Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  You mentioned how often your stories get these vastly different interpretations. Do you think that’s true of all stories, or do you think there’s something particular about the way that you tell stories that lends itself to these vastly differing interpretations?

  That’s a good question too. One answer is that it’s always possible to read a story in any of a thousand different ways. I used to get in trouble in college in poetry class because I would invariably argue that every religious poem was a sex poem, and I would point to all of the language and be like, see, see, this is the charged language of sexuality, and eventually the professor and I would end up in a donnybrook, and I would storm out of class, and I’d have to take it again the next semester. I almost didn’t get out of college because of one poetry class.

  I know from experience with my friends that we do a lot of that. We say, “What if you read Pride and Prejudice, except you’re thinking about it as if it’s all about the horses. How does that change the story?” I bet you don’t even remember there were horses, and yet horses are pivotal to the plot, so we were always playing these little party tricks of reinterpreting stories according to this filter or that. I think with most stories, that can be done with. You can always say, “Well, I think this is the subversive. I think Tess of the d’Urbervilles has a subversive feminist subtext.” I wouldn’t say that I do more of it than other people, but I do think that, because my language is often so precise, the fact that I leave something purposefully vague makes people crazy. They put their thumb on that spot, and they start pushing at it trying to figure out what exactly it means. Other people who are more diffuse writers, and I’m thinking specifically of “The Hortlak” by Kelly Link, which is a brilliant story, but if you ask somebody what that’s about … the interpretations are everywhere, because you really have a hard time telling what it’s about. That’s the gift of that story. It’s so broad, and so strange, and diffuse, and wondrous.

  That’s interesting. I’m sure our producer, John Joseph Adams, would also want me to mention your story “The Apartment Dweller’s Bestiary,” which he picked for his Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Do you want to tell us about that story?

  “The Apartment Dweller’s Bestiary” is, I now know, part of three stories. It’s a collection of somewhere between sixteen and nineteen very, very short stories about the animals that live in your apartment when you’re alone. So they live under your bed, or they live in your oven because you never cook, or they party in your shoes at night, and all the little animals, they’re the company that fills the empty space of the apartment. There are two that I’m working on right after the story I’m finishing right now, there are two other “Apartment Dwellers” compendia which are going to be different stages of adulthood, but the three of them together will be about a 10,000-word super-random thing. So, the bestiary I originally wrote because I wanted it to be a chapbook with illustrations, but I have a full-time job, plus I do a lot of stuff for the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and I just didn’t have time to organize illustrators or anything like that, so if any illustrators are listening to this, you’re certainly welcome to write to me.

  To what extent would you say those little sketches are autobiographical? Do you have a lot of experience living by yourself in apartments?

  Yeah, yeah, I have. I wrote all of them when I was living in my beautiful apartment, the apartment I just moved out of, which was the third floor in a 1910s apartment building, and there was a crawlspace between the roof and the ceiling, and squirrels lived in there, and birds lived in the bathroom vents, and spiders lived in the ceiling, and at any given time, I’d be reading, or sleeping, or looking out the window, and I’d hear skittering noises that weren’t mine, and they weren’t my cats, and I would think, “Those are the beasts.” You never live alone. You’re always surrounded by the other things that share your space, and so that was the inspiration for it. At that point, I had lived alone for almost a decade, and I’d gotten really used to the weird noises and the sudden discoveries. Obviously, a mouse has been living in my oven kind of discoveries. Memo to self, use oven more often.

  In New York, you have to use it for storage.

  Right, right. That’s what I always thought. That’s where you put the pots. That’s where you put baked goods if you don’t want the animals to get to them.

  In addition to squirrels and things, the story also reminded me a lot about cats and dogs and the way people get attached to them or use them as status symbols or things like that.

  Right, or substitutes for company. There’s one called the Orco, where if you fall asleep with a book in bed, and then the Orco is there, and you reach across. It’s almost like all the pieces of someone, I say in the story. So all the ways that they substitute for company, or the ways that they console you for the lack of company, or reward you for the lack of company.

  You mentioned the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which, actually, I first met you at that back in 2003. I took a science fiction writing class there. I was curious, what’s new with the Center for the Study of Science Fiction?

  We are in the middle of four new initiatives. Three of them I can’t talk about, curse it. But the one I can talk about is that the University of Kansas, which has always had a lively science fiction degree and program, is starting a vertical column of science fiction courses that are specifically science fiction-colon-something or other. So, Science Fiction: The Canon, Science Fiction: Books That Should Be Canon, Science Fiction: Afro-Futurism, Science Fiction: Slipstream, Science Fiction: Fantasy, because we’re using science fiction inclusively because of tradition, mostly. We’re starting to pull this together, and part of this is because we are well into the process of building a science fiction certificate, which would be independent of a degree. Once we’ve done that, that would allow people to get a degree in anything: English, French, microbiology, and also get a science fiction certificate, which would indicate that they have some knowledge about science fiction, and also some knowledge about extrapolative thinking patterns, because one of our core premises is that science fiction is not so much a literature as it is an intellectual mode of inquiry that allows you to explore things in ways that nothing else does.

