The development of the Hoaxer society parallels many human frailties and foibles. Did you find the science fiction genre particularly amenable to satirization of society?
SF perhaps in particular—because of the whole “if this goes on”/comic inferno strain—but pretty much all SFF, because all satire depends on thought experiments and that almost immediately makes SFF into the vehicle you naturally use.
Your writing career has focused on poetry, criticism, and more recently novel writing, more than short stories. From your perspective as an observer of popular culture, what do you think is the attraction of short fiction in today’s world?
Short fiction—not that I write much of it right now except as occasional narrative poems—is a way of going in and getting the job done in a single instant of thought. It has a single-mindedness I like, but it lacks the endless organic growth and sudden moments of “OMG, so that’s what I mean” of huge projects.
What are you currently working on?
Revelations Book Four; some ideas for a novel that will be about memory and time-travel but be less genre, more like the novel/memoir Tiny Pieces of Skull that’s coming out next spring. Poems, always poems—I need to put together another collection.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lee Hallison writes fiction in an old Seattle house where she lives with her patient spouse, an impatient teen, two lovable dogs, and the memories of several wonderful cats. She’s held many jobs—among them a bartender, a pastry chef, a tropical plant-waterer, a CPA, and a university lecturer. An East Coast transplant, she simply cannot fathom cherry blossoms in March.
Author Spotlight: Annalee Newitz
Sandra Odell
“Drones Don’t Kill People” starts with a stark, specific voice that immediately captures the reader’s attention. Many writers struggle to find a voice that completely embodies their point-of-view character. How hard was it for you to find such a perfect voice?
I have a lot of sympathy for machines and non-human creatures, and I spend way too much time speculating about what they might be thinking. So the drones felt very familiar to me.
In many ways, Turkey is at the crux of a number of political issues in the Middle East. Your story embraces both the political strife and intellectual hope of a country often overlooked by genre writers. What inspired you to set the story in Turkey and Eastern Europe?
Istanbul and Budapest are two cities that I love, with rich histories of political resistance—but also imperial power, too. Both have been at the centers of empires that lasted centuries. And Turpan, in western China, has occupied a place of strategic importance for over 1,500 years. Enormously important historical events took place in these areas, so it makes sense that important future events would happen there too. I like thinking about how history continues to affect us, even in a world of sentient drones—and I especially love speculating about how drones will misinterpret human history for their own political needs.
The drone’s transition to self-awareness is subtle and well-handled. The methods also speak to fears such as the current drone strikes, data theft, and the uses of tactical and personal data. One of the values of fiction is in how it allows both readers and writers to explore the nature of such fears. How conscious were you of such fears when writing “Drones Don’t Kill People”?
I was very conscious of these fears—I am terrified of war, as any sane person would be. But I grew up at a time when the anti-war movements of the 1960s were still fairly fresh in people’s memories. I heard about them a lot from the adults around me, and from my professors at Berkeley. So when I think of war, I imagine all the ways that people and other intelligent beings would try to resist it. Maybe that means I’m blinded to the darker possibilities, but it’s not like I’m saying everybody is going to dance off into fields of happy cyberlight. People will die and it will be horrific, but there will always be good guys who try to stop the killing.
You have an extensive background in journalism. How do you find your interests in nonfiction writing have enhanced your works of fiction? Do you find the same to be true in reverse?
Absolutely. This story was completely inspired by journalistic pieces I’ve researched. I think it doesn’t really work in the other direction for me. I find that the nonfictional idea always precedes the fiction.
What’s next for Annalee Newitz? What can the fans expect?
I’m working on a nonfiction book about how cities evolved. I also have a novel I’m revising, which is about a military robot, a pharmaceutical pirate, a government ninja, and a slave. And of course I will continue to write my heart out at io9.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sandra Odell is an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. She attended Clarion West in 2010. Her first collection of short stories was released from Hydra House Books in 2012. She is currently hard at work avoiding her first novel.
Author Spotlight: Kat Howard
Liz Argall
I love the imagery in this story and the way grief that is made visible is then pressured to become invisible and performative. How do you think contemporary society would cope with grief if it were this visceral and embodied?
That’s such an interesting question to me, because of course societies have their rituals for grief. We have wakes and we have funerals and we have our lists of expected—and acceptable—behaviors. We have unofficial rituals as well—when someone famous dies, we go back and we read their stories or watch their movies or listen to their music. Grief is a big thing. And because it is, because we as a society know what is expected, it also means when someone reacts differently, that stands out. We comment on it, or we make apologies for it—“I didn’t know losing her would affect me like this.”
