
KJF: I spend as much or more time thinking about what I don’t want a reader to know as what I do. I think of this as the negative space in my stories. I focus a lot on that negative space. The trick for me is not in revealing too much too soon—I rarely do that—but in still wanting the reader to understand the story clearly at the end, which I am less good at. Readers are smart and wily. And cranky. It’s hard to keep them off balance, but also leave them satisfied.
I think “What I Didn’t See” exemplifies another thing I do often, i.e., that I write a lot of stories that are not really science fiction, but are written for people who read science fiction. The kind of readers I want—engaged, puzzle-solving, thoughtful, and smarter than I am—are thick on the ground in science fiction.
DB: One of your many contributions to the genre was helping found the James Tiptree Jr. Award, a prize given to science fiction and fantasy that “expands or explores our understanding of gender”—which has been a tremendous opportunity to highlight work that the canon may have previously overlooked. To which (perhaps underrated) works would you like to award a retrospective Tiptree?
KJF: One of Pat Murphy and my main motivations for starting the Tiptree Award was our desire to see Carol Emshwiller’s novel, Carmen Dog, win a bunch of prizes, even if we had to make those prizes up. In the intervening years, Emshwiller has gotten more attention and if it still isn’t as much as she deserves, I’m not as upset about it as I once was.
It’s been fascinating to watch the conversation on gender move along through the lens of the Tiptree Award—to see what things we were talking about when we started it, as opposed to the things we are talking about now. I can’t even guess where the conversation will go next, but I’m excited to see it.
DB: I loved this line of yours from a previous interview: “I always say that I write history as it might have been reported in the National Enquirer.” Can you expand a bit on what that means to you?
KJF: I think that we tend to be pretty conscious of the insanity of the time we actually are living through. (I say that, well aware that we are currently mired in the most insane time I can remember, and I have been alive a good long while. Every morning’s headlines beggar belief.) But as the past recedes, it ends up sepia-toned. Those history books that focus on the movement of troops and the speeches of politicians leave out all the parts that I prefer—the immortality cults, the Elvis and UFO sightings, the dance marathons, picnics to see Civil War battles, streaking, phone booth–stuffing, rains of fish and toads, toad licking, bizarre medical treatments, fasting girls, etc., etc., etc.
Though now that the National Enquirer has become a genuine player in our political world, mostly through the stories they suppress, I may have to find a new reference. Although the National Enquirer version of the National Enquirer story is an intriguing thing to think about.
DB: Your work also explores our world’s own secret history by delving deeply into the less familiar corners of our past, particularly the nineteenth century. One example is the “Sweetwheats Sweethearts,” a women’s baseball team in 1947 Minnesota, explored in your novel The Sweetheart Season. How do you stumble on these tidbits, and what makes you think “Hmm, that would make a good story?” And is there something about the nineteenth century that is particularly powerful for you?
KJF: I think your configuration is perfect. I stumble on to them. Sometimes they’re in the footnotes of some book or paper that I’m reading (Always read the footnotes!). Sometimes, but less frequently, they arise out of something I’m told. I live in a university town and go to lectures on campus. These are good sources for arcane information. When the Smithsonian used to publish the American Heritage magazine, I got a lot of ideas out of it, and I still have a number of back issues that I turn to when I’m fresh out of ideas.
I’m attracted to the bizarre. If my response is “WTF?” it’s likely I’ll want to write about it. I like the nineteenth century because I can go and read the contemporaneous newspapers. I’ll be writing a story and I’ll pull the articles and headlines up on microfiche and be reminded that Jack the Ripper was working London at the same time that my story takes place. Or else that San Francisco was being menaced by a ghost train. Or that the whole city was obsessed by a custody case. I like to look at the advertisements and read the letters to the editor.
I also like nineteenth-century science, which is almost science, but sometimes not quite. I try to think of something contemporary that would pose the same paradigm-shifting challenge to our worldview as fossils did during the 1800s. I haven’t found it yet. I’m fascinated by how people negotiated that shift.
DB: Your speculative fiction is powerful in part because of how deeply it’s grounded in realism and verisimilitude; the speculative parts are made authentic by the attention given to real-life detail. You spoke at a Clarion writing workshop about how extensive your research process is for your historical novels, and the dedication of that work made a big impression on me. Can you talk a little here about how you go about researching a historical novel?
