Is it harder in a non-urban setting to get into this state of mind?
I wouldn’t want to generalize it. I tend to get into it in an urban setting. That’s probably because I tend to be in an urban setting. I know perfectly well that some people find being in the wilderness, being in the woods, intensely hypnotic, hallucinatory, and intense. Certainly, I have written things that I love and that I think do touch that not in urban setting. I wouldn’t want to generalize that. It is the case, as I say, that I tend to do it in an urban setting, but that says more about me and about the projects that I’m interested in than it says about the countryside versus the city in general.
Railsea is your second young adult novel. What does this category require of you? Does it challenge you in different ways than, say, a more intricate book like Embassytown?
I don’t like the category of young adult very much. I think it’s not terribly helpful. It’s basically a marketing category. I am not having a go at marketers here. I work with marketers. They have to do their job. I understand that. These categories may be useful in marketing terms, but what it’s not, I think, is a psychological category or an aesthetic category or philosophical category or anything like that. It’s not my job to worry about marketing, so for that reason, I don’t particularly set much store by the category of Young Adult.
I am very aware that when I read books as a child—I would say as a child, not as a young adult–there was a different kind of intensity that I fell into. No matter how much I love a book now, I don’t read it in the same way, with that same kind of absolutely compulsive inhabiting of the book in a way that I did when I was a kid. And then there’s a shift. I think what Young Adult tends to mean is this blurry line, a very, very, very blurry line between that and “adult” book. I think essentially for me it’s simply question of not worrying about it. I don’t really care. What I always do, and I think probably a lot of writers would say this, you’re writing for yourself and you’re writing for yourself at a particular time in your life. Quite early on when I was planning Railsea, I realized that I was writing for my own, I would say roughly twelve-ish, maybe thirteen-year-old self. That doesn’t preclude reading it also when I am older, and it doesn’t preclude reading it when I am younger. But that was who I think I had in mind when I was doing the writing.
What does it mean? For me, it’s a question of the kind of voice that transports and transported me when I was that age, which doesn’t mean dumbing down or anything like that. You don’t have to do those at all. For me, because of the kind of books that I loved, it means a certain kind of relationship to language, a certain more kind of overtly playful relationships. I use things like punts, which I wouldn’t tend to use in a book written for an older me. It means a certain kind of playfulness about the structure and shape of the novel, so that the whole book is predicated on a silly joke about Moby-Dick. It’s a joke that’s hopefully kind of fun, but it’s the kind of thing that I wouldn’t feel secure writing with my thirty-year-old in mind.
That doesn’t mean that my thirty-year-old self wouldn’t read it and enjoy it, it just means that’s not who I am writing for in that moment. Different writers can do this very differently. For me, things like those jokes, those puns, that kind of playfulness about language tend to be the kind of things that get freed up. I keep repeating the word playfulness because that’s the fundamental difference that I am aware of. I know when my British publisher has published this book, and they haven’t called it a YA novel, it’s a “story for readers of all ages.” On one hand, that’s obviously a piece of marketing because they don’t want anyone to feel they shouldn’t buy it. And I am grateful to them for that, but I do honestly much prefer that as a description because that’s how it feels in my head. It feels like Un Lun Dun. I know some adults read and enjoyed Un Lun Dun. I am delighted by that. We can all read and enjoy books for younger readers. But that felt very much like a book for younger readers for me. Railsea feels more like a book is written for “readers of all ages.”
Is there anything that you read now or any particular writer now who gives you a taste of that compulsive inhabiting of a book like you experienced when you were younger? I keep thinking of drug-users trying to recapture that first high. Can we get that back? Can we still find that buzz?
Some people may be able to. I suspect not. I suspect that that particular kind of buzz is absolutely, fundamentally a function of reading as a young reader who doesn’t have a lot of, relatively speaking, a lot of reading under their belt and who doesn’t have a lot of life under their belt. But again, that doesn’t mean that you don’t feel a trace all the time. I think we do feel a trace of it. It’s one of the many things that we’re constantly hankering for. If there are readers who really do fall into books in the same way they did when they were eight, then I am envious of them. You also have certain new things when you read as an adult. It’s not all a loss. You gain some things, too. One of the things you gain as an adult is that every book you read, you are reading it through a matrix, through the kind of warp and weft of all the other books you’ve read and that number grows and grows and grows, so every book becomes more and more entangledly intertextual. That’s a lovely thing. You lose and you gain. There is definitely a melancholy to it, I freely admit that, but melancholy is not the worst thing. That hankering itself gives you a certain drive to read, which is good.
Are there any books that you inhabited when you were younger that changed you in a significant way? Books that you keep visiting in your mind?