So I think if we did live in a society where grief was more visceral, where it was physically embodied, the change wouldn’t actually be that great. We would still know what was expected of us, and what we expected of others. The only moments we would notice would be where someone deviated from that.
What inspired this story?
Two things. One was my beloved dog, Sam I Am, died. He was fifteen and a half, and I had known him since the day he was born. And I was such a fucking mess about it, I literally couldn’t even leave my apartment, but I felt like I would break if I didn’t do something. I’m a writer. I wrote.
But the less visceral inspiration came from a discussion with Ellen Kushner. I can’t remember why, but we were talking about mourning customs. And she made the point that while we often consider them restrictive—you have to wear black until a certain time has passed, you can’t leave the house, you can’t dance in public—they also gave space for people to work through their grief.
That space is something that I think has been lost. It feels like things move so fast, and we expect people to be over things right away. We no longer have those obvious cues, like the color of their clothing, to know what they might be dealing with. And certainly enforced mourning could be difficult, but it could also be a blessing. So I wanted to try to explore that idea.
I wanted to ask you what the name of Sibila’s actual grief was, but it seems to me this story is more about the complexity of grief and the parts of it that escape naming (and in this world become embodied instead). I love the line “Grief is never solely about the person gone. It would not need to fly, if it were.” Can you expand on that?
Thank you. For me—and just because I wrote it, doesn’t mean I’m right—this line is about the idea that when we mourn someone, we aren’t just mourning that person, but we’re mourning our relationship with them as well. We’re mourning the chance to say “I’m sorry” or “I love you.” We’re mourning all of the things that will now never happen, and that’s part of what makes grief heavy, which makes it something we must bear. In the world of this story, ideally what happens is your grief flies once you are able to bear it, once you have healed. Ideally.
Earlier this year you wrote, “I look at these pieces of paper that re
present the broken pieces of a story, and I am afraid of what it means to fix them, because to do that, I need to put myself back into that story, and that has the side effect of meaning that I am looking back at that time, at that past self, and it hurts, and I don’t know what the physical therapy exercises are for this.” Did you ever figure out the exercises for this? This seems like such an important and valuable challenge to face, even if it’s just articulating the challenge and pushing on!
It turned out that—for me, for that project—there wasn’t a series of emotional physical therapy exercises. Getting back into it was basically the emotional equivalent of jumping naked into ice water. At the beginning, it wasn’t fun. But the thing was, the project meant enough to me that I knew I had to try, and eventually, I remembered why I loved it, and so working on it became bittersweet, and then became something I was proud of.
But I also think it’s important to say that setting it aside—for longer, forever even—would have also been a valid choice. Our art shouldn’t be a weapon that we turn against ourselves.
You provide professional critiquing and mentoring services. How does that influence your own creative process?
It makes me think about stories in much more technical ways, which is something that affects me more as I am revising than when I’m drafting. For me, drafting is all about getting something—anything!—down on paper. But once I have that, then I look at the story with a more critical eye, and make sure that the arcs are there, that the emotional beats are right, that the voices are consistent. And not that I didn’t do those things before, but spending time with my hands in other writers’ stories makes me much more aware of the act of doing them in my own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Liz Argall’s short stories can be found in places like Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death. She creates the webcomic Things Without Arms and Without Legs and writes love songs to inanimate objects. Her previous incarnations include circus manager, refuge worker, artists’ model, research officer for the Order of Australia Awards, farm girl, and extensive work in the not-for-profit sector.
Author Spotlight: Matthew Hughes
Jude Griffin
Even though the world has changed completely, Obron’s approach is still very much in the vein of scientific discovery: he researches, he hypothesizes, experiments, etc. It makes me think about Clarke’s observation that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and that maybe the magic of Obron’s world is just governed by different scientific truths. Or is the magic incompatible with any scientific framework?
In this setting, the terms “magic” and “scientific” could only combine in an oxymoron. Magic is about the power of will, but for that power to be applied it has to be controlled and focused. There are techniques for that, many of them very difficult, which have to be learned and practiced. So it’s definitely more of an art than a science; talent comes into it, but so does study and practice. Some will become the equivalent of a Pavarotti or a Yo-Yo Ma. Others will become competent journeyman. Some will be tone deaf or fumble-fingered. Kaslo, by the way, is tone deaf.
Poor Kaslo—to be so competent and then to be thrown into a world where all his strengths are so reduced. Can you talk a little about his character arc?
He’s a man who was superbly adapted to an environment that has suddenly ceased to exist. But he’s also the kind who never gives up. So he’s struggling (characters must always struggle) to meet a whole new series of challenges for which he is not naturally equipped.
The concept of a character who is ill fitted to his environment is a common theme in my work. Henghis Hapthorn, the foremost freelance discriminator of Old Earth (who will play an off-stage role in The Kaslo Chronicles) had a similar problem with the onset of magic.
