by Neil Clarke
But honestly, a book is like a dream: you don’t know what it’s really about until it’s over and you’re explaining it to someone else. When I go back over my own work from years ago, I see what I was trying to tell myself. That’s another way it’s like a dream: it’s a story one part of the brain tells to the other, in hopes of communicating something.
In your 2012 interview with Brenda Cooper on SFSignal.com you mentioned working on “a manual for feminist activism in the gaming community.” Did the manual happen? And, what are the most relevant or important intersections between feminist activism in the gaming community and feminist activism in the SFF community?
It didn’t! At least, it didn’t happen that I know of. I believe it was an academic project I was involved in. I think I’d remember if I’d done something that big! And as for your other questions, I’m not the best person to answer, because I haven’t been part of those spaces for a long time and I can’t give the most pertinent information. When I have questions about those issues, I defer to my friend Natalie Zina Walschots. She’s an expert, there. I’ve had her come in to give talks on gaming and game design to my Digital Futures class. Coincidentally, she has a novel coming out from William Morrow this fall, called Hench.
You tend to feature female protagonists. Is it important to write female protagonists, or is it just a matter of what feels right for the story?
I really struggled to write women for a long time. I was better at writing men. At least, I felt like I was. I should let the reader be the judge of that. I think before that, I was dealing with a lot of internalized misogyny. Whenever I found mainstream commercial novels by women, as a child, they didn’t feel like they were about the kind of woman I could ever be, because they were about these beautiful women who everyone liked. I wish someone had given me Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison and Arundhati Roy and Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin and Shirley Jackson when I was much younger. Maybe adults were afraid of giving me books that had rape in them, or something. In my experience people are afraid of letting girls read about things that might actually happen to them. If they read about it then they might actually get angry, and organized, and we can’t have that. The whole history of Western literature is dotted with pearl-clutchers pathologizing what girls are reading, for that reason. They’re so fucking scared of us being smart.
I actually had the same thing with mainstream American TV—I didn’t feel like I’d seen women who felt like me until I started watching things like Evangelion or Ghost in the Shell or Serial Experiments Lain. In the nineties, there was this string of anime where women got to be talented and fucked-up and question why they were even alive. And you could say the same about Buffy, I suppose. But I couldn’t watch BTVS when I was in high school. My parents didn’t have cable. They didn’t have high-speed Internet for a long time, either. It was literally easier for me to watch fansubs bootlegged onto VHS tapes than it was for me to watch shows aimed at my demographic. I didn’t actually watch BTVS until I was in university and the series was almost over. I was at a party at this crumbling farmhouse and someone had the DVDs. The next day I woke up earlier than everyone else because I was sleeping on the floor, and so I started watching them.
You also utilize a diverse array of characters, from Khalidah and Song in your Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocitiesstory “Death on Mars” (reprinted in Clarkesworld in 2018), to Company Town’s Hwa, and more. Is this simply a question of representing demographic realities? Or is there more to it?
For one, there’s a local influence, in that I live in one of the most diverse cities on Earth, in Toronto. Immigrants make up 46.1 percent of Toronto’s population. Visible minorities make up 51.5 percent. We have two Chinatowns, two Koreatowns, two Little Ethiopias, and the second-largest concentration of Iranians outside Iran, both Persian and Kurdish, who occasionally refer to it as “Tehranto.” The city hosts the largest festival of Caribbean culture in North America. This is why Toronto plays the future on Star Trek: Discovery and The Expanse and Pacific Rim. Toronto looks like the future because diversity is the future.
So, I guess that’s just how I’m used to seeing reality. That’s my neighborhood. Those are my students. Probably around six or seven years ago, I gave a talk at the University of Toronto. This class had read vN and they had me come in. And I got asked about what I was working on next. At that point, Company Town wasn’t really finished. I said I was working on a cyberpunk novel about a biracial Korean-Canadian woman living on an oil rig in Newfoundland. And after the talk, this small group of East Asian undergrads from within the class came up and told me how excited they were for that book. “No one writes about us,” was how they put it. That’s thankfully no longer the case.
My hope is that those students and others like them can find books that speak to them, maybe by Fonda Lee or Sarah Kuhn or JY Neon Yang or Malinda Lo, or maybe by someone just starting out. Maybe one of those students or their peers has already written the book that they needed back then, and if so, I hope that they get the full force of their agency and publisher and marketing team behind them, and they get the chance to find their audience.
Are there specific challenges or hazards to writing characters of color? And how do you navigate those challenges?
There are. But those are different challenges every time. It’s not like there’s One Weird Trick or something. The moment you believe that, you’re just making another assumption. Recently for work I was asked to write a suite of stories set in a region not my own, and featuring a variety of countries that speak multiple languages and have wildly diverse demographics on every level. And it was a client I’d worked with for months, but they asked for a tight turnaround and there wasn’t time to read-in other writers, because of the vetting process. So, first, I asked that they do a sensitivity read on my work when I turned it in. Second, I researched each story and character individually rather than looking at the region as a whole. And that research brought me up short—I was researching rights for queer and trans people in one country and I found they were (thankfully) better than I’d expected. Those expectations were my baggage to unpack.
