Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  I saw that on Tor.com they posted a map of this dreamworld. Did you draw that map and then they professionalized it or did someone collaborate with you on that?

  I did draw the map. My brother is a cartographer, so I grew up drawing maps. Like any good fantasist, one of the great delights of writing fantasy is making up your own maps, so I really enjoyed putting that map together. There is one classic map that shows up online a lot, and I used that as a starting point for some thinking I was doing, partly because I wanted it to fit into a vertical layout, and most of the maps are usually landscape oriented. I wanted something you could actually read on one page of a paperback.

  You mentioned the language in this and that you weren’t really trying to imitate Lovecraft’s style. I mean, the style in this is unbelievably gorgeous.

  Thank you.

  Could you talk about what approach you took to crafting the specific style in this book?

  When I started it, I was going to try for Lovecraft’s voice, but the more I read it, the less I liked it, and the more I realized that I wanted something that was lush, but I wanted it to be lush and precise. That’s what I aimed for. I usually try to experiment with style when I’m writing, so I’ll try something in a very austere style, or a very florid style, but at some point during the early stages of drafting this, I realized I just wanted it to be my voice, so it ends up being probably the closest to an unaltered voice for me that I’ve written, except possibly for “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” which I wrote a few years back. I guess that’s sort of my natural voice when I’m not trying other things.

  There were a lot of words in this that I did not know. Are those words you know? I thought maybe you were intentionally trying to mimic that aspect of Lovecraft. Sort of the unfamiliar words.

  I wouldn’t necessarily have added all that. I do know all that vocabulary. I was a precocious child, and I was bored growing up in a small town, so I read dictionaries and encyclopedias, but I would not have used all of that vocabulary for writing, let’s say, an adventure novel set in the 1930s, but I did enjoy being able to use some of that vocabulary. It was trying to chime with the fact that he would have words that when I was a girl I would look up, and I wouldn’t find them in any dictionary. Not even the Oxford English Dictionary, that gargantuan tome. It wouldn’t even be in that. I was always a little bit in awe of that. In fact, there are, I think, two made up words in this, which is sort of my tribute to the fact that I’m not one hundred percent sure that he didn’t just make those things up.

  Is there anything in this that actively contradicts anything in Lovecraft that you’re like, “Nah, this just doesn’t work. I’ve got to completely change that.”

  That’s a really good question, and I haven’t thought about it that way. The biggest thing is that in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, I changed the geography just a little bit. When Randolph Carter crosses to visit his friend Kuranes, it takes him three days, and I didn’t want this to be a three-day trip. I wanted this to be an immense blue sea trip. I didn’t want to change the geography, but that’s why I put in the thing about the mutable geography. Sometimes a thing takes three days, sometimes a thing takes three weeks. You can’t trust it. That’s, I think, very appropriate to a world that’s being constantly reshaped and redriven by these whimsical, selfish gods.

  That’s really interesting. That makes sense, because it is a dream world. I guess that’s sort of a double-edged sword, because a lot of the times in stories about dreams, there’s so much of this sense that anything could happen that you lose interest as a reader because there’s no rules, and it starts to feel arbitrary. Was that a concern you had at all when writing about this sort of dream world?

  Absolutely. One of my other favorite books is Alice in Wonderland, and I’ve thought sometimes about how it would be fun to readdress that as an adult. The thing about dreams is that, my dreams, at least, make no sense. I know people who are lucid dreamers or people who have those long, dramatic dreams. But my dreams tend to be a fragment of this attached randomly by one ligament to a fragment of that. Sometimes there are no ligaments at all attaching them. Fiction that’s based on dreams often feels artificial because their dreams are too narrative. Or it feels incoherent because they have no narrative and story requires that. I was very aware of that, and that’s why there’s a lot more identifying of the number of days things happen in than I would have put into a story set on our planet. I would not have said, “Well, it took them five days to get there, but it might have taken nine or it could have taken three.” That was because I was constantly trying to reanchor the reader into the fact that not everything is steady, but this is a fact.

