Lightspeed Magazine - September 2016

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  When you say you’re writing about a consent-based culture, could you say a little more about what that actually means?

  That one actually always surprises people. At the age of twelve, for all of the people in this culture, you are not allowed to physically touch them in any way unless you get their permission. So, if you want to hug someone, if you would like to touch their shoulder, if you would like to hold them back from rushing into a burning building, you have to ask for their permission. I said, “Hey, I want to make a fully consent-based culture. I want to know what that looks like.” You could kind of give a blanket consent to someone who you’re in love with and say, “Hey, you have blanket consent. We’ve consented to X, Y, and Z.”

  It was interesting because it would turn into these negotiations between characters of what is and isn’t okay. Then having that culture interact with other cultures was explosive, because for them, touching without consent is punishable by exile. You get rid of them. And they’re of course non-violent and all of that, so there’s huge repercussions. So yeah, that was interesting.

  Lots of these things I do because, as a writer, it challenges me in how I’m writing, because I didn’t realize how much I’d rely on, “Oh, so and so tapped her shoulder,” or “grabbed her arm,” or did something where you’re actually physically touching someone. I’d have to stop. They’re going to get attention some other way. They might grab a sleeve, but that was like the furthest I could go. It was very interesting for me to give myself those restrictions and see what happened with it.

  You mentioned your character Nyx. I was really struck by this description in the book. You say, “What you’d end up with is something like Nyx, the foul talking, head-chopping mercenary from my God’s War series sitting on the toilet, belly fat spilling out, ragged scars, upper thighs, hairy legs splayed. She’d be sitting there with mismatched skin, lined with scars and stretch marks, and maybe paging through some boxing magazine, flabby breasts unbound and spilling on her stomach, and she could give a fuck about you.” This is not a character that we see much in fantasy.

  No, unfortunately. She was super fun to write because, again, she lived with absolute privilege. I think it was Adam Roberts who wrote a really great review of that book where he talked about escapism and how she was just such a great character for channeling all of one’s frustrations about sexism in the world.

  You’re in this little office cubicle, and you’ve got a boss who asks you to get coffee again, even though you outrank him. All these little microagressions that you deal with every day, and then you can just go home and read about Nyx, who really couldn’t give a crap. She goes off and punches people in the face.

  I was writing a scene with her for a novella I’m working on, and it was interesting because I had her kind of drunk and disorderly in a bar, and even the authorities didn’t want to deal with her because she used to be a government assassin. She could do anything. She could literally kill someone and she was untouchable. I thought, “Wow, to live with that kind of privilege.” Which, as we know, lots of rich people in particular live with. It was very interesting to create this society of someone who didn’t have to live with The Gaze. You know, the male gaze or the gaze of society that can tell you what you can and cannot do. People let her be herself, for better or worse, right? She’s not a great person. I want to make sure that’s clear. She’s not great, but she’s different, as you said. She’s not someone that we get to see a whole lot.

  Right. There’s a lot of discussion these days about “strong female characters.” You say in the book that you feel like these characters aren’t written for you and you don’t find them too persuasive a lot of the time.

  I was reading something recently where the “strong female protagonist” has almost just become a trope in itself, where literally it’s just, “Hey, I am a woman with a gun, and I’m running around in this world full of mostly men, and everyone respects me, and I have lots of sex, and that’s great, and I punch things, and that’s great,” but there’s nothing deeper than that. I felt like it’s almost people going, “Well, but look, she’s strong. She has a gun.” There’s more to those sorts of things. You don’t give a woman a gun and go, “Sexism is over.” It doesn’t happen. There’s no exploration.

  I run into this all the time. There’s no exploration a lot of times when I see people go, “Oh, well, women are equal.” What does that mean? Who does the work? It’s like, who is doing all of these jobs that were traditionally gendered jobs that we see in a lot of societies? You need to actually do that work and figure it out economically. Yeah, it’s great, everyone can be what they want to be, but does that mean guys get to stay home and do what they want? Does that mean that there’s a class of people that has to do most of the childcare and the cooking? God, who does the cooking? There’s a lot of work that makes society function that we made into gendered work, so I think that really needs to be explored, and people don’t want to do that. They just want to go, “Woo, everything is equal.” It’s like, ahh, that one little part is.

  Then there’s also no deconstruction of masculinity. Is giving someone a gun any better? Again, Nyx: not a great person.

  You make the point in the book that I thought was really interesting, that a lot of these strong female protagonists, they’re able to fight physically, but so many of their preoccupations are still preoccupations that come out of living in a society in which women have less power. So, you say, like, “I want to be tough but lovable. I want to be cool but acceptable. I want to be special, but not so special that nobody loves me.” It’s still based on this power dynamic, no matter how physically ass-kicking they are.