Is it too late to plead for a female wizard to pop up?
I’m not terribly good a writing female characters, so I’ve been told—although I thought I was doing them fairly well. I suppose I’ve begun to leave them out unconsciously.
Now that you are pretty far along in the serialization, what are your thoughts on the experience? Would you do another? What would you change if you did?
It’s been a bit of a tightrope walk in the dark, since I can’t go back and change something in Chapter Three to fit with something I didn’t think of until Chapter Nine, as I would normally do. But it has been enjoyable, and I would do it again. The only thing I would change is the thing mentioned above, which I can’t change.
Any news or projects you want to share?
I’m taking a run at writing straight suspense fiction again. I’m about to send my agent the draft of a story about (yet another) ill-fitting but highly competent oddball who decides, for a complex set of reasons, that it will be good for him to go around knocking off people who do a lot of harm and get away with it.
Where in the world do you write these days?
I’m about to leave one small village in France for another a hundred miles or so farther south. In December, I’ll be in England, then from January to July, it’s Brittany. After that, I don’t know where I’ll be. If the suspense novel sells, I may settle down somewhere for a while, maybe even permanently. Ireland’s a good place to be a writer. They put up statues and name major ships after us.
Any big ideas or stories you want to tackle someday?
I’m about to start writing the historical novel I’ve wanted to do for more than forty years. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve discovered some key facts about the historical events and persons involved that just make for a hell of a story.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.
Author Spotlight: Jennifer Stevenson
Laurel Amberdine
There’s so much great musical background in this story. Are you a musician or did you do research for the story? Were there any neat details you weren’t able to fit in?
I spent my first twenty-five years as a musician in a family of musicians. The funny thing is, none of them were into rock’n’roll. Classical, Dixieland, Chicago jazz, early polyphonic choral music, even screech’n’fart, as we fondly called stuff like Charles Ives and Arnold Schoenberg. As a child I was told that rock’n’roll is a gateway drug to heroin, so I didn’t discover it until I went to college. But music is music, eh? Kind of my point in this story.
Only at the end did I realize the significance of the protagonist’s name: Dawn. Did you know that when you started writing, or come up with it after you’d figured out the story?
I recall that the last two lines of the story were serendipity. I came up with it at the end, when he very naturally asks her her name and I thought, “DUH, it’s Dawn, ka-ching!” Then I went back and added her name to the beginning.
At the beginning of the story, Dawn has big ambitions for her musical career. After this solstice party, seeing the real power of her music, do you imagine that she’s going to continue on the same track?
I don’t see why not. In my fantasy universe, you get rewarded when you preform services for the gods. So she probably has excellent chances to fulfill her ambitions after this.
Is there any particular reason you used the setting of “near Madison, Wisconsin”?
I wanted a specific kind of terrain, hillier and stonier than my native northern Illinois, so that the hostess’s house, built into a hill, would be geologically likely. If you’ve ever seen the Blue Mound area, such as at Black Earth, Wisconsin, you know what I’m talking about: a series of little round hills like tits, too small
to be mountains, located in lightly rolling farm countryside. These hills are left over from 400 million years of erosion since the retreat of the Silurian Sea. Such a landscape used to cover the entire Great Plains. However, weirdly, this part was never scraped flat by retreating glaciers, as the Great Plains were. So these lovely mounds, capped by Niagara dolomite, remain. It’s an eerily peaceful area that feels populated by its hills. The sense is that somebody important lives here, but you’ll probably never meet them.
I loved the idea of this amazing party to bring the sun back at the winter solstice. Do you think there is a corresponding event at the summer solstice? What would that be like?
Hm, great question! Now I have to think about that story. Give me six months and I’ll come up with one. Meantime, I refer the reader to the end scene of John Crowley’s Little, Big, which is a summer solstice party, I think. I suspect my own version would have some passionate triangles, because while the winter solstice is about death and rebirth, the summer solstice is for emotional carrying-on like idiots, as if this day will never end.
What are you working on now?
When my paranormal romcom Slacker Demons series ended, I had a fabulous man-lair left behind, empty, because I’d married off all the sex demons who’d been using it. Now a team of succubus trainees has moved in. I’m building a new series called Coed Demon Sluts. This is new territory for me. The succubi don’t have the same motives as their male counterparts for taking the job. This series is still funny, but it’s women’s fiction, exploring what moves women to change their lives. Like Slacker Demons, Coed Demon Sluts takes place in the same reluctantly magical contemporary universe as my first series, Hinky Chicago. Look for cameo appearances of characters from earlier books.
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 54 Page 29