What do you think are the benefits of revisiting history through literature? Do you think the injection of fiction into historical events contemporizes any lessons to be found in humanity’s past?
I’m less interested in lessons than in resonances. History exists as narrative and so, like narrative, always has a point of view. Some of history’s narratives will be invisible to whole generations of scholars—many of the narratives of history that so fascinate us in the twenty-first century could not have been detected by nineteenth-century scholars and many historical details seemed so implausible to them that they simply assumed the notaries and chanceries, etc., who recorded them meant something else. To me, it makes sense for fiction to revisit those narratives when they speak to our own experiences and understanding of the world.
Twelfth Night seems a perfect historical lens through which to view modern, persistent gender-role expectations. Do you have an abiding interest in Shakespeare, or were you drawn to this play through explorations of gender differences in literature?
I’ve always been drawn to Twelfth Night because of its play with gender roles. But I’ve long been a fan of Shakespeare, not only because of the vividness of his language and imagery, but also because most of his plays offer the viewer/reader cracks in the surface of reality, inviting imaginative, thoughtful exploration. Call it a kind of visionary spatial liberation. It’s the reason that performances can vary so radically from director to director and generation to generation. The crack running through Twelfth Night is what allowed me to conceive of an alternate ending the Fool then leads the Countess and Queen to glimpse.
Was the Countess correct in saying that Shakespeare’s plays end with such unfair disparity between the sexes simply because his works mirror true life and are too honest to be “happy”? Is that a fair reason for a lack of forward-thinking on behalf of the Author, or a too-easy, benefit-of-the-doubt excuse for a talented but socially-blinded artist?
Every artist is a product of their culture, and in that sense is “socially-blinded,” as you put it. In my view, the disparity at the end of the play (and at the end of many popular stories) is there to please the audience’s—and author’s—notions of a harmonious resolution. Such notions often fly in the face of real-life experience even as they seem to speak for “common sense.” I rather doubt, given what we know of his life, that Shakespeare thought of marriage as a happy outcome in real life. And as far as disparity of the sexes goes, it’s worth noting that gender politics (or sex war, depending on your generation) was as hot-button an issue in Shakespeare’s day as it is in ours. Although the law and distribution of property overwhelmingly favored men, women owned businesses, ran households (which in many cases were indistinguishable from businesses), owned property, and in a few cases even voted for members of Parliament, just as they had been doing for centuries; and at a time of great economic and social upheaval, the lack of total, absolute patriarchy came in for a good share of the focus of the resulting anxiety. Hence the sermons, legislation, and witch trials desperately resorted to by men determined to impose absolute patriarchy on English society. The anxieties raised by the long reign of Elizabeth, James’s predecessor, can be glimpsed in the narrative anxiety created by Lady Olivia’s lack of a spouse to rule her and manage her property. That Malvolio could even dream of aspiring to be her husband would have underscored the point for Shakespeare’s contemporaries. And so, though Sebastian may seem to modern audiences an unlikely substitute for a woman performing masculinity, he is at least of an appropriate rank for Lady Olivia. The epigraph quoting scholar Lisa Jardine on the erotic indifference to gendering for Elizabethan/Jacobean audiences reminds us of how different a twenty-first-century reaction to the substitution of Sebastian for Cesario typically is. I’d like to think that apart from the issue of erotic plausibility, at least a few women watching the play might have regretted the substitution—knowing full well what a different sort of life Lady Olivia might have had with Viola playing Cesario from the one she would have had with Sebastian (who has always struck me as thoroughly obnoxious).
How far, do you think, has the literary world moved from ingrained notions of gender? Can you list any modern authors or works that break traditional gender-roles? Or any that reinforce them?
The literary world hasn’t moved far at all from ingrained notions of gender, if by “ingrained notions of gender” you mean the assumption that some or many gender differences are biologically ingrained (and therefore essential). What particular ingrained notions are, of course, are constantly shifting (even within the same individual) over time—mostly without our noticing it. As for “traditional gender roles”: That phrase doesn’t make much sense to me, except as a sort of mantra resorted to by people desperate for authority over a social reality that makes them anxious. Ideas about gender change so often and so quickly that it’s impossible to point at one particular idea and claim it as “traditional,” since one can always go further back in time and discover an idea or role contradicting it. As I discovered doing graduate work in early modern European history, gender roles have always been fluid, changing not only from generation to generation and culture to culture, but from one town or city to another (especially before the technological revolution that engendered mass communications). Again, as with Shakespeare, the issue for writers isn’t holding up a mirror to the world, but confirming notions about reality that writers assume they share with their audiences.
Do you have any projects upcoming or in the works you would like to share with us?