  There’s very much that, “Oh, she’s tough but vulnerable” thing. Because I think that there’s this idea, especially for male readers, but for female readers as well, because we’re all indoctrinated, right? There’s this idea that if a woman is tough, it can only be in a way that is still sexy, because if she is not still a sexual object, then that’s really scary and that’s abhorrent and that’s monstrous, and we need to get rid of that.

  So, what ends up happening is, yeah, you have the “tough but vulnerable” character, and that in and of itself is a fantasy, right? It’s something that we can say, “Oh, this is acceptably strong.” There’s a line, which I think that you see quite a bit. So, yeah, it’s something that I try to be aware of, and it’s something that kind of bugs me when I see it in a lot of books as well, where it’s like, “Oh, she’s tough. She’s great. She’s awesome. And then she’s with the man that she loves and she sobs and cries.” Which, I get it.

  Where are all the women friendships as well, right? With a lot of these, you don’t see female friendships. You don’t see female background characters. It’s literally just this woman existing to kind of be a fantasy for guys. I don’t see as much of it where it actually feels like a living, breathing human being.

  There were really some things in this book just about the real world that I didn’t know, that surprised me. You were talking about gendered work. You say that actually we have this image of cavemen going off and hunting meat while the cavewomen stay at home and took care of the kids, and that this is kind of a fiction.

  That was a fiction developed in the 1950s, actually. If you look at that and you go, “Gosh, that just looks a lot like the 1950s lifestyle,” and in fact, it is. This is the problem that we have when we look back at the historical record, is that we are always going to be trying to evaluate the past from our place in the present. It’s very dangerous to do that, because then we end up doing something called downstreaming (my background is in history), which is when we kind of press all of our social mores and beliefs onto the past.

  There’s a great book, again I mention it in the novel, called Blood Rites by Barbara Ehrenreich, where she goes into this thing where she said, “There were not these pair bonds of one man and one woman and their 2.5 children hunting bison. Man goes out to hunt bison, and the woman just sticks around by herself
.” You couldn’t survive. You couldn’t have people who were specialists. You had to have generalists, and you would live in a loose family unit where you would have grandparents, and uncles, and aunts, and moms, and dads, and friends, and cousins, and it would just be this web of people.

  A lot of this “hunting” was actually a group activity, especially ones where they’re getting all the mammoths to go off the cliff. You had everybody out there with sticks, running around, getting them to go off the cliff. There are all these things that we assume because we learned them from these texts that were initially put together in 1950. 1950 is a great touchpoint, too, because, of course, those were the times where you were all trying to be just the same because we didn’t want to be accused of being communists. So everyone was told to be just this way, and do only these things, and that those are the normal things. When now, even after the economy has tanked and things are crazy, we look back at the ’50s and go, actually that was the unnatural time. That was the most unnatural time, post-World War II, where we were trying to make this world where everyone is the same. And every man gets a house, and every man gets a wife, and they all have these children. My grandmother loves to tell me that. She’s like, “The 1950s was not the way the 1950s is portrayed. It was nothing like that.” But that is our cultural story, right?

  There’s a part in the book where you’re in South Africa, and you’re talking to this professor about your master’s thesis. Could you tell us about that?

  I lived in South Africa for a year and a half doing my masters. I was very interested in the resistance against apartheid. I had actually done my undergraduate work looking at how students were mobilized by the African National Congress to end the fight against apartheid. I was following up my research there, and I was talking to one of the professors. He was the expert there on Zulu culture.

  I said, well, this is really cool. I found this thing that says, hey, twenty percent of uMkhonto we Sizwe, which was the militant wing of the African National Congress, was women. It actually says it in their meeting minutes for the organization. Wow, that seems like a lot. If you look at your picture of revolutionary movements from media, I mean, twenty percent, that’s not an insignificant number. That’s like one in five. If you look in the background of all those revolutionary movements, you’re not seeing one in five of those people being a woman. I said, I’d love to do this because, of course, women haven’t been a part of any fighting or revolutionary movements.

  He’s like, “Women have always fought. That’s like the craziest thing. Like, Shaka Zulu had his whole contingent of women fighters. This has always been a thing. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Young person, what are you saying?” That really led me down the path of going, “Oh, this is not an anomaly, what I’m seeing. This is actually something that has happened a lot.”

  In fact, once I went through the historical record, especially in resistance movements, it was usually twenty to thirty percent was female. And even, of course, in more formalized armies. The Civil War, World War II, Russia had a huge battalion of women tank operators. I started actually looking at it, and you realize that impression that you’ve gotten from, again, those textbooks written in the ’50s, was that that had not been the case. That things had always been a certain way. In fact, it was all a lie. You have to really dig to get past those stories we tell ourselves.

  Right, you talk about how these narratives have so much power, and you suggest that a lot of reasons so many men are willing to abuse women verbally on the internet is because they’ve grown up with these narratives that women are prizes to be won and men are the ones who always deserve the prize and get the prize in the end.

  Laurie Penny had this amazing article recently about why it is that we keep having these darn stories that feminize AI. Why is Ex Machina …? It goes all the way back to Pygmalion and his statue coming alive and, of course, it’s a woman.

