Locus, July 2014

by Locus Publications

  ‘‘Getting back to steampunk, I wasn’t clever enough to anticipate this happening, but there’s this whole influx of younger and talented writers who are using steampunk as a hammer to break apart their own personal ethnic backgrounds. We’re seeing this exciting and completely unanticipated, at least by me, multicultural steampunk. We’ve got great Asian steampunk writers, and some incredible African steampunk writers. The one I always recommend is Balogun Ojetade, who has what he calls a ‘steamfunk’ series of novels and stories. There’s one titled Moses: The Chronicles of Harriet Tubman, about the great slave rescuer of the civil war – she’s an adventure character in the book. She’s like an Indiana Jones of rescuing slaves from the Civil War South. When I picked up his book and read it, I thought, ‘Wow. This guy I really want to kill.’ Just kidding, of course, but that’s how clever and funny and exciting the book is. For the Asian steampunk writers, and Asian-influenced, there’s one I enjoyed, a really good collection called Shanghai Steam from Absolute XPress. I started thinking these writers had picked up a ball that I didn’t even know I dropped, or I didn’t know existed, and they’ve done some exciting things with it. Virtually everyone was a Victorian at one time. The Victorian British Empire was so huge, that you’ve got people from a Malaysian background, or Vietnamese, or Indian, or African-American, or Caribbean, anything like this, and they are saying, ‘Look, steampunk is not going to be just a nostalgic celebration, here’s to the Queen and foggy London streets. There’s much more that can be done with it, and we’re the people who are going to do it.’ They’ve resolved it into some cool interesting stories and books. I think that’s going to become bigger and bigger. Steampunk is the new kid in town. There’s not as much old science fiction that you have to deal with to get to where you want to do interesting stuff. As the new kid on the block, steampunk has enabled this influx of smart, talented people to grab it and do their own thing with it. It’s already resulting in some great books and stories. As much as I love the whole genre of science fiction and all the fantastic genres, in some ways steampunk has become this magnetic center for really talented people. It has this openness to it, and a crazy, wacky, anarchic spirit that might have attracted more people to it than to some of the other genres and subgenres. It’s younger.

  ‘‘Being down in Ecuador, traveling is a little more involved for us. We were either going to go to Worldcon in San Antonio or to Brighton for World Fantasy Con. We decided, because we wanted to see all of our British friends, that we’d come to World Fantasy. Then I read a lot of people’s blog posts and things, friends of mine, when they came home from San Antonio. Of course they had a great time, but people were saying, ‘Gosh, it seems like everybody was so old.’ I said, ‘Go to a steampunk convention, because that skews way younger.’ A lot of the wildness makes some dismiss it as just people running around with goggles on their top hats and corsets on the outside of their dresses. But it’s also this anarchic approach to history. In steampunk, historical accuracy doesn’t matter. There’s a bunch of stuff happening in South America too, in Bogota, and in Brazil it’s huge.

  ‘‘Back in the ’60s and early ’70s, we had editors like Damon Knight doing anthologies of nothing but European and Latin American SF, and it was a lot easier to get. The US has become quite provincial in terms of paying attention to the rest of the world, but that’s changing. This is a good development, the turning again toward the wider world and seeing what the world contains outside of the US. For US readers and writers this is going to be just as exciting as it was in the ’60s and ’70s, where, essentially, if you were in university and couldn’t recite a list of Ingmar Bergman films or Kurosawa films, you could kiss off getting a date. There was a dimming of the light through the ’80s and ’90s, and we lost that influx of things that were happening outside the US. Now you go down to South America and you find out things politically and culturally that we’re not hearing about in the US. It could be that the 21st century will be the Latin American century. There are so many incredibly talented and smart people down there, coming out from underneath the boot that was keeping them down. We’re having a fine time down there.