KJF: Again, I rarely set a story so far back there isn’t a massive written record. So I’ve yet to work in the time period where there’s a shortage of material. I read newspapers, which is great for giving you a sense what people were talking about at their dinner tables and what the general mood in a city might’ve been. I read nonfiction about the time, the place, the people, but I also try to find novels that were published just before, books my characters might’ve been reading. I’m very happy if I can find letters or diaries. I haunt the special collections rooms in libraries. I read other novels set in the same time period, even if their locations are different. I usually read for about a year before I begin to write. It’s a very happy time for me.
DB: Speculative fiction is often a tool for imagining the future. You have a particular talent for using it to imagine the past. Why do you think it’s important to reexamine the past through this lens?
KJF: The past is n
ever dead. It isn’t even past. You can quote me on that. You can quote me quoting Faulkner.
DB: A lot of secret history depends on shifting our focus from the traditional protagonists to the peripheral characters, and seeing things from their perspective. In your opinion, how does this project intersect with the project of speculative fiction?
KJF: One of the things speculative fiction is especially suited for is destabilizing an accepted narrative. Changing perspective from the one readers probably expect is also a destabilizing strategy. So the two fit together very neatly.
Speculative fiction often focuses, just as historical fiction also often does, on the extraordinarily consequential character. Realism is more likely to look at characters whose lives impact the large story less. I tend toward more ordinary characters, but I’m also greatly interested in the context of a specific political, legal, scientific, and ecological moment. A focus on more peripheral characters allows me to indulge both those desires.
DB: You’ve expressed an idea that I share as well, which is that our actual reality is far too strange, messy, horrific, and unlikely to be accurately represented by “realistic” fiction. What are your favorite works of “realistically unrealistic” fiction—and how, or why, do you think they work?
KJF: I’m going to try to avoid the obvious suspects here and also to stay in that liminal territory we already talked about. I love Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; that one’s probably not so liminal. There was a book out last year called The Epiphany Machine, by David Burr Gerrard, that I thought was extraordinary. I love the short stories of Alice Sola Kim and Kelly Link and Sofia Samatar.
Often what I love about science fiction and fantasy are the settings. This is the only genre in which a story can take place absolutely anywhere. If I’m deeply immersed in a strange (or even slightly tipped) world, then the story is likely to work for me on that basis alone. I most love that reading experience in which the writer’s imagination is producing things you could never have dreamed up yourself. In which you were constantly asking yourself, how does someone think of that?!!
DB: Who are your most obscure influences? Which creators of speculative stories, whether now or in the past, do you think should receive more attention than they do?
KJF: I think I read a lot in those liminal spaces when I was a child. Books like The Pink Motel, The Trouble with Jenny’s Ear, Castaways in Lilliput, and David and the Phoenix. I went through a long period in which all the books I read had dog protagonists or else protagonists who worked with dogs—most memorably The Green Poodles, Follow My Leader, A Dog for Davie’s Hill, and A Dog on Barkham Street. These all turned out to be appetizers for the completely fabulous novel Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis, published in 2015.
I recently reread Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner and remembered how much I love it. I often talk in interviews about T. H. White’s Once and Future King, but far less often about his wonderful Mistress Masham’s Repose. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook had a powerful impact on me when I first read it in college, and my father’s favorite book, pressed upon me, but I’m grateful for it, was Herbert Read’s The Green Child. I loved Green Mansions as a child, but I’m terrified to reread it. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior completely transported me. I was particularly struck by all the different strategies she employs in telling her story. Different voices, different texts, different tones. There was a freedom she allowed herself that, when I began to write, I wanted, too.
Fifteen Dogs is a book I’d like more people to pay attention to. Also The Epiphany Machine. Brian Doyle’s Mink River. Ruth Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being. I would have included Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, but since it just won the Pulitzer Prize, I guess I can shut up about that one. And Molly Gloss should be on the bestseller list every time she writes a book.
Though wildly influential, the 1927 film Metropolis has existed in a fragmented and incomplete form for most of its history.
FILM—AND TELEVISION
In many ways, film and television are as foundational to science fiction and fantasy as is the more ancient art of literature. Through visual spectacle, inventive set design, and special effects, moving pictures spark the imagination in their own unique way.
This chapter explores some of the earliest entries in the one hundred-plus year-old tradition of SFF cinema; the work of ambitious filmmakers who through their nascent visions of a genre not yet defined, laid the groundwork for the field that would eventually bring us Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who.
We also imagine a few of the films that could have been—from Jodorowsky’s Dune to William Gibson’s Alien III, from an erotic “film noir” take on aliens in Manhattan to a horror-movie precursor to E.T. While they never made it to the big screen, these visions live on in screenplays, concept art, storyboards, and more; and their raw inventiveness influenced Hollywood and spawned many imitators.
