What’s at the heart of the book for you?
Those are two different questions. For me it’s about whether it’s a good thing for humans to gain knowledge. Knowledge means power, and power corrupts. But if we don’t go out to learn about the Universe, then species like the Ilmatarans will live and ultimately go extinct without ever getting beyond their circumscribed world. (Yes, as I admitted above, I stacked the deck in order to make the issue as plain and starkly-defined as I could.) So for me, the heart of the book is the moment when Alicia shows Rob and Tizhos a colony of phosphorescent organisms in Ilmatar’s ocean: something that nothing had ever seen before that moment.
How about for the characters?
For my characters, the heart of the story is quite different. Rob gains maturity, going from being a feckless overgrown adolescent to a hero capable of making tough choices. Broadtail loses his territory and status on Ilmatar but ultimately gains the entire Universe. And Tizhos has to break out of her consensus-based society to do the right thing.
Is there a character that you connect with differently than the others? One that’s special? One that repulses you?
I poured a lot of my own worst qualities into Irona, the Sholen commander who leads them into disaster. Irona thinks he’s a lot smarter and more virtuous than he really is. He’s arrogant and vindictive and assumes the worst about others. And yet I kind of enjoyed writing his scenes, just because it’s always fun to depict a really horrible person.
I think it’s obvious that my favorite character in the book is Broadtail. He has a lot of qualities I wish I had. He can thrive and prosper within his society, and get along outside it. He’s a scientist, an engineer, a farmer, an explorer, and a warrior.
What do you enjoy about writing fiction?
I suppose I could talk about the practical advantages—I work when and where I choose, I’m flexible and independent, I get to meet interesting people. But all those things are equally true of being a bank robber, and bank robbery pays better.
The part of writing I enjoy the most is when I get to feel clever: the times when the work really flows, and I know that what I’m writing is good. I expect that’s what the ancients were thinking of when they invoked the Muse. Bank robbers probably never get that feeling. It doesn’t happen very often, just often enough to keep me hooked and coming back for more.
About the Author
Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.
Another Word:
The Words We Carry
Jason Heller
When I was a kid, I carried around universes in a cardboard box.
My universes were heavy. But I was lucky. They all fit inside that box, even if their numbers kept expanding.
My universes were small. Like a certain famous British police box, they were bigger on the inside than on the outside. Way bigger. In fact, they were limited only by the imaginations of their creators.
My universes were books. I carried them around in a cardboard box because, when I was a kid, my family and I were always trying to keep one step ahead of an angry landlord, or an eviction notice, or simply, the street.
I grew up poor, and I grew up loving fantasy and science fiction. This shouldn’t seem remarkable, yet it is. Most of the kids I knew who liked SFF were well-off—comfortably middle-class at the very worst. Meanwhile, most of the kids who came from my side of the tracks did everything they could to avoid the taint of geekery. Being a geek meant being weak, and when you’re poor, being tough—or feigning toughness—is one of the first survival strategies you learn.
When it came to being tough, I was a failure. The best I could muster was aloofness. Then again, it’s easy being alone when you love being alone—especially alone with a book. Or a whole box of them.
Reading SFF didn’t curb my loneliness. Nor was it an escape. It’s easy to paint SFF, and its fans, as escapism addicts. I grew up around real addicts. It’s not the same. When I first read my uncle’s dusty copy of Stephen R. Donaldson’s brutal, morally murky Lord Foul’s Bane at the age of eleven, I didn’t escape my situation any more than the book’s leprous antihero, Thomas Covenant, escaped his when he crossed over from modern-day Earth to the fantastic realm known as the Land. By the age of eleven, I’d already witnessed plenty of horrible things in real life, from nervous breakdowns to drunken destruction to domestic violence. Lord Foul’s Bane only reminded me of them—and of the alienation, confusion, and rage that often come when kids, precocious or otherwise, are trapped in poverty.