  ‘‘I’m making an effort not to shackle myself to steampunk. I’ve got a bunch of stuff sitting out with my agent and my editors now, which will be a continuation of the noir crime thriller orientation I had in books like Madlands, Farewell Horizontal, and some of my horror novels. I’m trying to keep the bifurcation going with the steampunk projects here and the crazy noir there. I’ve got a thriller series of short novels, as e-books, revolving around a young woman named Kim Oh. There are four of them so far. They’re not SF, they’re pretty larky. At one point I called them ‘absurdist comedies of violence.’ She does kill people, and she becomes quite good at it. A big part of the story is a Bildungsroman about her educating herself as a killer. She approaches it as a young businesswoman. Those are fun to write, and we’re still seeing what the ultimate home for them will be. Right now they’re solely available online, but we’re talking to some publishers.

  ‘‘In some ways, Kim is the young embodiment, in terms of killing people, that my mother and her sisters were in terms of the crazy projects they did. I don’t think my mother and my aunts ever got around to killing people, but if they had, they would have done it in a workmanlike way, or workwomanlike way. Kim is also based somewhat on my wife and her best friend Alison.

  ‘‘Even though Kim is Korean-American, she grows up as an orphan, so she has no connection to that culture. She’s like all other Americans now – she refers to herself as a feral American. She’s had to do everything herself and educate herself. People are constantly asking her things about Asian culture and she says, ‘How the hell should I know? I grew up in Poughkeepsie.’ To a large part, she represents my own interior life, but also what I observe in my wife and other women. Some people criticize the books saying Kim talks with a guy’s voice, but she talks like some women I know. At the same time she has a frustration about having to act like a guy, in a guy’s world. She’s advised by the people who are educating her to be a killer that if you’re going to be a killer, your personal life has to be set on a shelf until you retire from being a hit man. She’s like, ‘That seems kind of harsh.’ Well, what are you going to do?

  ‘‘It ties back to the Victorian novelists like Mrs. Gaskell and Mrs. Humphrey Ward. They were concerned about the corrosive effect of the modern world on both men and women, worried that men would become harder and crueler because they wouldn’t have the civilizing effect of women anymore. The great instance of this that many people talk about is the British crusade against slavery that came out of a group of people usually referred to as the Clapham Common group. Everybody knows the names of William Wilberforce and the other men, they were leaders in the Baptist and Methodist churches. Nobody knows the names of their wives. But if you read the correspondence of Wilberforce and the other great anti-slavery crusaders, they were constantly referring to the influence of their wives. They were doing this abolitionist work because their wives said that it was how they would achieve personal salvation, by undertaking this great crusade against this terrible evil. There’s really moving correspondence that still survives between some of the Clapham Common group and their wives, where they say it was all because of the women: ‘People are giving me the credit, but it was all because of you. You made me a better man through your wise feminine influences. Because of you I have a chance at heaven.’ It’s absolutely true. It’s one of those great things about this division between men and women. As much as we’ve gained by the entry of women into what had previously been masculine preserves, there might be a possibility that we’ve lost something. The loss is seen more in the change in men than the change in women, because without the spiritual guidance that men used to receive from their wives, men have become crueler and stupider. It’s one of those things where you gain here but you lose there. Men have become crueler and stupider simply because they don’t have this wonderful goddess or angel
at their sides. In some ways Kim Oh is in this androgynous situation where she’s getting a tremendous empowerment in her masculine dimension by going out and killing people, but at the same time she’s intelligent enough to realize that it has a corrosive effect on her. She’s self-analytical about this and she says, ‘I have no choice but to do this. I have to protect myself and my younger brother who I’m responsible for. But I can already see this has an effect on me that I’m not happy about.’ The novels are funny and there’s a lot of humor there. She sees what’s happening in a dark-humored way. In some ways, I think she’s my most admirable character of all, male or female, because of that self-analytical streak she has. A lot of my other characters don’t turn inward as much as she does. She’s sort of a scientist of herself and of the situation she’s in. Even though she’s going to go ahead with this project of becoming a hit woman, because she has to, she’s watching what it’s doing to her at the same time. She’s such a fascinating character that I really want to continue with her because if nothing else she’s my own personal mirror, in a way that some of my other characters only partly were.

