Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 168

by Neil Clarke

  There were other important aspects that went into the book’s development. I enjoyed working with Xia Jia on her thrilling tale, which was translated from Chinese by Ken Liu. Working closely with both authors gave me deeper insights into “The Monk of Lingyin Temple.”

  I had a lot of fun going through loads of art with Susan. Tatiana Plakhova’s work is stunning, thoughtful, and full of entangled connections. I was really pleased that she agreed to be a part of Entanglements.

  Personally, one very satisfying aspect of this book was having the opportunity to choose a distinguished science fiction author to profile or interview. Other volumes of TT have featured Neal Stephenson, Samuel R. Delany, and Gene Wolfe. I knew immediately that the author I wanted to fill this role was Nancy Kress. Lisa Yaszek, a professor of science fiction studies at Georgia Tech, whose work I’ve followed for some time, was an excellent interviewer. I felt very lucky that Nancy agreed to write “Invisible People” for the book as well.

  Were there stories you really liked that didn’t make it into final selection for one reason or another?

  No. This wasn’t an open call for submissions. One author sent two stories and I had a very strong preference for one over the other. Another author offered me a couple of different story scenarios. Both would have been fascinating, but sadly I could only choose one. I did ask for some rewrites and clarifications, but I was very happy with the quality of the material that I received.

  In the Introduction you wrote, “The book’s ten fiction authors were asked to write tales about the emotional bonds that hold us together. They had a broad canvas.” What are the advantages to giving authors a broad canvas to work with, and are there also potential disadvantages?

  I was afraid that a narrow theme would result in stories that were too similar to each other. A broad theme ensures that that there will be a variety of perspectives. Yet, there were some very interesting, and narrower, themes that I didn’t choose. I’d love to revisit some of these and figure out strategies for making them work.

  If someone will read only one story to see if the book is for them, which story would you tell them to read—and why?

  One strong feature of an anthology is the range of material. Some stories will appeal to you. Different stories may appeal to someone else. “Sparklybits,” Nick Wolven’s complicated tale about parenting dynamics, tools for virtual education, and concerns about screen time may be the best story for one reader. “Your Boyfriend Experience,” James Patrick Kelly’s story about a sexbot developer, his boyfriend, and the sexbot may be someone else’s favorite. “The Monogamy Hormone,” Annalee Newitz’s often very amusing story about a woman trying to choose between two lovers should charm almost everyone.

  Science fiction can challenge readers in different ways. Which story in the anthology challenges the reader the most?

  Sam J. Miller’s “The Nation of the Sick” may be the most challenging. There are a million ideas coming at the reader. As we are getting our mind around iterative modeling and floating fungitecture, our understanding of two brothers’ complex relationship also becomes clearer. The epistolary storytelling technique eventually yields the entire picture, but getting there is a great ride.

  Science fiction can also be about innovative ideas. When you think about the book from this angle, which stories come to mind?

  In addition to technology and ideas mentioned elsewhere here are a few: “Mediation,” Cadwell Turnbull’s deeply moving story about grief and an AI family therapist; “Don’t Mind Me,” Suzanne Palmer’s chilling look at a child-lock device that conveys ultimate parental control; “The Monogamy Hormone,” with Annalee Newitz’s walls painted with bacterial slime to help build the immune system of elementary students; and Mary Robinette Kowal’s robot service animals in “A Little Wisdom” are great examples of innovative ideas about technology’s future effects on all of us.

  If you weren’t collecting these pieces for Entanglements, would you have potentially published them in Asimov’s?

  Each of these stories could have been published in Asimov’s, although not in the same issue, as the issues aren’t thematic. There’s a brief graphic scene in Rich Larson’s story that might have caused me to waver about whether it was right for Asimov’s. Still, the characters are so humanely drawn and the mix of humor and pathos work so well that there’s a good chance I would have ultimately decided to take it for the magazine.

  You’ve edited a number of anthologies before, but the bulk of them are related to Asimov’s. Do you plan to do more anthologies completely separately from the magazine?

  Working on this original anthology was challenging and fun. I’d love to do more books like this if the opportunity comes along.

  About the Author

  Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, and is also associate editor at both Locus and Lightspeed magazines.

  The Heart of the Story:

  A Conversation with Scott H. Andrews

  Arley Sorg

  Scott H. Andrews has over a dozen electric guitars, half of which he built himself, including one he started building in 2007. But then he launched Beneath Ceaseless Skies in 2008.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies (BCS) is a nonprofit, SFWA-qualifying online magazine dedicated to publishing “literary adventure fantasy: fantasy set in secondary-world or historical paranormal settings, written with a literary focus on the characters.” Within a few years of launch, the magazine was receiving Hugo Awards nominations. In 2013, Andrews received the first of several World Fantasy Award nominations. Since then, the magazine has been a Hugo finalist in the Semiprozine category. In 2016, the magazine won a British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine/Periodical, and Andrews won the World Fantasy Special Award, Non-Professional in 2019. BCS stories have garnered a slew of accolades, including regular appearances on Locus Recommended Reading lists, landing on most major genre awards lists, and being reprinted in notable anthologies.