Oh my god, so many! Absolutely heaps, and often when I am asked to list them, one forgets them because they are so close up. It’s like that thing when you look for your glasses, and you are wearing them. The paradox is a lot of the books that are most embedded in me are books that I sometimes forget to mention, which is a terrible injustice. The short answer is yes, loads. I mean there is no hard division between children’s books and adult books. I would say book that did that for me, hugely, was The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, which is not a children’s book. It’s an adult book, but I read it when I was probably eleven. It absolutely took up residence in my head. It’s one of the key texts in my head.
What was it about The Anubis Gates that captured you?
It’s always very difficult to sort of explain one’s affective reaction. I love the intricacy—and I get back to your structure point, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time—I loved the intricacy of the time-travel narrative. I love the way that it appeared to be exploding into this chaos, but then everything came together with this extraordinary neatness, this extraordinary kind of clicking into place. I thought that was beautiful. I loved the monsters. I loved the time-shifting visions of London. It’s magic, but it’s systematized magic. I passionately love that book. It’s difficult for me to host back there and explain why, but that’s a kind of groping towards it.
Lastly, what are you working on now?
I am doing a novel, which I will not say too much about because I am always very superstitious about talking about work in progress. I am very much looking forward to doing some more short stories. I love writing short stories, although I am not a very quick writer. I write one every so often, but I love them when I do. I’d also like to do some more nonfiction, which I haven’t done for a while. I really enjoy writing nonfiction. Other than that, I am doing a regular comic now for DC [Dial H For Hero]. That is something I would love to keep doing. That kind of depends on people continuing to buy and read it.
About the Author
Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.
Another
Word: Plausibility and Truth
Daniel Abraham
There’s a puzzle I don’t know the answer to, but the more I look around for it, the more I see it. Most of the time, it’s amusing. Sometimes it scares the crap out of me.
So, funny story. Back in 1998, I was at Clarion West. One of my classmates turned in a story about a woman who worked from home, writing up recipes for the local newspaper. The essential problem in the story was that the protagonist’s dog kept digging up space-time wormholes. It was a light, comic piece, and one I remember fondly. But we were there for a workshop, and critics have to criticize. We came together for the morning critique, and our comments were very consistent. We all loved the wormhole dog, but no one was willing to believe in a woman supporting herself writing recipes.
I’ve known for as long as I can remember that the willing suspension of disbelief is something that science fiction and fantasy writers work for. Finding the details that make something feel not realistic—there’s nothing that can make, for instance, a psychic-power inducing space fuel harvested from a planet-wide desert inhabited by massive sandworms into mimetic realism—but plausible. It’s not truth that we’re looking for, but the tricks to make something seem true.
I’ve come to understand that it’s something mainstream and literary writers need to concern themselves with too. The thing I’m coming to see now, the one that moves me from amused to anxious, is that nonfiction writers, journalists, bloggers, and scientists (oh my God and scientists) have to worry about that too. Being true, it turns out, isn’t enough, even when you’re just trying to tell the truth.
The relationship between plausibility and truth is always a problem.
So, funny story. Given how much nonfiction I’ve read, I really haven’t written much, but now and then the occasion arises. A few years back, a good friend of mine was guest of honor at the local convention, and I got to write her biography for the program book. I had a scheme for how to approach it that would be fun, but for it to work, I needed a bunch of trivia about her life and history, and I was running a little short. As I recall, I was writing it pretty late at night and pretty close to deadline. I could have called her, rousted her out of bed, and quizzed her about herself. Or I could go to Wikipedia.
I went to Wikipedia, and it had everything I needed for my project. I whipped up a nice little biographical essay that was, I hoped, amusing and informative and fun to read. One of our mutual friends read it at the convention and whooped with delight. Not because it was such a great piece and not because I’d gotten something egregiously wrong. It turned out that one of the little bits of light trivia I’d harvested from her online bio was a ringer. And in fact, it was a ringer that our mutual friend had planted in the article as a joke.
It’s not the first time I’ve been gulled. It’s not even the first time I’ve been gulled by a friend. But the fella in question wasn’t laughing because I’d fallen for his trick. He was delighted because now that the false fact had been picked up, used, and put in print, the Wikipedia article could include a citation saying where the information had come from: me.
There are things that make a story seem real. Some of them happen inside the story itself. Concrete, specific details are more convincing than vague, abstract ones. Slightly surprising details are more convincing than expected ones, so a model with a zit on his earlobe seems more real than just a model. Other things exist outside the story. Things that are repeated are more believable, especially if they’re repeated by more than one source (for example, a citation in Wikipedia). Things are more believable when they’re presented by someone who seems not to have anything to gain by telling the story. Or when the folks listening already have a larger worldview that the story seems to bolster, so they’re predisposed to accept it.
But that’s not about being true. That’s about seeming true.
