IGMS Issue 38

by IGMS

  The deeper Hollywood has gotten entrenched with its current blockbuster business model, I've seen its central (mostly male) characters streamlined into cookie-cutter movie-star heroes. But perhaps that has allowed strong female characters to blossom a bit more under the radar. Or maybe these particular women stand out more simply because studios have given us so few characters like them in recent years. Either way, at least a few people have been doing things right over the last year or two. Hollywood can keep churning out Spider-Mans and Avengers all they want; I'll find my way back here to Clara, Eleanor, India, Carmen, Elsa, Anna and Dr. Ryan Stone, thank you very much.

  InterGalactic Interview With Allen M. Steele

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  * * *

  Allen M. Steele is one of those science fiction writers whose fiction is more often than not set in outer space or on other planets. His first published novel was Orbital Decay (1989), which is the beginning of his Near Space or Rude Astronauts series. He is best known for Coyote: A Novel of Interstellar Exploration (2002) and its various sequels and companion volumes. He has won the Hugo Award three times - twice for novella, for "The Death of Captain Future" (1996) and "Where Angels Fear" (1998) and once for novelette, for "The Emperor of Mars" (2011). He is originally from Nashville, Tennessee, but presently lives with his wife Linda in Massachusetts.

  SCHWEITZER: Could you give our readers some idea of your background, where you're from, where you were educated, what you thought you would do with your life before it was taken over by science fiction?

  STEELE: I was born and raised in Nashville, where I spent the first couple of decades of my life. My education was public school until the seventh grade, when I went to the first of the two private schools I'd eventually get kicked out of. Nashville was a very conservative town in the 60s and early 70s, so if you were an upper middle-class kid in that place and time, it pretty much meant one of two things: either you'd get with the program and make good grades, go to church every Sunday, vote Republican, keep your hair short and your lip buttoned up, and go on to marry a cheerleader and get a job at a bank or an insurance company and otherwise have a comfortable but dull life . . . or you'd rebel.

  I think I began to rebel as early as the fourth grade, but by the time I was in junior high school it had become pretty serious. If you can name some kind of trouble I'd either cause or get myself into, chances are I did it. I managed to make it all the way to the ninth grade in one school before they had enough of me and invited me not to return for my sophomore year, so my folks shipped me off to the Webb School, a boarding school in west Tennessee, where I lasted for only six weeks before I was thrown out. I spent the rest of that school year in a public school before my father managed to get me reinstated at Webb, this time letting me know that, if I didn't knock off the Patrick McGoohan act, military academy was going to be my next stop.

  There's a couple of bits of irony there. First, I later compared notes with guys like me who'd been sent to military academy, and they told me that, once they got past having to wear a uniform, they had a blast; it was like being given a license to raise hell, so long as you didn't actually blow up the place. So I might have been happy there. Second, John Scalzi went to Webb's sister school in California, where he had a great time. But the Webb School in California was a far more progressive place than the Webb School in Tennessee, and I had to throttle down quite a bit.

  Anyway, I decided to put up with things I didn't like, telling myself that, if I could just get through high school, I could leave all this behind and go do what I really wanted to do with my life . . . which, by then, was become a science fiction writer.

  SCHWEITZER: Related to that, when did you realize that your life was going to be taken over by science fiction?

  STEELE: My life was taken over by science fiction as soon as I began reading the stuff, and that was around the time I started visiting the principal's office on a daily basis. I'm not going to blame SF for being the root cause of all my bad behavior, but it certainly was a contributing factor. One of the subtle yet omnipresent themes of SF is nonconformity, of questioning the beliefs and attitudes of the world around you and acting upon it. SF can be quite subversive, really, although it's seldom recognized as such. Anyone who believes that Robert Heinlein was a conservative writer hasn't read much Heinlein, or very deeply . . . and just wait until you graduate from Heinlein juveniles to Harlan Ellison!

  One of the best things I got from SF, though, was an interest and respect for science. Tennessee schools in the 60s and 70s were particularly lousy when it came to science, and that went for the private schools as well as the public education system. There was even a biology teacher at Webb who was teaching creationism . . . I spent a weekend raking leaves after I challenged him on his views of evolution. And one of my best moments was walking out of a Sunday school class when the teacher tried to tell us that the Book of Genesis was literal truth. I learned about science from reading Isaac Asimov's column in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jerry Pournelle's column in Galaxy, and every issue of Analog from cover to cover. I really didn't have a formal science education worth speaking of until I got to college, but in many ways I got a better understanding of science from the magazines and novels I was reading late at night than the classes I was dozing through during the day.

  And in the meantime, I decided to become a writer . . . very specifically, a science fiction writer.

  SCHWEITZER: So, when you were in school, was reading science fiction itself a form of rebellion? I can't imagine that creationist biology teacher would have had much use for it. Indeed, the two chief messages of science fiction are inherently subversive: that the future might have different values and not everything about the universe and our place in it is known yet. If you believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, all has been revealed and there is nothing to speculate about.

