by IGMS
But the most interesting experiences have come in my career as a quality management consultant. After a decade as a quality technician and quality engineer I was hired by a well-known consulting firm and went hither and yon to conduct training courses, work with quality improvement teams, and/or consult on problems. The core of the work involved statistical analysis, which can be quite exciting, at least for a certain cast of mind. In the course of this work I have visited not quite every state of the Union, three Canadian provinces, and portions of northern Mexico, but also Costa Rica, Panama, South Africa, India, Australia, England, France, Germany, Austria and Hungary, encountering a wide variety of people and cultures, as well as of industries from manufactures of various sorts to services to government and quasi-governmental agencies.
This was not only interesting, but also provided vignettes, details, and characters that I used in books and stories.
SCHWEITZER: When did you first discover science fiction, and when did you realize you wanted to write it?
FLYNN:: Science Fiction came to me when I was a child. My father used to tell bedtime stories to my brother Dennis and me. One was about aliens who came to Earth "to serve man." It turned out to be a cookbook. Good night, sleep tight. After as story like that? Good luck. Another I remember turned out to be a Ray Bradbury story. The Old Man, which my math skills tell me could not have been that old at the time, had gotten similar bedtime stories in his day, from an uncle who also illustrated them with cartoons. "Mongo of the Moon" was at least original. Later we discovered Dad's stash of IF and Galaxy.
So Dennis and I devoured every science fiction book in the local children's library. My first book was Space Captives of the Golden Men. Lucky Starr, the Heinlein juveniles, and all the rest soon followed. I even read fantasies, like Mary Poppins. When we ran out, we went to the librarian and asked if we could check out the adult books. The librarian selected an adult science fiction book, asked Dennis to read a passage and then explain it. (Dennis was younger by a year. If he could do it, it was reasoned, so could I.) He did, of course, and we were given special privileges. It's a good thing Samuel Delany hadn't written Dhalgren at the time.
So what could be more natural than that Dennis and I would write our own stories -- in pencil, in spiral notebooks, illustrated by Magic Marker. (The original Magic Markers, with the aromatic VOCs wafting off of each stroke. It's probably illegal now.) We did the Grand Tour, with an adventure on each planet, the natures of which were then quite unclear to us. We recruited two other kids and the four of us created what is now called a "shared universe." We made a list of stories for a future history out into the far future and parceled them out for the scrivening. (My mother saved them, and my youngest brother one day stumbled upon them.) All this came to the attention of a local news columnist who did an interview with my brother and me. The space-writing Flynn brothers. I think we were in 8th and 9th grades or thereabouts.
My one greatest regret is that I will never co-author any stories with Dennis. He died in high school. For sixteen years, everything we did, we did together.
I collected several form rejection letters while in high school. Then one day, I received a three-page rejection letter from John C. Campbell Jr. at Analog ripping my story to shreds. I was devastated. Little did a high school weenie know that a three-page rejection letter meant "put these shreds back together in a more interesting way and try me again." So the world was spared for several years.
When I rediscovered that story some years later, I read it and realized that it really sucked. So I rewrote it, and sent it to Ben Bova. He rejected it with a form letter. Oh well.
Then some years afterward, when I was married and living in Colorado, I came across Galileo magazine, which was running a story contest for unpublished writers. Well, I qualified, right? The stories in the high school literary magazine didn't count, because I was the editor, too. So I wrote a story called "Slan Libh" and Charlie Ryan decided he wanted to buy it for the mag. Unfortunately, Galileo went under shortly after. My brothers, in the kindly, supportive manner of all Irish brothers, told me the magazine failed because it had bought my story.
Nonetheless, after I had the rights back, I sent it to Stan Schmidt at Analog and . . . he bought it. Someone actually gave me money for something I had written. Hot damn. Maybe I could pull it off again. So I pulled out that old story that Campbell had ripped and Bova had rejected and read it again.
And it still sucked. So I rewrote it again. And this time it worked. Stan bought "Ashes" for Analog. Somewhere along the way I had learned how to actually write. Go figure.