  Andrews has a PhD in biophysical chemistry, which, he says, he only uses “when I see TV chefs getting protein chemistry wrong.” As a teen he was the ecology teacher at his summer camp, where he spent time catching rattlesnakes. Over the years he has identified as chemistry lecturer, musician, woodworker, and connoisseur of stouts. But clearly, his heart was in fiction. Before launching BCS, Andrews graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2005. In 2006 his piece called, “A Brief Swell of Twilight” won the $1,000 Briar Cliff Review short story prize, and his short story, “Excision” came out in Weird Tales in 2007.

  Andrews lives in Virginia with his wife, two cats, overflowing bookcases, and hundreds of beer bottles from all over the world. About that guitar? “It probably won’t get finished until whenever BCS ends.”

  In your 2017 Locus Spotlight, you quoted Faulkner. Do you mostly read genre or is your reading habit fairly broad? Was Faulkner a homework assignment, or did you grow up reading a lot of different kinds of books?

  I grew up reading a lot, nonfiction too, but the fiction was mostly cool stuff that caught my eye or that I picked up from friends, like Lord of the Rings, Dune, and Earthsea; a lot of spy raid novels like Alistair MacLean; all the James Bond novels; some Heinlein juveniles; some early Stephen King. My mom would take us to the library and turn us loose, which was great. My granddaddy had a bookshelf of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, which I would tear through during family visits; that was my exposure to pulp short fiction.

  My literary background comes mostly from the exceptional English classes I had in high school. We read the usual things like Shakespeare and The Great Gatsby, but we also read Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, multiple Faulkner novels, All the King’s Men, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Kate Chopin, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Virginia Woolf, Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Hardy, Forster, Camus, Kafka, Gogol, Ralph Ellison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and García Márquez. It was overwhelming at the time,
reading a hundred pages of Dostoevsky on the school bus each afternoon, but later I realized what a transformative experience it had been. I can’t claim to remember it all or understand it, but it gave me a background that I draw on to this day.

  My current reading is embarrassingly scant. I’m so swamped with BCS reading these days that I rarely read other stuff. I always try to read all of the award-finalist short fiction pieces every year, and I read on the cell phone when traveling, but of course I haven’t been traveling this year. Some short fiction writers whose work I find brilliant are K.J. Parker, Cat Valente, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Ted Chiang.

  What were some of the most influential genre books you read growing up, and how did they impact you?

  The most influential fantasy books I read growing up were Lord of the Rings and Raymond E. Feist’s early epic fantasy novels. I read the Earthsea novels too, but they didn’t hit me quite as much as the classic pseudo-northern European medieval fantasy did, maybe because I was interested in Earth history as a kid and I had lived in England for a year and seen northern European castles and ancient ruins up close. Feist’s novels were great epic fantasy page-turners, with fun characters and a world-jeopardizing plot that still had a personal level to it. Lord of the Rings impacted me with the sense of history in it; the sense of past ages of civilization, and the people who had lived them and the works they built and knowledge they kept, and the current nostalgia and wistfulness for those accomplishments—for better or for worse—that were now lost or fallen.

  From your years of editing BCS, are there one or two stories that stand out as particularly important or special? Or which exemplify, more than most, what a BCS story is?

  For me, core things that “a BCS story” has are an interesting fantasy world, a focus on the characters and their goals and hopes and aches and yearnings, and emotional resonance—something emotionally moving or profound. Two stories that stand out to me are “Laws of Night and Silk” by Seth Dickinson and “Geometries of Belonging” by R.B. Lemberg.

  “Laws of Night and Silk” has an elegant and rich literary voice to it, which is a thing that really engages me when it’s done so well that it’s effortless to read, and the conceit of the magic system is that the societies in that world do a hideously cruel thing to their children in order to give them apocalyptic magical power. The protagonist must shepherd such a child in order to fight a war, and her bitter rival is shepherding her own child. It’s epic, fantastical, moving, and haunting.

  “Geometries of Belonging” is set in R.B. Lemberg’s Birdverse fantasy world, the same world as multiple of their BCS stories and their new novella from Tachyon, The Four Profound Weaves. The world is deeply rich and developed, with societal structures and a magic system that literalize real-world issues and situations that are profoundly important to R.B., and their passion for those things comes through in the characters and their interactions within those societies.

  The protagonist is a bereaved person in a complex relationship who is trying to help a person who’s on the margins of that society, and all that protagonist wants is to belong; to find their place in their complicated life and world. There’s a lot at stake for the other characters and the society, but what made me cry when I read it was the simple core humanity of a person who just wants to find a place to belong. Isn’t that what all of us want? That to me is great literary secondary-world fantasy: a lush and fascinating world that’s commenting on important ideas, inhabited by characters who are achingly human.

  One of the things people expect or love about fantasy fiction is worldbuilding. Are there one or two stories that stand out in your mind specifically for their worldbuilding?

  For me, the best fantasy worldbuilding is worlds that are cool and awe-inspiring but that are also integral the story; worlds that impact the culture and the characters uniquely. R.B. Lemberg’s Birdverse stories are a great example. Two others that stand out to me are “The Secret of Pogopolis” by Matthew Bey and “Woe and Other Remedies” by Michael Anthony Ashley.