  I actually heard you say in an interview that you don’t dream much.

  I don’t. For a lot of years, I was on a medication that pretty much prevented my dreaming, and I didn’t even realize it until I went off that medication and found that all of a sudden I was having dreams again, and they were pretty great. Just seeing things at night. I had forgotten that when I was a little girl, sleeping was about my favorite thing to do, because dreams were so interesting.

  I interviewed John Cleese and he told this story that Thomas Edison thought that he got all his best ideas just as he was drifting off to sleep, so he would sit in a chair holding ball bearings, and then when he fell asleep, he would drop them, and he would wake up. So he would constantly be falling asleep and waking up over and over again.

  I understand that A. E. van Vogt would set an alarm all night. Jim Gunn tells this story, I don’t remember whether it was every hour, every twenty minutes, or every two hours, but he would set alarms all night long, and he would write down whatever he had thought, and then he would go back to sleep. I have to say, that kind of makes sense with the way van Vogt writes because it really does feel like every seven hundred words he’s forgotten which book he’s writing, and he’s just writing another one.

  I thought he had a rule for himself that every seven hundred words he had to introduce some completely unrelated concept.

  Right, the van Vogtian scene where you always bring something new in. You can really see at the end when he strains to pull it all together, or he just sins boldly and refuses to. It’s always very entertaining watching the last chapter of a van Vogt novel.

  Did anything in this book come out of your dreams or did dreaming play a role in writing this at all?

  I think so. I think that the landscape in the very last parts when she’s in our plane, a lot of those landscapes, while they’re real landscapes, at night I have recollections of dreams where I would be walking in yellow cornfields, and the sky would be very dark overhead, and I was very aware of that when I was writing this. There are other things, I think the way the deep sea feels, that’s based in dreams for me, but at no point is there something that I would say, “Well, when I was sixteen, I had this dream and it changed me forever.” Although, now that you mention it, I do remember dreaming about giant spiders biting my shoulders off and surely if you can’t fit that into a Lovecraft story, there’s no place for it. I should have put that in.

  Speaking of the deep sea, just the part where Vellitt is looking into the ocean and sees the lights. I thought that was a stunning sequence in this story.

  Thank you. I was swept away by it as well. I had this sense of immense mass. A lot of times, it’s hard to tell in places like planes and on the sea. I take a lot of cruises with my mother, and it’s really hard to tell if something is small or far away, and you’ll see a boat, and it’s like it’s either a very small fishing boat not too far away or it’s a cargo ship a very long distance away, and I cannot tell right away. We go to Alaska and the glaciers, you’ll come up to them, and either that glacier is forty-eight-feet-high or that glacier is a mile-and-a-half-high, and there is nothing to give you a sense of scale unless there’s a smaller boat in front of it. And even then, you can’t tell, because you don’t know how big the boat is. I was thinking about that, just the incomprehensibility of scale
that happens when something is outside of our experience.

  We’ve talked about Vellitt, your protagonist; do you want to say more about her?

  One thing that always annoys me about older characters in television, movies, and she’s fifty-five, so I’d say she’s not older, because I’m fifty-six, so she’s really the age of sense, I’d like to say. But, one thing that’s always irritating is there’s a real assumption that you can only do and be certain things.

  Five years ago, I was a rock climber, and I was bouldering V4s and V5s, which is a very high level. None of the people who write about grandmothers making cookies ever imagine someone who is a grandmother’s age could do something like that. It’s not to say that all grandmothers can, but there are grandmothers who can, and it would be nice to see those people represented.