  I always thought, “This is men and their fantasies. They just want a woman that they can tell what to do.” She said, “No, this is part of men’s way of trying to understand when it is that women become human and whether or not women are human.” I was like, “Oh my god.” It’s really good. You should read it. I forget the name of it.

  But I get into this again in the essay “We Have Always Fought.” We are given these specific words, and we do this in the military. I do a lot of research into military history, and it’s not, “I want you to shoot that man over there.” It’s like, “I want you to hit that target,” right? Then there’s all sorts of terrible names we come up with for the people that we want to kill.

  We run into that again with women. People say, “Why do you consider saying ‘bitch’ or ‘whore’ is so bad to a woman?” And it’s like, “Well, the reason is that’s usually the prelude to being assaulted.” Someone says that to you, and they are othering you. They are making you not a human so that they can feel that they can do something horrible to you.

  To me, that whole idea is that guys aren’t really taught that women are fully human. You see that with all the segregation that we have, especially in schools. Men don’t need to know things about women’s anatomy or feelings or any of that in order to be successful in life. They just don’t. As a woman, you have to know things about men. The world is literally run by guys. You need to know how to get around in a world of men. Men don’t necessarily have to, so they can kind of get by on going, “Well, I don’t know that women are actually really human.”

  I had never heard of this before, but you say in the book that in countries that are more egalitarian, like in places like Amsterdam and Canada, that pick-up artist tactics don’t work.

  There was a really great article from a … I don’t know who it is, don’t need to mention his name, but he wrote this long diatribe against Amsterdam because he was going around the world and picking women up. He realized that his story about being rich and awesome … he couldn’t just go in and neg women and basically tell them they’re crap because they would be like, “So what?”

  There was no alpha male thing. A lot of times you’ll see, when you’re in a country that is very hierarchical, it’s like, “Oh, well money is everything,” and you hear all these guys who say, “Well, if I just go in and I say that I have money, I will have all these women all over me.” It’s like, “Well, yeah, because it’s really hard. Women still make a lot less than men.” What he found was that no longer worked. He couldn’t just be a jerk and say, “I’m a jerk, but I have money.” They were just like, “Well, you’re a jerk.” They don’t need money. It was just completely different. And the cultural attitude is just very different. I think, in America, we let jerkdom almost be equated with genius. Steve Jobs, great example. He was a jerk. Brilliant in some ways, but also a jerk. People then equate his brilliance with the jerk part.

  I was like, “No, he was successful in spite of being a jerk, not because he was a jerk.” I think that a lot of times we put that on a pedestal, where other places don’t do that. We’ve just got to be like, “No, why would you do that?” Unfortunately, sometimes in our media that becomes the narrative: Well, yes, he’s a horrible human being, but look, look at what a genius he is. A lot of times only white guys can get away with that one. Only white guys, because it’s like, anybody else, man, if you are a jerk, that’s the end. That is the end.

  Could you talk about this, you say in the book, “My blog had a lot more fucking teeth before I started publishing books.”

  My first interaction with another author was actually, again, early 2004, I wrote a review of his novel. I loved it. One of my favorite books still. I love all of his works. But, I said, “There’s some misogyny issues in here, I feel. And here’s my critique of those particular issues that I saw, and here are the other things that I really liked about it.” Very fair review.

  He was so mad. He emailed me. We went back and forth several times. As a new author, I had been to Clarion. I was submitting stories. I was really intimidated. He’s an award-
winning author. Now he’s gone on and become a best seller.

  I was really freaking out, but I was standing by my guns like, “No, I’m right. This is flawed. These other things are great, but these things are flawed.” Then finally, at the end of it, he was like, “Okay. Actually one of the reasons I responded so strongly to this is that you’re right. It’s something I’ve been dealing with, and I’ve been really trying to address in my work.” And he has since. His stuff has gotten much better.

  But that was my first interaction, and it was my first realization, I think, that the authors were reading my blog. No one realizes that, until you become an author. You’re like, “What the hell? An author has all this time to sit around and Google themselves?” Yes. That’s all we do. Now I know.

  But, yeah, not long after, I was at a convention, and I had just written a review of Daniel Abraham’s book. Abraham is one half of James S. A. Corey from the Expanse now, but this was his first novel at the time. I saw his name badge, and I liked the book. I just had some critiques. But I saw his name badge, and then he started coming toward me, and I was like, “Oh my god.” So he comes toward me, and he holds out his hand, and he goes, “Oh, thank you so much for that review of my book.” Well, it turns out that again the book didn’t have a lot of reviews and kind of struggled, but he was really thankful for it, and he was really happy.

  I started to realize, again, people are reading these, and so I really need to be careful about whether I’m going to burn a bridge, and I really am like, if this is someone who writes awful things, and I’m going to say that it’s awful, then I need to recognize that I’m burning a potential professional contact. And that was hard.