Lightspeed Magazine Issue 32

by Judith Berman

  And once you start doing that, once you start designing devices so that they hide things from their owners, you get into really serious trouble, because the devices that we use, we use them for everything. They’re not just our entertainment tools, they’re how we live our whole lives, and they know lots of things about us. They know where we are, and who we talk to, and where we’ve been. They know all the secrets of our lives, and so we really want to be sure that they’re honest servants and that they’re not hiding things from us and that they’re not disobeying us when we tell them to do things.

  I saw that Amanda Palmer wrote an introduction to the book.

  Yeah, and so did Neil Gaiman.

  And recently there was this big brouhaha online about the way that Amanda handled her Kickstarter campaign. What was your take on that?

  Yeah, I was on tour when that happened. I have to say that I didn’t really understand the brouhaha, particularly. It seems to me that what she wanted was to allow people in different cities who had bands and who loved her music to come and perform with her, in the same way that sometimes authors who are coming to town will say to their publicist, “You know, there’s this other author who’s not as well known as me but whose work I really admire. Maybe that author would like to interview me on stage?” I’ve done a ton of those gigs, and I’ve done them in the other direction too. And it’s often the case that when an author is brought to town they’re paid for it—or at the very least they’re selling a book—and the author who’s the kind of junior partner in that, they do it not for money, they do it because for them it’s an opportunity to I guess ride on the other author’s coattails a bit, and also it’s a mutual aid situation—“I’ll help you a little and you help me a little.”

  I don’t doubt that Amanda could have paid for musicians to go around with her, or could have arranged things so that she didn’t need as many musicians, but I think that what she did, she did from a fairly generous impulse. The people who complained about how she was organizing that part of her business weren’t the people who she was nominally exploiting. It wasn’t like there were people who showed up to perform with Amanda Palmer, went backstage afterwards, saw her lying in a bathtub full of hundred-dollar bills, and went, “Oh my god, I’ve been robbed.” They were instead people who, when Amanda announced, “I would like to get some local performers to come up on stage with me so I can promote these people to the audiences that come out to my gigs and so that we can all perform together, we can play together,” those people jumped at the opportunity. They even queued up to audition for that opportunity, competed for the chance to be on stage at an Amanda Palmer gig and to be within the penumbra of her performance.

  The thing that’s confusing about the arts is that it’s both a business and a cultural activity, and there are lots of things that we do in the arts that are not economically rational. I have neglected my own work—rather a lot, in fact—to do things like read young writers’ books so that I could write reviews and blurbs for them, sometimes dropping everything to get a blurb in on time for an author that I really believed in. I didn’t have any rational expectation of making money from that, and the author who asked me was going to make money directly as a result—or at least believed that they would make money directly as a result—of my writing the blurb.

  The reason I did that was not a commercial reason. The reason I did it was a cultural reason. It’s because the arts consist of a cultural conversation as well as a series of economic transactions, and those can’t be interrogated according to the same criteria. That’s not to say that you can’t do the wrong thing in a cultural context, but something that might seem wrong or exploitative in an economic context in many cases I think looks great and right in a cultural context.

  Another new book you have that came out recently is Rapture of the Nerds, which is an adult SF novel you wrote with Charles Stross.

  Yeah, Charlie and I took about seven years writing that one. It started as a pair of novellas, the first one published in SCI FICTION and the second one published in Infinite Matrix, and also in Lou Anders’ short-lived novella zine Argosy. The first one was called “Jury Service” and the second “Appeals Court,” and they’re books about the Singularity, but they’re books about what happens to the people left behind after the Singularity.

  They’re kind of the inverse of the Left Behind novels about the Rapture—there are these fundamentalist Christian religious adventure novels called the Left Behind series that are tremendous bestsellers, and they’re about the lives of the sinners who are left behind on earth after the final trumpet blows and all the godly people are sucked up to heaven, leaving nothing behind but the godless. Except in our story, all of the people who are rational and godless and secular and technophilic get sucked up into “the Cloud.” Their brains get uploaded to a giant computer literally in the sky—the bones of the solar system have been taken apart and reassembled into a huge Dyson sphere around the sun, with only one hole in it that tracks the earth like a lighthouse beam.

  And the people who are left behind are people who, because of religious conviction or because of suspicion of technology, refuse to send their brains up to the Cloud. It’s a kind of comic adventure about one of those people, a guy named Huw, who’s a Welsh potter and technology hater, who is delighted to find himself chosen for jury service to evaluate a new technology that’s been sent down from the Cloud—from the posthuman intelligence, the Cloud—to earth, and that some people have actually assembled, and he gets to help choose whether or not that technology will be allowed.