  ‘‘A lot of what I see in Kim is not just a reflection of the strong women in my life, but also my thinking about myself. You get into your sixties, and you start to think about what life has done to you, and Kim popped up inside my head a fully formed creature with her own voice and her own appearance and the fact that she was Korean-American. I thought, Korean-American, where did that come from? I was fortunate enough to grow up in southern California in the ’50s and early ’60s, which at the time was a true melting pot where everyone was thrown in together and you had all kinds of friends of all sorts of personal and family backgrounds, and your Asian-American friends were just like your other friends except that they played cello in the school orchestra, and you just got along. In terms of a diverse, sort of a children’s United Nations to grow up in, southern California in the ’50s and ’60s was absolutely wonderful – or at least it seemed that way at the time.

  ‘‘I usually do a lot of note taking and fiddling around, concerning my characters. Kim was unusual in that she walked into my head the way she was. I thought maybe I should change her and make her different, to avoid all the issues that come with writing outside your personal background. Okay, she’s no longer Korean-American. Nope, she came right back in that way. Or maybe I should change this or that about her. Everything would revert right back to the way she wanted to be. I think that’s because she’s really me, sort of an auto-psychological self-portrait. Not because of the details of who she is, but because of what she’s had to to do, that whole feral thing, trying to figure out the world on her own. Those books I wrote very quickly, faster than any other books in my career. Other books I’ve sometimes taken years to write, but the Kim Oh stuff just happened. Some people who never enjoyed my other books really enjoy the Kim Oh books. We’ll see what happens with them.

  ‘‘When I met Phil Dick I was totally in awe of him. He still is the one writer I admire more than any other. Meeting him…. It’s like if you’re some kid living in the Roman empire in some crappy village, and someone says, ‘You want to meet Jesus Christ?’ When college punks like me and Tim Powers and Jim Blaylock met Phil Dick, we were like, ‘Oh, my God, Phil Dick.’ But then I got to know him for a few years, and it had this weird parallax effect where one eye was seeing the writer I admired most in the world, and the other was seeing an interesting guy I knew. He was a lot of fun to be with when he wasn’t doing some crazy psychological thing. He could be an absolutely charming person as a friend. At the same time he had a lot of pain in his life, and issues. What was fortunate was that his last circle of friends was the Orange County crowd, Jim and Viki Blaylock, Tim and Serena Powers, Steve Malk and his sister Dana, and everybody around there. We admired him and enjoyed his company, and we became protective of him, and did whatever we could to get him through rough patches. I think that last circle of friends he had in Orange County was the best group of people he could have wound up with in his last few years. His death felt like a tragedy then, but because he died when he was 52 and we’re in our sixties now looking back, we think about not just the many more books he could have written, but all the fun and recognition and enthusiasm for his stuff he missed. If nothing else, though, he went out at the top. Big budget Hollywood film being made. Ridley Scott’s crew came in a limousine and took him to a movie theater in Long Beach and showed him about 20 minutes of Bladerunner. He was over the moon about it, justifiably so. He was completely financially stable, making a six-figure income the last few years of his life. No debts, nice condo, and very importantly, he had reconnected with his children, his two daughters and a son. They were absolutely fond of him. That was important to him. And to see everything since then, the movies being made, all this attention being paid to him posthumously, it’d be wonderful if he were here to enjoy it. For people like myself and Tim Powers and Jim Blaylock, we were early evangelists before we met Phil. Back when we were nuts for Phil Dick’s books, and you really had to go looking for them. You had to dig through crumbling old piles of yellowed paperbacks, it wasn’t like you could go to a bookstore and say, ‘Oh, yes, I’ll have the Library of America edition.’ You had to be dedicated. The Holy Grail was The Cosmic Puppets. To find a copy of The Cosmic Puppets, I searched for years. It took me a long time, and I can remember the exact place I was when, ‘My God, here it is!’ I immediately bought it for a nickel, because there was no value attached to it. I showed it to Tim and Jim: ‘I’ve got The Cosmic Puppets and you don’t!’