SCHWEITZER: So, has your orientation always been toward "hard" (or scientifically based) science fiction from the start?
FLYNN:: I would say more or less. Both "Slan Libh" and "Ashes" were time travel stories, and how hard is that? The next two involved 14th century Rhineland and an alternate world, respectively. I think there were space ships in the fifth one, which was a parody Western set out near Uranus. I did enjoy the stories in Galaxy as well as Analog; and even the fantasies that Avram Davidson and others were writing in F&SF. I have sometimes said that what I write is really more like "high viscosity" science fiction. I did do some envelope-back calculations for the Firestar series and for The Wreck of "The River of Stars" but they were mainly to set the boundaries of what was plausible.
SCHWEITZER: Presumably you were reading Analog for some while before you sold there. Would you say that your idea of what science fiction is comes largely from that magazine and the ghost of John W. Campbell?
FLYNN:: I first encountered Analog at a newsstand inside the Northampton National Bank at 4th and Northampton Streets in Easton while I was waiting to change buses on my way home from high school. What caught my eye was the 8.5 x 11 format. It was January 1964, which is why I was waiting inside the bank building rather than out at the bus stop. I picked it up off the newsstand for a couple of months, then got a subscription, which I've kept ever since.
My idea of science fiction was likely formed in the 1950s, by Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Norton, de Camp, Leinster, van Vogt, Anderson, and others. Heck, I read Witch World when it was still science fiction. I haunted the paperback racks at Straup's Drug Store, where I bought just about every SF book that appeared. The Ace Doubles were a great favorite. Bulmer, Brackett, Chandler, even the early Samuel R. Delany: The Jewels of Aptor, The Fall of the Towers. Then there were the annual Best of Fantasy and Science Fiction from Judith Merrill, the Groff Conklin anthologies, and so on.
Campbell was a big part of the mix, but not likely the biggest part -- except insofar as many of the authors I read had been influenced by him, one way or another.
SCHWEITZER: Were you reading SF in the 1960s? What did you make of the New Wave wars?
FLYNN:: There was a war? Who knew? At the time, I was a reader, not a fan; so I was not hip to the jive. I read and enjoyed stories like "Day Million," "Repent Harlequin ...," "Riders of the Purple Wage," "The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde," et al., which I suppose were considered New Wave. I've never been too clear on what the Wave was supposed to consist of. I was outside the bubble, so to speak, and never even heard about it until after it was over. It does strike me that nothing has a shorter shelf-life than things that are relentlessly up-to-date, once the date has passed.
SCHWEITZER: Did you find that, say, the Dangerous Visions books had any impact on your ideas about what science fiction could be? I am guessing you probably did not read New Worlds.
I read Dangerous Visions and did not understand what was so dangerous about them. But then, when someone told me that my novel Firestar was "old fashioned," I didn't understand what was the problem with that, either. What does diversity mean if it doesn't mean all sorts of diverse stories and story-telling?
SCHWEITZER: As for more recent movements and such, what did you make of the cyberpunks? Did you feel any affinity with that?
FLYNN:: I have to admit that cyberpunk, to the extent that it actually described a coher
ent thing, did not turn me on. I came more and more to believe that it was not a possible future. However, George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails, which I think was ur-cyberpunk, was a thoroughly good and serious work. So I still go by particular books, not by "movements."
SCHWEITZER: And then there's the question of where the future went. Many commentators (notably Judith Berman) have suggested that science fiction is turning away from the future, or that it is dealing with yesterday's tomorrow, in that the typical SF vision of the future stands on Campbellian SF, the Foundation series, maybe even the Lensman series, and other rather aged constructions. Any thoughts on this? Do you think that SF is eventually going to have to jettison a lot of its traditional baggage to remain relevant to younger readers?