  And from there things get very funny and very weird and very madcap. He’s a kind of Rincewind figure who runs all around the world and gets entangled in all these conspiracies. So the first two novellas were really well received, and Tor asked us if we would be interested in adapting them to a novel. So we wrote a third novella that’s longer than the first two put together, and then did a complete rewrite of all of them to make them fit into one book. And that’s Rapture of the Nerds. It came out in September, and did very well, I think.

  I’ve heard you say that this book kind of charts your change in perspective from being very optimistic about the Singularity to being more skeptical. What’s happened that’s made you change your mind about that?

  I guess it has to do with my feelings about where my identity is—who I am and whether or not I would still be me if I were inside a computer. Those feelings have changed over time as, for example, I’ve grown older and had to ask questions like, “Am I still me now? Am I still the me that I was ten years ago?”, and also as I’ve watched my daughter grow up. All of those experiences have changed my sense of the extent to which the lived experience of a conscious human being can be successfully simulated in silicon, and whether or not, having been transitioned to silicon, you would still be recognizable as you, or whether something important will have been lost—not a soul, but rather some element that informs your cognition or your sense of self that is in some way inherently embodied.

  You also have a story that you’re doing for Neal Stephenson’s Hieroglyph project.

  Yeah, I really need to get working on that one. I’m working on a story about “burners”—people who go to Burning Man—who experiment with a 3D printer that they can leave on the playa—on the gypsum desert—that harvests gypsum dust and turns it into a yurt over the couple of months that it takes for Burning Man to start, using solar energy. And so this autonomous, habitat-building, 3D printer robot gives them the idea of building one that can print out using lunar regolith—moon dust. And they land a lunar printer on the moon using private space exploration vehicles, and they direct its operations from a ground-based wiki that can bounce new messages to it—new firmware to it or new instructions to it—using ham radios that bounce signals off the moon. And over the course of a generation they direct its operations to build a lunar habitat that their grandchildren can move into.

  Are there any other new or upcoming projects you’d like to menti
on?

  Well, Homeland is the sequel to Little Brother, and that’ll be out in February. I’ll be on tour with that as well, for three to four weeks, I think, and mostly on the West Coast, in the Southwest, and the South. Those who have followed my tour this time around will know that I’ve stuck to the Northeast a lot. I actually got the last plane out of Boston before the hurricane hit, and my publicist and publisher have said, “We’re going to try to keep you in warm places that are unlikely to have extreme weather events during the next tour.” Because the last thing you want to do when you’re on these tightly scheduled tours is get snowed in. So if you live in the South, or the Southwest, or the West Coast, keep watching this space.

  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, 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 the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor), Oz Reimagined (2013, 47North), Wastelands 2 (2013, Night Shade Books), and Robot Uprisings (2014, 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: Daniel Handler (a/k/a Lemony Snicket)

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

  Daniel Handler is the author of the literary novels The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, and, most recently, Adverbs. Under the name Lemony Snicket he has also written a sequence of books for children, known collectively as A Series of Unfortunate Events, which have sold more than 60 million copies and were the basis of a feature film. His intricate and witty writing style has won him numerous fans for his critically-acclaimed literary work and his wildly successful children’s books. His latest book is Lemony Snicket’s Who Could That Be at This Hour?, the first in a new series called All the Wrong Questions.

  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.

  Last year you wrote a piece called “13 Observations Made by Lemony Snicket While Watching Occupy Wall Street From a Discreet Distance.” What motivated you to write that piece?

  Um, I guess watching Occupy Wall Street from a discreet distance, and also Occupy Writers—the organization—asked me if I would write a piece, and I said no, because I didn’t think I had anything to say. And then I was swimming laps at the place where I swim laps and I had a rude experience with a clearly successful capitalist, and it ticked me off, and so I thought, “I can write something about what’s wrong with capitalists being greedy,” and it went from there.

  What sort of reaction did you get to that piece?

  Well, I’m not as plugged in to the online world of social networking as I might be, so probably most of the reaction I was shielded from. But some people told me they liked it, and Rachel Maddow liked it, I guess, and then I ended up on The Rachel Maddow Show, which was curious.

  Yeah, so what was it like going on The Rachel Maddow Show?