  I wanted to write something about a character who had a complicated and rich past, and I wanted to write about an intellectual who had not always been in an intellectual, because I find as a new college professor, I’m pushing a lot against people who have never done anything but be college professors and college students. There’s so much out there that they could have done but they didn’t do, and that’s what I wanted to talk about, was a woman who had done all these interesting things, made some decisions to do the right thing, the sensible thing, but still retained many of those skills, and also some of the nostalgia for that. When I had to stop climbing, it kind of broke my heart a little bit because I was never going to be the person who climbed mountains the same way again. I wanted Vellitt to be that. I did not write her to be autobiographical, but of course she turned out to be more autobiographical than any of my other characters have ever been.

  Like you, she’s a college professor, which is kind of what kicks off the plot of the story. Do you want to say a little bit about what the setup is that sets off the story?

  Vellitt Boe is a professor of mathematics at Ulthar Women’s College. Ulthar is a town in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, and that’s where Randolph Carter meets lots and lots of cats. There’s in fact a short story called “The Cats of Ulthar.” So, Ulthar is packed full of sort of untamed and also domesticated cats.

  What he says is quite minimal, it’s a town with a tower in the middle of a hill, and there’s a priest up there, and he plies the priest with alcohol to get some information out of him, but I thought, there have to be schools in this place, so I decided there’s an Oxford-style university in Ulthar that’s like Oxford in the ’30s, which is within a decade of when Lovecraft was writing his books. There were women’s colleges, but there were very few of them, and they were walking on thin ice. People recognized in the abstract that women could be educated and some of them should be educated, but that women had to be held to a different standard.

  Vellitt is a college professor teaching maths to the women in the only women’s college in Ulthar, the Ulthar Women’s College, which means she’s also kind of the keeper of the morals of the girls. One of the girls, her best student in twenty years of teaching, elopes, and she leaves a letter saying she’s going to be with Stephan. Beautiful Stephan. And Vellitt decides that they need to retrieve her. The problem being that the man that Clarie Jurat, the student, has run away with is not actually a man of their country. He’s a man from The Waking World, so he’s taking Clarie back to The Waking World where nobody from Dreamland has ever been, and in fact, nobody is entirely sure you can go. But Vellitt, with her past, was a far traveler when she was a young woman, and she volunteers to go, and that’s the start of the quest.

  One of the reviews I read describes this as a road trip story. Would you call this a road trip?

  Every story that moves across space is a road trip. All road trip stories have picaresque elements, because you have episodes based on geography or based on author’s whim. That’s one of the things I love about road trip stories. Yeah, it’s absolutely a road trip. I think you could argue in a very strange way that it’s sort of a buddy movie because she has a cat with her, even though the cat is nothing but an ordinary cat. It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t say funny things. It doesn’t do things cats don’t do. But, she’s not travelling alone. She’s travelling with something that is always with her for reasons that are very confusing to everybody, including me. It’s also a quest, because quests always take place across geography as well, and you see this if you read really anything, but if you read Lord of the Rings, you see the episodic nature of certain things that are happening.

  I thought it was really interesting that you chose to have Vellitt not have a companion that she talks to in this story. I think most stories, the first thing they would do is introduce a companion for Vellitt to talk to, so this story is much more about what’s going on in her head and what she’s seeing and feeling. What was your thought process behind that decision?

  I’ve written a lot of stories about isolated characters moving through space where they encounter others and then they part ways, but when I’m teaching writing, as a joke, I used to say everybody should put a dog in a story because a dog randomizes things. If you are a writer, and you are marching your characters through a plot, it can feel like they’re being marched through a plot. Here’s a point, here’s a point, and now we have to get to here. When you add any kind of a randomizer, like a dog which needs to be walked, or a baby which needs to be nursed, or anything like that, you shake things up a little bit because there’s always the chance that something else will happen, and with this cat, it doesn’t really do anything that cats don’t do. She does, rarely, talk to it. But it gives me a place where she’s looking up at the stars, something warm can curl up next to her, and that gives her something she can do besides just look at the stars. It gives me a sort of tactile, interactive, organic mover through the story.

  You mentioned earlier that in Lovecraft stories, all the dreamers are men, and you carry that through into this. That there’s almost this cosmic sexism at work. Could you talk about that?