Yes! I’ll mention two things. I’ll be launching an anthology I edited titled Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries from across the Known Multiverse at WisCon, which contains a story of mine that recontextualizes an 1889 feminist utopia by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett called New Amazonia. And I’m close to finishing a new science fiction novel with a working title of Deep Story that engages with historical material from mid-16th-century Rome.
Moshe Siegel proofreads and interviews at Lightspeed, interns at the pleasure of a Random House-published author, and freelance edits hither and yon. His overladen bookshelf and smug ereader glare at each other across his home office in upstate New York, and he isn’t quite sure what to think about it all. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.
Author Spotlight: James S. A. Corey
Andrew Liptak
James S. A. Corey—a pseudonym for the collaboration between authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck—is the author of the Hugo Award-nominated The Expanse space opera series, which includes Leviathan Wakes, Caliban’s War, and Abaddon’s Gate (an excerpt of which is featured earlier in this issue).
When we started with The Expanse series in Leviathan Wakes, you almost destroy all life with an alien protomolecule, and in Caliban’s War, you bring everyone to the brink of war and the extinction of the human race. How do you top that?
DA: By doing something bigger. Seriously, though, we’ve talked a lot about how to have the books build on each other so that it never feels like we’ve taken our foot off the gas.
TF: The universe is much larger and far scarier than our poor characters realize. There’s a lot of room to escalate the threat. Poor monkeys.
The world of The Expanse is immersively large: What influenced your creation of the background when you were putting it all together?
DA: Ty was actually responsible for all the worldbuilding and background. That he had done such an amazing job with it was what got me into the project to begin with.
TF: My big influence for the setting was Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. I loved the solar system in which Gully Foyle has his adventure. A populated Mars and Luna, colonies on the moons of the outer planets, people living in the asteroid belt. I wanted to live there, too. Maybe work on a long haul freighter. Because of that, when I first saw the movie Alien, it plugged straight into my brain. I could see myself as Parker or Brett, wandering the corridors of a freight-hauling spaceship with a t
ool belt on. So when I created the background for the Expanse, I wanted that blue-collar feel. Space conquered, not by PhD supermen, but by regular Janes and Joes working regular jobs.
When we last left everyone in Caliban’s War, you ended with a hell of a bombshell. Where does Abaddon’s Gate pick up for your heroes?
DA: I think about a year later. There are a lot of things that needed to happen between the end of Caliban and the beginning of Abaddon that are cool in their way, but wouldn’t have made for an interesting story. So we took a page from Elmore Leonard and didn’t write the part that people would skip. If you’re taking your cues from Elmore Leonard you can’t go too far wrong.
TF: The character responsible for that bombshell is back. Sort of. But very, very strange.
The cultures that have spread out from Earth include societies from all over the Earth, a stark contrast to the historical racial makeup of space opera. Have we moved beyond a post-Cold War/US driven vision of the future?
DA: We’ve moved past a US vs. USSR zeitgeist, which makes sense since it’s almost a quarter century since the USSR broke up. Science fiction in particular reflects the age in which it’s written, and the kind of cultural and ethnic diversity we’re aiming for in the Expanse books is what you already see in an American hospital staff or post-graduate science program.
TF: We actually had a conversation when first plotting the series about how we didn’t want the series to be another “white men in space.” My mother is Hispanic. Her people settled portions of California long before the white settlers started pouring in from back east, but we only hear about the brave wagon trains full of white guys conquering the land. There’s this sort of cultural myopia that built up in this country that it was white Europeans that explored the world. But it’s incorrect. Also, a lot of exciting space stuff is happening now in countries that aren’t the US or Russia. I don’t think that will stop.
We have a rotating cast of characters in Leviathan Wakes—Principally Holden and his crew—and in Caliban’s War, we meet Bobbie, a Martian Marine; Avasarala, a UN official; and Prax, a Botanist. In Abaddon’s Gate, we’re introduced to a new cohort: Bull, Anna, and Melba. Do you worry about cluttering the system with too many characters, or is the focus firmly on Holden & Co.?
DA: The idea is to have the crew of the Roci be pretty consistently in the story and broaden the people in the universe book by book. You might catch a glimpse of Prax or Avasarala in later books. Bobbie may rotate back in later on. But I like the flexibility to put characters in place who would be where the interesting stuff is happening rather than finding reasons to bring the same seven people to every event.
TF: I think that would be a valid concern if we felt it necessary to keep all of the characters in every book. But because we can have a character appear in a book, and completely resolve that character’s story in the same book, we don’t need to keep checking in on them. Prax’s story is done. He’s farming on Ganymede with Mei. There are characters in Abaddon’s Gate that will only show up in that one book. In addition to giving us peeks into places in the Expanse universe that we wouldn’t otherwise see, it also allows us to tell a complete story in each book, at least for a few characters. Holden’s arc is the long one that will cover the entire series, so we only see a small piece of it in each book. It’s nice to have some stories we can tell and finish in each book.