  STEELE: I kind of think so, yes . . . although in that place and time, reading anything for pleasure was uncool, unless it was Playboy or Sports Illustrated. Very few teenagers I knew read SF or fantasy, and those who did had better sense than me and left their books at home or in their dorm rooms. I carried my paperbacks and magazines at all times, so I could read them between classes (and sometimes during class, in the time-honored tradition of hiding them within my textbooks). I got a lot of crap for this which I remember to this day, although I got over it a long time ago. It helped to learn, around the time my first novel was published and I was making a name for myself as an up-and-coming new writer, that the big-jock-on-campus who'd call me "Dr. Spock" and ask me how things were on Mars was pumping gas in a one-stoplight town in Louisiana.

  But you're right . . . there's a certain mindset behind pious acceptance of creationism and the like which says that the universe is unchanging, and it often manifests itself in an inability to step outside what are considered the accepted community standards of behavior. SF stands in opposition to this. Sometimes, though, even kids I knew who were trapped in those roles would find ways to get out. One guy I knew back then had a fundamentalist mother who wouldn't allow any books in her house besides the Bible and his school books. He was a SF reader, though, so he got around it by keeping his paperbacks hidden beneath his mattress and getting rid of them as soon as he was finished. We'd talk about the stuff we were reading when we were sure no one else was around. I understand he grew up to be a preacher, just as his mother intended, and I've also been told that he's one of my biggest fans. Rebellion can be a quiet thing. I was just a little more up-front and in-your-face about it than most.

  SCHWEITZER: I've read your famous (and Hugo-winning) "The Death of Captain Future" and this raises two questions, one geeky and silly, the other more serious. The silly one is why this future nerd/obsessive did not have his precious 20th century pulp magazines de-acidified. You can do that now with a spray from the Gaylord Company, for about $35 a magazine. It renders the paper PH-neutral and stops the decay. I am sure this will be even easier to do in the future. His c
opies should not be crumbling.

  STEELE: Well, if you really want to be persnickety about it, you can also ask why Bo even bothered to collect pulps in the first place, but instead simply download them as ebooks the way we can now. The fact that my story was written in 1995 before this sort of digitalization became widespread isn't an excuse . . . obviously I failed to predict the future! So that's a reason why "The Death of Captain Future" is no longer worth reading, isn't it?

  I think the tendency of fans to nitpick the stories they read for real or perceived errors is one of the things which have hampered science fiction. It doesn't really accomplish anything of practical value, because authors seldom have a chance to make revisions to published work beyond changing or scratching out a few words here or there, and it adds to the public perception that SF is the sort of stuff only read by people who still live in their parents' basement. And more often than not, the nitpicking is either flat-out wrong -- like an online reader-review for my new book, V-S Day, which claimed that I didn't have any of the 1940s scientists in that novel using slide-rulers, when you see them doing exactly that in the very first chapter -- or carried to absurd lengths. Bob Eggleton told me that he once overheard a couple of fans at a convention discussing a painting he'd done of a dragon and criticizing it on the basis that the musculature of its wings wasn't sufficient to allow it to become airborne. It's a dragon . . . they don't exist!

  Fans will say that they're keeping writers on their toes, but I think this is only self-justification for petty behavior. Really, it discourages writers from being specific in their details. If you know you're going to get hammered for not telling the reader the exact atmospheric pressure of the planet your characters are visiting, then why bother with trying to be realistic? Call the place Oz, let them get there in a hot-air balloon, and shrug if anyone complains that the flying monkeys aren't aerodynamic.

  SCHWEITZER: The serious question has to do with the story itself. This is what some critics would call a Late Science Fiction story. It is almost a metafiction. The characters even discuss science fiction. The story is written with a great awareness of the past of the field, which was very different than it was for the actual pioneers like Edmond Hamilton or Jack Williamson, who had very little behind them. I like the way the characters apply science fiction to their actual lives, i.e. using it to create a myth of heroism when space travel has become as dull as truck driving. But isn't this inherently self-limiting, sort of the way late classical Latin poetry got when it became mostly a matter of references to earlier works? How do you feel about the inevitable self-awareness of the form that comes with writing science fiction these days?

  STEELE: The major theme of "The Death of Captain Future" is how real heroism is much different from fictional heroism. Bo is someone who believes that heroism means recklessly running into a dangerous situation without thought of the possible consequences of his actions. Rohr, the narrator, is a pragmatist who knows that the universe is a dangerous place that can kill you if you're careless. Bo thinks being a hero means emulating Captain Future, and in the end this dissonance leads him to his death. Rohr survives because he knows better . . . and in the end, he becomes the hero who saves the day and gets the girl, although it's Bo who gets the credit.

  So, yes, the story is commentary on SF itself. One of the things I find odd about science fiction -- although there's a lot less of this lately -- is the notion that, in the future, people will have forgotten that there's ever been any SF. You'll see first-contact stories, for instance, where no one ever stops and says, "Y'know, wasn't there a Star Trek episode that dealt with something like this?" In the real world, you can barely get through the day without someone remarking that such-and-such "looks like science fiction, but it isn't." As many people have noted, we live in an SFnal world, but SF itself often exists in a cultural vacuum . . . except perhaps for references to Shakespeare, which everyone seems to have read and is able to quote at the drop of a hat.

