Locus, February 2013

by Locus Publications

  ‘‘I didn’t think Fairyland would be traditionally published. Then it went to auction, and I was shocked! It’s amazing how fast this happened. Three years ago editors were like, why would you buy a book that’s already available online? All the Fairyland books are three-act stories. They have 24 chapters, eight chapters per arc. (There are also 24 chapters in The Odyssey. Fairyland is The Odyssey for little girls.) The publisher asked me to take the last act off my website, and right before the book came out they asked me to take down the second act. There are still eight chapters free on my site. And Tor.com put the first five chapters of the sequel, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, up online.

  Interview continues after ad.

  ‘‘Some of my foreign publishers have said, since I’m now a children’s author, ‘You should not swear in your Twitter.’ I said, ‘I’ve been writing for adults for eight years. I’ve been writing for kids for a year.’ Kids are going to the website, and I’ve never gotten any pushback. You could literally raise a kid through my books. I’ve done a picture book. I did The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland. Orphan’s Tales is kind of YA, and there are all the adult books! I think people have been pretty good about understanding that I write for two audiences. Had Fairyland not come out online, I probably would have chosen a pseudonym to keep the children’s stuff separate. Now it’s all connected, but when I go on tour for Fairyland, all the publicity will refer to me as ‘Cat Valente,’ which is a subtle branding that I think works. I haven’t had any pushback from the YA community. They’ve all been really incredibly supportive. It is an entirely different world. It took me a long time to get to know people in that world, and their conventions are different.

  ‘‘Silently and Very Fast took me a long time to write. It was originally supposed to be a novel. I cannot imagine now trying to make a full length novel out of that story. Because I’m not a natural short story writer, most of the time I try ideas on as novels. It just so happened that Capclave wanted me to do something for their convention publication, and I didn’t have anything they could reprint, so I decided to do an original. Who knew the runaway success would be the novel I published online? Who knew the thing that would let me sweep award nominations would be a convention book? It’s insane. Capclave did a reprint; the novella is very available.

  ‘‘My husband’s a programmer, so I’ve been learning a lot over the last seven years about programming and computers and AI, which is his pet specialty, and how that works in the real world. I’m fascinated with it, because it hits all of my interests in consciousness and the way we express our humanity. I’d wanted to write about it and didn’t know how for a long time. Part of the reason there’s fantasy stuff in with the science fiction is because I wanted to write about these issues in a way that people who are not hard science fiction writers would still understand on a visceral level. I had someone come up to me and say this was the first time they’d ever felt like a story about computers was written for them. That’s where I feel like I’m going in my work – it’s a weird hybrid.

  ‘‘The core of Silently and Very Fast is something that I think underlies a lot of my work: that the most human thing is telling stories. When you can tell a story about yourself, that’s the beginning of consciousness. You can see it in little kids, and it’s part of why dogs are not conscious. In all of the books I’ve read about AI, my favorite part is always when the AI talks. I wanted to write something where the AI was struggling with how to talk about itself. We have all these stories about sexbots and things, because nobody talks about how gender has to be programmed – everything has to be programmed. My husband gave me programming lessons. He sat me down and said, ‘You have to do your Hello World.’ It was sobering to see what it means when people talk about strong AI. And how much code it takes to do even a tiny thing. Once you’ve written the code, it isn’t done. There are bugs, and it breaks. Nothing doesn’t break. The amount of code necessary for an AI is incredible. I learned about genetic programming, which is the mechanism by which the AI develops in Silently and Very Fast.

  ‘‘Especially with Silently I’ve been going back and forth on the old question that everyone groans at: ‘What’s the difference between fantasy and science fiction?’ I don’t have a good answer, other than that science fiction feels the need to explain things, and fantasy is not obligated to, but can. Silently feels like science fiction to me, but every time I’ve ever written science fiction I’ve had reviews saying it’s not science fiction. Silently and Very Fast is the first time nobody has outright said it’s fantasy, but they do say it has fantasy elements. I say it only has fantasy elements if you feel that folklore and mythology are fantasy – I feel they’re sociology and psychology. There’s a reason I quote Bruno Bettelheim in the book. He wrote The Uses of Enchantment, which is all about fairy tales as psychoanalysis. I love telling folktales about science fiction.

  ‘‘I think that’s part of what science fiction can do for us. We live in a world that we need explained to us. For a long time, if you were sufficiently smart and had sufficient resources, you could know a lot of what humanity knew, but that’s impossible now. We need things explained to us. We need fairy tales of the workplace and computers. For a long time people asked me if I was going to write science fiction, and I said, ‘I don’t think there’s room for me in science fiction. I don’t think they want me.’

  ‘‘Science fiction, when you’re on the outside, feels surrounded by a rigorously defended wall. I didn’t think there was a place in science fiction for someone who writes with the kind of language I write. I didn’t think the things I’m interested in are things people would follow me on. Even though I’m interested in science fiction tropes, the angles I’m interested in are wrong. I did it, but it took me a long time. My first instinct was, ‘There’s nowhere for me to go.’ What I figured out was that I only want to write if I feel I have something new to bring to it. I didn’t have anything to bring to science fiction. I’m Red Riding Hood and there’s nothing in my basket. But telling folk tales about the science fictional world we live in was something I could do.

