Lightspeed Issue 46

by Charlie Jane Anders

  But they appeal to serial killers and aliens probably?

  [Laughter] Yeah, probably. That was just another thing that came to me. I wrote a short story from that guy’s point of view, which was in an anthology a couple of years ago.

  Which anthology?

  I’m trying to think of the name of it. The thing is, I’ve written so many stories, and if I don’t have my list in front of me, it’s hard to pin them down. It was a big red book. Does that help? It was a thing that I wrote for a friend, and then thought it had some real possibilities as a more commercial novel, and then I thought, “Well, no, I’ll use this as the secondary novel in this more literary novel about a hack writer.” So, it gets more and more complicated, I’m afraid.

  What is it like using a writer for a protagonist? Are there any particular advantages or disadvantages to doing that?

  One disadvantage is you probably know too much about it, and you want to be accurate about the details of a writer’s life, and yet you want to make a good story out of it. I know more writers than I know [people in] any other profession, except perhaps professors, and I can guarantee writers don’t have exciting lives. They basically sit there and type away and eventually rewrite the thing until it is in shape to be sold, and then they start another one, and it goes on. To me, it’s an exciting life because I think that writing is exciting, even other people’s writing, but I can see that an objective observer would look at me sitting here, and it doesn’t look very exciting. Probably a pharmacist or even a drugstore clerk probably sees more interesting stuff, and in some ways has a more exciting life.

  It occurred to me, reading this book, though, that one advantage of using a writer as a protagonist is that you can give that character almost any skill you can imagine because you just have to say, “Oh, I wrote a book about this a couple of years ago, and I had to research X.” And they could do it.

  Yeah, that was fun.

  Because Jack has all sorts of obscure knowledge involving telecommunications and things like that in the book.

  Right. And weapons, and all sorts of stuff you would expect an adventure writer to know.

  He also spends a lot of this book on a bicycle, and I know that you’re a fairly serious bicyclist, so how much of your own cycling experience did you draw on to write the book?

  Just some mechanical stuff. Actually, the part of the trip where he rides was part of a trip I made with my wife from the East Coast to the West Coast. We took a set of maps that a national organization published years ago, and we just followed that. It was fun.

  So when I wanted to write this part of the book, I pulled out my old maps, and put it in the middle of a part of the American South. A place where somebody would hang around if he wanted to be able to kill people and spirit them away. I don’t want to give away too much of the book, but there is a fellow like that in there.

  I was reading a little bit about your cycling trip on your blog. There was some funny stuff in there—like you helped put out a house fire at one point?

  That was very fun. We were just pedaling along, and there were all these people standing around a lawn which was on fire, and they were sort of carrying a little bucket back and forth, and so we got off our bicycles and ran in to help them put on blankets and things to actually put the thing out. We were dressed like superheroes in spandex, and they were this little bunch of country folks in Georgia, and they thought we were much more exciting than the fire, I think. So that was our fifteen minutes of fame.

  From reading your blog, it sounds like you had a bicycle accident and didn’t finish the trip.

  I did finish it up, ultimately. In Alabama, I had an accident at a pretty high rate of speed for a bicycle, and landed on my helmet, and broke the helmet and my shoulder, and got scraped up and such. But all we did was, we had an RV, so we just went to an RV park, and sat and drank beer for a few weeks, and then took off again.

  You say in your blog that you were planning to turn that trip into a book called Road. What happened with that?

  In fact, I wrote about thirty pages, and my agent said, “Don’t do this.” He said, “You don’t have any idea how many hundreds of manuscripts that are exactly this, a record of a bike trip across America. You couldn’t sell that if you were Ernest Hemingway.” I thought, “Oh, okay.” I’m not a really practical man, but I thought that was pretty practical advice.

  You were able to use that in Work Done for Hire, though, to some degree.

  Yeah, in fact, quite a bit of it.

  One thing I was wondering about in Work Done for Hire is one of the places that they pass is called Carlinville, and there’s just this line about how this was once the home of the woman H. G. Wells called “The Most Intelligent Woman in America.” What is the story behind that?

  The story is: I got that out of a book. That is a book that was describing various small towns we were going through, and I thought, “Oh my god, that is so cool.” I had to put it into my own book. I don’t know anything about it except for that one quote.

  You don’t know who the woman is or anything?

  Nope.

  I’ll have to Google it. You mentioned that doing work for hire writing is this ambiguous sort of thing, and you mentioned that you did two novels, and you have actually had some dealings with Hollywood as well. You worked on a screenplay for the movie Robot Jox.

  That was a lot of fun.

  Tell me if this is true. The story I heard was that this wealthy Hollywood producer or something invited you and your wife to come with him for a couple of months and work on that screenplay.

  That’s not quite it. Actually, we went to Rome and stayed in a hotel. The producer did have a chalet, just a wealthy man’s dream, which was about fifty or sixty miles outside of Rome, and we did go there for an all-day feast and a walk around the town that was basically like a baronial estate. It was fun to see how the other half lives, but no, they didn’t offer to put us up there. But they did pay for a really, really nice hotel.

  I gather that they made a lot of changes to the story though.

  That’s Hollywood. I don’t have any real ambition to do that again. I wanted to do that once, and that was enough. It was fun. But ultimately, it is work done for hire, and you work hard, and somebody else gets the credit. It’s not a great deal.

  So, basically, that and contract killing are two things you don’t have much interest in?

  [Laughter] Well, I’m not a good enough shot. They’d find out and fire me. That would be a bad bunch to get on the wrong side of.

  You had another book that came out recently called The Best of Joe Haldeman, which was edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe. Could you talk a bit about how that project came about?

  Basically it’s the best short stories that I’ve written. I’m actually a novelist. I don’t write that many short stories, so I looked at the list of all the short stories I’ve ever published, and I found that their [selections] comprised almost exactly half of the stories, so there is room for another book which is “the worst of Joe Haldeman.” The mirror image of all those wonderful stories. But I haven’t actually proposed it to anybody.

  Has anyone ever done a “worst of”? You’d think maybe just the novelty of it would get it some attention or something.

  I wonder. I’m sure that somebody has done it as a title. In fact, I do remember a “worst of”—it was an advertisement in Publishers Weekly. That’s all I know of it. But somebody years and years ago did a “Worst of Mike Jacowsky” or something.

  For this “Best of” book, you wrote a note for each story. What was it like looking back at all those stories? Did you see patterns or see ways that your writing had changed or things like that?

  Yeah, it was fun. I saw my writing become more sophisticated, of course. But pretty quickly—I learned the game five years or seven years after I’d started; I was producing some of the things that were the best I’ve done, which I shouldn’t be too proud of. I guess I haven’t improved that much over th
e last thirty years.

  I saw patterns repeating which had been pointed out to me before. A guy wrote a book about my work, and he identified this trope of beheading because about half the stories I’ve written have somebody being beheaded, which is kind of a singular habit for a writer. But in fact, I saw somebody beheaded in Vietnam.

  I don’t study the people who write about me. I think that way lies some kind of madness. And I don’t write to satisfy critics and such. I write for myself and for my readers secondarily.

  It seems like you also write for friends of yours, because a lot of the stories in this book were written for various editors who requested stories for themed anthologies.

  It’s not a selfless thing, of course. They offered money, and I thought, “That sounds like a cool idea.” It’s kind of fun because the decision basically is made for you about whether you should write the story or do something else. When you tell someone you’re going to write a story about shoes in the future, you have to sit down and figure out something about shoes in the future, and go ahead and write it. It’s fun in a way because of the smaller personal investment in it. If the story sucks, you can say, “Well, it was his idea.”

  Could you say what some of those themes were? Were any of those themes really challenging or did you write a story that you never would have written in a million years if not for that theme?

  If I had the book in front of me, I could probably think about that better, but no. By and large, it’s somebody who is doing a theme anthology, and they give you a lot of latitude. I’m trying to think of the title of one. Janis Ian coordinated a book, Stars, it’s called, and the stars are various writers who she wanted to write stories. And we each wrote a story about one of her songs, and that was an interesting challenge because, of course, the song was its own narrative, and then you want to incorporate the pattern of the song into the story, so that someone who knows the song will recognize it in the story, but if you don’t know the song, it doesn’t hurt. The story is still coherent. That was fun to do.

  That was kind of like a hat trick. I got to satisfy all these friends. A lot of the stories that I wrote back in the ’70s and ’80s were based on cover illustrations or paintings or drawings that somebody had done that a magazine had purchased, and then they were getting somebody to write a story about it. So I’m up here with my hand up, so I got chosen for some of those.

  “Tricentennial” was one of those, right? That was written for an illustration?

  That’s right. It was as restricted an assignment as I’ve ever had because the illustration had all sorts of singularities in terms of physics and art, and I had to satisfy all of that at once. It was tremendously successful. It won awards and everything. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, it was not the kind of story that I could expand into a novel, so I couldn’t get into that particular category.

  But this Best of Joe Haldeman, it does include your story “Hero,” which was expanded into a novel, into The Forever War. I read The Forever War years ago, and I just read “Hero,” and I was really struck, in your author’s note, like you were saying earlier about Work Done for Hire, that you didn’t really have any outline or anything when you sat down to write it. And I was just amazed by how much detail there is in this story, and how well worked-out everything is regarding the suits, and the environment on Charon and stuff. I was just wondering, did all that just come straight out of your head, or did you research and then go back and rewrite it or anything?

  What I did was: I did research on the fly. Of course, that story was written before computers, and so I basically was going into the library every day and looking up stuff so that I could write about it tomorrow. That was my pattern in those days. I basically wrote my fiction during the morning hours, and in the afternoon I’d go out and do research, and so computers probably save me a certain amount of shoe leather, but I don’t get as much exercise as I did back in the day.

  Another thing that really struck me about “Hero” is that it doesn’t feature what I think of as being the central conceit of The Forever War, which is the idea that the Earth is different every time the soldiers come back. Had you come up with that idea at that point or did that come later?

  In fact, I came up with the idea before “Hero” came out. I wrote a short story for Amazing Science Fiction which was exactly about that, about people who go out over the course of years, they go out to be soldiers, and they come back and years have passed on Earth when only months have passed in their own lives. That was the basic point and the plot logic of that short story. I looked at the two stories, and I thought, “I can cross-fertilize these two and get an actual novel out of the situation.” Although I don’t remember, there was never an “Ah-ha” moment saying, “Oh my god, I can make million dollars this way.” But it’s obvious if you look at the two stories that the end result is The Forever War.

  What was the title of that story that was published in Amazing Stories?

  It’s called “Time Piece.”

  I’ll have to go check that out. Another thing in “Hero” that really struck me is the way it portrays women in combat. For those who haven’t read the story: There are women who fight alongside men, and also the enlisted soldiers are all expected to have sex with each other.

  I got a lot of flak for that one.

  Could you talk a little bit more about the reactions you got to that?

  I didn’t get much reaction from feminists, or rather I got positive reaction from feminists, because the guy who edited Analog showed me the file of letters they got over that story. It’s hundreds of letters, and they were mostly about, “How dare you think that we could be so inhumane as to make women into combat soldiers.” And those probably outnumbered twenty-to-one the ones who said, “Yeah, this makes sense. Why should men have to do all the fighting and killing?” Which is basically my own thinking behind it.

  But the subtext is no longer obvious. When I was writing in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese did have female combat soldiers, and we thought that that was just bizarre. We wouldn’t do that to American women, at least not in the 1960s or ’70s. Of course, now women do fly combat missions, and they work hand-in-hand on the battlefield with men, and I think by and large it’s a good thing.

  How about the aspect of the soldiers being assigned to have sex with each other? Do you just see that as an alienating sort of thing or do you think that that might actually happen in a hundred or two hundred years?

  Of course it happens now, to a certain extent. People are not assigned bed partners or anything like that. I think at the time I wrote it, it was just a weird kind of wishful thinking. If you’re going to have women fighting side-by-side with you, I’d think that intimacy would be, not a guarantee, but it would happen pretty often. Talking to people who are fighting now, it still is kind of a fantasy for men. The idea of fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with women, I think, has helped the cause of feminism a lot, but it hasn’t made being a soldier any simpler or being a woman any simpler.

  I’ve heard you say that you, to this day, get letters every day from veterans, people who are serving in combat right now. What kind of things are they saying in recent letters that you’ve been getting?

  Well, not every day, but probably once a week I get letters saying, partly, how amazing it is that forty years ago I was able to predict the present day military; it’s not predicted at all, but it’s just that metaphorically there are things that are startling considering how old the story is. I get letters from people who are soldiers now who say, “Wow, you really got it. You know exactly what it’s like here.” But I’ve got news for them—it hasn’t changed that much. If I could get a letter from somebody fighting in the Civil War, it’d probably say, “You know? That’s pretty accurate. That’s the way we feel. Although we don’t have disintegrating rays now. We don’t even know what rays are.” But it’s just the way soldiers are.

  Given the sort of anti-war perspective of a lot of your writing, do you have any optimism that w
ar is becoming less common or will become less common in the future?

  It would be a nice thing to believe. I suspect that war will become obsolete only when something worse supersedes it. I think we’ll keep using force to bring about political ends, but the way the force manifests itself may be more sophisticated in the future.

  Like killer plagues and stuff like that, you mean?

  We’ve used plagues, and we’ve used them to help conquer the West with the blankets we gave to the Indians, but I’m thinking more in terms of weapons that don’t look like weapons. I’m thinking of ways you could win a war without obviously declaring the war in the first place. That seems to be a direction that combat could go. Nanomachines and biological warfare are the obvious directions for the future.

  So you’re thinking more in terms of mind control or super propaganda or something like that?

  Propaganda that actually works and is predictable would be a first order weapon for the future. One hopes that they never will be able to use mind control kind of weapons, because we’re all done for if that happens. I don’t want military people or political people to have that kind of power over those of us who just [live] day to day.

  Speaking of letters that you’ve received, I like the note for your story “Angel of Light.” In that story you invent this imaginary religion called Chrislam, which is a combination of Christianity and Islam, and in your author’s note you say, “Please don’t write me any letters about how wrong I’ve gotten it, or if you do please make them interesting.” Have you gotten angry letters about that story?

  I actually haven’t. I’ve gotten a couple of notes from people who are Muslim who appreciated the sympathetic nature of the character. But most people go, “Okay, he’s a science fiction writer, so he’s taking a science fictional look at a religion.” I tried not to be offensive. I have to admit, I read The Idiot’s Guide to Islam to try to not make too terrible mistakes about the basic parts of it.