by Neil Clarke
I read that a fan asked you once why there was a dearth of villains in your writing, to which you replied that good people are far more interesting than evil ones. Are you specifically speaking to the choices in light of tough circumstances or overcoming faults?
I think it’s the human condition. If they are fictional villains, they have very narrow viewpoints. ‘What benefits me?’ ‘How can I make money out of this?’ Or there is just joy in cruelty, which of course exists, but it’s a very narrow thing. The thing you have to remember is that a real villain never thinks he’s a villain.
You’ve mentioned in the past your love for H.G. Wells’, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Just how many times would you say you’ve read that book?
To the best of my knowledge, four times. I read it three times in my early teens somewhere and then I started a fourth reading and I realized I knew everything and I said that I’m going to put that aside until I’ve forgotten it a little bit and then I’ll pull it out again. They put the whole novel in an issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries and I didn’t actually look at it again until I had to write a piece for a man who was putting together a collection of essays.
Now in your newest novel, A Borrowed Man—E.A. Smithe is a mystery writer brought back without consent as a “reclone.” One of the interesting aspects, and I hope not too spoilerific, is that despite being owned and unable to rebel from their current predicament, reclones are unable to produce any new works.
They are not allowed to. That would cloud the issue, you see.
But we’ve seen from multiple examples, record companies, publishers, etc., bring back “never before seen works!” of artists, authors, and musicians to make more money. Why bring back someone famous that you can’t use in that way or exploit?
They would be consumed with their new work instead of talking about their old work and it’s talking about their old work that is what they’ve been brought back to do. You could clone Charles Dickens presumably, dig him up and get some DNA material and get yourself a new Charles Dickens. But, you want him to be there as a reference to the guy who wrote Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol.
E.A. Smithe is reborn into a world where every problem seems to be solved. No war, hunger, strife, etc. Yet, as we read on, we realize there are so many things left unsaid about underlying issues. Was there any particular parallel you wished to draw between your 22nd century setting and today?
They definitely have their own problems. That’s just reality. Throughout human history, there are always underlying problems. Sometimes we don’t realize what they are. The caveman had underlying problems.
I also noticed in A Borrowed Man, the publishing landscape has whittled down to POD only with a large absence of precious hand-held paper books. Is this inevitability, and if so, why?
Yes. I grieve for that. That is part of what makes the civilization presented in that book a dystopia. If we abandon literature, we abandon the best part of the human past.
I see that a sequel is in the works. Interlibrary Loan will follow in the footsteps of your mystery writer protagonist. Can you give us some advanced spoilers?
No, because I haven’t finished it yet, and it may not be published, etc. etc. but . . . Smithe is sent to a different library on interlibrary loan and gets mixed up with a cookbook author and so on and so forth.
Do you think you will ever return to the shorter forms, like The Fifth Head of Cerberus?
Yes. Definitely. One of the things I’ve been promising myself as I try to write this new book is that I’m not going to start a new book after this, I’m going to write a bunch of short stories. Short stories are how you really learn how to do it. I used to believe that [writing short stories] wasn’t necessary, and in the strict sense, it isn’t necessary, but there are people who taught themselves to write by writing novels. But that’s doing something that’s already hard with one hand tied behind your back. You are making it that much harder on yourself and the readier path to writing good work and more publishable work is to write short stories. That’s why it’s so much to our advantage to have short story markets.
There’s little left to urge someone to write a short story if it can’t be bought and published! Print markets are dwindling, but there are Internet paying markets and one would hope that there are more of them.
Aside from writing short stories and learning the craft, what other piece of advice would you give a new writer?
The main piece of advice that I would give to the new writer is to write. The difference between writers and would-be writers is that would-be writers write very little and writers write a hell of a lot and you learn by doing. You can read three books on swimming, and attend seventeen lectures on swimming but if you’ve never been in the water . . . you don’t know much about swimming.
I have a time machine in my pocket. You can go back to one moment in your life to relive. What is it?
Do I get to stay there?
If you like . . .
Oh wow, okay. I would go back to the moment where I went out of my bedroom on Christmas morning and saw a shiny new bicycle standing beside the Christmas tree. My parents were still alive. I was a kid, and I had life before me. There are things that I would change, but there are an awful lot of things I would just greet with joy. The family dog died when I was at college, when I got that new bicycle, she was still alive and so on and so forth.
All this reminiscing about life and career, did you ever imagine you’d be doing this? Do you believe in fate?
Yes. The completely materialistic view is clearly wrong. The world is full of things you cannot explain, one or two you can pass off as there will be some explanation later when we know more, but when you see how much there is that purely materialistic view cannot explain, you realize that view is only one part of a larger whole. Many people are trying to pretend that view is all there is.