  ‘‘I’m working on the third Fairyland book now. There will be five in the series. I’ve got two new adult books sold to Tor, Matryoshka and Radiance. Radiance is based on my short story ‘The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew’ – it’s my deco punk alt-Hollywood history space opera mystery with space whales. But it’s also pulp SF, with the solar system the way it is in Zelazny, where Venus is a water world and uninhabitable. It’s also about movies and filmmaking. I’m working on writing that right now. The second is not a sequel but a companion piece to Deathless.

  ‘‘I went to Rio Hondo a couple of years ago, and Carrie Vaughn was there. We were having one of those late night conversations about our careers. She hadn’t left her publisher yet and she was feeling frustrated, like she couldn’t write what she wanted to write. It was six months before Palimpsest came out, and I was really nervous about everything. She was talking about how she couldn’t get higher than 15 on the New York Times bestseller list. She was always slotting in at that same number and her publishers wanted her to be higher, and they just couldn’t seem to do it. I said, ‘I am never going to get on the New York Times list.’ She said, ‘It’s okay, I’m never going to get nominated for a Hugo.’ And the year I got on the New York Times list, Carrie got nominated for a Hugo. We emailed each other immediately – ‘Oh my God!’ We were co-guests of honor at Capclave, so we told this story to the convention. I am Little Miss Least Likely To Make The New York Times List.

  ‘‘Do I think it’s still very difficult for women in publishing? Yes, I do. Is it difficult for people of color? Yes, it absolutely is. Is it difficult for LGBT writers? Yes. Is it better than it was? Sure, in a lot of ways, it’s better. I think, as in many parts of our culture right now, we’re seeing something of a backlash against recent gains, panic at any change in the status quo, anger that anyone might care about the contents of a table of conten
ts, and the dismissal of these conversations as demographic concerns or PC gone wild, even though the only people still talking about political correctness seem to be those who want carte blanche to behave callously and cruelly. There are still huge issues and hurdles. It’s still harder to become one of the big marquee names if you are a woman or queer or trans or a person of color. I just talked to someone who said there are very few British women being published in SF in Britain. We’re exporting American writing but we’re not importing translations. But I think it’s definitely improving and I think that there’s a generational shift. But it’s still really tough. You still see things like the reaction to the casting of people of color in The Hunger Games. It’s still hard to find protagonists that don’t fall into very accepted demographics. I’m not sure that I think much of this is malicious. Everybody just runs on their cultural programming, and it’s hard to break programming. That’s part about why I wanted to write about AI, because we all run on programming, 24/7, and it’s hard for a machine to break its own programming. We are complex machines, but our complexity does not make us better or different from that very basic equation. I hope we see greater diversity in the future. It’s not only authors having better representation in their books, but having publishers and editors and readers who read outside of their comfort zone. With a wide range of authors having their own voices heard rather than hunting through mainstream novels trying to find one person who looks or thinks or loves like them. I’ve walked into people’s houses and found no woman writers on their shelves. And I don’t (usually) think they’re consciously saying, ‘Mwa ha ha, I will never read a woman!’ They say they naturally gravitate toward men – and they’re right. But when they say naturally they mean ‘I was raised to think men’s voices and stories have more gravity.’

  ‘‘There’s this idea that when we say gender issues, we’re talking about women – that male is not a gender, it’s the default. The idea that when we talk about race issues we’re not talking about white people. I think all of that is brutally hard to break out of. At the same time, you have all these issues about how to write respectfully about a culture that is not your own. Those are hard problems and they should be hard. We should be wrestling with them. If you think it’s easy and you’re not questioning and struggling and thinking it’s difficult, you’re doing it wrong.

  ‘‘We’re trying to defeat the vacuum of living in a town where everybody looks one way, where heroes are defined as white, straight men. On the other side, we’re trying to build a town where nobody has to look alike. There is a vacuum created when culture is a monologue. The vacuum of not taking part in a conversation, so you don’t know what the conversation is about. But the conversation is vitally, undeniably important.’’

  –Catherynne M. Valente

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  Brian Francis Slattery was born February 6, 1975 in Ithaca NY. He attended Williams College, graduating with a BA in English in 1997, and went to graduate school at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, earning a Master’s in International Affairs in economic development with a concentration in human rights. He taught English in Japan, worked for the Guggenheim Foundation and the Gimbel Foundation, and works as an editor specializing in economics and public policy; he is also occasionally a journalist. Slattery is currently an editor at the US Institute of Peace and for the New Haven Review. He is also an avid musician, playing fiddle and banjo. Slattery lives near New Haven CT with his family.

  Slattery began publishing with mainstream literary story ‘‘The Things That Get You’’ (2002). He moved more firmly into the genre with his first novel, Spaceman Blues: A Love Song (2007), followed by Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America (2008) and Lost Everything (2012).

