Lightspeed Magazine Issue 31

by Ted Chiang

  I mean, the recent harassment that happened at Readercon was deeply, deeply disturbing. Now it’s sort of shaken things up a bit, it’s started the right conversations we need to have, but I’m not shocked that there was this kind of flagrant case of sexual harassment at a place like Readercon. I mean, I’ve been to Readercon, I love Readercon. Most of Readercon is this fantastic, brilliant convention, but there’s also a lot of weird stuff when you get a lot of guys together—even if they’re geeks, whether they’re geeks or not—a lot of guys together in one room and no mechanism to handle this stuff, well, you’re going to have serious, serious problems.

  I think that this is why creators like Alan Moore, like Hideaki Anno in anime, are so important to us. They’re people who look at the culture in which they operate, the geek culture in which they operate, they look square into its shadowed heart, and see not only what’s good about it and what’s exhilarating about it, the promise of it, but what’s incredibly dangerous about it, what is retrograde about it, what in some ways is toxic about it.

  We’re something that I find beautiful, that I find interesting, but that I myself think is plagued by a lot of shortcomings. And shortcomings we can fix, shortcomings that I think a lot of us are really interested in fixing and addressing. And it’s generational too. There are more women, people of color, queer folks, with each generation—certainly now, in what we would call the nerd or geek arena, than there were when I was a kid. And I think each generation brings us more promise of diversity, and brings us more promise of a better climate for all nerds/geeks.

  Speaking of writers of color, I saw you say that one of your ambitions was to be a Dominican Samuel R. Delany or Octavia E. Butler.

  Did I actually say that? That’s so deranged! I think that was one of my younger ambitions. Sort of like when you used to have a dream about going to a Shaolin Temple. Me trying to be Octavia Butler or Samuel R. Delany really is like the forty-year-old guy wistfully thinking about how if only he had run away when he was fourteen and gone on a tramp steamer off to Hong Kong, and from there slipped across the border into the new territories and gone up to the Shaolin Temple and practiced his wushu, my god, if only I’d done that I’d already be the absolute master killer. Let me tell you something, that tramp steamer has sailed and gone, my friend. I’ll be lucky if I can write another two books before I’m in the grave.

  These writers are absolutely remarkable and important. The depth of their metaphors—you know, when you think about what science fiction does best, whether we’re talking about Suvin’s idea of the novum, or all the different ways that people approach the central force of science fiction, these metaphors that allow us to address sectors or areas of our reality that aren’t being addressed, that aren’t being openly discussed, that are cloaked in silence or taboo. I look at both of them and I think that they have done wonderful jobs of exploring our realities, and exploring our anxieties, and dreaming of futures in a way that allow us to better see our present. They’re absolutely indispensable, and they’ve certainly given me a vocabulary of ways to think about my present and my future as a person of African diasporic descent, and just as a person living in the U.S. I said that I’m working on a book right now that’s an apocalyptic, giant-monster, zombie-virus invasion story that might not ever come together, but if there’s anything that’s useful and good about that, I certainly would love to put that at the feet of these two writers.

  Are you familiar with authors like Nalo Hopkinson and Tobias Buckell, who write fantasy and science fiction using Caribbean themes and characters?

  Of course. I mean, Nalo is my girl. I saw Nalo just a couple days ago. She is somebody that I’ve been reading since she first won that Warner Aspect First Novel Contest back in the day for Brown Girl in the Ring. And of course, Buckell. I mean, Buckell is someone that I started reading immediately because of the stuff he was doing and the way that he was weaving in the Antillean reality into his work. I mean, really, really great stuff. Listen, you can’t go wrong with somebody who has a group of characters called the Mongoose Men. I’m in. I mean, compared to where we were twenty years ago, it’s really, really, really promising. And then we have N. K. Jemisin, who’s fantastic. I think each generation brings more to the table, and hopefully this trend will continue.

  Back in episode 55 we interviewed Michael Chabon, and he mentioned how in college he wanted to write science fiction, but his professors forbid it. Did you have experiences like that in school?

  I was very fortunate. As an undergraduate I had a brilliant professor who was what we would call a “mainstream science fiction writer”—though of course now they just cast him as mainstream—a brilliant genre writer named T. E. Holt, who published a collection of genre short stories called In the Valley of the Kings. We start off with a spaceship on its way to Jupiter that has lost all power and is going to go crash, and then moves on to a story about a meteor that’s going to smash into the Earth and these are the last months before the inevitable doom. Really, really remarkable stories, and he was very, very encouraging about my genre tastes and my genre interests.

