IGMS Issue 38

by IGMS

  SCHWEITZER: What intrigues me about your more recent "The Emperor of Mars" (2010) is that I think you've hit on an interesting, albeit narrow vein here: science fiction about how science fiction affects the culture of the future. A difficult trick to pull off, is it not? I don't think anyone else has put any particular emphasis on this.

  STEELE: When I learned that the Planetary Society had persuaded NASA to place a disk containing a library of Mars stories and artwork aboard the Phoenix lander, I was so happy that I didn't mind the fact that they hadn't asked my permission to also include my story "Live from the Mars Hotel" on the commercial release of that same disk. I was just pleased that my first widely-published story was finding its way to Mars. I'll probably never walk on another world, but my work will be there, and that's good enough for me.

  When I saw the list of stories on the disk, one of the things that jumped out at me was the fact that most of them came from the pre-space flight era of science fiction. Along with Bear and Benford and Varley and Steele, there was also Wells and Burroughs and Weinbaum and Bradbury. And it occurred to me that, if a future Mars colonist were to ever recover the disk and successfully download its contents, he or she would probably enjoy Brackett more than Clarke, or Zelazny more than Robinson, because their stories represented a Mars that didn't look very much like the place where they were now living. That Mars -- the so called "old Mars" to use a term recently coined by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois for the anthology for which "The Emperor or Mars" was originally written -- is the one that's more appealing in many ways, the one which prompted everyone from Robert H. Goddard onward to want to go there. If I was a morbidly depressed Mars colonist who was stuck there with no immediate way home, this might become a fantasy world in which I'd gladly retreat.

  So this story is about two things. The obvious one, of course, is how we often use fiction as a means of dealing with reality, particularly the scary or tragic events that sometimes happen to us. Anyone who's ever latched onto a book as a way of dealing with this sort of thing knows exactly what I mean. But the other and more subtle context of the story is something which intrigues me about science fiction itself, how it occasionally helps form a creative feedback-loop in which writers look over the shoulders of scientists to get ideas for stories, and then scientists in turn gain inspiration from the SF stories they read for their own real-world efforts.

  I've seen this in action lately during the recent 100-Year Starship and Starship Century conferences, where SF writers and scientists have gathered to discuss the prospects for building interstellar spaceships within the next hundred years. At these things, there's been very little division between these two different kinds of visionaries. The series of stories I'm currently writing comes straight from my notes of presentations delivered by Freeman Dyson and Jim Benford, and the scientists who spoke there often alluded to SF stories they'd read.

  If no one else has written a story about this sort of thing, then I guess I'm a bit surprised. It seems like such an obvious insight.

  SCHWEITZER: The point about "mainstream SF" is that there are lots of books, like The Postmortal by Drew McGary or Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro which are science fiction by any definition but are not published as science fiction and may well reach an audience that doesn't ordinarily read science fiction. Is there still a real difference in technique, or how language is used in such a book? You wouldn't start a story for a mainstream audience with "The jumpship dropped out of warp half a parsec from Rigel IV." That would be gibberish to them. But it would pass without notice in Analog.

  STEELE: This is one of those questions where there is no answer that can't be argued by counter-example. If "mainstream SF" is distinguished by the lack of technical jargon, then where does that leave, say, Michael Crichton's novels? If we decide to call it "literary SF" instead and use the same definition, then what do we do with novels like Gregory Benford's Against Infinity or Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer or Samuel Delany's Nova, which are clearly "literary" in intent but also use genre techniques? If "mainstream" or "literary" SF doesn't concern itself with traditional SF subjects like space exploration, then what do we make of a novel like Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow or much of Doris Lessing's work? And if we decide that it's simply a matter of publisher labels -- i.e. "mainstream SF is the stuff that isn't being called science fiction" -- then what happens when we point to books like, on one hand, Fahrenheit 451, which was originally published as a genre paperback from a genre publisher but has since become accepted as part of the mainstream canon, or, on the other hand, 1984, which never was presented as SF but clearly is?

