Lightspeed Magazine - September 2016

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  I had a problem with the title of Neil Gaiman’s short story collection called Trigger Warnings, and I went into that going, okay, I could potentially make an enemy by doing this, but I feel really strongly about this. I need to post about this. That was really hard, because he had friends who were other authors who unfollowed me. He retweeted it. He’s a nice guy. I love Neil Gaiman. But you have to be really careful with all the stuff that you do, and you have to speak your truth knowing that you’re going to piss people off. Not even necessarily the people that you’re writing about, but their friends. We all know each other. Once I think I got into blogging a little bit more, I had to be more careful with, “Is this the hill that you want to die on?” Sometimes it is, and I will be outspoken. And sometimes I’m just, “I’m going to let that go.” Or, “I’ll let someone else get that one.” There was one recently where a friend of mine was like, “I can’t believe you haven’t taken that guy to task.” And I’m just like, “It’s not the hill I want to die on. I have other ones I’ll take on.”

  I know you’ve been really pretty successful on Patreon, raising funds, I was just curious, as that income directly from your fans increases, do you feel less and less nervous about potentially alienating people in the publishing industry?

  No. Here’s my thing, everybody knows everybody else, and it certainly doesn’t stop me from taking a stand, right? There are certain things that I will absolutely take a stand on, but you also just need to go, these are my colleagues, and I’m going to see them all the time.

  This is why the recent Hugo craziness is just hilarious. I did a group dinner with Larry Correia at one point, who’s … anyway, that’s all crazy. But it’s fine. You’re fine. You sit down at the table with people, and you enjoy yourself, and all of that, but the more fisticuffs that you get into, the more difficult that becomes.

  We all interact in those same spaces. I actually have two exes, other writers, who go to certain conventions that I don’t go to anymore because I’m like, they’re my exes. It’s one of those things where you just need to understand that these people are absolutely going to help you, but they can also say, “You know what? Actually, I don’t want to help you because we had a disagreement.” And that’s fine, which is why I piss off the ones that I don’t care what they think of me. If I care what someone thinks of me, then I might be like, “Maybe I’ll talk to them in private. Or maybe I’ll bring this up and buy them a drink some time.”

  It’s like with any business, right? You wouldn’t be like, “I’m going to write something about Joe in the cubicle next to me and say how awful he is online.” You have to be like, “Well, that’s great, but Joe is in the cubicle next to you. You have to go to work with him every day.” It’s important, and if there’s a reason to do it, because you’re trying to enact some kind of change and get Joe fired or whatever, then go for it. But if it’s just to be a jerk on the internet, then that’s not helping any conversation.

  I wanted to ask you about this. You say, “I can’t guarantee you young women writers that things are going to get better. I’m not going to pretend that you won’t get trolled, harassed, threatened, or stalked. But what I can promise you is that you’re not in this fight alone.”

  When I was first coming up through science fiction and fantasy, it was very important to me when I finally found the other feminist science fiction writers and found that there was a history of it. I wouldn’t say it’s ignored, but these sorts of histories where you go, “Oh yeah, somebody was there before me, and somebody hacked through this jungle. That’s why it’s a little bit easier for me to hack through it.” I needed to feel that kind of support and to know that I wasn’t by myself.

  This is a very isolating industry. I live in Ohio in a reasonably small town. It can be very lonely. You can feel kind of crazy sometimes. Very disconnected. And I like this book, and I think people have really been drawn to it for that reason, because it makes it clear that we’re all living on a continuum, and we’re all pushing together, and we’re all doing this together. I think that has helped a lot of people. It helped me to write it.

  I tell people a lot of times, “I write these inspiring posts and books and things for myself as much as anyone.” So I can go back and be like, “Yeah! We’re gonna do it! Don’t quit!” Luckily, it seems like that’s what a lot of people are taking away from the book, and that’s really fabulous, because that’s why I wrote it.

  This book, again, is called The Geek Feminist Revolution. Kameron, I know you have another interview, so I’ll let you go here. We’ve been speaking with Kameron Hurley. Kameron, thank you so much for joining us.

  Thank you so much for having me.

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  ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

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  Author Spotlight: Charlie Jane Anders

  Christie Yant | 942 words

  Welcome back, Charlie Jane! Your intriguing story “Power Couple” presents a science fictional solution to a problem that many of our readers can relate to, a problem your characters face as “careers designed for single-achiever families.” In more general, perhaps lower-pressure terms, it could be considered a problem of work/life balance. Until we can get the restoration part of the cryonics solution worked out, what strategies do you use to balance your creative work with the rest of your life?

  God, I wish I had some secret for balancing work and life. Just making time for writing and everything else is a nightmare—it was hard when I was juggling io9 and creative writing, and weirdly it’s still just as hard now that I’m writing full time. Life just has a way of getting crazy. I often fantasize about having the power to stop time—not so I could rob a bank, or sneak into places, or do any of the things that people do in “time stop” stories, just so I could have a few days of uninterrupted writing time. Actually, if you could stop time you could live in a nice apartment for months without paying rent, and that would be a huge plus. You would just have to stockpile a lot of food in the refrigerator before bringing time to a halt in the outside world.