In 2017, I was doing a luncheon event for Company Town with the Ontario Library Association, and a young Southeast Asian librarian asked me what gave me the right to write Go Jung-hwa. I mention this because it was really brave of her. I was the guest of honor, and she was going out on a limb and using her position to challenge my position of privilege in front of this room full of her peers. But that’s exactly what someone paid from the public purse should be doing—they should be advocating for their community and asking tough questions.
For a moment I just stood there gawping like a goldfish, because no one had asked me that question before. Ever. I didn’t have a clever answer. I didn’t have a talking point. And finally, I just said, “Nothing.” Nobody gave that right to me. I shouldn’t have presumed to have it—that presumption was, however unintentionally, the legacy of a colonialist mindset, or a settler mindset, or just cultural tourism or dilettantism. At best it’s what Henry Jenkins calls “pop cosmopolitanism.” I had to own that and accept it in front of that crowd. I never thanked her for that moment. I should have. She took a social and professional risk there that no one else did. But in that spirit, I would encourage other librarians and other educators to do the same, in her position.
You do a lot of research for your work and for your writing. You even talk about some of the research on Afghan food you couldn’t fit into “Ishin,” in your SFSignal interview with Charles Tan. What are some of your favorite researched bits that never made it into your fiction?
I wouldn’t call this a “favorite” bit, but there was an unexplored plot element to Company Town, wherein the reason Jung-hwa and her brother Tae-kyung were so proficient in TKD was that they were training for the opportunity to repatriate to South Korea via military service, before her brother died. It was a plot her older brother hatched to get them out from under their abusive mother’s thumb. Whi
ch brings me to one research pathway I followed but didn’t belabor the point of: I looked up child abuse stats in South Korea.
I kept seeing moms slapping kids as a joke in K-dramas, sort of like how Homer used to choke out Bart in the early seasons of The Simpsons. So much of humor is exaggeration, though, soI hoped that was just a caricature. But PubMed has a lot of literature on the subject. There’s a lot of recent scholarship on it with regard to the relationship between abuse and suicide. In 1960, there was a law codified that allowed parents to physically discipline children. In 2019, efforts to repeal it were met with vocal resistance. A government poll said that over 78 percent of parents believed corporal punishment was necessary. Between 2000-2017, there was a tenfold increase in reported cases of child abuse. I could go on. But for all that research, I was really deliberate about never depicting Hwa being abused as a child. It’s a violent book, but there are certain things the audience never witnesses. Hwa herself never refers to it as “abuse.” It just sort of leaks out around the edges.
As someone specifically writing SF whose fiction has been recognized as delivering those captivating SFnal ideas in the context of solid storytelling, how do you balance the two, craft-wise? How do you write a strong narrative while also giving it a core of great science-y science fiction?
I tend to think of characterization and narrative coming first and then the science-y science. The thing is that the state of the science-y science might change: you might run across something in Discover or Nature that gives you an update on the technology or the science, and have to change it. So, it’s best to give yourself wiggle room there. With a solid character and a solid story, the reader will spend time with them during the exposition. The reader has to enjoy spending time with them, first, and care about their problems. Nobody wants to spend time with someone they don’t enjoy, and they really don’t want to spend time with someone they don’t enjoy as that person spends four pages explaining what every single goddamn deck of the ship is for. Did anybody watch ER so they could learn how to take out an appendix? No. They watched ER so George fucking Clooney could tell them how to take out an appendix.
Your career story is a bit unusual—meeting Ursula K. Le Guin and being inspired by her to take writing seriously, then getting into the workshop group founded by Judith Merrill. So many writers start off in their basements, alone, often not even knowing that a “writing community” exists. Do you feel like the writing community in general is helpful to folks who want to break in?
I think finding a supportive community of any sort is helpful. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a writing community. Finding a group of people who see you and validate you and who encourage you to keep pushing, that’s what’s important. I hesitate to describe “the writing community” as any one thing. I think that’s very different now from when Judy Merrill started the Cecil Street Irregulars; now there’s a functioning Internet. A lot of writers now, their first “writing community” is their fandom, and the fanfic community in that fandom. I know that was true for me. That was where I first felt part of a community.
I always knew I wanted to be a writer, from when I was child. And it was really important that I play to my strengths, otherwise I wouldn’t get any financial aid for school. I had that drilled into me from when I was very young. I couldn’t really afford to try a lot of things and fail at them. So, I had a lot of support in focusing my talents as a teenager, which isn’t true for a lot of people. I wrote my first novel when I was fourteen, basically on a dare from my Grade 9 history teacher. I never had anyone telling me I couldn’t do it, or that it was a stupid idea, or that I could never make a living at it. So, I had plenty of self-doubt and hang-ups about other things, but not about my work. But for a while there I was getting some stories loved and appreciated by one community and having other stories just ripped to pieces by another. And I needed both. I was like the person at the beginning of a kung fu movie who thinks they’re hot shit in their village and then they meet a real master and they just get bodied, over and over. Like Leung Chang in The Prodigal Son. I could hit hard, but I had no technique. This isn’t to say that my workshop was cruel, or punitive, or unsupportive. But I couldn’t get away with anything. My tricks didn’t work.