  Because there's no clear answer to this, it's one of those things that drives SF writers, editors, and serious readers completely crazy, and I believe the reason it does so is the genre's long-standing inferiority complex. Those of us who live and work in this so-called ghetto have a tendency to look over at the clean streets and well-manicured lawns of contemporary fiction (aka the "mainstream") and become jealous of its perceived wealth and success, and get just a little pissed off when something is published that explores ideas first developed in genre SF but gets reviewed by The New York Times Sunday Book Review instead of Analog. But I know quite a few mainstream writers, and their books are usually ignored just as much as SF novels are. Indeed, the average SF novel is often more successful than the average mainstream novel.

  I had a chance to become a mainstream writer. My writing teacher was Russell Banks, and the first novel I produced, Play Dirty, was a contemporary novel that I wrote under his tutelage but went unsold and unpublished. Russ was very disappointed that I returned to science fiction, a genre he despises, to write my second novel, Orbital Decay (which, of course, is regarded as my "first" novel), but I think that, if I'd stuck it out in the mainstream, my career would have lasted only a few years and eventually I would've become just another writer who'd published a couple of now-forgotten books before getting a job teaching creative writing at some community college. Or worse, a middle-aged journalist who'd now be out of work because of the slow death of the newspaper industry.

  Yeah, it's probably a difference of technique. Probably also subject, approach, depth of characterization, marketing and any of a number of different factors. Ultimately, though, it comes down to one thing: are readers going to enjoy your work? If they do, and continue buying and reading over the years, then does it really matter that you'll never get a MacArthur fellowship?

  SCHWEITZER: So let's talk more about Coyote. Is this going to be your Dune?

  STEELE: I'm reluctant to have my best-known work compared to one of the acknowledged classics of the genre. The book has been in print for almost twelve years, yes, and now it's being taught in college SF classes, but it may be a bit presumptuous to claim that it's entered the canon. On the other hand, I'm very complimented by the fact that a number of people have lately been describing it as "the new Dune."

  The thing that's most satisfying about Coyote's success is that, because the book takes an unconventional form, it was initially rejected by quite a few genre readers. There were some bad fan reviews for this novel when it first came out. It's not a linear novel, but instead told as a linked series of stories, with different narrators, viewpoints, and tenses, sometimes even divergent reiterations of the same events. Halfway through the novel, I kill off a character who'd been presented as the main protagonist. All of this was intentional, but it disturbed readers who are more accustomed to straight-forward narratives with an obvious hero as the central character. This untraditional approach rattled some people and they reacted negatively, but in the long run its unconventional nature has given Coyote some staying power.

  SCHWEITZER: Taught on college classes? Do you hear from the students? How does it feel to be a classic, just like Herman Melville?

  STEELE: It would be even more presumptuous to compare Coyote to Moby Dick, although I believe that, if Melville were alive and well today, he'd probably be writing science fiction. I know
this sounds weird, but when I was taking a college class in American transcendentalist literature, it occurred to me that what Melville wrote about was very similar to what SF writers would later be doing: using a voyage into the unknown to the dark side of human nature. And when my class visited the historic New Bedford seaport and went to the customs house where Melville worked, I saw it as an early 19th century analogue to Cape Canaveral. Bradbury perceived much the same thing, I think, when he wrote "Leviathan '99" -- an overlooked later work which made me jealous because I didn't do it first.

  I've heard from students who've read Coyote as part of their curricula, and a couple of times I've done guest appearances at schools in the area where the kids have been reading the book. Interestingly, they often understand the novel better than some fans have. Maybe it's because they've come to it without a lot of preconceived notions about what a SF novel ought to be. I don't know. But it was a strange thing to once visit the off-campus college bookstore that supplies UMass students with their course reading and find stacks of Coyote on the inventory shelves alongside textbooks.

  SCHWEITZER: About that feedback loop between science and science fiction, do you usually get your story idea from science (or a scientific presentation), or do you start with an image or a situation and then start looking around for scientific stuff to rationalize it?