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  ‘‘I think genre labels are important and useful, especially for critics, readers, and publishers, but they aren’t something I spend much time thinking about when I’m writing something. I didn’t know what genre my first book, Spaceman Blues, was in when I finished it, and I decided to let someone else decide. I sent it around to literary fiction people and to science fiction people, and I figured whatever happened, happened. The consensus among literary fiction people was that the book was really confusing. For science fiction people it was the other way around; they were like, ‘Oh, this is cool, you wrote something that is pretty well written and it has a lot of stuff in it that we like.’ The label fits, and it has fit for all three books that I’ve published, and I’m quite happy with it.

  ‘‘I try to be kind of intuitive when I’m writing, especially during the first draft; I try to just turn off the higher-functioning parts of my brain and react. The first spark for Lost Everything came when I did a gig with a couple of other musicians in New York City and we played a tune that’s actually called ‘Lost Everything’. As we played, this overwhelming, really serious ball of sadness just hit me. I’d never been sadder in years. And then the tune ended, and the gig ended, and I thought, ‘I don’t know what just happened.’ At the same time, I grew up in upstate New York, and I’d been trying for a long time to write a book about the area, and to get at the things about the place that I find interesting and that I love. I tried and failed for a long time, and for a while I just abandoned the idea, thinking it was something I couldn’t do. But as it turned out, I could do it if I approached it slowly. So it was a shot in the dark, and at the same time, something that had been gestating for a long time. I managed to cherry-pick the tiny fragments that were good from all the junk I’d tried to write before, and finally put it into a shape that seemed like something, instead of just a ridiculous collection of stuff. It was satisfying. Not necessarily fun, because I wouldn’t describe the book as fun, but it was satisfying.

  ‘‘Part of the reason the book is sad is because, even since I was a kid, things have changed in upstate New York. Things seem to be getting worse in a lot of places. It’s really sad, and also underreported. Remember when Binghamton had that giant flood that cost I don’t even know how much to clean up? I was watching the news about that, and the newscaster on location had this attitude like, ‘Well, things are looking a little better around here, so let’s wrap this up.’ But behind him you could see that the bridge he was standing next to was underwater. I thought, ‘Turn around, man. Things aren’t actually looking that good. The bridge is underwater.’ Things still aren’t okay in Binghamton, and all they got was 30 seconds of attention – ‘Hooray, the rain stopped, so you’re good now, right?’ My native upstate New York hackles were raised at that point. A lot of the specific details in Lost Everything that give the impression of a place slowly deteriorating are less extrapolations than just straight-up descriptions of what I think I see when I go to upstate New York now, and what I hopefully remember right about what I saw when I was growing up there. The town I grew up in is doing fine, which makes sense because it’s a big college town. But a lot of towns aren’t, and I look around and just think, ‘How are they going to get out of this?’ It’s sad, because it’s a place that I care about so much.

  ‘‘I’ve figured out that I can’t actually write about a place well unless I’ve been there. Oh, sometimes I can fudge. I can learn enough about a place by talking to people and reading to be reasonably confident that I can accurately represent it, but only if it’s a small part of the book. Liberation is full of cheats like that – instances in which I realized I only needed a page or so about a certain place, so I couldn’t justify spending the money to visit and walk around. But any place where more than a couple of pages take place, I have to go. Writing Liberation meant I spent a week just bumming around western Kansas and eastern Colorado, taking notes and a lot of pictures and asking the people who lived there a lot of stupid tourist questions, and when I got back I had to revise a lot of what I’d already written, because of so many things I got wrong. It’s the details I get from those trips that I think make parts
of the book snap into focus. Some of my favorite parts of all the books I’ve written, I couldn’t have written without those details. Though interestingly, sometimes those are also the details – the descriptions of things that are actually there, or that actually happened – that strike people as the least believable.

  ‘‘The book I just finished writing – we’ll see if I can sell it – is about a highly dysfunctional, wealthy family in Cleveland, with Eastern European roots, and also about the rise of old and new forms of organized crime, in the ‘20s and in the ‘90s. So it’s one of those books about different generations, where you get to learn all about the people and the crazy amount of trouble they get into, which brings you from Africa to America to Eastern Europe. In terms of content, it’s more like historical fiction; there are no science fiction or fantasy elements. The story just didn’t need them. But in terms of form … well, I’ll just misquote Neal Stephenson. After he wrote Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle, I vaguely remember coming across something where people said to him, ‘you don’t write science fiction anymore,’ and he basically said, ‘I feel like I am still writing science fiction. I’m just figuring out how far I can push the form.’ I see what he means there, because even though this new book I’ve written doesn’t have any specific genre elements in it, the structure of the book is much more like that of a science fiction or fantasy novel, in the sense that the book is ultimately about an idea that draws a lot of people together: In addition to being about the characters, the book has an overarching idea that runs throughout the whole book, and that idea is what drives the plot. I think that’s a more typical genre move than what I understand as a more literary approach to plot. I’m also wincing, because these are huge generalizations I’m making about two genres, but whatever. We’re talking about the labels, and for me, those labels are themselves just big generalizations about the genres, both of which are actually a lot livelier than the generalizations would suggest.