by Neil Clarke
So we get the most popular radio drama broadcast through the Solar System, we get the gossip hounds (it’s hard to express the power they had in old Hollywood when most now treat them as a joke) hunting down rumors of murder and secret homosexuality and studio malfeasance, the diary of an actress coming to the Moon for the first time, the advertisements made to encourage Americans to settle Pluto. And throughout, the shifting, changing film Percival Unck keeps trying to make about his daughter’s disappearance, flitting through genres and styles, desperate for one that will make the story make sense. And all these together create the voice of a culture on the brink of change, many perspectives, many voices, as though we’re listening to everything come through the transom on some Neptunian outpost.
What films inspired or influenced Radiance
Oh, goodness. A Trip to the Moon and Metropolis, obviously, influenced the aesthetic enormously. Un Chien Andalou, the 1925 Phantom of the Opera, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Lodger, the Fairbanks Robin Hood, early animation like Snow White . . . and then as the novel moves through other genres, noir, gothic, children’s fantasy, detective films, movies like The Maltese Falcon, Touch of Evil, Murder on the Orient Express, Rebecca, The House of Usher, Fantasia. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Several of the found footage horror films of recent years like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, and Cloverfield. There’s even a bit of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? hiding in there.
I suppose the shorter answer would be: all of them?
What drew you to black and white era of filmmaking?
There is something uniquely beautiful about black and white film. It glows away imperfections, its light is otherworldly and strange, and it still communicates a kind of cultural authority to us. Black and white is serious art. Black and white means business. And yet it took such a wild circus of techniques to pull off—the bit about Virago Studios painting everyone black and white is drawn from real life. Color shows strangely on black and white film sometimes, and George Méliès, ever the perfectionist, had everyone on his lot painted so what he saw would be what the finished film would show. Shooting in black and white was very difficult and still is if you’re not just using an Instagram filter. But it looks instantly like Art to us.
Plus, I was really angry at Thomas Edison.
At this point, I think most people are well aware that Edison was a terrible human being. Though we tend to focus on Tesla and electricity, his underhandedness stretched far further. He really was a proper supervillain, in a way. I was reading a book about old Hollywood, and the men who founded the first four major studios, and became interested in why Hollywood itself had become the center of filmmaking, when it was so far from New York, the cultural and financial center of America.
It turns out, the answer is: California was just far away enough that Edison couldn’t do whatever he wanted. He really did own all the patents on color film and sound and video recording, and really did pursue them viciously. Ultimately, filmmakers had to run away to even make and show a film without paying Edison enormous sums of money. I found the idea of what might have happened had that situation persisted, despite such runnings away, fascinating. After all, patents today are used to crush new companies and industries. It’s not much of a stretch at all. Of course, corporate studios could always pay the price, but that would mean only schlocky blockbusters would have sound. “Real art” would slowly become silent, and then the studios might chase that authenticity, and give up sound to get the shine of the artiste.
Combine all this with an issue I’ve always been interested in: the idea of what a science fictional or fantasy world produces as art. What is speculative fiction to that world? What is realism? And you have Radiance. Silent films and wild planets.
What was it like growing up as the daughter of a filmmaker? How did it influence the story?
The very first seed of the story was an interview with Mark Z. Danielewski in which he talked about what a profound influence his father, a cinematographer, had been on him as a writer. And I thought: Huh. My father was a director and I’ve never written about that at all.
My mother was, too, actually. They met at UCLA and at one point my father was pursuing film directing while my mother directed theater. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother wearing black all the time and going to something called “rehearsal,” which just sounded like another planet to me.
Ultimately, my dad went into advertising and my mom became a political science professor, but my father absolutely gave my siblings and I childhoods steeped in movies like developing chemicals. Our home movies were all beautifully shot and directed. We all know how to find the camera. In the 80s, life wasn’t as constantly recorded as it is now. But we have all been filmed since birth, more or less. We speak to each other in movie quotes—common now, but not so much when we were kids. Movies are the lifeblood of my family.
Radiance is a story about a father and a daughter and the cameras between them. It’s not the story of my father and I, but it draws much from the experience of being raised by someone who could look at life as a scene, reshoot the occasional heartwarming moment, and talk to his kid about structure while she ate Frosted Flakes.
What were some of the challenges of expanding the original Clarkesworld story into a full novel?
One of the biggest was the ending. You can be coy about an ending in short fiction. You can be coy in a novel, but it tends to piss people off a little. Hell, it pisses me off unless it’s done absolutely perfectly. I didn’t want to pull a LOST and not provide answers. So I had to decide what happened to Severin. But the ambiguity of her was part of what I loved about the story, so it was very hard for me to come down firmly, in a solid science fictional not hand-wavy way, on the central question of the book.
