by IGMS
SCHWEITZER: Well there have been novels in which the world ends, everything from James Morrow's This Is the Way the World Ends, all the way back to Mary Shelley's The Last Man in 1826. The protagonist has to protag, certainly, but he doesn't have to triumph. So if SF seems to be inherently optimistic, is that really the nature of the form or something that is market-driven?
BACIGALUPI: It's interesting that you mention the question of markets, because I do think that an author who simply wanted to have a career writing about the world ending again, and again, and again . . . probably wouldn't have a very long career. I remember speaking with an agent years ago, and one of the comments he made about the difference between being a short story writer versus a novelist was that a novelist ideally wants a reader to want to pick up another book by the author -- rather than give up on that novelist and go find other others to read. There's potentially a career limit to how many times you can devastate readers with protagonist-failure and world-ending before you no longer have anything except the most self-flagellating or death-fetishizing readership.
Or maybe that's my bias.
As far as separating SF's literary nature from its market-driven nature . . . intellectually, sure, we can separate the two and observe that indeed, any kind of novel can be written. But the reality is that we only recognize and talk about those novels that are published and widely read, and it turns out that those stories largely adhere to structural conventions like having living people in them, and having at least a handful of the characters we care about survive. So, even though SF, just like every other genre of literature, can affect any experiment it likes . . . if no one wants to read it, does it really matter?
SCHWEITZER: So, is SF supposed to predict possible futures or prevent them? What about its didactic or propagandistic nature?
BACIGALUPI: When I'm feeling idealistic, I hope that SF can in some way influence where we're headed. For me, that informs a lot of the reasons that I write, and helps me choose my themes and topics. I think that we're headed for interesting times, so it seems worthwhile to write about those, and try to get a grip on them in some way.
As far as didacticism or propaganda . . . is it necessarily bad for a writer to have an opinion, and even to reveal that opinion on the page?
SCHWEITZER: I see what you mean. I met a "retired" writer once who explained that his last couple novels were so gloomy he didn't see the point in adding to the general depression of the world, so he did not publish them. But this does get back to the question of didacticism. The Windup Girl for instance certainly takes place in an undesirable future, but is the point of the book more to warn people about how the future might turn out, or to tell a story in which people adapt to that future?
BACIGALUPI: I think I leave that to the reader to decide. There's not much point in my stating my own opinion about what the reader should take away from the story. The story does what it does.
SCHWEITZER: Sure an author has an opinion and it inevitably ends up on the page, but we all know horrible examples of how the author's preachiness or just self-indulgence ruined his fiction. The most obvious examples are the later Wells and the later Heinlein. So how do you strike the right balance?
BACIGALUPI: I think that the key probably lies in how deeply rendered the characters and their world is. I think one of the ways you can avoid didacticism in science fiction is to simply make the world define your argument -- then the characters can proceed with almost any plot they like, while the world looms in the background, defining their lives. The characters, then, don't need to make moral points of the story. They don't need to preach. They don't need to learn a lesson. They don't need to be on the "right" side or the "wrong" side. I think where authors often get into trouble is where protagonists represent the author's "good" values and the antagonists represent the "bad" values. They become obvious marionettes. Interestingly, I've been flirting with some of those exact problems in The Doubt Factory. Sometimes, you just want to wear your values on your sleeve and stop trying to be tricksy about your thinking. Sometimes a good romp over obvious bad guys is just good entertaining fun, and I think if you've got a sympathetic reader, they'll still enjoy the ride.
I think the other place where an author can fail, though, is when you stop thinking about your reader at all. And I think that's very much what happened with later Heinlein. I don't think he was struggling to tell stories for others anymore, not really. I think he was at a point in his life where he'd realized that he didn't need to try very hard. Sometimes, I think that writing is a process of dreaming deeply inside a world. If you aren't immersing yourself in that dream, risking, and testing, you don't get a good story. But the problem is that the dreaming process is hard work. It's more than just setting up the mechanics of a story, or illustrating a concept, there's something emotionally risky about being down deep inside your fiction, and I think when we authors find ways to remove ourselves from that deep dream state, that's when stories start to ring false.
SCHWEITZER: Or is there an opposite to didacticism? Have you had instances where you find that, logically, for story purposes, your characters begin to hold opinions or values that you don't share?
BACIGALUPI: Again, I think if you let the world make your argument, then the characters can simply exist and do whatever they're inclined to do.
SCHWEITZER: So, what are you working on now?
BACIGALUPI: The Doubt Factory has just come out. Next Spring, The Water Knife will launch, it's going to focus on a climate change-driven water war between Phoenix and Las Vegas. After that, I'm working on the third book in the Ship Breaker series. I've also got a few short story projects in the works, including a follow-up fantasy novella to "The Alchemist" in the same shared world that I did a few years ago with Tobias Buckell. After that, I'm not entirely sure. I'm sure something will present itself.
SCHWEITZER: Thanks, Paolo.
Letter From The Editor
Issue 42 - November 2014
by Eric James Stone
Guest Editor, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show
* * *
Welcome to Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show. I'm Eric James Stone, guest editor for issue 42. [Insert Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy joke here.] Presented for your enjoyment are the following tales:
Our cover story, "Wine for Witches, Milk for Saints" by Rachael K. Jones, starts us off in the holiday spirit. Puppetism, a disease that transforms children into wooden puppets, has a beneficial medical use: hearts that are defective in flesh can be easily fixed in wood by a Tinker. But when the promised wooden cogs fail to arrive by Christmas Eve, a Tinker must deliver bad news to his young patients - who proceed to take matters into their own hands.
Find out the full history behind "Eli Whitney and the Cotton Djinn" in Zach Shephard's story, which features numerous madcap inventions, two djinn intent on lovingly murdering each other, and one rainbow-maned walricorn (cross between a walrus and a unicorn, of course).
M.K. Hutchins makes her fourth appearance in IGMS with "A Dragon's Doula." Dragons may live among us in human form, but they still are born from eggs. The doula's job is to make sure the egg can hatch in a calming environment, but that can be difficult when there's an angry nine-year-old in the house.
Our audio story, "The Burden of Triumph" by Samuel Marzioli, is told from the point of view of a parasitic alien predator, reborn with a genetic memory of what happened to its ancestors - including a warning about the bipedal meats.
In "Fire Born, Water Made" by Adria Laycraft, a baby will be killed if his fireborn mother cannot prove he has the birthright of fire. But can she bring herself to steal another child's birthright to save her own son?
The first half of the novella "On the Winds of the Rub' Al-Khali" by Stephen Gaskell introduces us to a young Bedouin boy with a talent for math. Because he is uneducated, he may be better able to learn from the alien device that has baffled mathematicians ever since it landed in Africa a few years earlier. But even ab
stract math can have real-world consequences.
Darrell Schweitzer brings us an interview with award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi, whose dystopic short story "Small Offerings" is reprinted in this issue.
We are also privileged to present the first chapter of Orson Scott Card's recently released novel Visitors, which I can personally attest brings a very satisfactory conclusion to the Pathfinder trilogy.
Thank you for reading. Please come back next year for some more great stories.
- Eric James Stone
For more from Orson Scott Card's
InterGalactic Medicine Show visit:
http://www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com
Copyright © 2014 Hatrack River Enterprises
Table of Contents
Wine for Witches, Milk for Saints
Eli Whitney and the Cotton Djinn
A Dragon's Doula
Fire Born, Water Made
On the Winds of Rub' Al-Khali, Part One
The Burden of Triumph
Visitors, Chapter 1
Vintage Fiction - Small Offerings
InterGalactic Interview With Paolo Bacigalupi
Letter From The Editor