About the Author
Kate Baker is the Podcast Director and Non-fiction Editor for Clarkesworld Magazine. She has been very privileged to narrate over three hundred short stories/poems by some of the biggest names in Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Kate lives in Northern Connecticut with her first fans; her three wonderful children. She is currently employed as the Director of Operations for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Another Word:
On Reading, Writing, and the Classics
Cat Rambo
In many ways I’m glad that I didn’t have the Internet when growing up; among them is the effect it had on my reading. I was a rapid reader and I read all over the place, frequently re-reading if it was something interesting or I was driven to it by boredom and lack of other reading material. (Kids, this is the #1 thing to love about the Internet—you can always find something to read nowadays. I even have The Canterbury Tales on my phone nowadays for textual emergencies.)
I went through most of my parents’ (both educators) shelves, including some oddities like the complete Albee, Tennessee Williams, and Faulkner as well as all of Thurber and Perelman. At my grandparents, I read five gazillion Reader’s Digest Abridged novels and a bunch of antiquated children’s books that included Kingsley’s The Water Babies and Little Black Sambo at one house while at the other, I found a mess of modern literature and my uncle’s boxes of pulp fiction, primarily Doc Savage and Remo Williams.
I read everything I could find. At the library, after they finally, reluctantly allowed me down into the adult stacks at twelve, I terrorized myself with H.P. Lovecraft. Then, there were the extremely limited books available the year we spent in Mexico: a mixture of a tiny lending library and the spy and military fiction already there in my bedroom, left there by the owner.
A set of World Book encyclopedias as well as an encyclopedia of animals and a coffee table book on wildflowers that taught me how to identify wild trilliums by leaf alone. Gifts from grandparents included the Lord of the Rings in the original bootleg edition. I read it all—the wonderful offerings plucked from the pages of S
cholastic, the tiny school library with its somewhat outdated collection, and finally, fantasy & science fiction from the Griffon Bookstore.
I read everything the Griffon had, I think, in the F&SF section, particularly since when I was working there it was kosher to sit during slow times and read at the front desk. I also went through a number of the Penguin classics, which were displayed on the shelves closest to the front desk—all of Dickens, Hardy, and a lot of Trollope for one—and a great many Greek and Roman texts. I’m sure many of the nuances escaped me, but I may have also run the only D&D campaign with references to Aristophanes in it.
I was lucky. I read fast and omnivorously. We had basically three TV channels (plus the religious ones). At some point we got Pong, but that was it for video games. When we got one of the first Macintosh computers, it was a revelation and a half.
Later on in college, someone came through and told a bunch of fellow English majors and myself that Notre Dame English grads usually had crappy GRE scores, so I got a basic overview of literature (I remember the title as being A Biography of English Literature but I haven’t been able to track it down) and used it for my reading list, reading or at least skimming every work the author referenced. That lengthy list included things like George Orwell’s, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which is the only reason why I know what an aspidistra is. (I ended up doing well on the GREs, sufficiently so to satisfy my highly competitive soul.)
Despite the fact that the Internet was starting to become a force, I logged a lot of reading time during work hours in college, primarily at the hospital computer lab where I worked and where the long night hours left plenty of time for reading with little other distraction other than the need to change a computer back-up tape every twenty minutes.
The point I want to make about my perspective on the “classics” is that I’ve read a substantial portion, both of the F&SF variety and the larger set, and made some of them the focus of study in grad school. (Again from both sets, since that focus was an uneasy combination of late 19th/early 20th American lit and cultural studies with a stress on comics/animation. You can see me here pontificating on The Virtual Sublime or here on Tank Girl. I’m not sure I could manage that depth of theory-speak again, at least without some sort of crash course to bring me back up to speed. But I digress.)
So here’s the question that brought me here: should fantasy and science fiction readers read the F&SF classics? And the answer is a resounding, unqualified yes, because they are missing out on some great reading in two ways if they don’t. How so?
They miss some good books. So many many good books. At some point I want to put together an annotated reading list but that’s a project for tinkering with in one’s retirement, I think. But, for example, I’m reading The Rediscovery of Man: The Collected Stories of Cordwainer Smith right now (in tiny chunks, savoring the hell out of it) and they are such good stories, even with the occasional dated bit.
They miss some of the context of contemporary reading, some of the replies those authors are making to what has come before. The Forever War, for example, is in part a reply to Bill the Galactic Hero; read together, both texts gain more complexity and interest.
Beyond that, they run the risk of accepting regurgitations instead of originality—and I will argue that regurgitation is not a process that makes things better, but simply more digestible by even the simplest and most inexperienced digestive systems. There’s a reason we lay aside children’s books and move onto more complicated things as our tastes become more sophisticated.