FLYNN:: I'm going to suggest that it doesn't matter, since the younger readers have never read any of that stuff. I once gave a horror story of mine ("Dragons" in Weird Tales) to the then-secretary in the office where I worked. A reviewer had said that it used Standard Ending Number Such-and-such, ho-hum. When she came to the end, the secretary screamed. Out loud. Right there. I was flattered. You see, she had never read that sort of story before and it blind-sided her completely. So old-fashioned tropes can seem new to the virgin reader. But then, the experienced reader likes to see something new and different, too.
I would be happy if younger readers existed, as opposed to younger gamers and younger watchers. Logos has been fighting a losing battle with Icon - words vs. pictures - for some time now. Visual media are now more important than print media. And the medium really is, to some extent, the message. There are things you can do in print that you cannot do in visuals. (And vice versa, of course.) Images and poses matter more than plots or scientific plausibility; excitement and immediacy matter more than textual depth, or the wordplay that New Wave was supposedly known for. There has been an ongoing loss of attention span in large segments of the population, and reading requires quiet reflection, not a controller and quick reflexes. In other words, the competition is not between today's Future and yesterday's Future. Both are allies in competition with the everlovin' Now.
In fact, I suspect that younger readers would have more trouble with New Wave stories than Campbellians did. There is nothing so dated as a tomorrow that was relevant yesterday.
But I have had some odd complaints. "Too many characters. My head hurts." Or "You spend too much time on character development. I just want content." Are these canaries in the coal mine?
SCHWEITZER: What happens if I say "Singularity" in your presence?
FLYNN:: New religions are always amusing. See my story "Places Where the Roads Don't Go" in the recent collection Captive Dreams.
I have sometimes contended that we already went through the Singularity: it lasted from 1870 to 1920. During that time the daily lives of people in the cities of the Western World changed more than they ever had before and (to a large extent) since. To my grandfather, born in 1900, automobiles, telephones, telegraph were an old hat. There is more of a qualitative difference between not having a car and having a car than there is between having a Hummer or Prius and having a Model T. There is a bigger gap between having a telephone and not having a telephone than there is between having a cell phone and a land line. What happened after 1920? Basically, 1920 became faster, bigger, cheaper, more plentiful. Planes got faster and lost their propellers. Radios got pictures. Hollerith punch card tabulators became automated digital computers. The first successful jet airplane take-off was in 1910. (Unfortunately, the first successful jet landing came much later.) Holograms were described scientifically, also in 1910. Goddard flew the first liquid propellant rockets.
Now, I won't defend the conceit indefinitely, because quantity can be a quality all its own, and it matters that things get faster, cheaper, and so on. You can do things with an internet that the old internet of telegraph operators and (later) ham radio people could not do; and more people can do it. (Ham radios were expensive.) But I do love to turn things backward and upside down. The first time I had lunch with Stan Schmidt, he asked me if I was working on a new story and I turned my mind blank and blurted out "psychohistory was invented a hundred years ago." I don't know where that came from, but I know where it went to: In the Country of the Blind. I guess, what it means is that to someone from 1920, 1970 would have been Gosh-Wow but not utterly shocking. But to someone from 1870, 1920 would have blown him away. When my grandfather was a kid, the Wrights flew at Kitty Hawk; before he died he watched a man walk on the Moon - on TV, in his living room. One summer he took care of horses at the rental stable. The next summer, there was a rental car, too. The summer after that, there were no horses. We now think rapid change is the norm. We expect it; and to some extent we envision it.
Hmm. Might be that the major tropes of SF were set by what went down in those seminal 50 years.
But I understand the religious impulses that underlie a lot of the transhumanist/singularity foo-foo. Rapture for Nerds, and all that. Nietzsche's search for the Superman continues.
SCHWEITZER: I am reminded of a certain magazine editor, whom I shall not name, who, when asked why there were no spaceships and planetary scenes on his covers, remarked, "That would make people think the magazine was devoted to nostalgia." I think the perception that Firestar is "old-fashioned" is similar to this. That is, the positive, Campbellian vision of a bunch of can-do guys in spacesuits conquering, first, the Solar System, then the Galaxy, seems to be based on the SF of the 40s and 50s, exactly what you and I read when we were growing up. This gets back to the question of "What happened to 'the future'?" Is this consensus future something we still believe in?