  Cryonics as a trope is a personal favorite of mine—I first learned of it when I was a kid, from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light, and my fascination with the subject was renewed with the movie Demolition Man. Do you have any favorite treatments of the trope?

  I love cryonics as well, and I did a ton of research before writing this story. My favorite cryonics stories are the ones that involve space travel. Actually, my favorite is probably the Doctor Who story “Invasion of the Dinosaurs,” where people go into suspended animation and think they’re traveling to a new planet—but they’re actually in a vault under London, waiting to go back in time to prehistoric times. That’s such a neat concept. Also, I love Captain America.

  Things have come a long way since Robert CW Ettinger first worked to popularize the idea of cryonic suspension as far back as the 1940s. There’s the long-standing Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, among others–and now Timeship in Comfort, Texas, has broken ground on a facility intended to hold up to 50,000 cryonically preserved people. Would you consider cryonic suspension yourself? What would you have to know or be confident in before you’d consider it?

  I don’t think I would consider cryonic suspension unless I was dying of an illness that I hoped they could cure in the future—I imagine there would be a huge likelihood of something going wrong and a ton of people dying before they ever woke up. I guess there would have to be pretty impressive proof that the process was safe, before I would consider doing it.

  Your characters each go into suspension
for seven years. Considering the rate at which technology and society are changing, if you went into suspension yourself for seven years, what do you think you could expect when you came out?

  My honest, considered opinion is that after seven years in suspension, I would emerge into a world that would be totally unrecognizable to me. Probably controlled by vicious chainsaw-headed robots, with most of the human race reduced to cyborg vassals, being wheeled along on tank treads, forced to work in a factory where we all make novelty gag gifts, purely because the robots find it amusing to see how many whoopie cushions the humans can produce before we finally die out. When we all die, our remains will be turned into more whoopie cushions. That seems like the most likely vision of the world of 2023, if you were to wake up from a cryogenic sleep then.

  Many congratulations from all of us on your novel All the Birds in the Sky, which came out from Tor Books in January. What’s next for you?

  Thanks! I have been totally blown away by the response to All the Birds in the Sky. I am now feverishly at work on my second book from Tor, which is going to be much, much weirder and darker. It’s shaping up to be sort of an homage to those early ’70s Ursula K. Le Guin science fiction books like The Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness —only not nearly as good as those, of course. It’s a vaguely political book, but my hope is that when it comes out, nobody will look at it and think “Oh this was being revised during the election of 2016.” That’s my hope, anyway—I often think the best political fiction contains little or no specific political commentary. So you won’t read it and think, “Oh, that character is supposed to be Reince Priebus” or anything. It’s more thinking about the ways we organize our societies, and the views of human nature these systems reflect. But it’s early days—I am going to be tearing this novel apart and putting it back together again over and over, for months if not years, until I get it right.

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  ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

  Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, Associate Publisher for Lightspeed and Nightmare, and guest editor of Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction special issue. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines including Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 (Horton), Armored, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, io9, Wired.com, and China’s Science Fiction World. Her work has received honorable mentions in Year’s Best Science Fiction (Dozois) and Best Horror of the Year (Datlow), and has been long-listed for StorySouth’s Million Writers Award. She lives on the central coast of California with two writers, an editor, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @christieyant.

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  Author Spotlight: Maria Dahvana Headley

  Sandra Odell | 2117 words

  “See The Unseeable, Know The Unknowable” is a lyrical, lovely story filled with poetry. It invokes poetry and shadows, hints of Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin. Tell us about the inspiration for the style and story.

  Thank you! I wrote the first draft of the first half of this story in 2012, while I was in the middle of leaving one life and trying in vain to imagine another. I wanted to write a path: a story about escape, about fleeing the world that everyone else thinks is normal. All I could imagine was a woman in a little house in a woods, a cat, and the feeling that horrible things were on their way. Back then, all the stories of escape I could think of ended in the protagonist being lost herself, or dying in misery. I guess I believed, at that moment, that this was what was going to happen to me. And now, four years later? It really, really didn’t. I ran away to feed the elephants, to brush the lions, to climb onto the high wire, and I lived. It was the right choice to leave. Here I am. It wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t wrong. I picked the story back up, and gave it the ending it always needed.

  As much as it came from a moment of abject misery, it also came from a childhood reading of Bradbury, of course. The temptation of writing about the circus, specifically, the way it can cover all kinds of things, horror, hilarity, weirdness, freaks, animals, runaways. I’ve always been interested especially in adult runaways, which is what this story is about. This is the second time I’ve written a story about that—the first one was eighteen years ago—a children’s musical in which a mother runs away from her children to be a disappearing lady. It was lighter than this story, which didn’t mean anyone would produce it! But for me, the notion of writing a story very much for adults, based on a thread typically sold to children, that’s an interesting notion. What if you ran away from home? As an adult, you might run away from home because you’ve committed a crime, or because a crime was committed against you. Maybe you’re a fugitive. Where do you go if there’s nowhere to go? What do you bring with you? (I guess it’s obvious that I’d bring my cat.)