  It was strange, because I don’t think of myself as a political figure, and I was worried that I would be called upon to have the kind of fake expertise that many people have on those political shows where someone who actually doesn’t know what they’re talking about just has an opinion. And I was grateful that we really didn’t talk much about politics, so that I didn’t have to come up with opinions that I later would have to stand by.

  Does that make you really nervous going in front of a camera, or have you done enough public events now that it’s no big deal?

  I’ve done it a lot—I have a kind of self-hypnosis thing that I go through where I say, “No one cares!” That’s what I tell myself over and over. The first time I was on TV it was a disaster, because I was nervous, so after that I just began to say to myself, “Who cares? No one is watching. It doesn’t matter. No one watches TV,” and I convince myself of that before I go on.

  I don’t know if you saw this, but there was this recent J.K. Rowling quote where she was asked why she doesn’t use more tricks to avoid paying taxes, and she said, “I’m indebted to the British welfare state … When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net … was there to break the fall, and I cannot help feeling therefore that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty check.” As an author yourself, what do you think about that?

  I did hear about that, and I was proud of Ms. Rowling, and I also don’t live in the West Indies, so I’m glad that neither of us headed for the hills. [laughs] I didn’t have a hardscrabble youth the way she did, and so I have not had to rely on public assistance, but I’m certainly in favor of it and try not to duck paying taxes any more than is necessary.

  Well, I think it’s really striking that she’s this billion-dollar industry now, and if it weren’t for welfare and arts grants as well, this whole Harry Potter phenomenon which has done so much for young adult literature wouldn’t have existed at all.

  No, it’s absolutely true. I think she’s a prime example of public assistance being well worth the investment. I mean, the amount of business that she’s created in Britain I’m sure far outweighs the taxes that people paid that went to her.

  So regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement, what do you think about the current situation with that and where do you think things are headed?

  Oh gosh, I don’t know. I mean, I continue to watch from a discreet distance, and I would be loath to speak for a movement of which I’m not officially a part. But it does seem like they’ve had quite a bit of triumph in just having income inequality end up being an issue in this campaign. I mean, the widening gap between rich and poor in America has been going on for a long time, but it’s never been discussed as a top shelf issue that presidential candidates have to deal with. And it seems to me like it’s the first time that a very successful businessman actually has to account for his success, and how he pays for it, and what kind of effect it has on other people. I mean, previously successful businessmen ran for president all the time, and it went without saying that they must be geniuses, and now actually it seems if anything a bit of baggage for him. So that seems like a triumph for the movement to me.

  Speaking of politics, the name Lemony Snicket actually came out of politics, in a way. Can you tell us about that?

  [laughs] I don’t know if that counts as coming out of politics, but I was researching my first novel for adults, which is called The Basic Eight, which is about a girl in high school who kills a boy in high school, and part of it is about the media uproar that follows, and I was interested in cultural commentary, and I began to contact groups that like to appear on TV and state their opinion on things they don’t know about. A lot of those groups are conservative, and I was on the phone with a conservative organization
and I wanted their materials sent to me, but I had a sudden thought that I shouldn’t be on their mailing list permanently, and so the woman on the phone asked me my name and I just said the first thing that came into my head, which was “Lemony Snicket,” which was not a name that I’d ever heard before or ever thought of before.

  And I thought to myself—during the pause that followed on the phone—I thought, “That was a really terrible name to say. Out of all the fake names you could have given, that’s the least believable one.” And then she just said, “Is that spelled how it sounds?” And I said, “Yes,” and I said, “Read that back to me,” because I had no idea how it sounded like it was spelled. And that was the first time that the name Lemony Snicket existed, and I began to use it for various pseudonymous, prankish things.

  I was in my early twenties, and a friend of mine made me some Lemony Snicket business cards for my birthday, and I used to give them out at bars, and I used to write long, rambling letters to the editors of newspapers and sign them “Lemony Snicket.” And so then years later when I started writing for children, it occurred to me that it would be fun to write them and publish them under the name of the narrator rather than the name of the author. And then I had this name lying around gathering dust. So I guess it had its roots in politics, slightly. I don’t know if making fun of right-wingers when you’re in your early twenties really can count as a political movement. [laughs]

  Years ago I saw you on tour for A Series of Unfortunate Events, and it was certainly the most entertaining book appearance I’ve ever seen, and even just one of the most entertaining public appearances of any kind I’ve ever seen. You talked about how Lemony Snicket couldn’t be there because he’d been bitten in the armpit by a giant bug, and you played the accordion, and I was just wondering if you did that same routine at every stop? Did the routine develop over time?