Since you are an anime fan, I’m curious, what are a few favorites that people may not know about, and why? You have mentioned Ghost in the Shell elsewhere, as well as Cowboy Bebop.
I’ve written a lot about my affection for Evangelion and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Cowboy Bebop, but I don’t think a lot of people know how deep my love for Avatar: The Last Airbender runs. It’s a show a lot of people love, but for me it was a huge education in basic storytelling principles. From worldbuilding to characterization to even how to compose something visually, it’s such a master class.
Take Zuko’s entry at the top of the first season: he arrives on this huge cruiser. But by the end of that season, he and his uncle are on this tiny little raft. Big boat to little boat. The whole arc of his season is right there. And the show is full of stuff like that: you ever notice how both Zuko and Aang get nailed by Azula’s lightning in the exact same spot? They have matching wounds. Then you have this exploration of colonialism and foundational narratives, and the role of storytelling in both national and personal identity, from a genocide survivor desperately clinging to his roots, to an athlete trying to shuck off her parents’ narrative of disability, to an entire country realizing that what is essentially the Co-Prosperity Sphere is just an unsustainable dream of avarice. It’s a brilliant show.
Except for that fucking Lion Turtle Ex Machina, at the end. Christ, what a cop-out. It’s like winning the World Series on a bunt. Instead of having our hero explore his limitations, this ancient mythical creature that has never been mentioned before shows up and hands over a McGuffin—which has also never been mentioned before—that makes the plot resolve bloodlessly. Without ATLA we wouldn’t have Adventure Time or Steven Universe or the new She-Ra: shows for kids that trade in very adult themes.
But those other shows nailed their endings in part because they raised the stakes and killed some characters. I hope someone in the writers’ room for the Netflix adaptation sends this to their producers. (Now there’s a job I would kill for, which should go to an Asian writer instead.) Just fucking kill Ozai, guys. And better yet, have Zuko do it. Ozai and Ursa killed Azulon, so having Zuko kill Ozai is actually just a poignant repetition of Fire Nation history. The world needs more stories about young men withdrawing from a hateful ideology and having the courage to utterly annihilate the adults who indoctrinated them into it.
When you look at your body of fiction to date, do you feel like there are specific themes or ideas that you usually gravitate toward?
What I’ve heard people say is that my work gravitates toward issues of the body and identity. I wrote a lot about that in my first master’s thesis, with regard to cyborg bodies, so I think that’s pretty accurate. My favorite reviews are the ones that pick out issues that are swimming below the surface of the book: there are a lot of reviews of Company Town that talk about how violent it is, but very few that talk about how it’s about the experience of feeling invisible, feeling ugly, feeling as though you have no place. There are a lot of reviews of vN that talk about the body horror of a little girl eating her grandmother alive, but very few that talk about how internalizing that grandmother’s voice is a metaphor for intergenerational trauma, or how Amy has to live with a very real presence in her mind that is constantly trying to take over by telling her to die.
Your more recent stories are “Blue Lotus” in XPRIZE’s Current Futures: A Sci-fi Ocean Anthology and “Viral Content” in the free-to-read Take Us To A Better Place anthology published by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. What is important to you about these two pieces? What do you want readers to know about them?
“Viral Content” is about a virus that escapes a detention center, where it emerged as a result of inhumane conditions, and is stron
g enough to wipe out the high school football players who were volunteering there as part of a church group. It’s one of mine that’s a little too on the nose, in terms of what we’re living through at the moment. I told RWJF that I wanted to write a short story about a pandemic happening just as the CDC hits its funding cliff. “That’s pretty specific, are you sure?” they asked. “Pretty sure,” I said.
“Blue Lotus” is actually a sequel to another story I did for MIT Technology Review, called “Tierra y Libertad,” about a person who essentially profiles artificial intelligences for the UN, in an effort to determine if sentient consciousness is emergent within the system. Like Asimov’s Susan Calvin, only not a spiteful caricature of intelligent women being frigid. “Tierra y Libertad” is about agri-bots going on strike on a California pistachio farm.
“Blue Lotus” is about undersea cables and perfume. I’m into fragrance. I use scent triggers for a lot of things. Some students of mine craft-brewed a fragrance for me, once, and it’s one of my most treasured possessions. I only wear it maybe once or twice a year. When I visited the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, I had to physically pry myself away from their Kajal collection, Jihan and Sawlaj in particular. The guy at the Ex Nihilo counter probably hates me by now, because my colleagues prefer Amber Sky, but I’m more of a Midnight Special person and I can never buy anything. I’d really like to smell the Madeleine candle from Trudon, inspired by Madeleine de Maupin. I huff Diptyque at the duty-free. It’s embarrassing for everyone around me.
