Even once I’d got that part sorted, though, the end-game changed about six times; this was a story built out of numerous conversations, and I’m tremendously grateful to Stu Nathan, Neil Williamson, Stu West, Elaine Gallagher, Asia al-Massari, J. A. Grier, and Christie Yant for their patience, kindness, and generosity as I tried to hammer it out.
Is there any significance behind the choice of the name “Meisner” for the syndrome?
There is! I asked Karen Meisner, dear friend and former fiction editor at Strange Horizons, for permission to name it after her, since she was one of the first people with whom I discussed the story lo these many years ago, and is, moreover, one of the warmest and most empathic people I know, so it seemed like a natural fit to name a syndrome rooted in an overabundance of empathy for her. Also her joking about how in this story “diamonds really are a girl’s best friend!” helped to spark off some things about its structure.
What were the strengths and challenges of structuring the story the way you did?
I felt the strengths were things that helped carry me through the enormous insecurity accompanying the writing of my first science fiction story: feeling that I was doing something with structure, that I could mirror the narrative’s function in its form by telling it in fragments coalescing into something bigger, and also feeling that offering storytelling snapshots instead of a long camera pan along its events would allow me more flexibility with representing the technology instead of explaining how it works.
The challenge, of course, is pulling it off: curating the fragments such that they hold a reader’s attention, and lead to a conclusion made satisfying by the fact that every fragment was necessary to achieving it. I leave it to readers to determine the measure of success there.
Whose science fiction destruction do you enjoy?
I love SF that shows a love for the organic and for storytelling, possesses an aesthetic dimension, and makes me feel as well as marvel. Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman gave me a glimpse into an alt-history SF canon where the celebrated texts of ages past could involve space exploration without colonization; Cat Valente’s Silently and Very Fast is one of the most magnificent novellas I’ve read; Kage Baker’s Company series is one of my favorites; Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” still makes me shiver at the thought of it.
What’s next for you?
I’m tentatively writing a novel set in the world of “The Green Book” (http://www.apex-magazine.com/the-green-book/ ) and working on a stupendously exciting project with fellow Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours (http://bactroubadours.com/) CSE Cooney and Caitlyn Paxson—the latter involves space-faring ethnomusicologists, nineteenth-century miners abducted by aliens, and ballads from a distant star.
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: Elizabeth Porter Birdsall
Laurel Amberdine
You’ve combined Jane Austen, a distant space-faring future, and a society of thieves into one amazing story. Can you explain how this came about?
Sometimes I sit down to deliberately write a story containing this or riffing off that, but this really was just a burst of inspiration—I sat down and wrote out the first scene, the conversation between Genevieve and her mother, starting with Genevieve’s dutiful quote about how it’s gauche to steal from one’s social inferiors because that’s the purpose of taxation, and only proper to steal from one’s social betters. And I sat back, and looked at that quote, and said to myself, “Well, looks like it’s time to make up some etiquette.”
Once I was consciously developing the story, one of the things I wanted to try to do was recreate the Regency feel of a very stratified society with complex ritualized manners and interactions, but to change up some of the details of what those rituals consist of. Dances, for example, were a way for young people to meet and converse, and to show off skills they’d spent a lot of time working on, and let off some steam with athletic activity—all of it in a socially acceptable setting, and chaperoned and hedged about with manners and expectations. Burglary and the formal visit to retrieve your stolen stuff is one of the things that fill that niche in this society. It’s not really any sillier—well, not much sillier! I love Regency dancing, and I find it tremendous fun, but let me tell you, if I had the opportunity to make daredevil cat burglar entrances into people’s homes part of a flirty-yet-formal greeting, I would be all over that.
The setting has a lot of potential for extrapolation. What other types of manners and rituals do you see the ladies and gentlemen of this future society engaging in? What do they do for a dinner party, or a wedding, or a funeral?
Oh, gosh, good question! Let me think.
You called this a society of thieves, and obviously that’s not wrong, but what it really is is a society that highly values both daring and adherence to codes of formal etiquette. So there are a lot of displays of that kind of socially approved daring. Burglary like Genevieve’s is a game for young ladies, but I expect that invitations to weddings and other formal occasions tend to be delivered by sneaking into your friends’ houses and depositing a fancy card on the mantelpiece or the middle of the breakfast table, for example. Even smaller occasions like dinner parties, you’d invite your friends by paying a call on them and discreetly leaving the invitation when no one’s looking—you’d never be so gauche as to actually hand something to someone. Weddings might involve some kind of pretend kidnapping—maybe the bride’s family kidnaps the groom and the groom’s family kidnaps the bride, all according to prior agreement of course, and then they “resolve” it with the wedding? There’s probably a nonlethal but highly ritualized form of dueling by which business disputes are often settled. And masquerade balls really go above and beyond.
All of this is for the upper class, mind you. (And members of the upper class who don’t want to live within these expectations, which among other things are pretty darn heteronormative, have their own choices and compromises to make, if their family hasn’t already rejected the relevant expectations.) I suspect that some of the working class folks think the whole burglary-and-dueling lifestyle is glamorous and wonderful and try to mimic it in cheaper ways, and others are just like, “Oh my god, how do they have all the money and power when they’re such NINNIES about everything??” It’s the way of the world.
Still, it’s probably a society at any level where there’s a lot of awareness of where one falls in the social strata, and where people are a lot more inclined to leave things at your house than give them to you, and to make a showy, officially anonymous gesture when something big seems warranted. Birthday presents that appear mysteriously when you’re not looking, that kind of thing.
Do you have any other stories planned for this setting?
Not currently, but I’m not ruling it out. Now you’ve got me thinking!
Due to her circumstances, Genevieve is torn between obedience and willfulness. Luckily she finds a friend in Catherine, but if she hadn’t, would she have gone along with her mother’s wishes or would she have found some other way to get the attention of James Yendaria?
Well—both! Willful is a good word for her, because Genevieve wants to push boundaries and get her own way, but she’s not really rebellious in the sense of rejecting her society’s norms. She’s supposed to obey her mother and father, and when you get right down to it, she mostly will. But within that, she’s always going to be maneuvering to see what she can get of what she really wants. Without Catherine, she probably would have stolen something slightly larger that was still close to the minimum she could use to say she was obeying her mama, and gone right back to cajoling to be allowed to rob the Yendarias.
Her mother does have a fair bit of sympathy for the “But he’s so dreamy, Mama!” argument, and probably would have given in eventually, once Genevieve had made more of a name for herself. She just wants Genevieve to start with more socially ambitious burglaries to establish her debut as well as a proud mother might wish.
Can you tell us a bit about your writing process?
I’m absolutely an outline kind of writer—even when I start writing with no idea where I’m going, I only get a couple of scenes in before I have to backtrack, figure out what I’m doing, and write little bracketed notes to myself about what each scene will contain. (Sometimes those notes stick around until nearly the final draft, and they usually contain a lot of all caps and question marks. I usually do a lot of extremely dignified talking to myself in a draft.) Sometimes I have a few false starts to a story, but once I figure out where I’m going, I usually just have one rolling draft that I edit until I’m happy with it.
And then I send it to friends to read it over. I’m lucky enough to have a lot of really sharp, really talented friends who are willing to tell me whether something’s working or not. This is especially true of my writing group—I have two friends with whom I email just about daily to check in about whether we’ve written and what. We keep each other honest about keeping our hands on the keyboard and our momentum up, and we read all of each other’s drafts. They’re fantastic.
What other plans do you have for destroying science fiction?
So many tropes to destroy, so little time … ! Please picture a supervillain’s dramatically lit grin and steepled fingers when I say that.
No, I love science fiction—SFF is where my writing heart has always lain—but I’m always going to be approaching it with the idea of putting in more women, more diversity, more awareness of class. And I love turning tropes on their heads. I think they’re much more fun that way.
Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She recently moved to San Francisco with her husband, and is enjoying its vastly superior weather. Between naps she’s working on polishing up a few science fiction and fantasy novels, and hopes to send them out into the world soon.
Author Spotlight: K.C. Norton
Laurel Amberdine
I loved the unique elements you combined in “Canth.” The possibly sentient ship powered by a human heart. The Portuguese pirates. The merman and the lost city. And more! Which of these ideas occurred to you first, and how did you wind up combining them all?
When I started writing this story, all I knew was that I wanted Aditi to be chasing her ship off the coast of Portugal. I’d heard about some divers who thought they’d found Atlantis in that area, so those two things came together early on. I wrote the beginning with those elements, and then realized that I had no idea what they were going to find. The merman/Giant Squid bits got worked in as I was doing research on monster hunting, mostly because steampunk cryptozoologists sounded really cool. My dad had asked to read “Canth” when I finished it, since we’d shared some books while I was doing research. He told me he liked it, but he didn’t get how the ship’s engine worked. I said, “Oh, it runs off a human heart,” and then had to go back rewrite a big chunk of the story. It sounds like a mess—it was a mess. It was a lot of fun, too.
The Canth, Captain Pearce’s ship, is named after her mother, Coelacanth. What does that ancient fish mean to you, and to the story?
I am absolutely fascinated by coelacanths. A brief summary: These fish have been around for about 360 million years, and their bodies have remained basically the same for all that time. For perspective, T-Rex lived about 66 million years ago. We had fossils of coelacanths, but people thought they were extinct. Nope! There are at least two species of them living today. I’ve read every book about them that I can get my hands on. The mere mention of these fish sends me into some kind of geek spasm that involves a lot of hand waving. If I was going to be metaphorical, I would say that “Canth” is about finding lost things, which is a very coelacanth theme—Aditi is searching for the ship, but the ship is searching, too. Also, I really like ’canths, and am happy to include them wherever I can.
Where did you learn about the mythical Sea Monk, and how did that inspire you to include one in your story?
Originally I wanted Aditi to find a coelacanth, but I was worried that people wouldn’t be familiar with them, so I started looking into other ex-cryptids that people might know. Giant squids seemed the most likely candidates, especially because there’s so much kraken lore, and then I started reading about the Sea Monk and got hooked. In the 1800s, a bunch of sailors described this very odd-looking merman they’d found at sea, which turned out to be the carcass of a squid. I really have no idea what they were seeing—if you look at a photo of a giant squid, you’ll probably agree with me—but I was really fascinated by the idea. My first thought is how alien these critters look, but these sailors thought they appeared very human, like a holy man. So of course I had to write about it.
What was the hardest part about writing “Canth”? Did you ever feel stuck or did it all come together?
I wrote about a page of this story, and then put it aside for six months because I had no idea what to do with it. I was thinking of it as a love story between Aditi and Anselmo. When I finally decided to take it in a cryptozoology direction, I realized that wasn’t going to work—it’s a shame, because that would have been a lot of fun, but once I gave up on them as a couple I realized where the story needed to go. Aditi had other plans.
You have created a rich world here, with a lot of unexplored depth. Do you plan to set any more stories here, or did you come across any research that has inspired other stories?
I did a ton of research for this story—I really enjoy writing alternate histories, because I end up digging through all of this really interesting information, most of which never actually makes it onto the page. I am working on another story in a similar universe, maybe a hundred years after this one takes place. I suspect I will be spending a lot of time poking around this world. There’s a secret order of morally questionable cryptozoologists to explore, after all. It would also be fun to follow up on the “Miss Eulalia” novels …
Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She recently moved to San Francisco with her husband, and is enjoying its vastly superior weather. Between naps she’s working on polishing up a few science fiction and fantasy novels, and hopes to send them out into the world soon.
Author Spotlight: Tananarive Due
Jude Griffin
How did “Like Daughter” come about?
I think I was challenging myself to write a science fiction story—which I don’t often do. Usually I write fantasy. But cloning was in the news—there had been a recent court decision about it—and I wondered what kind of society we might be if we actually did regulate cloning. What might go wrong? To me, clones are nothing more than glorified offspring—they have identical genes, but they’re shaped by their experiences just as we were shaped by ours. My clone, in a different environment, would be very different person. The question I always asked myself was: Who are these people who are so eager to clone themselves? What’s the point? This story was an answer.
What were the challenges/rewards of the way you structured the story and the slow reveal?
I’m pretty sure I envisioned the slow reveal from the beginning, so the entire challenge of the story was to make the premise and characters so interesting that the reader would be willing to wait to see the clone.
Many years ago someone told me that Jung had a theory along the lines of “People tend to re-enact unresolved traumas of their childhood in order to seek a more satisfactory ending.” Was this or any other psychological theory in the back of your mind for why Denise makes the choices she does?
I have always considered mysel
f a very fortunate person, which is one of the reasons I write such dark fiction—I’m trying to prepare myself for future traumas. So I’ve had this awareness that other people hadn’t had two parents, hadn’t had parents encouraging them, didn’t live as comfortably as we did. That’s where Denise came from: this idea that the luck of the draw separates a good home on one side of the street from a terrible home on the other. And as children, Denise and the narrator were grimly aware of the great chasm between them. So Denise had a specific model of the kind of home she wishes she’d had and wants to give to her daughter.
Are all parents at least a little like Denise? Seeing their children as a second chance for themselves?
Absolutely. To me, clones are no more than very expensive offspring.
What drives Paige ultimately to take in little Neecy: Is she, too, looking for a second chance?
And here’s the irony: Just as Denise was so misguided in believing she could create a second-chance life, now Paige has entered the world of her madness. She will try to “fix” Denise too. Who knows? Maybe she’ll succeed.
Whose works of science fiction destruction do you admire?
My favorite science fiction writers are Octavia Butler and my husband, Steven Barnes.
Any projects you want to tell us about?
I’m researching a historical story now set against my family history in Florida—and the research alone is scaring me so much that it’s hard to imagine how I can make it scarier with a supernatural element. I also just released a short film I co-wrote and co-produced, Danger Word, so I’m very excited about that too. Here’s the link: www.dangerword.com.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 43