FLYNN:: It goes back deeper than Campbell. It was the core of the Scientific Revolution, articulated by Descartes and Francis Bacon and the rest, that science would henceforth be dedicated to expanding Man's "mastery of the universe." Look at Boyle's list of the great problems facing science (one is tempted to write Science™). It reads like a summary of Golden Age SF. In effect, this was the basic idea of Science that defined the Modern Ages. It was quite different in intent from medieval science.
I think there has been a genuine turning away from the future in Late Modern culture. Science is being perceived more and more as a burden on the planet. For example, in 1989 the American Chemical Society commissioned an exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American History to be called "Science in American Life." The result was "an exhibition that presented American science as a series of moral debacles and environmental catastrophes: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Silent Spring, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, and the explosion of the space shuttle." We are now more likely to anticipate what can go wrong than to anticipate what benefits might accrue from new science and technology. There have been serious proposals for a board to screen proposed scientific advances before they are allowed, lest they lead to whatever it is that people fear they may lead to. The fading of the "can-do guys in spacesuits" is not due to a lack of spacesuits.
SCHWEITZER: Your suggestion that the younger readers aren't going to know any of the older stuff suggests a profound change in the way science fiction is published and read. Stop and think about the first SF you read as a kid. Probably some early Heinlein, some Bradbury, Adventures in Time and Space. Had any of it been published in your lifetime? But today, it may well be, SF is a blank to most new readers, who may have grown up with Star Wars and Star Trek, but have no awareness of the older literature. Doesn't this make the writer's job harder? Either you have to reinvent everything, or else you have to just go with the Star Wars/Star Trek vision, which may not be very interesting.
FLYNN:: When I was growing up, we depended on libraries for our reading. Hence, our reading included older books as well as contemporary. Perhaps that resulted in a greater sense of continuity with the past. For whatever reason, there is now more of a focus on the immediate. Gotta keep your eyes on the screen and get ready to jump or shoot. Many young people cannot watch black-and-white movies, for example. I don't mean they don'
t, I mean they seem unable to process black-and-white imagery - all that shadow/focus/angle of shot stuff doesn't register on their perceptions. You have to learn to see an image, and they never learned to see black-and-white.
In one sense, the writer's job is harder. We are writing in a visual age, not a verbal age. We are writing science fiction in an age when science is being viewed with growing suspicion. But in another sense, it may be easier. We can revisit older themes with a new perspective.
Longer term, I'm more hopeful. There have always been renaissances, when the values of the past have been resurrected.
SCHWEITZER: Do you think younger readers are still reading SF? What sense do you get from fanmail or whatever who your readers are?
FLYNN:: I don't think they are, at least if attendance at SF cons is any sort of indicator. The younger crowd, when they read, seems more attuned to fantasy and horror. If they read SF, it is more attuned to Late Modern Hollywood sensibilities - and special effects work better in a visual medium than in a written one. But this is simply an unexamined impression, not something I've given a lot of study to. Just what I see at cons and the like, and that may not be -- probably is not -- typical even of SF readers. In any case, I don't write for younger readers myself in the sense of targeting that audience, although it may be that there are teenagers who do read my stuff.
Fan mail is a thing of the past. I used to get some in the early days -- in the 80s and 90s, but receive very little now. No one writes letters. It's all tweeting and such. Since I had a full-time job until the past couple years, I never had time for that. I have a blog now, and get some reactions via the comm box. But most of those I do hear from tend not to be young readers. I recently received a fan-comment from a reader of On the Razor's Edge from a user whose on-line picture looks to be in his 30s. He describes himself as "a Catholic anarcho-capitalist software-engineering business-owner" who enjoys "blacksmithing, guitar playing, wood turning, gourmet cooking, throwing ceramic pots, and a few other things." Whatever else he might be, a kid he is not. At a recent reading/book signing there was a young woman in attendance, but she was there because her parents were there.