Finally, we pay tribute to the unsung all-stars of moving pictures—concept artists. Though they seldom get the red carpet treatment reserved for directors, producers, and actors, concept artists have played a particularly essential role in SFF cinema, inventing the memorable and arresting characters and creatures, landscapes and planets, futures and pasts that make science-fiction storytelling so delightful.
Bonus: The science fiction movie that shaped American military policy; why Star Wars got slapped with a lawsuit for ripping off a Buck Rogers serial from the 1940s; the scientific discoveries of James Cameron; and a couple not-quite-canon films that shaped the genre.
Le Voyage dans la Lune, the First Science-Fiction Film Ever Made
Science fiction’s first film is a surreal twelve-minute extravaganza created by a magician turned filmmaker. Le Voyage Dans la Lune (or A Trip to the Moon) was made in 1902 by French filmmaker Georges Méliès (1861–1938). No doubt fueled by his practice of the magical arts, Méliès brought an incredible sense of the surreal and fantastic to his visual storytelling. The short film’s most recognizable image—a makeshift space capsule landing in the eye of the Moon—remains one of the most iconic visuals in cinema history. The same image is often referenced in art and graphic design, particularly to evoke the retrofuturistic aesthetic of steampunk, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne.
Indeed, Verne and Wells were both influential to the filmmaker and the film, Verne with From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon (Méliès called these major influences) and H. G. Wells with The First Men in the Moon, which was published in French just a few months before Méliès made Le Voyage Dans la Lune. He was quite likely also influenced by an operetta by Jacques Offenbach, also titled Le Voyage Dans la Lune, which parodied the works of Jules Verne.
Méliès starred in the film as Professor Barnenfouillis, leader of the voyage. The story follows the professor and his colleagues, a group of six astronomers (fancifully named Nostradamus, Alcofrisbas, Omega, Micromegas, and Parafaragaramus) who build a cannon-propelled, bullet-shaped space capsule, along with an appropriately sized cannon to launch it to the Moon. The six astronomers are loaded in and fired off by young women playing the role of flight attendants, dressed in sailors’ outfits. The Moon watches benevolently as the capsule courses toward it, sinking into its eye, in the image that’s become so iconic.
Built in 1897, Méliès’s film studio in Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis was modeled after a greenhouse, inviting plenty of sunlight through the glass walls and ceiling to aid in filming.
There are plenty of other striking and beautiful visuals in the film, which is done in a highly theatrical, stage-play influenced style (as film, in its early days, still sought its own voice). Each shot is packed full of action and visuals, with many actors in each scene, moving both individually and together in a complex choreography that occasionally becomes chaotic. The imagery is surreal and baroque, and the storytelling is racuous and slightly comedic, tongue in cheek.
The astronomers disembark from their capsule and bed down on the surface of the Moon. They
watch Earth rise as they fall asleep; mythological celestial bodies frolic overhead. It begins to snow. They run to hide in a cave filled with giant semi-sentient mushrooms. There, the astronomers encounter a lunar inhabitant called a Selenite, who they promptly kill—pretty effortlessly, as the Selenites explode when struck. But many more Selenites soon appear, and the astronomers are captured and taken to the court of the Selenite king. One of the astronomers body-slams the Selenite King, who disintegrates into a puff of colored dust.
The Selenites pursue the astronomers as they run back to their capsule in a hasty attempt to escape. With no cannon to launch them back to Earth, Professor Barbenfouillis ties a rope to the space capsule to tip it off a Moon cliff and into the void of space. An attacking Selenite stows away at the last moment and makes it back to Earth with them. The capsule lands in a sea and is towed to shore. The Selenite ends up a captive in their celebratory parade.
The story sounds simple, but this film was one of the earliest narrative movies ever made. In that sense, its twelve-minute story was a groundbreaking achievement for film. Technically, it was also impressive, drawing on a larger budget than usual, a longer filming schedule (three months), and an unusually lavish and detailed film set. The film studio Méliès worked in had a large glass roof, which appears in the film as the astronomers build their spacecraft. The film’s special effects drew particularly on substitution splices—the cameras would stop rolling for a second, they’d switch up some stuff in the shot, and then splice the two shots together to create the visual illusion. That’s how Méliès achieved the shocking and delightful shot of the astronomer’s umbrella suddenly transforming into a giant mushroom. The iconic sequence of the capsule in the eye of the Moon was also created using this early special effects technique. Here, Méliès’s background as a magician no doubt came in handy, as he was already accomplished in the art of redirecting the eye to create the illusion of magic.
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