  ‘‘Somebody asked Tim about Phil’s influence on him, and his answer was the best: ‘Phil really showed us and many other genre writers how worthwhile writing could be while still being really funny.’ A lot of Phil Dick’s writing is extremely important, and at the same time it’s constantly erupting into absurdist humor. Phil is so important that you can’t just talk about his influence on the writers who knew him, like me and Tim and Jim. He’s important for everybody. I doubt if you can find a science fiction or fantastic writer now who wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, yeah, Phil Dick, I’m pretty influenced by him.’ It goes without saying. To that degree, he brought an enormous amount of respect to the field.

  ‘‘The main alternative activity I have, alternative to writing or being with people, is that when I moved down to Ecuador, I found myself associating with a lot of musicians. Great guys, expats and Ecuadorians. Everyone’s having a lot of fun because Ecuador is such a musical country, and I thought, ‘I’m not having enough fun here.’ So when we were at Steampunk World’s Fair in New Jersey, I escaped for an afternoon and went to the nearest big music store and bought myself a bass guitar. The standard wisdom is that if you want to make a lot of friends fast, learn to play the bass guitar. Everybody wants to have a bass guitar playing with them, but nobody wants to play the bass guitar. The great thing about rock ‘n’ roll is that it’s a wonderful art form in that it sounds better with even a crappy bass player, which would be me. All my musician friends said, ‘Yeah, bass guitar, cool.’ So I go up to one of the local joints and play in a bar band with my friends. It’s wonderful because, I’ll tell you, I’m probably the world’s worst bass player, but things happen when you’re playing in a bar band.

  ‘‘Every bar band in the world has to play ‘La Bamba’. In North America and Britain, everybody thinks that the lyrics are, ‘Mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble, mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble, mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble, Ay, La Bamba.’ If you’re playing in a bar band in South America, people actually know the words, and they sing them. There are some verses that are politically incorrect, to put it mildly, but everybody loves them down there. There’s a whole verse that you hear down in Latin America, translated it goes, ‘I’m the boss, if you want to be my secretary you have to have really long legs and a really short skirt. Ay, La Bamba.’ When we do that verse, all the girls in the bar jump up and they do this little dance where they hike up their skirts and show off their le
gs. I didn’t know this was going to happen. I’m pumping out the bass notes, and all of a sudden these beautiful Ecuadorean women jump up and I’m thinking, ‘I never did anything as a writer that made all of the young women in the room jump up and dance. This is great.’ So this is a perfect life. Write all day, and once a week in the evening go and play ‘La Bamba’ and watch all the Ecuadorean girls get up and dance. What more do I need?

  ‘‘Who knew? Stuffy science fiction writer old guy. Let’s rock. Call the interview, ‘Rockin’ in the Steampunk World.’ And it’s gotta be ‘Rockin’ with the apostrophe. Do that and I’m your friend forever.’’

  –K. W. Jeter

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  MAIN STORIES

  2014 Locus Awards Winners • Locus Poll 2014 • Theroux Wins Campbell, Pinsker Wins Sturgeon • Pomerico Joins Harper Voyager • Source Interlink Folds • Amazon and Hachette Battle Continues

  2014 LOCUS AWARDS WINNERS

  BEST SF NOVEL

  Abaddon’s Gate, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

  BEST FANTASY NOVEL

  The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman (Morrow; Headline Review)

  BEST FIRST NOVEL

  Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

  BEST YOUNG ADULT BOOK

  The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two, Catherynne M. Valente (Feiwel and Friends)

  BEST NOVELLA

  Six-Gun Snow White, Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean)