I’m seeing so many different approaches now to readdressing Lovecraft. I’m sure it will go away. It’s a trend, and five years from now we’ll be done with Lovecraft, and we’ll be on to something, I hope, like Shirley Jackson. In the meantime, there was so much going on with Lovecraft that can be explored or can be countered. You can reply to Lovecraft in so many ways.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the anthology called She Walks in Shadows, which is all explicitly feminist Lovecraftian fiction.
I’ve heard of it, but I made a decision not to read anybody else’s Lovecraft while I was working on mine.
One thing I wanted to ask you about is that this is a novella, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, which is sort of a very difficult story to publish. Could you talk about why you chose to write it as a novella and what sort of market there was for it?
I know that Tor.com has been doing these standalone published novellas now for a little while. I might very well have written a novella anyway, but knowing that it could be a novella was really nice. The book was originally much longer. This is about 40,000 words, but at one point it was almost 60,000 words. That was 20,000 words of gorgeous language and static scenery, which somebody recommended I take out, and, feeling as though I was gutting myself, I did. But it did make the book better.
The novella length, it has some really amazing gifts. There’s no need for massive subplots. You can stay true to your theme, true to your topic, without unnecessarily complicating it, if that is the kind of story you’re telling. I do feel it’s almost a perfect length for quest stories, because it doesn’t get so long that you start to see churn and repetition. You can advance a quest across 40,000 words without padding or putting in extra points of view or anything like that. So I do think it’s a marvelous length. It’s really underutilized because nobody has been doing it.
P.S. Publishing also publishes standalone novellas. P.S. is in the UK, I believe. There are a couple of people who have experimented with it. But I do think that ebooks are why we are able to write them now, because people are a lot more patient. You don’t have to hit a length. It doesn’t have to be a thirty-two-page break and the reader has to feel like he’s getting his money’s worth when he picks up the book. He has to say, “This book is worth eighteen dollars because it’s this many pages.” I think things have changed a lot, and I think there’s going to be more room for novelettes, even, and novellas.
I’m really excited about this. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, most science fiction novels were 60,000 words. Novels have basically gotten to be twice as long these days, almost entirely, as I understand it, for economic reasons, rather than artistic ones. People haven’t learned to read any faster than they ever did.
Right, exactly. There were a lot of reasons why books had to be long, or they had to be short stories. When I worked at Tor, which was twenty-five years ago, we didn’t publish novellas because nobody wanted to buy them. It didn’t seem like they were getting enough value for their dollar. Now we read ebooks and the value for dollar isn’t defined by the number of pages so much as it is on how long it takes you to get through it and whether you like it. But it’s wonderful now that we can write this length. It was a perfect length for science fiction, and for fantasy, and so much science fiction and fantasy feels unnecessarily labored. I know a lot of people talk about how science fiction is hard to read. It’s less accessible than it used to be, and there are content reasons, but also, I think just the format reason, that a 60,000-word book is just easier.
Whenever I talk to any of my friends who aren’t involved in writing and publishing, they always say, “Oh, I don’t really read much anymore.” I ask them why, and they always say, “Oh, well I got such and such book, and I made it halfway through it, and I just didn’t have time to keep reading it. I’m not going to buy any more books if I didn’t finish that one.”
Exactly. Whereas they’d be done with it if it was Mission of Gravity.
I wanted to talk to you about some of your actual short stories though. One of my favorite stories of yours is “Spar.” We can’t talk to you without mentioning “Spar,” right?
You also can’t recite any of “Spar.”
I just added an explicit content warning to this podcast, so we’re all good.
Oh, sweet. That’s good. “Spar” was really, I’m not sure what you wanted to ask about it, but “Spar” was a really interesting story for me to write because it was the first time I ever wrote a story where I just said, “Fuck it. I don’t care what people think of me or my story. This is the story it has to be.” I was really uncomfortable writing it. I showed it to one person. I was like, “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.” I had trouble rewriting it. I couldn’t read the whole thing in a row. I had to read the individual sections piece by piece and craft each one, and then go read another one out of order. Since the story is told out of order, it actually works really well. I wasn’t able to read the whole thing until after it had been bought by Clarkesworld, because by that time it had been read by enough other people that I was like, “Okay, now I’m seeing it through other eyes instead of through my own eyes, and now I can judge it with different standards.” So it was a very difficult story for me to write, even though the words were not hard, since it’s only about twelve words in the whole thing, but it was a very ambitious story for me. It kind of changed everything for me, because then I realized that I was better off sinning boldly, better off writing the hard stuff that satisfied me, even if people didn’t like it, than trying to write something that was maybe more conformable.
For people who haven’t read it, can you just say what the premise is?
I can just read you the first sentence of it? That’s always a good start. I have the book right here because I thought if we were going to talk about my fiction, it would be good. “Spar” is page 199. I see they buried it towards the end of the book so that the people who never finish a book, they wouldn’t get to it.