This was also the first time I ever pulled out the old trick of getting down the structure on index cards and putting them up on my wall to keep it all straight. Radiance seems complex on the surface, but it’s really a fancied-up thriller, and getting myself in that mindset, rather than in the long, elegant strokes of a short story, was quite tough.
But it was never hard to fill the space. Radiance was always squeezed into that short story. Making it into a 450-page novel was mostly a matter of giving everything room to breathe.
Why did you change the name of Bysshe in the short story to Severin in the novel?
*laughs* Well, I suppose this is a little embarrassing. Initially, my idea for the aesthetic of the short story was more “romantic poet” than art-deco. So Percival’s daughter was Bysshe, after Percy Bysshe Shelley.
But I did a couple of readings of the story, and once I started writing the novel and reading bits aloud (something I think all writers should do), I noticed I was wincing when I said her name. Because it doesn’t sound as nice as it looks on paper? It sounds soft and flaccid and like it’s sort of apologizing for being said. That’s not Severin at all. And also sounds a little like you’re saying “bitch” with a lisp?
So I figured, if you wince saying the protagonist’s name, that can’t be good, because girl, you are gonna have to say that name a lot. So I chose Severin because it, too, is a traditionally masculine name, and it shares a root with severe. Plus, I can say it without wincing.
With its complex narrative style, do you think Radiance could become a film? If so, who would you like to play Severin?
I do! I think an enterprising screenwriter would have to pare it down to a more core concept (or else make it a television series) but I think the story of a filmmaker disappearing on a Venus infested with giant whale-aliens would make a lovely movie, with the silent film aesthetic but without the silence. It’s a book about movies, after all. Half the novel is scripts!
I think Jessica Brown Findlay or Tuppence Middleton would make a fantastic Severin. If they’re busy, there’s an Australian actress named Becky Lou Church who would be utterly perfect. Maybe Chiwetel Ejiofor or Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje for Erasmo, Carey Mulligan for young Mary Pel
lam, Emma Thompson for older Mary, Colin Firth or Bill Nighy for Percival? I think Iwan Rheon would be a great Anchises. I CAN DO THIS ALL DAY.
Is an author a director, an actor, a screenwriter, or a bit of all three?
All of the above! Plus lighting designer, special effects supervisor, set builder, cinematographer, all the actors, film editor, craft services, stuntman, and probably best boy since hardly anyone knows what that is. (It’s like a manager for the lighting or grip department.)
All of the planets in the solar system you’ve created are utterly unique and beautiful. What inspired them?
Well, the watery Venus came straight from Zelazny, most directly The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth. But a lot of authors in the pulp era fancied Venus a waterworld, and it was wanting to recreate that pulp idea with a 2015 literary sensibility that fueled Venus.
The others, in a strange way, came from genre. I thought about what genres the different planets made me think of: Mars, obviously a Western. With all that dust, it would be a perfect place for ranches and cowboys and boom-bust towns. Pluto is clearly a hothouse gothic world. Uranus felt so noir in my head—the cold, the distance, the dark, neon lights reflecting in the ice. Neptune is associated with water, of course, but I loved the idea of massive cities moving like ships over the oceans. Jupiter’s gravity seemed a perfect match for a kind of Grand Central Station, so I left it a gas giant, unlike the others, where I wanted people to be able to plant their feet. (For all the fantastic unreal elements, there is actually quite a bit of carefully thought-through science in Radiance, I promise!)
And the Moon has been the great spotlight in the sky for millions of years. Where else would you put the movies?
About the Author
Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.
Another Word:
Love Song for a Saturday Morning
Alethea Kontis
Saturday morning cartoons began sometime in the 1960s and ran until the fall of 2014. For over fifty years, from roughly 8 AMuntil noon, children in the United States sat in observance of this weekly ritual with an anticipation second only to Christmas morning.
Being one of these children myself, I speak from experience.
Every week, by appointment, we frolicked in commercially sponsored Elysian Fields. We witnessed at least six impossible things before the sugar-filled breakfast we had prepared with little or no help from our parents. Saturday morning was Our World, Our Time, and we each stood proudly as noble defenders of this magical domain.
Even now, the League of Saturday Morning will defend their favorite shows with equal vigor. Just ask them. We are incredibly passionate when it comes to this little Technicolor corner of our history.
Saturday morning cartoons originated with both strip and rack comics, movies, and toys. Some introduced us to role-playing games (hello, Dungeons and Dragons). Some were unique to the small screen (thank you, Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera). Some were even based on candy (who would have thought the adventures of The Gummi Bears would be so much fun?).
Unfortunately, the passing of those halcyon days was inevitable. The FCC began requiring a minimum amount of educational programs on broadcast networks. They forced limits on commercial content, killing advertising revenue. DVRs, subscription services, and the internet provided children with whatever they needed whenever they wanted.