Not all the books I read fueled that darkness. For every Lord Foul’s Bane in my cardboard box there was a disintegrating, secondhand copy of Dragonriders of Pern. Pern isn’t bright and happy—Anne McCaffrey was never strictly that—but compared to Donaldson, her work is more balanced and open to the notion of heroism. Again, though, there is no escapism.
Lessa, the heroine of Dragonflight, is caught in a caste system. Born noble, she’s orphaned then forced to disguise herself as a menial drudge. As clichéd as that trope seems now, it captivated me. I wasn’t a noble, but I could relate. Growing up in an unstable, alcoholic family that struggled to stay clothed, sheltered, and fed, I knew how subtly yet insidiously people could be treated according to where they fell in the economic hierarchy.
Looking back, it doesn’t surprise me that I grew more intrigued by the Holdless, the lowest class on Pern, than I was by the dragonriding Weyrfolk. Lessa was an excellent character, but why did she have to be a royal reclaiming her birthright? Why couldn’t she have been born a drudge? Why couldn’t she be someone who fought her way upward without that inner assurance of entitlement?
There has been a call lately for more poor protagonists in SFF. I couldn’t agree more. But it’s just as much a matter of quality as quantity. Even with the unlimited scope and imaginative prerogative at the fingertips of the SFF writer, one outlandish concept still eludes most of them: that poor people might possibly see themselves, and reality, differently than those who have never gone homeless or hungry—and that such an outlook might lead to an entirely different kind of heroism.
Some have done so beautifully. Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring immediately springs to mind, as does Nick Mamatas’s latest novel Love Is the Law. Each acknowledges and addresses poverty in a way that’s both integral to the story and unique to the author’s voice. Neither panders. Neither excludes.
It’s not that SFF isn’t rife with poor protagonists. Woebegone serfs and dystopian proles litter the genre-scape, and the heroes among them are often the ones who feel contempt for their poorness. The problem lies in many authors’ inability or unwillingness to portray their poor protagonists as anything other than middle-class people—with middle-class views of self and society—who simply wear tattered clothes and have a chip on their shoulders.
Oh, that chip. As a kid, I was angry. There were times that I went hungry. There were also times that my family was homeless—and if it weren’t for the kindness of near strangers, we might not have made it. When you’re a kid, and this is all you’ve ever known, you’re not driven by ambition or redemption or revenge or any other kind of dramatic agency. You’re driven by survival, except for the times when even survival seems like a luxury that maybe you don’t even really deserve. But for every flash of anger and envy that I felt, I was gripped by other things. Fear. Excitement. Curiosity. Pensiveness. Desperation. Determination. Even, at the worst of times, a perverse sense of self-sabotage.
These are the kinds of conflicts, both internal and external, that I still crave to see more in SFF. It isn’t an issue of economic justice, although
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t deeply concerned about that. It’s an issue of richness—the kind that has nothing to do with riches. Some positive steps have taken, like the new grant being launched by the Speculative Literary Foundation to catalyze diversity within the ranks of upcoming SFF writers. It’s a start. More writers from disadvantaged backgrounds should be encouraged to write SFF. And when they do, they should be encouraged to write from that experience rather than expected to act like Lessa in reverse—a poor kid hewing to middle-class sensibilities for the sake of a genre that, on the whole, does not return the favor.
I’ll never fully realize just how much all those books in my cardboard box helped me cope. They kept a poor, hungry, lonely kid occupied. And focused. And ever questioning. I can only guess what those books would have accomplished if people like me had actually been in them.
When I wish for more economic diversity in SFF, I’m not concerned about the health of genre fiction as a whole. I’m selfish like that. I want more of those books for me. More precisely, I want the younger versions of me to be able to go to a library sale, a secondhand bookstore, or a generous uncle and find more SFF books that understand what it means to be poor. Books that say there’s no shame in growing up poor. Books that show how SFF has the ability, as no other literature does, of illuminating the human condition of being poor—the good and the bad.