They should just put it first just to throw down the gauntlet. If you can’t make it through this, you’re not even worthy to read the rest of this book.
You don’t even get to read the rest. The first sentence is: “In the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien fuck endlessly, relentlessly.” That sets the tone for the whole thing. The story is about, insofar as there is a story, what happens in a lifeboat when you have two spaceships that have collided, and the only survivors are this sort of weird cilia, tentacle-thing, and this human whose point of view we’re in, and her attempts to establish communication, or not, and there’s lots of sexual activity, which may or may not be communication. She has no idea. It was actually not at all about a deep space ship collision, but that was the metaphor I was using. It was a very powerful metaphor, I found. It was powerful imagery, but it was also just a super powerful metaphor. It was everything I wanted it to do. Every piece of discomfort of what relationships are like, I was able to put into it.
I’ve heard you say that there was a great deal of variability in people’s interpretations of the story.
[Laughter] Yeah. To my mind, it seems very obvious, but a lot of people … feedback has ranged from: “This is just tentacle porn, plain and simple,” to: “This is about a marriage gone wrong.” People have thought of alternate endings, ways they wanted it to end that were different, but a lot of people have seen different things in it. Some people think she’s the aggressor. Some people think it’s the alien that’s the aggressor. This one doesn’t get as much variability as “Ponies” does, but it does get very strong reactions.
I want to get to “Ponies” next, but first I want to ask, you mentioned that you had a great deal of apprehension about showing the story to anyone. Has it turned out that your fears were overblown, or was it about what you thought it was going to be?
My fears were pretty overblown, but Neil Clarke insulated me from that. There was a certain amount of slagging that went on in the comments, and if it was just personal abuse, he cut it. He deleted it from
the comments, which was fantastic. If it was critiques of the story, he left it, and that was fine. I’m always very comfortable with people’s critiques of a story. Once it is out of my hands, it’s not my story anymore. That’s part of why it’s hard for me not to keep fiddling, because I keep wanting to address something, but it’s not my story, and if somebody wants to read it and read it as a light-hearted sex comedy, I’m not the person who can tell them no. That’s the situation I found myself in with that. Every so often, somebody writes me and either says it’s brilliant or says it’s a really messed up story. Both of which are true. Things can be both good and bad. I’m okay with that. Pretty much that’s what they say about all my stories now, one way or another. So I’m okay with that, too.
Do you remember, at this point, what the initial spark for that story was? Like, what the first image, or character, or mood was?
Well, the first sentence was the one I just read. But the first inspiration was, I’d been working on this long, intellectual novel that I eventually shelved, and at some point I said to somebody, “You know, I am just so damn tired of writing this book. I’m going to write something that is about two people in a lifeboat fucking, because that’s simple, right? That’ll be easy.” And then it transmuted in conversation to, “Okay, a human and an alien in a lifeboat fucking.” But then I couldn’t figure out how to get an alien in a lifeboat on the Pacific Ocean. So then I thought, well, what about space? Then that first line came in, and it stopped being funny. It started to be deadly serious. Because once you have a first sentence like that, you have to pay off. You don’t get to back off. You don’t get to change your mind about your language. You don’t get to change your mind about your content. That is a first sentence that demands a difficult story. If I didn’t want to write the story that first line needed, then I needed a different first line.
It’s interesting that it kind of started out as a joke, because some of my stories have started out as jokes and then turned into serious stories. I’ve heard Stephen King say someone asked him, “If you have an idea, how do you know if it’s good or not?” He said, “If it makes me laugh, I know it’s a good idea.”
Right, I think that’s true. I’m working on something right now where it started as a joke, just a phrase that I use all the time. I’m always talking about seething swarms of this or that animal. I was talking about chickens, and I started thinking about seething swarms of chickens covering the landscape, and that was the start of this, and it was all very funny, and then I realized, “Oh, wait, if your chickens are raptors, and if your raptors are like fire ants, there’s nothing funny about this story.” I’m in the middle of maybe the darkest story I’ve ever written, and the bar is pretty high for that.
Something that is a joke, I think, is the bacon remix of “Spar”?
Oh yeah. Bacon remix was one hundred percent a joke. It was for a fundraiser. John Ordover was doing a fundraiser for a Brooklyn school, and he did something that he called the Baconthology. He asked us to reimagine fiction through a bacon filter, so I changed everything to bacon. So, in the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien eat bacon endlessly, relentlessly. I found that it didn’t change anything in the story. It says the exact same things about relationships and communication. It says the exact same thing, except it says it all with bacon instead of with sex.
Well, pretty much the same thing, right?
Almost.
Let’s get on to “Ponies.” Do you want to say what that’s about?