  When I sold my first book, Drown, I actually had a dual contract. I sold my book Drown and I sold a three-part science fiction and fantasy series that was intended to be a more “popular” version of the Gene Wolfe Shadow of the Torturer books. It was going to be this Dying Earth-type setting, and Drown was supposed to have come out and then a few months later the first book of this trilogy was supposed to come out. I still have the contract, it is still in force. The problem was I never could rewrite the damn first book.

  I realized that the first book, which was hilariously, predictably, and stealing-ly enough named Shadow of the Adept—I could never get around to rewriting it, it was so bad, the draft was so terrible, and yet they still gave me a contract for it, because they were like, “You know what, this is actually pretty promising, if you could only take out all the bad stuff and rewrite it in a thorough way, we might have something tolerable.” I always had this dream that I was going to be this switch-hitter, that I was going to be one year writing a book like Drown and the next year writing Shadow of the Adept, and it never came to be, I moved so slow. And then of course what ends up happening is that what I’m known for is always my mainstream work, because unfortunately I’m pretty bad and seem to be very slow at my genre work.

  You currently teach at MIT, which I would imagine would expose you to a lot of science fiction fans. Is that true?

  Yeah, but I wouldn’t overplay it, though. You’d be amazed how many of my students are what we would consider mainstream. For example, I’ll have a creative writing class, and I will say, “Okay, we’re going to do a science fiction assignment,” and two-thirds of my students will be like, “I don’t want to do it. I’m not interested in science fiction.” I used to dream that I would go into an MIT class and I would say, “We’re going to do a science fiction assignment,” and the kids would put on bubble helmets and whip out their tin ray guns, but nope. It’s amazing. Even at a place like MIT, there has been so much of a transformation of MIT from a boutique nerd school to a more mainstream select college, but on average are there more sci-fi nerds than there were when I was teaching at NYU a year ago? Hell yes. Are there as many as I wanted? No. I really did think I would be able to literally form a sub-club for “Fans of Dune,” and we would have like 500 members, but that wasn’t to be. Or the “Samuel R. Delany-ists,” but that didn’t happen.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever been over there to the science fiction book club library that they have. They have one of the most extraordinary collections of science fiction that you have ever seen, assembled by student fans over the last three or four decades, it’s extraordinary. Everything that you could ever want is there and it’s upstairs in the student center. People are downstairs in the student center playing pinball and buying slightly out-of-date milk, and upstairs there’s every damn book you could ever want. If we ever get a plague apocalypse, I am going to set myself up
as the king of that library.

  Speaking of the apocalypse, I saw that you teach a class on post-apocalyptic literature. How did that come about and what sort of books do you use in your class?

  Well, as I said earlier, I grew up during the ’80s, which was a time ripe with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narrative. I was in the theaters when Terminator came out. I was in the theaters when Blade Runner came out. I was in the theater when Red Dawn came out. I grew up with Alas, Babylon. I grew up with Warday. I grew up with Earth Abides. You know, all the John Christopher novels—he was one of these great apocalyptic writers. I grew up with John Wyndham—another one of the Brit doom boys. I grew up with his The Kraken Wakes. I grew up with The Chrysalids. I grew up with The Midwich Cuckoos, which became Village of the Damned.

  So I grew up surrounded by this culture, and therefore it’s no surprise that when given an opportunity, I turn around and teach that class at MIT, and it actually went really, really well. I never realized there were so many young people that were equally possessed by this dread and fascinated by it too.

  What are some of the most obscure geek references in your work, and have there been any that you worried were just too nerdy or obscure?

  There’s a reference in the novel to M. A. R. Barker, who is a role-playing game designer, a kind of Middle-Eastern Tolkien, and a novelist. He created the empire of Tékumel, the Tékumel world. There were two novels that were published by DAW—The Man of Gold, and the second one was Flamesong. It was like a Middle-Eastern-meets-Urdu-meets-Mesoamerican future world where a human empire had spread to an alien world and colonized it, and then the human empire collapsed, and the humans were stranded in this very, very hostile world, and they rebuilt their civilization to an almost pseudo-medieval level, but of course the culture is entirely South-Asian/Middle-Eastern, and he has these remarkable mythologies and a remarkable world. And he created this series of languages à la Tolkien—Tsolyáni and Mogul lohani.

  They were science fiction in the vein of Gene Wolfe, where the science is so advanced and the culture where it resides is so collapsed that they view it in mystical terms. In his world there were two sets of extra-dimensional beings that humans worshiped as gods, and they were called the Gods of Change and the Gods of Stability. And there’s a reference in Oscar Wao to the change and the stability. And I think only one person has ever written me and told me, “Hey, I love those M. A. R. Barker novels, too.”

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

  John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Epic, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a four-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor) and Robot Uprisings (2013, Doubleday). He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

  David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.