  You also do these weeklong summer workshops, right? Because that’s what I did.

  Yeah, two weeks long. In the summertime, the Center does a two-week residential workshop mostly not for students, but we always end up with a student or two, usually adults of various sorts. One for short fiction and one for novels. They’re both intensive workshops and everybody comes out of it strung out and exhausted. We then have the Campbell conference, which is the conference at which the Sturgeon and Campbell award for best novel are given. There are two Campbell awards, by the way, one is the Campbell award that’s given at the Hugos, and one is the Campbell that we give, which is the best novel of the year. That Campbell conference this year is actually the academic track of Worldcon, which is happening even as this thing has aired. Then, the second two weeks are three courses, and now we’re going to be adding a fourth, which is advanced workshops in novels and short-fiction. We’re starting a young adult workshop, which would be for writers of young adult fiction, and there is a teaching institute, which is actually an excuse to read twenty-six science fiction novels or one hundred science fiction short stories and discuss them in a two-week period. So, the two weeks has now expanded to be four weeks, and by the end of that we are very exhausted, but it’s also the most exhilarating thing I’ve ever done.

  I saw you were going to be teaching at Clarion West next year?

  Yes, I’m very excited about that, too. I taught there a couple of years ago, and I absolutely adored it. I’ll be teaching, I believe, week three, which means that I’m the week where I start to put people back together after they realize how much they have to learn. I’m not sure.

  Plenty of opportunities to study with Kij, people, if you’re interested.

  Yes, yes, come and stud
y with me.

  This is kind of a random question, but I was curious, I remember when I met you, you said that you had gotten a tattoo for each of your first two books, I was wondering if you’ve ever gotten any more. How do you celebrate publishing a novella? Do you get half a tattoo?

  Just a little tiny tattoo. No, actually, I have not maintained that, and I was just thinking about that the other day. When I was a rock climber, I got climbing tattoos, but I didn’t continue with that, and now I will have had two books come out in a two-year period, so I have to decide, am I going to get a big garland of other animals or what am I going to do here? That would be kind of fun, actually. I could get a little bird, and give each of the birds a name or something.

  We’re pretty much out of time. Do you have any other projects you want to mention, or maybe just remind people of the stuff you have coming out?

  Sure, of course. I’ve got The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe coming out, in fact, in two days. I finally saw a copy of it, and I could not be happier. You can’t see, but I’m clutching it to myself.

  Gorgeous cover.

  Yeah, they did a wonderful job with it. I have a French edition of The Man Who Bridged the Mist coming out in two months from Le Bélial’, I believe, which I’m very excited for, because French is one of the few languages I can read. I can actually pretend that I’m reading somebody else’s book. Then next year, I’m really excited that The River Bank, which is sort of my retake of The Wind in the Willows, is coming out from Small Beer. That’ll be next summer. In the meantime, I expect I’ll have a bunch of short fiction coming out, because that’s what I’m concentrating on right now.

  Great. Everyone go check out The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe. The author is Kij Johnson. Kij, thank you so much for joining us.

  Thank you so much, David.

  *

  ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

  *

  Author Spotlight: James S.A. Corey

  Laurel Amberdine | 266 words

  How did “Rate of Change” originate?

  As best I recall, it came from a conversation we had about Octavia Butler’s novel Lilith’s Brood, and the way she handled the struggle of the older generation to cope with their own children. It seems like a metaphor for a very common experience. That sparked the idea about technology and being left behind by your own culture.

  What was your collaboration process like for this story? Was it different from how you write novels together?

  We plotted it out together, then one of us did the rough draft and the other did the polish. It’s pretty much the same way we do chapters, except there was only one instead of fifty-some.

  If you could replace your body like the people in “Rate of Change” could, what would you choose?

  I think it would be really interesting to fly under my body’s own power. Something birdlike, I guess.

  Do you have any advice for newer writers, especially those who want to try collaborating?

  The keys to collaboration are to agree beforehand on what kind of project you’re doing and then understand that the point is that it will come out differently than it would have if you’d done it by yourself.

  What do you like to do besides writing?

  Avoid work, mostly.