I will always carry that box of books around with me. Not literally, of course. My bookshelves are now overflowing, if no less dusty. Thankfully I’ve managed to get to a point where I almost always know where my next meal is coming from and where I’ll be laying my head that night. But I still carry around that same sense of wonder, and that same sense of frustration, that I did when I was a kid.
My universes were heavy. My universes were small. My universes were books. And they still are. Here’s hoping they never stop growing.
About the Author
Jason Heller is a former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld; as part of the magazine’s 2012 editorial team, he received a Hugo Award. He is also the author of the alternate history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books) and a Senior Writer for The Onion’s pop-culture site, The A.V. Club. His short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, and others, and his genre-related reviews and essays have been published in Weird Tales, NPR.org, Tor.com, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Traveller’s Almanac. A graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2009, he also teaches science fiction and fantasy at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. He lives in Denver with this wife Angela; between the two of them, they could build a house out of books. Maybe they already have.
Editor’s Desk:
Reader’s Poll Results and Other Award News
Neil Clarke
Our 2013 Reader’s Poll closed last month and I’ve been patiently awaiting the opportunity to share the results with you. With no further ado, I present this year’s winners:
Cover Art
First Place:
“Silent Oracle” by Matt Dixon
Second Place:
“Rainforest God” by David Melvin
Third Place:
“Lost in Space” by Piotr Foksowicz
Note: Matt took first place this year by a healthy margin, but over the month, five different works held the number two spot at least once.
Fiction
First Place: “The Urashima Effect” by E. Lily Yu
Second Place: “Effigy Nights” by Yoon Ha Lee
Third Place: “Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Fourth Place: “The Promise of Space” by James Patrick Kelly
Fifth Place: “Cry of the Kharchal” by Vandana Singh
Note: The top five stories were a total of ten points apart, with the gap between first and second being the only place where there was more than a three point difference.
Other Awards and Recognition
Locus Magazine released their recommended reading list and it included the following Clarkesworld stories:
“Soulcatcher” by James Patrick Kelly
“The Promise of Space” by James Patrick Kelly
“Effigy Nights” by Yoon Ha Lee
“Mystic Falls” by Robert Reed
“Cry of the Kharchal” by Vandana Singh
“No Portraits on the Sky” by Kali Wallace
The annual Locus Poll is now open to everyone. You can participate at:
www.locusmag.com/Magazine/2014/PollAndSurvey.html
Hugo Award nominations are open until the end of this month. Unlike prior years, Clarkesworld is not eligible for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine. I encourage you to check out semiprozine.org for a list of many eligible magazines you can nominate. Of course, our stories and editors are also eligible in the appropriate categories. (See: neil-clarke.com/2014-awards-eligibility-hugo-nebula/ for a handy by-category list.)
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our subscribers and everyone else that has supported us financially last year. Becoming ineligible for the Semiprozine Hugo is a milestone for us. It means that with your help we’re moving towards our goal of becoming a full-time business. With that comes the time and resources to maintain and improve on what we can offer. We still have many milestones to go—for example, we’re still non-professional in the eyes of the World Fantasy Award—but your support provides the confidence we need to believe we can get there.
Thank you!
About the Author
Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a two-time Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.
Cover Art: Hollow
Matt Dixon
About the Artist
Matt Dixon is a freelance illustrator and concept artist from the UK. Digital art first captured his imagination when he began to assemble images from ASCII characters on a Commodore VIC-20 way back in 1980. Happily, things have moved along a little and Adobe Photoshop allows him to achieve slightly more sophisticated results these days.
His long association with the games industry began when he first contributed art to a video game in 1988. He was employed by one of the UK’s largest independent games developers for more than a decade, initially as a production artist, then as an art lead. During this time he was privileged to be involved with numerous high profile game and movie licenses, including Harry Potter, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon and Pirates of the Caribbean.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 90 Page 14