  The locale in “The Secret of Pogopolis” is a city that bounces up and down like a giant pogo stick, and this condition has a strong and unique effect on the society and the characters. When the city reaches apogee, characters go to the peak of the city and revel in the moment of weightlessness that only occurs when the city has stopped ascending and is about to descend. When the city approaches perigee, the residents retreat to their homes and brood on special padded sofas that protect them from the impact of the city’s descent halting. It’s a very cool concept, and it affects the society and the characters.

  “Woe and Other Remedies” feels to me significantly about the moral bankruptcy of slavery. The nobility in this fantasy society are decadent and selfish and effete, in vivid and exaggerated ways that captivate on the page, but also create a cutting satire. The protagonist is a low-level noble who remains mostly sympathetic as he tries vainly to compete, following the dictates of his society, but only gradually do some catastrophic consequences make him start to realize the horror of what he and his society are doing. The worldbuilding is vivid and creative, but it also makes me squirm as the catastrophe escalates while this portion of the society remains oblivious to the consequences and to their own behavior that caused it.

  You have a number of short stories out as well, as a writer, including “Excision” in Weird Tales and “The Halberdier, by Moonlight” in On Spec. You won the 2006 Fiction Award from The Briar Cliff Review—a $1,000 prize—for your short story “A Brief Swell of Twilight.” Do you still write? Has editing impacted or changed the way you write?

  I really enjoyed all three of those stories. “Excision” was postwar medicine as a magic system, and “The Halberdier, by Moonlight” did a specific thing with POV shifts that I’ve never seen done elsewhere.

  I haven’t written fiction in many years. My writing these days is mostly working up single-session D&D adventures, to be played in three to four hours, which is a lot like a one-act play or flash fiction—there’s a build-up and one major turn. I’m fascinated by the storytelling aspect of DMing a tabletop RPG. The players make decisions based on their characters’ motivation and personality, like characters in fiction, but those decisions affect or even determine the plot, and the DM has to respond to that on the fly and keep the plot unfolding, while also controlling the pacing in real time. It’s a different type of storytelling, but I find it fascinating and a lot of fun.

  I think my editing might impact my writing if I were ever able to edit my own words like I’m able to edit other peoples’, but I was never able to see my own work in that way. If I get back to fiction writing someday, I’m curious to see if that will be the case.

  Does being a fiction writer give you a different editorial perspective, does it change the way you do things as an editor?

  I think being a writer, and a workshop graduate, and the fact that I was only a mid-level writer who never quite broke through, gives me deep insight into what it’s like to be a new or emerging writer submitting to magazines, through the slush pile; hoping to get passed up to the head editor, desperate for any comments, and not understanding why stories didn’t catch on. I was in exactly that situation myself, for years, and I was never able to break through it.

  That experience as an emerging writer strongly affected the way I do things as an editor. BCS’s policy of giving personalized comments in every rejection was a direct result of my experiences submitting to pro-rate zines, getting lots of form rejections, and being stunned and confused that my stories weren’t working for them. Giving our personalized comments is a huge amount of work, especially for our slush readers—Kerstin Hall, Deirdre Quirk, Rachel Morris, and Beth Hall—but for us it’s worth it. We often see new or emerging writers whose successive submissions to BCS get closer and closer to what we’re looking for, and who ultimately do sell a story to us.

  My experience as an emerging writer also drives me to work with new and emerging writers on rewrite requests or a revise
and resubmit, for stories that may have a large problem in my opinion—like, the ending doesn’t work—but that otherwise have an interesting character or world and a strong emotional investment from the author. In my experience, not every new writer’s debut story is going to be perfect or brilliant, but many stories that are very good yet not brilliant still deserve to be published and read, and many writers who may be writing very good stories now are ready to learn from the editorial process and from having an early story of theirs published, and often that publication and experience seems to be a first step for them in developing their career; often the next stories such writers send us are a level better than their first one that we bought, and their cover letter has new credits of stories they’ve since sold to other zines.

  In my opinion, our field needs venues that will publish very good stories by new writers, not only brilliant stories by existing writers, because doing that can help more of today’s very good writers develop into tomorrow’s brilliant writers and advance the whole field.

  How do you feel about dark fantasy and horror? How do you differentiate between the two, and do you enjoy or publish things with that sort of darker edge?

  I personally don’t read much pure horror, but I’m fine with dark fantasy or horror elements in fantasy. I think an easy and semantic distinction would be whether the setting is innately fantastical aside from the horror element.

  I do enjoy a darker edge to fantasy when it’s not gratuitous; when it’s essential to the character or the plot, and when it has an emotional significance and an emotional effect on the characters. That sort of horror element for me can have great emotional punch, especially when it’s as horrifying to the characters as it is to the reader. I’ve published some rather horrifying or gory stories, by authors like Greg Kurzawa, Eljay Daly, Mike Allen, and Jesse Bullington, but I’ve published more stories where the fantasy horror feels to me more psychological, by Greg Kurzawa and Mike Allen again.