Abaddon’s Gate was originally the last book of a trilogy; with three additional books coming, was there any worry about padding out the overarching story that you’ve set up?
DA: Oh my, no. Quite the opposite. I was worried we’d have to hack things way short.
TF: Yeah, we never plotted it as a trilogy. We sold a trilogy, because that was what Orbit was willing to buy at the time. But even just telling the minimum number of stories we want to tell would take, at last count, four trilogies. So twelve books in all. But that’s just the minimum. We could do a lot more than that easily. It all depends on what the audience, and by extension our publisher, wants.
What can you tell us about what comes after Abaddon’s Gate?
DA: We’re under contract for three more novels (Expanse books 4, 5, and 6) and four more novellas set in the same universe. My guess (and it’s still just a guess) is that there will be a few more past that before we get to the Last Book. But there is a Last Book. And Last Line. And it’s gorgeous.
TF: We’ve always known what the last book looks like. And I think it pays off all the promises the series will make to the reader. At least I hope so. The only question is how many stories we get to tell before that final one.
Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as Armchair General,io9, Kirkus Reviews,SF Signal,and Tor.com, and he can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.
Author Spotlight: Sarah Grey
Jude Griffin
What was the spark for “The Ballad of Marisol Brook”?
The first inspiration was early Hollywood studio contracts. In short, during Hollywood’s Golden Age in the first half of the 20th century, studios contracted with actors. The actor was all but owned by her studio—she took the parts assigned her, whether she liked them or not. I found myself wondering how cinema history might have played out if studios had contracted the right to clone their actors. Jean Harlow, always alive, always twenty-six, the leading lady in every film?
The second inspiration was the death of Natalie Wood, who drowned off Catalina in 1981. It was a deeply tragic event in Hollywood. When they buried her, all the red-carpet elite showed up at the cemetery. If it hadn’t been a funeral, it could easily have been the party of the century. I wondered if they would all have greeted her with champagne and kisses if she’d been miraculously reborn in a new body.
The structure of “TBOMB” seems like a rough sort of poetic ballad itself, with the repetition of her names and their meanings serving as a refrain. Was this intentional?
It was, more accurately, a happy accident borne out of a dead end. I originally conceived the story as a kind of déjà vu experience—similar circumstances evoking the same emotions, and the same tragic outcome every time. But really, déjà vu is a fleeting, insignificant feeling. It just couldn’t hold the weight this story deserved.
For several days, I kept repeating the first few lines over and over in my head, trying to carve out the story, figure out where it needed to go. It became an obsessive sort of chant, a prayer for inspiration. And that’s when the repetitive structure fell into place—it wasn’t déjà vu at all; it was a song, a new verse for every lifetime, until it all can end on a satisfying note.
What role does the subplot involving her son play?
Peter’s life and death were doubly important.
First, he is the only character related to Marisol by blood—he is her only true family, and he mourns her first death with an act of penance. At the end of his life, he even takes her family name, showing that he identifies more closely with her than with his father. Still, for a very long time, Marisol doesn’t think about him at all; she is still focused on fame, on pleasing people whose motives are self-serving, even insidious. When she begins to miss Peter enough to act on it, it’s already too late. But the realization that she’s lost something so profoundly important gives her the strength to rescue the only things she has left—her sense of self, her own freedom.
Secondly, Peter’s fate represents a more tragic path Marisol could have taken—an irrevocable descent into addiction and crime.
There are no contractions in the story, adding to its formality and distance: What were the language choices you made for “TBOMB”?
I wanted the story to read like a biography, like a documentary. The kind you might catch on late night public television—the tragic tale of some starlet who flared and died young, lots of montages, possibly narrated by an actor with an Oxford accent. Always evoking the right emotions, but never melodramatic.
That style, of
course, is native to film, not to written fiction. Mimicking it requires abandoning contractions, dialogue, and any close point of view—devices that ordinarily serve to draw the reader into the story. I approached it as a challenge: I needed to make the character and her story as sympathetic as possible within those stylistic constraints.
Those crows at the end, can you talk about them and the two bodyguards that appear throughout her lives?
Metaphorically, I intended the bodyguards to represent Marisol’s fears, her desire for respect and admiration, all the emotions that kept her obedient for so long. They’re waiting for her at the beginning of each new lifetime, armed and dark as ever. Not the sort of men you’d want to cross.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 37 Page 24