And we—those of us who are “adults” now—accepted it. We grew up and moved on. We sold that house to developers who bulldozed it and made a strip mall. We knew we could not bring it back because—in today’s technological climate—it would not have the same effect. We gave birth to a gaggle of humans striving for convenience and instant gratification. The modern world is their candy store.
But I believe our children, and future generations, will be the worse off for its loss. Yes, it might be argued that those hours spent in front of the boob tube were already washing our brains clean of inspiration and original thought, but I choose to argue the opposite side. Not only did Saturday morning cartoons open our minds to possibilities of the impossible, but their scarcity also forced us to appreciate them more.
Studies have shown that the scarcity of certain items increases their desirability. It’s a fairly basic psychological tenet that has become the basis for hundreds of love songs: we want what we can’t have. Flooding the market with webcomics and animation your child can create on your home computer are some of the main reasons those of us with spending money are reluctant to pay $4.50 for rack comics anymore. Every other blockbuster movie or high-budget television show is about superheroes. Impossibility has become commonplace.
Back when impossibility was the realm of Saturday morning, children were forced to use the rest of the week to dream up their own adventures, to challenge themselves beyond the limits of their paltry human existence.
There is a certain Zen inherent in a scheduled lifestyle—part of the freedom of childhood. There is considerably less stress when one knows what to expect in one’s life. (Those of us who choose a freelance lifestyle are just Hatters at the Tea Party.) In those early days, children had no choice but to get up and move on when programming ended. With the advent of VHS, children taught themselves scheduling and electronics in order to keep from missing the shows they loved that ran simultaneously on different networks, extending that morning ritual for a few more precious hours.
These days, the programming never stops. The difficult task of prying children away from small screens in the 1980s has become an almost Herculean undertaking. And the quality of said programming choices leaves much to be desired.
“Saturday morning cartoons had a heart and charm to them I feel modern cartoons lack,” says Patrick Kramer, a stage actor in the local Nashville theater scene. “Creators now strive so hard to be snarky and weird for weird’s sake and I think it’s a detriment to the art form.”
Being subjected to these cartoons on a regular basis certainly opened our young minds to realms of endless possibilities. If Duck Tales featured a backwards world full of rubber streets and stone tires and dinosaurs, we happily suspended our disbelief and let the story play out. So many great things have already been inspired by comics: Donald Duck himself has been given credit for raising sunken ships, and the opening sequence to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Inventors all over the world have attempted emulating ACME rocket skates, helicopter hats, and slingshots into space.
Coincidentally, it was an episode of Duck Tales that inspired author Eugene Myers to consider creating his own custom Saturday morning for his son. “The nephews were trying to trick Scrooge into thinking it was Saturday instead of Friday so they could get their allowance early, and part of their ruse included playing a VHS tape of Saturday morning cartoons. I figure I have so many DVDs of cartoons I grew up with…that I could compile shows into several hours of programming.”
The children of today may have much healthier eating habits, but will they be able to think outside the cereal box? How comfortable will they be imagining the impossible? Will the lack of Saturday morning cartoons stifle their dreams? All that clever, colorful nonsense is still out there. Only time will tell us if the weekly ritual was part of the revelation.
I sometimes imagine a post-apocalyptic dystopia in which the death of civilization can be traced back to the demise of Saturday morning cartoons. It is a dark and scary place. But if I wasn’t a member of the League of Saturday Morning, perhaps I wouldn’t have imagined it in the first place.
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author Alethea Kontis is a princess, a goddess, a force of nature, and a mess. She’s known for screwing up the alphabet, scolding vampire hunters, turning garden gnomes into mad scientists, and making sense out of fairy tales.
Alethea is the co-author of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter Companion, and penned the AlphaOops series of picture books. Her short fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in a myriad of anthologies and magazines. She has done multiple collaborations with Eisner winning artist J.K. Lee, including The Wonderland Alphabet and Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome. Her debut YA fairy tale novel, Enchanted, won the Gelett Burgess Children’s Book Award in 2012.
Born in Burlington, Vermont, Alethea now lives in Northern Virginia with her Fairy Godfamily. She makes the best baklava you’ve ever tasted and sleeps with a teddy bear named Charlie.
Editor’s Desk:
The Sad Truth About Short Fiction Magazines
Neil Clarke
Did you know that there are only three genre fiction magazines that completely support themselves from the revenue they generate? These are Analog, Asimov’s, and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, collectively known as the Big Three. Others, like Tor.com and Subterranean (now closed), are supported by the revenue of their parent companies. Below them are four more groups: the non-profits (like Strange Horizons and Beneath Ceaseless Skies); the hobbyists or beginners (typically characterized by low or no pay for authors); the aspirants (they pay authors SFWA-qualifying rates or better, but haven’t found reliable way to cover that cost); and the conceivable (the aspirants that have learned to generate enough revenue to cover costs, but not adequately compensate their staff). Today, I’d like to talk about the first and last two groups, but primarily the latter.