  Interview: Tad Williams

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

  Tad Williams is the bestselling author of the Memory, Sorrow & Thorn series, the Otherland series, and the Shadowmarch series. He has also written several other novels, such as Tailchaser’s Song, The War of the Flowers, and The Dragons of Ordinary Farm, which was co-written with his wife, Deborah Beale. His short fiction has appeared in such venues as Weird Tales, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in the anthologies Legends and Legends II. A collection of his short work, Rite, was released in 2006. He has also written for D.C. Comics, first with the miniseries The Next, and then doing a stint on Aquaman.

  This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

  So tell us about your new book, The Dirty Streets of Heaven. What’s it about?

  The initial idea was about the similar nature between the standard version of heaven versus hell—the classic, Western, Judeo-Christian idea that has developed—and the way that the Cold War was actually run, where the whole thing was sort of happening under the surface and all of the struggle was, to an extent, not noticed by most people most of the time. The main character, Bobby Dollar, is an Earth-bound angel who’s part of the process of Earthly souls being judged after the people die. But then things begin to get stranger, and other odd things happen in the Cold War between heaven and hell, and he winds up in a lot deeper than he had expected. So on one level it’s a fantasy—it’s about angels, it’s about demons, it’s about all that stuff. On another level, it’s also very much, I think, similar to a crime novel in its characters and approach.

  When you’re writing a book where the protagonist works for God, if God is all-powerful, is it a challenge then to create problems for your protagonist?

  Well, one of the interesting things about the book, I think, is that how the universe really works is not necessarily apparent to the minions down at the bottom end, of which our main character is one. Nobody he knows has ever met God, just as an example. The heavenly bureaucracy is huge and complicated, and the people at the bottom have only the dimmest idea of where their orders are coming from.

  I’ve always wondered why the forces of hell would show up at Armageddon if they know they’re going to lose. But in your book, you suggest that they think they’re going to win.

  Yeah. I think Bobby actually says something to the effect of that they think that’s all just PR and that they have a perfectly good chance to win, and since they sort of represent the chaos side of things—I don’t know how well you know Michael Moorcock’s cosmology of law and chaos. It wasn’t intentional—though I’m a big Moorcock fan—but the way it worked out as I was thinking these things through is that heaven winds up being sort of like Ultimate Law in Moorcock’s version of things, which is something that doesn’t change. It’s very static. It’s all about the same frequency of reward and existence, and it just keeps going on and on and on and on.

  Hell is much more dynamic, because the—and this is the main character’s presumption, I tend not to step in as the narrator in this, because it’s being told by the main character—but the main character’s presumption is that hell has to be varied, otherwise punishment is no longer effective, because it becomes familiar. So hell has to be something where your punishment surprises you, and part of your punishment is that there is no getting used to things because you never know what will happen next. That’s a very simplified version, but that’s one of the main differences. So hell is quite dynamic and changing. It’s very feudal. It’s very much about “whoever has the power makes the rules.” In heaven that’s true also, but you don’t know who made the rules. The rules have all been made and they’re not changing.

  I really enjoyed the angel and demon names in the book. To what extent are those drawn from folklore and to what exten
t did you just make them up?

  A lot of them come from traditional folklore—as I’m sure you know, a lot of angel names are in fact the names of religious figures or deities and things like that that were supplanted by Christianity, in most cases. Both the demons and the angels. And then some of them I have in fact made up.

  What about the demon names like “Grasswax” and “Howlingfell”?

  In a lot of cases I am taking things like that—the names of the common order of demons—I’m sort of inventing a pseudo-medieval sort of name, like the kinds of things that used to come up in witch trials. You know, where the women would admit the devil had sent them a familiar named such and such, and they always had these kind of odd, little, strangely domestic names that didn’t really sound very dramatically devilish, but clearly this had become the common currency at the time for what demon servants would be called.

  An example just off the top my head would be, say, Lovecraft’s “Brown Jenkin.” That was probably also based on these medieval stories where they were named things like “Creeper” or “Black Pat,” or just these very prosaic names. So that’s where I got that, but as I said, a lot of the names are actually invented, and I have to do that in part just because I tend to have so many names in even a very short book like this that I work very carefully to keep them from being too similar-sounding.

  The book is set where you live, in the vicinity of Stanford University. What are some of the benefits or drawbacks of using that as a setting?

  The main thing that occasioned that is, as I was first approaching the idea of writing something with kind of a noir angle to it—and specifically a noir in the classic mode of being told first person by the protagonist—the more I thought about it, the more I realized that one of the things about noir as a subgenre is it is almost always urban, and that’s because of the anonymity of cities, that’s because of the size of cities, oftentimes because of the impenetrability of cities and their subcultures.