  STEELE: It seems to come all at once as a brainstorm. I'll read something in the scientific literature, hear a lecture, or watch a documentary, and something just clicks: a story begins to form in my mind, and with it the major character or characters. If I've remembered to carry my pocket notebook that day, I'll jot down a few story notes, and if I'm still playing with the idea after a week or two, I figure that I may have something there and start doing serious research.

  Very often, I'll bounce the story off my wife to see what she thinks of it. Since Linda doesn't read SF besides mine, her feedback can be a good thing since I'm trying to appeal to readers who aren't necessarily SF fans. And because she's pretty good at telling me whether it's a dumb idea or something worth pursuing, she's saved me from embarrassing myself with stories that shouldn't be written. But early in my career, Harlan Ellison gave me some advice: a bad idea can occasionally lead to a good one if you work with it long enough. I once had an urge to write a sequel to Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea until Linda talked me out of. I still wanted to do an undersea novel, though, because that was what I was really trying to get at, so the story eventually evolved into Oceanspace.

  Overall, the genesis phase is an organic process that I try not to analyze too deeply. It's the research and development phase that takes a very long time, sometimes longer than the actual writing itself. The novella I wrote last fall -- "The Legion of Tomorrow," which will be in the July issue of Asimov's -- took about a decade to move from notes to published form. Coyote had a couple of false-starts before I got it right. Very seldom do I have a story that comes to me in such a hot flash that I begin writing it immediately, and I've seldom been happy with those that have.

  SCHWEITZER: I think you're right about Melville. Moby Dick is one of those non-science fiction books which has had an enormous influence in science fiction, because it is, thematically, very close to SF. We've had at least two science fiction sequels, John Kessel's "Another Orphan" and Philip José Farmer's The Wind-Whales of Ishmael. Did it have a science-fictional feel to you when you first read it?

  STEELE: The first time I tried to read Moby Dick, I didn't finish it. On the other hand, I don't think is a book that should be assigned to kids as school reading. The second time, though, yes, I had that sort of feeling you can get from a SF novel . . . but that wasn't until after I visited New Bedford and had that revelation I mentioned earlier.

  A contemporary, non-fiction book about a similar subject that had an even more profound influence on me than Moby Dick is Sea of Glory by Nathaniel Philbrick, which is about the U.S. Exploratory Expedition of 1820. This was a real-life science fiction story of sorts: a five-year global sea expedition which, among other things, resulted in the first landfall on the Antarctic continent, the first mapping of the Fiji islands, and a collection of rare plants that would later form the basis of the National Botanical Garden in Washington D.C. The most interesting part of the story, though, is its commanding officer, a young U.S. Navy lieutenant who was put in charge of the expedition despite the fact that he didn't have command rank and was unqualified for the role, but who got the job because his wife's father was a senator with considerable political clout. His ineptitude cost the expedition one of its ships and the lives of many crewmen, caused several scientists to jump ship and make their own way home, and very nearly resulted in mutiny. It was only the actions of his first officer, a more experienced seaman who should have been made captain, which saved the expedition from complete failure.

  Sea of Glory inspired me to write about much the same sort of situation in Spindrift, and the book received an incredulous reaction from quite a few readers and fan reviewers. They couldn't believe that a ship's captain would be so stupid. In hindsight, I've come to believe that many SF fans have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the Star Trek notion that captains are always right, the crew is always loyal, and no one ever makes mistakes. I call this sort of thing "the perfect people future." But when you study the history of exploration, matters are seldom so clear-cut and simple. Exploration has often been messy, gut-wrenching, and very dangerous, and I have little doubt that it'll be the same as we go out into space.

  SCHWEITZER: Other than getting one of your stories placed on Mars, are you aware of any other impact your fiction has had on real science? Isaac Asimov could see roboticists following his ideas, but I am not sure how many other SF writers get to enjoy that experience.

