Why does Wendell choose a church to begin his journey away from the dominant culture?
Wendell’s experience at his classmate’s church was the first time he had ever been outside of a mall for more than a few minutes. Though the church is a symbol of people trying to keep something sacred and apart from rampant commercialism, Wendell’s motivation is not really about religion. He has a growing curiosity about what life could be like if he hadn’t been raised in a culture that had resulted in massive debt and his shallow, materialistic character. I believe his journey will concern an exploration of nature and discovering new interests outside of video games and shopping, with the added challenge of being an adult and learning to be independent. Going to church will be helpful because it’s a break from the suffocating commercial complex he’s accustomed to. It’s not impossible that he’ll grow in his faith as a result of going to church, but he has plenty of maturing to do first.
Why did you choose a teenage boy for your main character?
I often write about young people because they feel more susceptible to growth and change. Wendell is not just young, but extra naïve because the culture within the mall is all about materialism, and he doesn’t know that he could strive for anything else. I honestly chose a boy to put some diversity into my writing after I realized that my protagonists are almost always young women.
What are you currently working on?
I am doing some final edits on a dystopian story about a nefarious government’s attempt to suppress natural human urges, and how the teenage population games the system so that they can indulge. My long-term projects are two different novels, both of which explore humanity’s relationship with nature in post-apocalyptic settings.
Will you revisit this future world in other stories?
It’s possible. I would love to explore the perspective of a newcomer who feels confined in the mall, juxtaposed with that of natives like August and Wendell who had never known anything else and feared the world outside. How would it look and feel to someone who had come from a place where this sort of structure didn’t exist, and what could they possibly do if they were unable to adapt?
Lee Hallison writes fiction in an old Seattle house where she lives with her patient spouse, an impatient teen, two lovable dogs, and the memories of several wonderful cats. She’s held many jobs—among them a bartender, a pastry chef, a tropical plant-waterer, a CPA, and a university lecturer. An East Coast transplant, she simply cannot fathom cherry blossoms in March.
Author Spotlight: Charlie Jane Anders
Sandra Odell
What inspired this story?
When someone starts a new romance, there’s always the experience of stuff bleeding through from the old relationship to the new one. I’ve seen this a lot with my friends and stuff. You find yourself doing things with your new lover that you used to do with your old lover—or you tell your new lover stuff about yourself that your old lover already knew. Connecting with a new romantic partner is a chance to reinvent yourself a bit, but it also means revisiting old territory with a new person. So then I started wondering: What if you could just give your brand new partner the relevant (happy) memories of your previous partner? Then you could save a lot of time. That’s where the basic concept came from. It wasn’t until I started to think of this as a story about Mary and Stacia’s relationship that it really gelled, however.
Your use of language and vernacular in the story really sets the tone and immerses the reader in your worldview. Why did you choose this particular narrative voice?
I spent a lot of time trying to get the tone right in this story—originally, it was a lot more silly and kind of satirical. I’m a huge fan of absurd and surreal near-future fiction by people like Eileen Gunn or Rudy Rucker, in which people are selfish and kind of horrible, and the world is portrayed as being anarchic and bizarre.
In fact, the first few drafts of this story were a lot weirder—instead of meeting in a regular bar for drinks, Stacia and Mary reclined in a parlor where genetically engineered beetles crawled along the ceiling and cried hallucinogenic tears into their mouths. There was a lot of weird crying-beetle stuff in the middle of Stacia and Mary’s first conversation. And instead of eating hand-pulled noodles, Mary kept eating genetically engineered kraken sushi.
But I needed the story to feel more grounded—and I wound up feeling that in a world with “smart cookies” and virtual malls, people would really cling to the comfort of old-fashioned hand-pulled noodles. I also wanted the feelings of loss and betrayal in the story to have a lot of weight, which meant dialing back the humor.
The immersive technology in the story speaks to the recent trends in real-life technical advances: Google Glass; neurological interfaces with artificial limbs; improvements in holographic technology. Of the advancements in your story, what are some of the ones you’d like to experience for yourself?
I really love the idea of smart cookies, in particular—the notion of being able to process information way faster and keep track of lots of things is really appealing. It was important to me to show that smart cookies don’t actually make people into geniuses, or make them less foolish—but they do allow you to visit hundreds of virtual stores in an hour, or jump off a building, or whatever. That would be awesome.
By not falling back to a happy ending, you elevate Mary, Stacia, and Dave to real people. You allow the characters to be imperfect, yet perfectly human. Do you have any favorite writers who have explored similar ideas of character growth and influenced your own works?
Most of my favorite writers have messy resolutions and imperfect characters. I already mentioned Eileen Gunn—there’s also Doris Lessing, who taught me more about writing than any other author I can think of. Her Martha Quest novels actually teach you how to describe characters in a realistic way, and are a brilliant portrayal of fanaticism and passion, and what it’s like to be swept up in a particular time and place.
What other projects can we expect from Charlie Jane Anders in the future?
I just recently sold a novel to Tor Books, and it’s coming out sometime in 2015—it’s a genre-bursting story about the relationship between a mad scientist and a witch, which begins when they’re children and then continues into adulthood.
Sandra Odell is an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. She attended Clarion West in 2010. Her first collection of short stories was released from Hydra House Books in 2012. She is currently hard at work avoiding her first novel.
Author Spotlight: Maria Dahvana Headley
Jude Griffin
How did “Dim Sun” start? Was it the SF play on “dim sum”?
“Dim Sun” started exactly that way, yep. To base an entire story on a pun about eating fried celestial objects? Severely not allowed. Except that I have a wrongful love of puns. And of dim sum, for that matter. Once I thought of it, I tried not to write it, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d written a lot of really dark things in the last year, and this was a goofy palate cleanser. Also, I wrote this in the middle of the first round of SFWA bulletin controversy circa June of 2013, and I was in a mood about the Golden Age of SF dudes who kept insisting they controlled the genre, and the way women should be depicted and discussed within it. I decided to write a universe in which a badass woman controlled everything.
Botanical singing: This is a tiny but arresting piece of worldbuilding in “Dim Sun”; will we ever read more about the songs of ferns, marigolds, and other plants?
Basically, I was interested in writing a science fiction world in which a lot of the tech is the opposite of shiny metal. Rodney, the narrator, complains about how the farm-to-table movement has taken over outer space, and all the glorious junk food of Earth is no longer in fashion. So the singing plants are part of that—the botanicals have replaced electronic music. Outer space is, in this iteration, a little like a hip and slightly annoying café in Brooklyn. I was thinking about the modern world, its nearly pornographic glorification of kale, for example—and
this is the logical progression—an outer space where “thick cream from happy cows” is fetishized over anything freeze dried and/or meal-substitute-y. I wouldn’t mind writing something else set in this world, actually, though I never do that—I had fun with all the plant-based trouble in the story, the hedge of sins planted in places far from the people who’d originally committed them, things like that. I was really trying to create a world in which there was a rural balance to the portals and interplanetary travel, a kind of Good Old Earth which the two old guys in the story resent and long for, but can’t get back to.
Why would someone as brilliant as Harriet ever date, let alone, marry Bert?
Short Answer: Patriarchy creates fuckery.
Long Answer: This is a story about a variety of kinds of hunger. Our narrator, Rodney, is constantly starving for food. Bert wants status—his job as the chief restaurant critic of outer space gets him some. And Harriet wants power. There’s also a lot of sexual hunger in the story—both Harriet and Bert have a history of using lovers as tools of war against one another—and sexual chemistry always blurs the issue when it comes to whether or not a person should really date someone else. As for their marriage, I think sometimes when you’re young, you have very different standards than you eventually will—the things you’re initially attracted to in a partner aren’t always things that will serve you well. We all have friends who are fabulously bright and yet mysteriously only attracted to trouble. I see Harriet and Bert’s marriage as the kind of thing that can happen when you’re a certain kind of confident woman—lots of men are weirdly frightened of you—so, maybe you marry one who isn’t. Bert has a lot of ego of his own, but then … well, it turns out ego and lack of fear aren’t enough to sustain a marriage. Harriet, by the time this story takes place, is seventy, divorced for maybe thirty years, and now, goddamn it, she’s the President of the Universe. I like that she’s not young. I like that she’s not beautiful. I like that she doesn’t give a fuck. All of that is on purpose. I have long been aggravated, and it increases, about the way that society values women almost exclusively for their beauty and youth, and when we get older, tries to make us powerless—just when we’re at our most knowledgeable, and most capable. It’s so rotten. I gnash my teeth. Even when I’m having fun. Which I am here. There is, on our own Earth, a structural nastiness which causes women to be societally expected to use their energy to make men successful, rather than to make themselves successful. Harriet is the result of me considering what could happen if a really fierce women used her energy on her own career and on bettering the world, rather than on the much smaller, but similarly energy-tapping business of bettering her partner’s life. For centuries, women (not men—this is exactly the reverse of the thing people say to men) have been told that the price of being powerful is that you have to be alone, that no one will love you. Fuck that. In this story, Harriet has lovers aplenty, and love, too. If powerful men can have love and happiness, so can powerful women. There was a time in my own life when I was worried about this same thing. I tried to make myself smaller and more palatable. I spent years of my life, both in a corporate and a personal sense, helping men ascend and achieve their goals. This would have been fine, had all of them done the same amount of free work for me that I did for them. Men are not generally expected to donate free and uncredited work as part of basic human relationships, but women are. This got old. I want to live in a world in which women go as big as they can. I’ve always been of the opinion (proven by experience) that it takes roughly the same amount of energy to do something huge as it takes to do something small, when we’re talking about social justice. You could sit at your dining room table and give a lecture on feminist theory to your partner, or you could write that lecture into a speech, and put it out into the world. Same lecture. And in fact, you can do both. I know that sounds utopian, but things have changed a lot in terms of historically marginalized voices, even in just the last year, via platforms like Twitter. We’re living in a science fictional universe. It’s now possible to reach a 100,000 people with words posted on what previous generations would have viewed as thin air. Go big. Then go bigger.
You write across formats and genres: “I’m a Gemini. I don’t give a shit about genre and not genre. I want to try everything I can try as a writer before I die, so I’m doing that.” What’s next for you?
Adult-novel wise, I’m adapting a very macho classic from the English lit canon into a contemporary version. It’s in verse, or at least part of it is. I’ve haven’t written in verse in years, not since I was a playwright. It’s a boy’s great book. I am sick of boy’s great books. I want great books full of people who aren’t boys, battling, building, loving, and doing gigantic things. It’s fantastical, but also grounded in the real world. Dark as dark can be. I’m myself, after all. And in 2015, the first of two young adult fantasy novels (also new for me—I’ve never written YA before!) comes out from HarperCollins. Magonia is also a riff on boy’s great books. Growing up, I got more and more disgruntled with the way characters like Wendy ended up being flung into Neverland and FORCED TO BE EVERYONE’S MOTHER INSTEAD OF HAVING ADVENTURES. No, no, no. No to the nth. Okay, so being a mother is an adventure. I happen to be a mother myself. I have two stepkids, now in their twenties—and I spent my twenties raising them. It is a crazy, crazy beautiful adventure to raise children, but yo. It’s not the only adventure a girl can have. (Apparently the gender roles in Peter Pan have pissed me off for about thirty years—Wendy being forced into mothering Lost Boys, and then being tormented by a jealous Tinker Bell? COME ON. I always wanted to be Captain Hook.) So, Magonia is a sky-sea story in which the Wendy character essentially gets to be Peter Pan. It’s not a Peter Pan riff, per se—but that’s part of what inspired me to write it.
You sometimes wear special clothing while writing: tiaras, ball gowns, a flight suit. Any new outfits added to the writer wardrobe?
I just bought a gorgeous Mexican dress embroidered with flowers, along with a 1940s tooled leather briefcase. I think I might eventually end up writing something about Mexico City and its surrealist painters. There were some amazing women hanging out there from the thirties on, and most of them lived to be one hundred. They beg to be part of a fantastical narrative. But I also have my eye on an early-sixties, mink-trimmed black wool jumpsuit to be worn while writing villains. I’ve been writing lots of villains. This is the kind of garment that might be worn while stealing a zeppelin. And I am stalking an 1870s flower-embroidered corset. I have a weakness for beauty and craftsmanship.
What still needs destroying in SF?
Narratives in which the characters who aren’t straight white men are forced into morgues, passivity, and reaction, rather than action. I just want an equally interesting and active landscape for all kinds of people, whether that landscape is Martian or laboratory. Earth, for example, is interesting for everyone who lives here. That’s just true. So, a tradition of storytelling in which Earth is interesting and active for only a thin slice of the population is always going to piss me off. A tradition of Star Trek-ified storytelling in which the whole universe almost exclusively interacts with adventurous straight white men is a tradition that needs smashing. It’s a big damn universe. There’s room for everyone. But I feel like many, many writers could be doing a much, much better job getting this right. Including me. It’s a process. Getting things right requires work. The work is well worth it.
Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.
Author Spotlight: Amal ElMohtar
Jude Griffin
How did “Lonely Sea” come about?
Back in 2010, I came across this article (http://news
.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/diamond-oceans-jupiter-uranus1.htm) about the discovery that under the right conditions, diamond behaves like water as it phase-shifts. But the article is titled “Diamond Oceans”—and I immediately had the reaction that Leila decries in the story, of imagining something like water but thicker, that refracts light differently, but that you can nevertheless swim through and see running through your fingers.
I next thought, “Suppose those diamonds were to be mined?” And after that, thought, “But suppose the diamond ocean is a sentient organism?”
Did “Lonely Sea” end up being the story you envisioned or did things take an unexpected turn during the writing of it?
So many unexpected turns! The story’s been developing over the past four years, very much on my mind’s back-burner as I flailed about trying to think of how to tell it.
Initially, I’d imagined a world in which Neptunian diamond was a prized commodity, and that people on Earth wore it as jewelry in devices that forced it to shift in and out of phase for decoration, and that this phase-shifting was torment to the sentient organism being parceled across the planet. But I felt very keenly my lack of a science background, and was for a long time convinced I lacked the vocabulary to tell the story at its best. I knew that I wanted the story to be entwined with myth and folklore involving diamonds, but for it to work as I was envisaging it, that folklore needed to be a counterpoint to a good story in its own right.
I think it was my friend Stu Nathan (who, as features editor at The Engineer, was someone to whom I turned frequently at sticking points of this story) who pointed out that since diamonds can be synthetically produced, there would need to be some quality to Neptunian diamond there that would justify the trouble of mining them. That percolated for a while, until I thought about how the diamond ocean wants to be whole, to reassemble itself, and thought that enabling teleportation would not only justify the cost of going to Neptune—it would effectively eliminate it.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 42