Admittedly, styles of writing change, and old patterns run the risk of alienating readers. I gave a young friend the Lord of the Rings and was dismayed when he bounced off it. Despite being a fantasy fan, the long sentences and formal prose put him off. Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World is very early SF (and a charming early example of Mary Sue fiction) but difficult to read because of the antiquated prose style. Here, for example, is a single sentence:
The Lady now finding her self in so strange a place, and amongst such wonderful kind of Creatures, was extreamly strucken with fear, and could entertain no other Thoughts, but that every moment her life was to be a sacrifice to their cruelty; but those Bear-like Creatures, how terrible soever they appear’d to her sight, yet were they so far from exercising any cruelty upon her, that rather they shewed her all civility and kindness imaginable; for she being not able to go upon the Ice, by reason of its slipperiness, they took her up in their rough arms, and carried her into their City, where instead of Houses, they had Caves under ground; and as soon as they enter’d the City, both Males and Females, young and old, flockt together to see this Lady, holding up their Paws in admiration; at last having brought her into a certain large and spacious Cave, which they intended for her reception, they left her to the custody of the Females, who entertained her with all kindness and respect, and gave her such victuals as they used to eat; but seeing her Constitution neither agreed with the temper of that Climate, nor their Diet, they were resolved to carry her into another Island of a warmer temper; in which were men like Foxes, onely walking in an upright shape, who received their neighbours the Bear-men with great civility and Courtship, very much admiring this beauteous Lady; and having discoursed some while together, agreed at last to make her a Present to the Emperor of their World; to which end, after she had made some short stay in the same place, they brought her cross that Island to a large River, whose stream run smooth and clear, like Chrystal; in which were numerous Boats, much like our Fox-traps; in one whereof she was carried, some of the Bear- and Fox-men waiting on her; and as soon as they had crossed the River, they came into an Island where there were Men which had heads, beaks and feathers, like wild-Geese, onely they went in an upright shape, like the Bear-men and Fox-men: their rumps they carried between their legs, their wings were of the same length with their Bodies, and their tails of an indifferent size, trailing after them like a Ladie’s Garment; and after the Bear- and Fox-men had declared their intention and design to their Neighbours, the Geese- or Bird-men, some of them joined to the rest, and attended the Lady through that Island, till they came to another great and large River, where there was a preparation made of many Boats, much like Birds nests, onely of a bigger size; and having crost that River, they arrived into another Island, which was of a pleasant and mild temper, full of Woods and the Inhabitants thereof were Satyrs, who received both the Bear- Fox- and Bird men, with all respect and civility; and after some conferences (for they all understood each others language) some chief of the Satyrs joining to them, accompanied the Lady out of that Island to another River, wherein were many handsome and commodious Barges; and having crost that River, they entered into a large and spacious Kingdom, the men whereof were of a Grass-Green Complexion, who entertained them very kindly, and provided all conveniences for their further voyage: hitherto they had onely crost Rivers, but now they could not avoid the open Seas any longer; wherefore they made their Ships and tacklings ready to sail over into the Island, where the Emperor of the Blazing- world (for so it was call’d) kept his residence.
The field moves and changes; our men of Grass-Green complexion change to crimson-skinned Martians and silvery-eyed androids. It is not the same thing over and over again and that is, at least to my mind, a very good thing indeed. And part of that is why writers, even more than readers, should be reading the classics, or at least trying to pick some representative stuff, should have read at least that which includes a solid smattering of works by Isaac Asimov, Lois McMaster Bujold, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Octavia Butler, C.J. Cherryh, Samuel R. Delany, Carol Emshwiller, P.K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Zenna Henderson, Robert E. Howard, Ursula Le Guin, Fritz Leiber, H.P. Lovecraft, Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton, Joanna Russ, Cordwainer Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, Jack Vance . . . I need to stop listing names or I’ll be here all day, but all of those are voices that have shaped the genre as we know it. And when you hit problematic stuff—because you will, in one form or another, find something tailored to your p
articular triggers, it’s okay to love it if you like.
Can you read everything in the field? Of course not. And you’re falling behind in that task even now. But one could, for example, pick up a Nebula Awards collection and get a sampling of that year. Looking at the first one, for example, I see stories by Brian W. Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Gordon R. Dickson, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, James H. Schmitz, and Roger Zelazny.
That’s an exclusively male line-up, despite the fact there were women writing at the time, and that leads me to suggest that it’s useful not just to read representative works but to get some idea of the context—both the publishing picture at the time various pieces were published and also the larger forces at work in determining what gets remembered and what doesn’t. (There’s an interesting piece in the most recent Uncanny Magazine talking about one of my favorite such books, Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, that is well worth reading and very applicable to today.)
If you tell me you are an F&SF writer who can’t be bothered to shape their reading around a greater understanding of the field, particularly one that will enhance both one’s reading pleasure and writing ability, then I am saddened by what I perceive as a poor choice of priorities on your part.
There are plenty of lists out there. I even helped curate one a few years ago. Sometimes I try to hit at books worth sharing with my You Should Read This posts. And I think it’s important to read all over the place, too and not just the same thing over and over again. Mine past centuries for their gems as well as the current bookstore shelves and make it a project idiosyncratic to your interests, your love.
Do we really need a prescribed reader route into learning to love F&SF? No. What we should focus on is creating as many ways into the genre as possible, looking for the shiny lures currently coaxing new readers into the genre and making lists like that—If you liked the Hunger Games, here’s five titles you’d enjoy. Love Star Wars? Here’s some space opera. Think the Avengers were awesome? Check out From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain.