Lightspeed Issue 46

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Another really, really great story from The Best of Joe Haldeman is your novella “The Hemingway Hoax,” which you also expanded into a novel. It’s funny, I bought a copy of that book at a convention years ago, and I had you sign it, and while you were signing it, your wife said that while you were writing that story that she could hear you in your room laughing out loud the whole time that you were writing it.

  I don’t often write deliberately funny books, but that one was. I had a riot with it. I was the perfect audience for it, of course, being a writer who writes about Hemingway.

  The premise of the story, we should say, is it’s about a Hemingway scholar who tries to produce a fake version of the manuscripts that Hemingway lost early in his career that his wife left on the train.

  Yeah, so that was pretty fun. I came up with the whole idea for it in about ten seconds. A friend was putting me on an airplane to Australia or New Zealand, and we had some time to kill in the airport; basically, on the way back from the men’s room, I had this whole idea about the story, and I wrote it down as soon as we stopped—which was in the Galapagos—and that was fun to write. I loved writing that book. It was like not working at all. I’d just type it up, and as my wife said, I was laughing all the way through it.

  You’re something of an amateur Hemingway scholar yourself, right? You attend the Hemingway conference every year.

  That’s true.

  What’s hot in Hemingway studies these days that people would talk about at a conference like that?

  There’s a kind of a backlash from the usual cliché of Hemingway being anti-women and anti-feminist and so forth. Hemingway studies cover an awful lot of stuff, and in fact, part of it is because his life is so tremendously well documented. He wrote thousands of letters, and they were all kept, and because he was famous, every little thing that he did was written down, and so he must be the most public American writer right now.

  On your blog, you quoted from The New York Times Book Review, and you quote this article that says, “by the mid-80’s, the brawling, womanizing train wreck that had characterized so many of the Lost Generation and post-war writers had gone out of style, replaced by weedy, thin-haired minimalists who had learned their craft at writers’ colonies and lived in college towns teaching in master’s programs.” What was it about that line that struck you?

  I just think it’s so true because I’ve known writers … The guys who were like twenty years older than me whom I hung around with in the ’60s and ’70s when I was still a young writer—they were very much influenced by this kind of hairy-chested Hemingway myth. You say it changed over the next twenty or thirty years to a kind of obvious rejection of masculinist ideals, and I guess Ray Carver is the obvious avatar of that. I may have mentioned him in that article. But you don’t want to be a hairy-chested, overly male writer because it’s way out of fashion.

  Do you think that that represents a cultural maturity, to move past the macho writer, or do you think something has been lost to people who went out and experienced life and got in bar fights and stuff like that?

  I think that particular kind of experience would not help anybody’s reputation, but they still do go out and do things, and the idea of a writer as an activist is still strong. But no, I think you get more points for being politically concerned, if not correct, and not being such a selfish … I’m trying to use some sort of polite language here, but you don’t want to be a jerk. Hemingway was a jerk. I mean, he was really a great jerk. He was a good writer, and he did all sorts of things that I would never have the courage to do, but I don’t think I’d enjoy being in the same room with him. He’s not my kind of person.

  In “The Hemingway Hoax,” it’s actually suggested that the sort of macho effect that Hemingway had on the culture might lead to World War III.

  I had fun with that one. You get two leaders, one in the United States and one in the Soviet Union, who both were totally influenced by Hemingway, and a man doesn’t back down, right? A man fights his fights. And if they both have nuclear weapons at their disposal, that’s really a bad attitude for them to have.

  Was that just sort of a fun idea, or do you think that fiction actually has that sort of impact on the world? Do you ever write a story and worry that you might start World War III if you write the wrong thing?

  I don’t think so. It’s a foolish and funny idea. I had to carry it out to its end. I suppose in some world, men of action would be so much influenced by literature that they would go off the deep end because they read a book that would reward them for it. I don’t see it happening in our society. In a simpler world, the world that we all came from, yes, one piece of writing could profoundly change the course of human events. The Gospel of Matthew, for instance, could change a lot. I don’t know. Uncle Tom’s Cabin definitely did. But you don’t hear about books that were pivotal that way anymore. I’m trying to think of any one in our culture.

  Of course, in other cultures where the distribution of literature is more strongly controlled, you can get political things succeeding, because they’re not in an open market of ideas. If everybody is reading and agreeing with the same book, you have a different kind of a situation.

  I’ve heard anecdotally that totalitarian regimes are famously hostile to science fiction because they don’t want people thinking about possibilities.

  Well, that’s true, or it seems to be true. When I was in the Soviet Union, science fiction was considered a part of children’s literature, and paradoxically that gave them a certain freedom, if only because the critics who read science fiction were the critics of children’s literature, and they didn’t go into politics deeply. They were more about entertainment and amusing ideas and this and that. So the science fiction writers, they could say some amazing things. They could criticize the regime with broad, humorous strokes, and the readers saw the game that was going on, but the critics just brushed it off because they had more important things to do. It was a very interesting time to be a science fiction writer, the ’70s and ’80s.

  We’re sort of short on time here, so we should start wrapping this up. Recently you announced that you’re stepping down from your teaching position at MIT. Could you talk about that?

  I turned seventy, and that’s old enough. I’d taught for thirty years, and that’s long enough. So, basically, I want to try living a simpler life and just writing. What I’d done for the past thirty years was go up to Cambridge every September, and then come back to Florida every December, and it’s just an awful lot of packing and unpacking and traveling, and just a more complicated life than I want to live, basically. I enjoy teaching, and I think I’m okay at it, but I’ve always been mainly a writer who just taught as a hobby. I don’t need hobbies so much as time right now.

  We’ve had Junot Diaz on the show twice, and he also teaches at MIT. Have your paths crossed there?

  Oh yeah, we had dinner together every now and then, and go to movies. Junot loves movies, and so do I. When we can, we hang out, and he’s a lot of fun to play with. He lives both in New York and Cambridge, so I never know when I can get him.

  Now that you’re going to be writing full-time, do you have projects you have in mind, or do you have anything in the works?

  I’m working on a complex science fiction novel now, which is taking all of my time and effort. I haven’t even sent in a proposal for my next novel yet, but I’ve never had any trouble coming up with ideas, and for many, many years I haven’t had trouble getting contracts for the books that I want to write, so basically I’ll just work on this one for another six months or so, and then I’ll work up a proposal for the next one, and they overlap, so I’ll turn in a manuscript and basically rest for a week or two, and then can start writing the next one. That’s been my pattern since the ’70s.

  We’re definitely looking forward to seeing whatever you come up with. I’d really like to thank you for being on the show today.

  I’m glad to do it. Thank you for thinking of me.

  The Gee
k’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

  David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Boot Camp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.

  Panel: YouTube for Geeks

  David Barr Kirtley, John Joseph Adams, Matt London, Cate Matthews

  This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the host discusses various geeky topics.

  Dave: Our panel topic today will be YouTube for geeks. We’re joined by not one, but two Guest Geeks. First up, we’ve got Matt London, making his eighth appearance on the show. He’s the creator of Space Pirates in Space, an animated web-series that premiered on YouTube in 2012. His fiction has appeared in The Living Dead Two, Daily Science Fiction, and is forthcoming in Space and Time Magazine. He’s also written extensively about video games and other geeky stuff for Lightspeed Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, and Tor.com. Matt, welcome to the show.

  Matt: Thanks for having me back, guys.

  Dave: Joining us for the very first time is Cate Matthews. She’s a graduate of the Alpha Young Writers Workshop, and a recent college grad who’s been vlogging on YouTube since 2010, where she’s racked up over three thousand subscribers. Cate, welcome to the show.

  Cate: Hello, thank you.

  Dave: Just to start out with, we’re going to talk about what our personal experiences have been with uploading stuff to YouTube. I’d like Matt to go first and tell us about Space Pirates in Space. Describe it a little bit, and what’s its current status?

  Matt: Space Pirates in Space is an animated web-comic about a crew of incompetent space pirates robbing the galaxy one screw-up at a time. I call it an animated web-comic because each episode is only about thirty to ninety seconds long. It’s not like your normal web-series that’s like three-to five-minute episodes or longer. I really like the idea of this bite-sized video content. It allows you to consume them really, really quickly, and it’s structured more like a lot of the web-comics that I love. We’re about to wrap up our first season, and then the second season will premiere sometime in the fall. It’s been an awesome project to work on. The inspiration for it was that I always wanted to be the showrunner of an animated TV series, but the opportunities for that are few and far between. I really wanted to emulate that style of production in making a web-series. I brought together a team of actor, improv-er, writer types, and got them all into a room to brainstorm ideas and collaboratively craft a script for the series. Then after that, we recorded dialogue for everybody, and then I animated the entire season.

  Dave: You can do an animated series as basically a one-person production team? What kind of equipment and software do you use?

  Matt: It’s not an easy task to do it all by myself, but I have a background in film and television production, so I came with a lot of those skills when I started. It’s mainly editing dialogue, something I’m sure you’re very familiar with, Dave. Then I build character assets inside of Photoshop, then export those to After Effects, where I animate the characters like puppets. After Effects is a really great tool for creating three-dimensional animation. Then I finish it all off in Final Cut Pro.

  Dave: Do you watch a lot of animated web stuff on YouTube?

  Matt: I try to. It’s funny, there are varying degrees of quality. What got me hooked into it was Machinima, which is this style of animation where you perform the animated film inside of a video game, and then dub over the motion of the game with your own dialogue. I think the first real break-out show was Red vs. Blue from Rooster Teeth. Now, Rooster Teeth has become this titan in the web animation industry. They do all sorts of comedic and game content. Beyond that, Machinima does all sorts of shows. A couple of my favorites are: Mega Man Dies at the End and Sonic for Hire, which take classic video game characters and put them into really absurd situations.

  John: We should mention that Red vs. Blue is set in the Halo-verse of the Halo video game, and “Red versus Blue” means that, if you’re playing a “versus” game, then one team is red and one is blue, and then they have humorous stuff happening and make fun of the silly little conventions of the game. It actually is quite hilarious.

  Matt: It’s a really funny show. The production value of web content can vary a lot, just because some people don’t have the resources to make something look really slick and first-tier professional. The truth is that it doesn’t take a budget to write something really smart or really funny. What you end up with is really brilliant writing. That’s the thing that makes good web entertainment.

  Dave: When you mentioned video game characters in absurd situations, it makes me think of the Dorkly videos. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of those, but they’re like video game characters, and in one of them Link rescues Zelda from Ganon in The Legend of Zelda, and then her boorish boyfriend shows up and goes off with her, and that was really funny. There’s this funny one where the main character from Braid is at a bar, and there’s all these other sidescroller characters like Mario and stuff, and the main character from Braid is really pretentious, and he’s like, “I’m not hanging out with you guys. I’m in a completely different class.” Mario is like, “Whoa, we’re both characters.” Braid is like, “No, but I rewind time.” Mario says, “You mean like Banjo Kazooie?” Braid says, “No, not like Banjo Kazooie, that’s outrageous.” That’s a really funny video.

  Matt: That’s exactly the kind of thing. Mega Man Dies at the End is a spoof on the Mega Man series. It sort of turns Mega Man into an ’80s action movie, where he’s grizzled with a beard, out in the woods, cutting lumber, and some robot comes out to bring him back for one last mission. He doesn’t want to go and he’s all conflicted, and then hilarity ensues as he navigates the seedy robot underworld.

  Dave: Cate, do you watch any animated movies on YouTube?

  Cate: I’ve seen a few, just one-offs. I can’t say that I make a habit of it. Some of the best ones I’ve seen were actually involving Batman and Superman, just parody videos.

  Matt: Did you see the video that they did of the death of Superman?

  Cate: Yeah, I did.

  Matt: Who is in it? There was somebody famous in it. I think it might have been through College Humor or Funny or Die, but they did a retelling of The Death of Superman: “If you’ve never seen The Death of Superman, I’m going to explain to you in ten minutes The Death of Superman, the whole saga,” but then they acted it out on the streets of Los Angeles, and it’s just completely absurd and ridiculous.

  Dave: I didn’t realize you were quoting that. I thought you were about to spend ten minutes describing The Death of Superman. I was getting a little nervous there.

  Matt: [Laughter] No.

  John: Actually, one of my favorite things on YouTube, which I was going to mention later, but since we’re talking about video games, is this “Breaking Bad Sixteen-Bit RPG.” I think this was College Humor. They took the story of Breaking Bad, it’s like the first four seasons, and they tell it in the style of a sixteen-bit role-playing game. It’s basically like playing Final Fantasy from the sixteen-bit days, but with Breaking Bad characters. It has all the ridiculous things that happen in the show, like when you strip away all the character stuff that’s so great on the sh
ow, and you look at it just on the surface, it seems ridiculous. It starts off with Walt going to the doctor and finding out that he has cancer, and then it pops up with a choice tree, and you have to decide what to do. It’s like, “Ask for help,” “Do this,” “Do this,” and then the last one was, “Sell meth.” So of course he just goes to “Sell meth,” ignoring the three other reasonable options that were above it. There’s all kinds of stuff like that. Then it has this really great coda at the end, where it’s like, “Breaking Bad Two: The Adventures of Walt Jr.,” which is Walt’s son, and it’s basically like his only option is “Eat breakfast.” On the show he’s basically eating breakfast and that’s what he does. Then it’s like, “Okay, go away, Walt Jr. Go to school.”

  Dave: I posted my top ten videos, and a bunch of these are animated. I don’t know if anyone got a chance to watch any of them.

  Matt: Love them. Ze Frank’s True Facts is maybe the most genius thing I’ve ever seen on YouTube. You can guess why I like it so much. It’s talking about the perverse sex habits of weird, alien-looking animals.

  John: Those aren’t animated though.

  Matt: No, they’re not, but that’s even more horrifying. You look at the sex lives of sea horses, or land snails, and you can be horrified.

  Dave: Did you see, I think this is animated, Scientifically Accurate Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and stuff like that? They have actual horrifying facts of turtle biology, and make it so that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have those characteristics. It’s so terrifying. You can’t even begin to imagine. They do it for a bunch of different animal-mutant kind of shows.

  John: Two other things that I had on my list of favorites that were animated: Do you guys know the comedian Tim Minchin? He’s a comedian-singer, so he has this song called “Storm,” and somebody made an animated movie out of it. It’s like poetry more than an actual song, he’s just reciting this story, but it’s kind of like a song. The animated film version is really cool to watch, and he’s a great geek-oriented comedian. His humor is very rational-based. He has a lot of atheist-type humor, and this one is specifically about being a skeptic, and running into someone at a party who’s a believer.