  That's been changing in recent years, though. I'm seeing more SF stories where SF itself becomes a cultural reference. I don't think this is a limitation any more than it would be, say, for a character in a horror story to mention in passing that they've read Dracula and how Stoker said that using a wooden stake is the proper way to dispatch a vampire. Mentioning a previously published story doesn't necessarily mean that a writer has to limit himself or herself to what was done before. It's just an acknowledgement that the past does indeed exist, and someone back then was thinking about the future before it actually happened.

  SCHWEITZER: Well I suppose Bo wants the original Captain Future pulps because they are sacred artifacts to him. He wants them for the look and feel and even the smell . . . which may be why he didn't get them chemically treated to prevent their decay. They must have cost him a fortune, particularly if you factor in the cost of getting them up off the Earth into space.

  STEELE: The problem with discussing a story published 19 years ago is that someone who read it just recently is probably more familiar with the details than the author. I imagine that Bo wanted the originals because they're valuable, as you suggest. I have an extensive collection of pulps myself, and although I can read their stories in the anthologies I have in my library, I prefer the original versions. It's sort of the poor man's answer to collecting antique cars. Bo is probably the same way . . . but again, that's something you'd have to infer from the benefit of hindsight. If digitalization had been commonplace when I wrote "The Death of Captain Future" in 1995, I might have used that technology instead.

  SCHWEITZER: I think you're right that any future we are likely to face from now on, unless it is a post-holocaust, barbarian one, will have science fiction in it as a cultural reference. I am reminded of that astronaut they had at the Nebulas who said, "We went into space because you guys told us to." So what do we say to the people who say that science fiction is done? There are those who insist it's run its course. I don't believe this is so, and I doubt you do either. The last time someone explained to me at length why science fiction was finished and could no longer be written was in 1983, and Cyberpunk happened the following year.

  STEELE: People have been saying that science fiction is dying or dead for as long as I've been actively involved in the SF field. I remember when people were claiming that the field was being destroyed by the Perry Rhodan paperbacks Ace was publishing in the 70s. When my first novel came out in 1989, Star Trek novels were the killer asteroid which was about to wipe out the genre. Now it's vampire books and steampunk and military space-opera and whatever other fad that comes through and sucks all the air out of the room for a while.

  Science fiction survives. It outlasts fashions and trends and gluts because there are always readers who prefer the real thing over the stuff that gets churned out for a quick buck. One of the reasons why I'm something of a traditionalist and have been careful to avoid bandwagons is that longevity belongs to those writers who don't just go where the money is. Cyberpunk was the rage when I entered the field in the late 80s, and many of the new writers who came in the same time that I did were doing the c-punk thing. Most of them have vanished, while those of us who've survived did so because we wrote SF and fantasy of a more durable variety. Our books may not be bestsellers, but I prefer to have written a novel like Coyote, which is still in print after 12 years and is now being taught in college SF classes, to a book that hit the bestseller list for two or three weeks but can now be found providing insulation for the walls of a used book store.

  SCHWEITZER: At the same time, how do we avoid SF getting too in-groupish and self-referential? Do you see a split into two streams, science fiction for the mainstream and science fiction for the science fiction audience?

  STEELE: As coincidence would have it, I'm currently reading the second volume of William Patterson's excellent biography of Robert A. Heinlein -- Tor was kind enough to send me an advance copy before publication -- and there's account of correspondence that passed between Heinlein and Forrest J. Ackerman. F
orry objected to the stories Heinlein was publishing in the Saturday Evening Post, saying that they were watered-down SF that weren't like the material Heinlein had previously written for Astounding, to which Heinlein responded that the readership of the slicks was much larger than that of the pulps, and his objective with stories like "The Green Hills of Earth" was to interest general readers in space travel, not to get them to read more science fiction.

  I think history has proven Heinlein right. There are times when SF has been very in-groupish and insular, and you see that in those periods when the average SF novel or story can't be understood by anyone who hasn't already read everything from Aldiss to Zelazny or isn't conversant in singularity theory or quantum entanglement. Up until a few years ago, that was my chief criticism of the field. That's changed lately, although not for the best reasons. Fads and trends are currently dominating what's being published, and I sometimes think that if I see another novel about an alien invasion of Earth or a dystopian society where teenagers are having firefights with soldiers in power armor, I'm going to hurl my lunch.

  It's great when a SF novel hits the literary mainstream and becomes a bestseller. The genre can't remain the sole province of geeks and fans and still have a healthy future. The problem is that, because such books are often produced by writers who have little prior knowledge of the genre, they often deal with subjects that previous generations of SF authors took on years ago, without much visible improvement. So the SF bestseller lists are being swamped with retreads of retreads. The literary frontier is still deep within the genre, with the print and online magazines -- as always -- providing the unexplored forest beyond the sunny and well-populated beach.