  *

  ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

  Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she writes science fiction and fantasy and works for Locus Magazine. Her YA fantasy novel Luminator is forthcoming from Reuts Publishing in 2017. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

  *

  Author Spotlight: Kat Howard

  Arley Sorg | 1087 words

  This is such a beautiful tale of love and longing. What I find remarkable is the mother’s connection to the sea, and specifically the way she maintains that connection through her daughter. On the one hand, I’m curious about your relationship to the sea; but I am also curious about whether or not this relationship, between mother and daughter, and especially sharing a connection or connecting through someone, is modeled on personal experiences?

  Thank you. I love the ocean. I’m never so happy as when I’m by a large body of salt water. I’ve snorkeled and scubaed and was part of a four-year marine chemistry program in high school. So oceans have always been a place of fascination and love for me. I really wish there were an ocean-oriented Launchpad-type program for SFF writers. So for me, part of this story was just choosing a setting that I loved, and trying to make that love clear on the page.

  To answer the second part, while I do occasionally steal pieces from my own life and give them to my characters, not this time. I am lucky that I have a close relationship with my own mom, but the mother and daughter of this story have their own.

  For me, the transitions really work. I like the way everything layers. I also enjoy the use of tense: moving from an almost fairy tale past tense to a present tense that is lush with sensory details. Some people hesitate to work with present-tense storytelling, while others use it almost exclusively. For you, what are the advantages and challenges of working in present tense? Stylistically do you have elements that are your “go-tos,” or comfort zones, or do you experiment a lot in your work?

  Present tense isn’t usually a go-to for me, but for this instance, it seemed right—I wanted the reader in the experience with the character, as she was having that experience. And the present tense sections were actually the first ones I wrote. The first draft of this story had none of the past tense sections, and I realized that it didn’t work.

  I do tend to gravitate toward writing in first person, but at the same time, I try to consider what’s best for the story, and to push myself into trying new things. I have my favorites, but I also don’t want to always write the same thing, or in the same way.

  I feel like there’s a separation between the outside world and the inside of the house, almost as if what goes on outside is wild and unruly, thrilling, unpredictable (“perilous”); and inside is safe and controlled—human. There is also the sense of limitations inside and a sort of limitless world beyond. Is this deliberate and meaningful/metaphoric?

  I’d love to seem like this very controlled, all-seeing sort of writer and say, “of course,” but that wouldn’t be the full truth of the answer. Did I set out to do this, in the sense that I sat down and thought about symbolism and weight and metaphor? No. But there is that general sense of separation between our own safe worlds, inside our houses, and the wild and perilous places outside, and I think that’s something that’s so often present in literature that the symbolism is easy to reach for. At the same time, I think there’s often the idea that at home is where you are your truest self, and that is certainly not true for either of the women in this story.

  Stories—especially myth and fairy tale—play an important role throughout. Were these important to you when you were growing up?

  Oh, absolutely. I remember going to the library, and checking out every myth and fairy tale collection I could find. And I remember reading them, and seeing the similarities and differences in the stories, whether those were retellings of fairy tales that focused on different elements, or the similarities in the Greek and Roman myths. (I liked the Greek pantheon better, because I though the gods and goddesses had better names.) But they gave me the idea that I could pick and choose—take a favorite piece from one version of a story and combine it with a favorite piece from another version, until I had my own favorite. I suppose I still do that.


  At the end, I feel like this piece is as much about freedom/release. While the things that both characters felt throughout are never necessarily resolved or healed, there is an openness to the final expression, an unhindered catharsis (“the tide is pouring from my hair …”); simultaneously, the two of them actually remain tied to each other. Is it one of life’s truths (and ironies) that we find emotional freedom and release through our relationships?

  I think we are interconnected people. So certainly sometimes we’re lucky enough to find relationships where we can find that freedom and release—the people we can be our true selves with. Finding that is a great joy. At the same time, I think that there are also relationships where we’re asked to limit or hide ourselves, where we feel like we have to be something that we’re not. I hope more people find the first, find that freedom, and that joy.

  I think this story is filled with subtleties, and I think it’s the sort of story that people can potentially read a variety of ways.

  Is there anything you want to tell readers about this piece that I haven’t touched on? Also—what are you working on now that we can look forward to?

  I am definitely not the sort of writer who feels like she should interpret her own work for readers, so I am going to step back and let the readers find in it what they want to. In terms of what I’m working on now, my next novel, An Unkindness of Magicians, will be out in September 2017 from Saga press. Social-climbing magicians engaged in a ritual—and often fatal—competition for power in modern NYC. I’ll also have a short fiction collection out from Saga in early 2018— A Cathedral of Myth and Bone. It will have some previously published work, as well as new pieces, including a modern Arthurian novella called “Once, Future.”