  The kid version of stories about running away to join the circus is almost always a morality tale, not a heroic journey. Frankly, the adult version is, too. You’re not supposed to leave things behind, not in this culture of holding onto what you’ve got. You’re emphatically not supposed to leave people behind. I wanted to write a kind of American, lost, fucked-up person on the run story, and see what happened if I pressed that together with a circus. I feel like I’ve talked somewhere about the great Buddy Mondlock song “The Kid”—which I learned from a recording by the trio Cry, Cry, Cry. It’s so bleak and also so yearningly magical. It’s one of the great heartbreaker hopeful songs about running away and discovering the world is both smaller and larger than you thought. It kills me. Go listen to it. The style came from years of listening to that song, combined with years of reading Denis Johnson, whose novel Already Dead: A California Gothic has haunted, frustrated, and inspired me for twenty years, combined with yeah, as you say, Ursula K. Le Guin, whose characters are never not complicated, who writes moralities that stretch my soul out and make me imagine painful and wonderful things in equal portions.

  You call upon a number of images that speak to the lives of many modern readers: the strong man pushing the pencil across the desk; the sword swallower walking through the metal detector; the guilt of information that is too much to bear as the world comes crashing down around you; the fear of being spied upon by the government. What fuels your writing? Are you drawn to specific elements of the world around you, or do you piece specific moments together with strands of silver thread?

  I have a file in the back room of my brain, and a real file of miraculous weird things, too. The brain’s back room contains panic, poetry, news, headlines, songs, weeping heard on corners, dogs barking, chunks of text from everyone from Shakespeare to Springsteen to Octavia Butler, and as I’ve said before (always trying not to seem entirely crazy), when I’m writing, I just try to sit in the quiet and listen to the voices of whomever happens to be talking in that room. Then I write them down. It’s my job to keep the brain room full of interesting guests, and that’s why it’s necessary to read all the time. It contains everything I’ve ever thought and read, and it recombines regularly, but if I don’t give it new guests, I end up with nothing good to write. My process is that of a frenzied bar owner, constantly trying to keeping the brain’s guests well fed and well lubricated so that they can tell stories, constantly inviting new guests in. It’s basically the Tabard Inn back there, and I’m the sprinting barmaid with a typewriter hidden under the counter. Generally when I tell people this, they just look at me, kind of blank-faced. I know. This is how I’ve always been, though. That’s first drafts. Revisions? The back room shuts up and I’m on my own. That part is much harder work.

  I wouldn’t call it silver thread, necessarily, though that’s flattering! I generally pull pieces of story with sutures. I feel like every little scrap of story is a living thing, and the ones that aren’t just one thing? Those are living things stitched together. Sometimes they have a definite Frankenstein’s monster quality. Sometimes they end up bigger and more difficult than I meant them to be when I was sitting there originally. Sometimes I make a mess. Sometimes I write something I didn’t mean to write. Here,
I wrote a story I didn’t mean to write. I was trying to write a damnation and instead I wrote a redemption. I didn’t know that there would be people throughout this story wishing they were back with this circus, people pushing pencils instead of lifting the universe. I thought they’d want out. They wanted back in. I didn’t know that when I started. I didn’t know anything would be joy.

  How much of Maria Dahvana Headley is on the page with this story? Did you ever want to run away and join the circus?

  As noted above, so much, and also none. I grew up in a family that was very circus-y. My little brother actually made a part of his living as a fire juggler for a while. My sister was a dancer. I’ve always been a writer, and my writing has always been wild. Artist mom, newspaper editor/sled dog-breeding dad? I didn’t need to run away to join a circus. They had nothing on us. I think I ran away to join the normals, and then I didn’t belong there. But running away? Yeah, that’s a thing I’ve both thought about and done. I’ve never been good at goodbyes. In this story, Wren does the worst version of running, but maybe the only version that leaves her among the living. She’s had worse luck than I’ve had. It’s coming to me now that some of this story came as well from my hearing the Beth Orton song “Central Reservation” back in the late ’90s. It’s a joyful song about a one night stand, and the chorus is “Today is whatever I want it to mean.” This story begins with the dark reverse of that song, wearing last night’s dress, but on the run, having to start over fast, elsewhere, after something’s gone horribly wrong. Still, it’s about starting over as wholly oneself, surviving. There’s something in that that appeals to me every time. Today is whatever I want it to mean.

  Many use genre labels as a means of sticking stories in neat little boxes, categorizing a writer’s works for the sake of comfort. “See The Unseeable, Know The Unknowable” slips in and out of such constraints—here fantasy, there horror, magical realism somewhere else, science fiction tightening the weave. When writing, do you assign a story a given genre or label to your fiction? Why or why not?