  STEELE: Another favorite moment of my career was when I had a friend, a fan I'd met when he was an engineering student at UMass and who'd since gone on to work for NASA at the Johnson Space Center, tell me that he'd decided to pursue a career in the space industry because he'd read Orbital Decay. I've also received a few letters from other people actively involved with space exploration tell me that my books have encouraged them to keep at it despite the frustration they've often felt. This sort of praise makes it all worthwhile. It's told me that I'm working for a higher purpose than selling books or getting awards.

  SCHWEITZER: I suppose what I mean about the Coyote series becoming your Dune is that it could take over your career. I mean, we all should have this problem, but the publishers could just keep on saying, "Here's half a million bucks, write me a book just like the last one," and this goes on and on until they won't let you do anything else. Do you think you could get to the point where this is all anybody knows about you, that you're the Coyote guy?

  STEELE: Hah! If my publisher were to offer me a half-million dollars to write anything, let alone a new Coyote novel, I'd gladly do so. People tend to overestimate by a considerable factor how much writers earn, though. There's only a small-and-getting-smaller handful of full-time SF writers who earn more than a middle-class income, and I'm not one of them.

  Aside from that, though . . . yes, the success of the Coyote series has threatened to overshadow everything I've done since then. That includes the three spin-off novels -- Spindrift, Galaxy Blues, and Hex -- which are set in the same universe, but only have brief scenes on Coyote itself. Unfortunately, I've learned that, unless the word "Coyote" appears in the title, the readers who loved the five novels in the main sequence aren't as interested in them. This has been a disappointment, particularly since I worked as hard on building Hex -- the Dyson sphere that's the title world of the novel -- as I did Coyote.

  After I finished Coyote Frontier, the third novel of the original trilogy, and was about to move on with Spindrift, the first of the spin-offs, Ginjer Buchanan, my editor at Ace, warned me that I might not be able to leave Coyote as easily as I thought. She told me that Frank Herbert had felt trapped by his own creation; he was proud of what he'd written since then, but his read
ers only wanted more Dune books. Ginjer was right. I'm getting the same thing now. I put a cap on the Coyote series a few years ago with Coyote Destiny, the fifth novel, but when I've published an unrelated novel like Apollo's Outcasts or V-S Day, I get letters or comments to the effect of, "Well, that's nice, but when are you going to write a new Coyote book?"

  I've got some ideas for a sixth Coyote novel and have written down a few notes, and one day I may bite the bullet and get on with it. But those books were hellishly difficult to write. They all have an eight-part structure which have two or three concurrent plots involving large casts of characters, and this octagonal narrative approach sometimes switches viewpoints and voices. So I refuse to do a new Coyote book simply for the money. If I find a better reason than that to write a sixth Coyote novel, I will. But if I don't, then I won't.

  SCHWEITZER: I gather you are a "talker," i.e. a writer who can talk about an idea before writing it. Larry Niven seems to think that if the idea can't start an argument first, or at least a lively discussion, it is not worth writing. But there are other writers for whom any talking about the story beforehand will remove the impulse to write it. I am much closer to that camp myself.

  STEELE: It all depends with whom I'm talking. I generally refrain from discussing works-in-progress in public, such as convention panels, except in the most general terms. Ditto with readers and most other writers. On the other hand, I've discovered that it's helpful to be table to talk these things through with people who are on the same wavelength. The kind of stuff I write is fairly complex on several levels, and it helps to have someone who can listen to a story that's being developed and offer advice. Besides Linda, I have a number of close friends -- writers, scientists, fans -- whom I can turn to while I'm in the research and development phase and discuss things. And in recent years I've begun enlisting first readers, something I didn't do for a very long time. I had a great first-reader in my late friend Ace Marchant, who helped me with the later Coyote novels and the spin-offs, and after he passed away a couple of years ago I replaced him with Rob Caswell, who also supplied the frontispiece illustrations for Galaxy Blues, Hex, and Apollo's Outcasts.