Most of us aren’t testing the world around us. We’re taking the word of people around us. We don’t evaluate whether something is true by going out and putting our hands on it, because most of the time, that would be irrational, right? I don’t even know from experience that it would be impossible to make a living writing recipes for a newspaper. I absolutely and unshakably believe it’s impossible, but the source of that certainty isn’t evidence. It’s a decision I made about a narrative (this seems unlikely) that was echoed back to be by a bunch of different sources (my fellow critiquers) and fit into a larger story that I was already disposed to believe (newspapers don’t pay well, especially for things that can’t be put under copyright). I didn’t call any newspapers or talk with anyone who puts together cookbooks. My time is a limited resource, and if I started tracking down and checking everything I came across and withholding judgment until I’d made my own investigations, I wouldn’t be able to do the things I actually want to do. Like make dinner or have a job.
So instead of judging facts, most of the time, I judge stories about facts. So does everybody. We don’t look for truth, because truth demands too much time and effort. We looks for plausibility, because it’s what we have time for. We suspend our disbelief at the drop of a hat for any number of reasons—because the person telling the story is a journalist, because the information matches what we already thought was true, because it’s a good story.
Most of the time, that’s close enough.
So, not-so-funny story. I have a friend who ran an oil-and-gas company in New Mexico, so she worked with a lot of geologists and engineers, most of them men, and most with a profound politically conservative bent. There was one man in particular, a fella who’d been in the industry for decades. An educated man and a professional with a wealth of practical, hands-on experience. He believes that anthropogenic global warming was a myth, but he also sees the drought that is slowly killing the American Southwest. He sees the fire seasons getting worse and worse. He came to the conclusion that terrorists in the Middle East have invented a weather control device that they’re using to destroy the United States.
And I can’t laugh at this guy. I want to. I’d love to call him an idiot and a rube and someone who is so blinded by the sins of his profession that he can’t handle the truth, and, oh my, do I think he is wrong about the weather-control thing. Only I can’t.
He’s using the same tools I am. He’s comparing the stories that are presented to him, maybe telling a few of his own, just like we all do.
The difference between plausibility and truth is that truth is objective and hard to find, while plausibility is subjective and easy. When the oilman says he doesn’t believe in global warming, what he’s saying is that however much the scientists insist that the data proves it, he’s heard some other story that’s more compelling to him. I can say that the idea that humanity can spend the time since the Industrial Revolution actively changing the atmosphere of the planet without changing anything doesn’t seem plausible to me. But neither one of us has easy access to the data or the expertise to interpret it for ourselves. Objective truth is difficult to come by, and even if you have it, what you can pass on to the next person is the story that you tell about it.
Stories—by which I mean novels, newspapers, the interpretation sections of scientific papers—aren’t a vehicle for truth. The things that make a narrative convincing are technical issues, and they don’t have anything to do with whether the picture they create of the world is true. The techniques are largely the same whether we’re talking about a detail of someone’s life in a program book biography, a light fiction piece about a dog digging up wormholes in the back yard, or whether our species is closing up our own ecological niche. In order for truth to be recognized as true, it has to be wrapped in plausibility. Just the same as lies.
And that scares the crap out of me.
About the Author
Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Gui
ld Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.
Editor’s Desk: Finding the Good in a Dark Day
Neil Clarke
Last month, my family and I filled the van with books and drove four-and-a-half hours to Burlington, MA for Readercon, one of my favorite conventions. After a nice dinner with Lisa and the boys, I walked over to the dealer’s room to get started on setting up the Clarkesworld table. After a team of volunteers helped unload my van, I started assembling my shelves. Halfway through, I began to feel overheated and nauseous. It felt like food poisoning, so I headed back to our room, but the situation worsened as time passed. Eventually, Lisa had to call the front desk for an ambulance. The paramedics arrived quickly, and after a series of questions, began to suspect that I was having a significant heart attack. They were right. I was rushed down the street to the Lehay Clinic, where they then proceeded to put two stents in my heart, in a location of my heart that they refer to as “the widowmaker.”
The day after, I recall asking Lisa to see if friends at the con could arrange to get all my boxes loaded back into the van. Later, however, she told me that when people heard what happened, they set up my table and arranged to have volunteers handle sales for the entire weekend. They were determined to make sure that I wouldn’t be carrying any boxes of books back with me. Cards were made from my promotional posters and people kept stopping by the table to sign and send me their best wishes for a speedy recovery. They even made arrangements to get some books from my personal collection signed for me. They handled every little detail. By the end of the weekend, they took what remained of the books, loaded my van and handed Lisa a stack of money. From my hospital bed, I checked in on email, Facebook and Twitter via my Kindle Fire. Every day, I was emotionally overwhelmed by the support and efforts of these people. I still am.
Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 Page 61