“Ponies” is a really, really short story. I think it may be the shortest story to ever win the Nebula. The theory is that little girls, they always have a Pony with a capital P. Ponies look a lot like My Little Pony. I did extensive research for this by watching every single episode of My Little Pony. My eyes were bleeding by the end. But everybody has a Pony and the Pony has a horn like a unicorn and little wings like a Pegasus, and they all can talk because every little girl wants her Pony to talk to her. There is a party that happens when you are of a certain age, like nine or ten, when other little girls are very important to you, when you bring your Pony to this party, and some terrible things happen. The Pony has to give up two of its three special characteristics in order to fit in. In order for you to be one of the girls. And that’s what this story is about. Barbara and her Pony, Sunny, go to what’s called “The Cutting-Out” party.
I heard in an interview, the way you said it made it sound like there’s an actual type of party that this is based on.
Well, sort of. When I was a little girl, I mean, little girls have little parties all the time, and when they’re in that clique stage, which is sort of nine to eleven, when girls become really cliqueish, really rankist, you’re in, you’re out. There’s a lot of viciousness if you’re one of the outside girls. Those parties, like birthday parties and Halloween parties, and pool parties, and all of those things, who is invited and who is not is very political. So that’s what I was thinking of when I wrote this, was being a little girl and having all of the other little girls be invited to a birthday party and me and one other not. So they don’t really have parties where they cut pieces off horses or anything. Not that I know of, anyway.
What were your impressions when you watched every single episode of My Little Pony?
At that point, Friendship is Magic was just starting, so for you Pony lovers out there, that dates when I was writing that, but I watched some of the old stuff, and then I watched some of the new stuff. The new stuff was working really, really hard to step away from the older stuff. Friendship is Magic is about how we all stand up for each other, we all have each other’s backs, if one of us feels insecure, we all try to band together to help her feel better, and stuff like that. My feeling about that was that it’s a lovely conceit, and if that changed the way that little girls interacted that would be fantastic, but it’s not likely. I watched them and thought, this is so improbable that this is just fantasy land. This doesn’t help anybody except by showing you a fantasy world where things might be better.
Have you followed the Brony phenomenon at all?
I have. In fact, I wrote the introduction to a Brony anthology that was done by Kazka Press in Seattle a few years back. I think it’s really interesting. I think it’s entertaining. I love when people cross into other fandoms in unexpected ways, and I think that the Brony thing, when it first started, was absolutely that. I’m all in favor of people exploring other people’s fandoms.
I found out about it because I just watch lots and lots of documentaries, and there was a documentary about Bronies that I watched because I watch every documentary. I thought it was really interesting, because they were making the point that entertainment that appeals to young boys, like Transformers, we just take it for granted that this should be made into hundred-million-dollar movies that everyone should watch.
But where’s the ponies?
If it’s something that appeals to little girls, there’s just this huge amount of hostility toward people being into it, and how deeply embedded the sexist assumptions are there.
Right, and I think that the Jem movie is an interesting example of that, because Jem is not the favorite IP of little girls, but it’s the IP that adult men look at and think should be the favorite IP of little girls. So, adult men looked at Jem and said, “What do little girls want to be? They want to be rock stars. Let’s do a movie about little girls being rock stars.” Not understanding that things that are happening that are not what they are expecting. Ponies, goodness knows, all of those ponies have very conventional gender roles. None of those ponies wants to be a plumber. None of those ponies is interested in rebuilding old cars. The ponies are all doing what girls are expected to do, but they are trying to do them at the very highest level.
What did you think about the response to your story “Ponies”? Did you ever think it would win the Nebula award?
I really did not. I had no idea. For one thing, I thought it was too short. For another, I thought it was a girls’ story and prett
y explicitly a girls’ story, which is not to say the Nebulas aren’t aware of that, but I thought, “This is a story about a specific phenomenon that is specific to one age and one gender, really.” But it does have broader implications and applications, it turned out. It just wasn’t … Because it was written in that very plain spoken voice, and I thought, it’s not a voice that people will respond to. So I was very surprised when it was nominated, and delighted, and honored, and then when it won, and it shared the award with Harlan Ellison, of all people, I was staggered by that. I did not actually pass out, which is good. Which was, I think, a major victory, on my part.
What sort of fan mail or other sort of responses have you gotten to it?
It’s taught a lot, it turns out. I get a lot of teachers writing me and telling me things about it. People have had, as I said earlier, very different interpretations of it. Everything from this is a story about female circumcision to this is a story about male circumcision, go figure, to this is a story about the way girls are, or this is a story about how parents force their daughters to conform. So many different interpretations. People have refuted it and said, “That’s not the way my friends were.” Boys who have read it and said, “That’s the way my friends were.” All of these different things. Every so often I get a personal email, this one I don’t get as much as some of my other fiction, but every so often I get a personal email from somebody who tells me a story, and often the story is about what it was like for them to be bullied and about how they totally understood Barbara’s quandary in the story.
Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017 Page 26