  All the dreamers are men. All of the gods are men. All of the characters who are mentioned are men. I don’t know what people from the Dreamlands spring from except the minds of the dreamers, so my assumption is that’s some of what’s happening, but also, they have their own lives. Ulthar goes on even when there’s no master dreamer there. Ulthar is still changing in its own slow way. It’s behind the curve of our world. It’s always behind us, because of course in dreams we tend to be nostalgic. You point backwards, not into the future, in most dreams.

  I really wanted to think about that. What does it mean to have a world where everything is male? I didn’t realize until after I had written it that these whimsical gods that change things all the time almost exactly map onto the way it would have been for women in the ’30s. They can shut down your college. They can beat you to death and not get arrested for it. They can do all of these terrible things. They can take your goods and leave you destitute. They can lie to you. All of the different practical ways that men would rule women’s lives, it all is mapped into the Dreamlands, where whimsical gods make things happen and everybody else has to just cope, has to work around their bad days, or their need for rest, or their petty rivalries.

  There’s a part in the book where Vellitt meets Randolph Carter, and he tells her, “Women don’t dream large dreams. It is all babies and housework. Tiny dreams.”

  I think that’s the way certainly back in the ’30s, but I would say even now, there’s a sense, sometimes I’ll read critiques of or reviews of women’s novels, and it will feel like there’s a sense that, well, this is kind of a big topic. This is a big story or a big novel, and this is something that is changing all the time, and it’s so much better than it was twenty years ago, but I feel as though this is the air that is changing is that sense that women want to stay home. I read a lot of 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s magazines as research for something else I’m doing, and a lot of those, women didn’t really have big dreams. If you read Little Women, the woman who wants to be a novelist gives it all up to marry an old
er man and raise children. Amy is the only one who doesn’t, and her fallback position is that if she doesn’t—sorry to spoil Little Women for you people—but her fallback position if she doesn’t make it as an artist in Paris is to come home and marry a rich man. That’s the world that it used to be, and that’s the world that Vellitt lives in. That’s the world that Vellitt, in the end, is escaping from.

  A big theme in this book, speaking of the ending, well, maybe not to spoil it, but a big theme is to mention that the gods are so capricious in this world, and Lovecraft is famous for transitioning horror away from Christian notions of Heaven and Hell and damnation being what scares you to more atheistic notions of the vastness of the cosmos and human insignificance as what’s scary.

  Right, yeah, the cold cosmological horror of deep space.

  Is that something you were thinking of with this theme of the evil gods and that they’re capricious like the universe is capricious?

  Definitely. And, yeah, petty. Because by the end, a world without gods has its problems, but a world without gods also does not have the moon being pulled this way and that by whim. So, the rules apply. There are rules in a world that is not dominated by whimsical gods, and rules give people structure. Give you the chance to make predictions about the future, make predictions about possibilities.

  How do you feel like this book is going to fit in? There’s this whole industry of Lovecraftian fiction. There’s whole presses that publish nothing but Lovecraftian fiction. What do you make of that?

  That’s always been the case, because Arkham House is always doing that, and August Derleth, I think he was doing it, but certainly a lot of people were playing around with Lovecraftian horror or Lovecraft pastiches and tributes and sequels and things like that. I didn’t realize just how prevalent the Lovecraft thing was until after I was almost finished with this book, and then I thought, “I don’t know if I want to play in this field,” but I’m happy I did, actually. I think Lovecraft has come to the foreground because there’s been so much discussion about the World Fantasy Award, which was a bust of Lovecraft, and a lot of questions about why is fantasy being represented by someone who is better known for his horror, who is also a racist in writing. A lot of discussion within the field of science fiction and fantasy about this. Does he deserve the attention he gets? If so, why? If not, why not? Right now I think that a lot of people are pointing back to Lovecraft and saying, “I loved him, but now I see the reasons why I was always uncomfortable.” Or, “I love him, and I feel like he merits a second look.”