I think we’ll be pulled in lots of directions. The internet and social media have had a huge impact in establishing a global perspective; no matter how much a country might try to control these media, it’s never going to work—the people will tweet. But at the same time we’re in the early part of a century that will see massive resource issues as fossil fuels dwindle and population growth and climate change put pressure on food production, fresh water supplies, disease control and more. These pressures are bound to trigger a lot of knee-jerk nationalism and territorialism. It’s hard to see how we’re going to avoid a whole host of large-scale conflicts in the years to come …
How important are popup blockers and personal security going to be in a augmented reality world?
We’re going to need ways to control how we interact with an augmented world or it will be unusable. The internet has spawned all kinds of scams, traps and irritants and we’ve developed ways to block them, or to filter them so that we only see the ones that might be useful, and this will be true as the augmented view spreads beyond the purely online. I don’t want to walk down the high street and have every shop spamming me with ads and special offers, but it’ll be really cool to have tools that tell me there’s a restaurant two streets away that’s just like the one I love back in my home town, or that the bookshop has a special deal on my favourite author. So yes, we’ll develop tools that will offer us those kinds of filters so that augmented reality works. And the spammers will find ways to circumvent the filters (“Special offer Viagra!!!!”) and we’ll have to upgrade our filters, and then …
Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Tor.com, SF Signal and Blastr, and can be found over at http://andrewliptak.wordpress.com and at @AndrewLiptak on twitter.
Author Spotlight: Gregory Benford
Robyn Lupo
Not every story begins with a shot to the face. Can you tell us how this story came about for you?
I like narrative hooks, and starting with action is a grabber. It’s also how the central problem comes to the protagonist. I could’ve opened with a description of how dull asteroid prospecting was, but … who wants to read that?
This story deals with where we, as humans, make our home. Can you tell us more about this idea?
I wrote this story in 1979, when the whole Fermi question was a hot topic and we’d come to realize that the O’Neill colony ideas of that era implied that people might well live in space indefinitely. I just put the two together.
It doesn’t seem like a big stretch to say that the narrator appears to identify more with the aliens she encounters than other humans. What is it in Rosemary that allows her to relate to the aliens so well?
She’s alienated from most human society. Loners in the Belt are far apart and take risks. Living indefinitely in space is a way of life. In this way the aliens aren’t so alien.
How do you balance off writing and your academic life? What’s a writing day look like for you?
I write for fun, always have. I fit it in around my research interests and time I spend working with the company I founded, Genescient. SF emerges from my scientific interests, so my life self-reinforces.
I try to write in the mornings, when I’m smarter (we all are, and get more stupid through the day). Sometimes I take months away from writing, which builds a narrative pressure and makes writing fluid when I do return to it. It’s a fun life.
Do you have anything upcoming that you’d like to let our readers know about?
I’ve started revisiting some of my novels and getting them back from their original publishers. In 2011, I reissued in a new edition my longest novel, about cryonics as I’ve known it, Chiller. It’s updated and available in trade paperback and eeditions.
Next year, Larry Niven and I will publish the first of two volumes of a long novel, The Bowl of Heaven. It’s about what I call a Big Smart Object—a starship the size of a solar system, with all the physics worked out. But who would build such a thing …
Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.
Author Spotlight: Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Erin Stocks
What was most unsettling for me about “Craters” was that even though it was written several years ago and its key plot points lie in the near future, there’s a very real and present-day element to the threat at hand. Where did the inspiration for this story come from?
Joe Haldeman asked me to write a story for an anthology he was putting together called Future Weapons of War. I got to the time I had allotted for writing the story and freaked out. Science fiction is sometimes a blueprint for people to invent technology and in no way did I want to come up with a “cool” weapon that someone would invent. So I just took trends in the news—trends that go back to the earliest days of human history—and came up with this story.
The main character consciously determines not to feel any emotion. She calls it the only way to get by, and yet, she must consistently talk herself out of feeling. Is this particular story finally getting to her in a way previous ones haven’t?
Yes. This story disturbs her and violates her sense of right and wrong. Journalists should be observers, not people who judge, and she’s judging here.
She acknowledges that nothing will get done, nothing will change, despite her work. Why do you think she continues, then, knowing that’s likely the case?
The war correspondents I know—and I know a lot of them, since I used to be a journalist—are the most idealistic/cynical people in the world. They’ve seen everything, more than everything actually, and they still believe if the information gets out there, someone will listen and make things change. It’s a weird dynamic, but I’m glad it happens. Because I do think people listen. I also think the real war correspondents, the ones who go into the dangerous places often without backup or weaponry, are the most courageous people I know.
The narrator and her other colleagues “… label it a calling, put it on par with other religions, other callings that deal with ethics.” With that in mind and considering her views on emotion, it seems like an effort to rationalize what they see: the blood, the suffering, the death. Is that a coping mechanism, you think?
It is a coping mechanism and one, again, based on the reporters I know. And on me, way back when. You can be desensitized by what you see, so you have to fight that. You can feel helpless when confronted with all of the world’s monstrosity, and you have to fight that. By seeing it as a calling, a religion, you know you’re not alone in the fight, and that you might eventually stem the tide.
The idea of a world where children are tools is horrifying. Why do you think it comes down to that, for those who have instigated such a zealous and uncompromising route?
To terrorists and people deep in a war or a crisis situation, other people are not real to them. Gangs use little children to run drugs. In Vietnam, the Viet Cong occasionally strapped bombs to toddlers. I can go on. Thanks to my own journalism background and my interest in history, I know lots of horrible, terrible things like that. And what it comes down to is that some people do not see others as human, even children. Those others are tools to fight a war, win a cause, deliver a good. It’s that simple, and that horrifying.
The similarities between the child who survived and our narrator are clear: the extraordinary solitude they both clearly feel, and the degree to which they must trust people in order to survive. Was that an intentional choice when you wrote the story?
I wish I could say I was smart enough to make intentional choices when I write. But the choices actually come from my subconscious as the story is developing. I remember finishing this story. I actually went, “Ewww.” Then I told my husband and first reader, Dean Wesley Smith, that I couldn’t mail this story. It was too icky. Dean made me give him a copy. He says when I say something is “icky,” it’s
worth reading. So I trust him on these things. It has certainly proven the case with “Craters,” which, on my own, I would never have mailed.
Do you think this encounter with the child had any lasting effect upon the narrator? Even if the child gave her new information, would she allow herself to change at all?
Oh, yes. I think this encounter had a huge effect on the narrator. That’s why she’s writing the personal stuff. As for her changing … I doubt she’ll change beyond her realization. She can’t. If she does change too much, she can’t do her work.
Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks’s fiction can be found in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth, Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Colored Lens. Follow her on Twitter @erinstocks.
Author Spotlight: Carrie Vaughn
Erin Stocks
Your new story for Lightspeed, “Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil,” features two characters that you’ve written about before, most recently in your story for John Joseph Adams’s upcoming anthology, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. What is it about Harry and Marlowe that keeps bringing you back?
Lots of reasons. They’re fun. I like the buddy-adventure format. They’re my excuse to write steampunk-type stories. I like having a ready-made setting and characters I can use to tell certain kinds of stories—such as neo-Victorian pulp adventure. Now that I’ve written a couple of stories using them as a catalyst, I want to write a couple that are about them specifically: where they came from, how they met, and so forth. That’s the thing about these kinds of characters, they really expand.
Harry is a plucky protagonist, determined to get what she wants and do what she wants, and nobody can tell her otherwise. Did anybody or anything in particular inspire her character?
She was inspired by a type rather than anyone specific. I’ve had a character like her in mind for a very long time—a woman who bucks tradition to go have adventures. I’ve read a lot of Victorian adventure stories, and I really wanted to see that kind of story but with a woman adventurer. It’s been done before (Agatha Heterodyne is an example that comes to mind), and there were actually quite a few real-life Victorian women who went adventuring. Harry is my take on the trope.
After the rousing escape and rescue by gondola, the reader is suddenly propelled into a steampunk world. What appeals to you about steampunk, and incorporating science fictional elements into it? Is it tricky to balance the fantastic against science fiction in a steampunk world?
Like a lot of people I’m attracted by the aesthetics of steampunk. It appeals to the anglophile and costumer in me. Also, big unlikely machines, ray guns, and all kinds of weirdness. What’s not to like? I agree with the idea that steampunk is more fantastical and less science fiction. Just as urban fantasy asks “what if vampires and werewolves were real?” steampunk asks, “what if some of the scientific ideas that were being investigated a century or so ago, that turned out to be inaccurate, were real?” It can be liberating, exploring some of those ideas. That said, I want the stories to seem as plausible as possible. We know exactly how dirigibles work, so I can’t diverge from that. On the other hand, my alternate history starts with the crash of an alien spacecraft in Surrey, and I can do just about anything with the reverse-engineered technology that comes out of that. Making it as plausible as I can involves the same effort as writing anything speculative—I have to establish my rules and stay consistent.
Why do you think Harry & Marlowe are holding themselves back from being together?
Because Harry is Princess Maud, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and Marlowe is a commoner. It’s really that simple. They’re a product of their place and time, and it’s going to take a little more effort to get them past that class boundary.
What does Harry get out of running away as she does, seeking this sort of adventure? Given her easy camaraderie with Marlowe, one has the feeling this is not the first time they’ve done this.
It’s not, and one of the stories I want to write is how they came to be partners in these spy-thriller escapades. My Harry diverges pretty radically from the historical Princess Maud, but the real Maud really was called Harry by her family when she was young—she was apparently quite a tomboy. I took that nugget and ran with it—once she got the opportunity to do something more than be a polite ornament, she grabbed it and ran. In the world of my stories, I imagine her brother, the Crown Prince (in my history, their father, Edward, died before Victoria and never became King), finds it useful having a secret agent very close to him whom he can trust utterly. And whom no one suspects.
Will we ever find out what the Aetherian talisman does? A next installment to this story, perhaps?
Who knows? I think the next story may go back in time rather than forward, to tell how Harry and Marlowe met, but the stories so far have been about Aetherian technology, and the next step that Marlowe is particularly eager to take—traveling into space. Maybe the talisman will be the key to that.
Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks’s fiction can be found in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth, Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Colored Lens. Follow her on Twitter @erinstocks.
Coming Attractions
Coming up in March, in Lightspeed …
We’ll have original science fiction by new writer Kali Wallace (“The Day They Came”) and Steven Utley (“Test”), plus SF reprints by award-winning authors Mary Rosenblum (“My She”) and Kathleen Ann Goonan (“Electric Rains”).
Plus, we have original fantasy by S. L. Gilbow (“Alarms”) and David Barr Kirtley (“Beauty”), and fantasy reprints by bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler (“Halfway People”) and the legendary Gene Wolfe (“The Legend of XI Cygnus”).
All that plus our artist showcase and our usual assortment of author spotlights, and feature interviews with Ian McDonald and R. A. Salvatore. And our ebook-exclusive novella will be “Cleopatra Brimstone” by Elizabeth Hand.
It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed. Thanks for reading!
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