Lightspeed Magazine Issue 37

by L. Timmel Duchamp

  So this book describes how the first visitors to Mars were, “too crazy, adventurous, thumbing their noses at all the moribund space agencies.” How likely do you think that is as a scenario?

  Look at the front-page headlines these days. Is private sector going to be the way that space exploration is going to happen, especially manned space exploration? The obvious answer is that the only initiatives toward manned space exploration that are going on right now are private sector ones. We understand the profit motive for going to mine the asteroids, for going to mine things on the moon, for going to mine things on Mars, the enormous tourism opportunities. And I embrace that with all the gung-ho-ness that has gone with the private sector opening up the American West, and where I live, in Canada, our whole north was opened up by the Hudson’s Bay Company, which was a company of adventurers and explorers, very much in pursuit of the wealth of the fur trade. Believe me, it wasn’t the geological survey of Canada, nor was it the geological survey of America, that spread out and tamed the land. It was people that thought there was a buck to be made, and endured enormous hardships to go and get that buck.

  You mention in the introduction that this book was partially inspired by a trip you took, I think to the Yukon, and you stayed at Jack London’s house, something like that?

  I stayed across the street from Jack London’s house. I stayed at Pierre Berton’s house. The name won’t mean anything to most Americans, but to Canadians, he’s the great Canadian writer of popular history. He’s our Shelby Foote and our Alex Haley rolled into one. And he has bought back his childhood home in Dawson City, heart of the Klondike Gold Rush, and it’s a very competitive writer’s retreat. You apply for it; lots of people want to get the opportunity. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to spend three months living there, across the street from Jack London’s cabin, just down the street from Robert Service’s cabin, right where all of the madness of the great Klondike Gold Rush took place, and that was the template for my Great Martian Fossil Rush.

  And there’s actually a writer’s retreat on Mars in this book, too.

  There is. That’s right, there absolutely is. On a similar basis that well-to-do, in this case, adventure novelist, actually patterned a bit on Jack London, has left a stipend in his will to make it possible for writers to go and spend some time on the red planet and hopefully capture it in a way that perhaps the scientists are not able to, and a way that greedy throngs who are rushing there to make money aren’t bothering to take the time to.

  Okay, speaking of writers, obviously there’s a long tradition of science fiction stories set on Mars. So which of those had the most impact on you?

  You know, that’s a great question. I love Mars in science fiction because it’s got so many different faces. It can be Ray Bradbury’s Mars. It can be Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars, Stanley G. Weinbaum’s Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars, Ben Bova’s Mars. Everybody who comes to look at it, it’s a Rorschach test. H.G. Wells, of course, War of the Worlds. Every writer whose come to look at Mars sees it in a different way. And that’s the beauty of the planet over history. (A), we have learned more about it and so we keep reimagining it, and (B) even in the present day, I said quite forcefully that I think there probably was life on Mars and probably still is life on Mars. Other people look at that same rock hanging there in space and say, “It’s sterile now and it always has been sterile.” It’s wonderful that we can respond in all these different ways to it. That said, the Mars stories that I enjoyed the most were not actually novels about Mars. I read all the Burroughs books and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, but I actually liked short story treatments of Mars, and my favorite one is one that Campbell turned down, I think: “A Martian Odyssey”—actually written, I guess, a little bit before Campbell took over Astounding—“A Martian Odyssey,” by a guy named Stanley G. Weinbaum. And it was the kind of story that you can’t sell anymore. It’s just a travelogue. It’s a guy who goes to Mars. His little ship crashes away from the base camp and while his co-astronauts are trying to find him, he tries to trek across Mars to make it back to safety, and along the way he has an endless series of adventures meeting all kinds of interesting Martian lifeforms, including one Martian lifeform based on silicone instead of carbon chemistry. And I loved that story when I first encountered it in the book The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg. It’s the first story in the book. And I still love that story to this day. Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey.” Sadly, Weinbaum died a year and a half after his first story was published and never really made the popular impact on the field that he should have. His name should be as well-known when we talk about Mars as Burroughs or Bradbury.

  Speaking of Burroughs, isn’t there a bar named Barsoom in the book?

  Yes. You know, as far as my research showed, nobody had yet used the name Barsoom for a bar on Mars, and it just seemed like such a natural joke to me. I’m sure somebody listening to this podcast will now comment and say, “No, no, no, it was used in this story or that story.” Barsoom is, of course, the name from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter stories. The natives don’t call Mars “Mars,” they call it “Barsoom.” And it just seemed like a cute and fun name to use. I mentioned a little bit about this “walking in the footsteps of.” Isaac Newton said, “If I’ve seen farther than those who’ve gone in front of me, it’s because I stand on the shoulders of giants.” You can’t be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the popular imagination that Mars was an exciting place. And I like to sprinkle those throughout Red Planet Blues.

  I listened to an interview you did about the TV show based on your novel Flashforward, and you talked about meeting with the producers. I was really struck about how many rules they had about what a television show had to conform to. It couldn’t look like the future. It had to be set in a major American city. The main characters couldn’t be scientists. They had to be cops, doctors, and lawyers. Everyone has to be young and gorgeous, stuff like that.

  Yes. Now all that said, for American network prime time television, that’s what they were aiming for. Obviously there are television shows around the world that aren’t set in the United States, but for the American prime time television market, those were the things that they felt would be the keys to success, none of which were in my novel Flashforward. It was set in Europe. Flashforward the novel has people flashing forward twenty-one years, not six months, so that would mean the beautiful young people who might have been in the cast would spend a large part of their screen time with the old and haggard—that was a non-starter. And at the time—this is now 2007 when we had this meeting, to show it on the air in 2009—at the time, it was a fair statement to say that the only shows that Americans watched in big numbers were shows about lawyers, doctors, or cops. Now, I had the great pleasure one day, working in the writer’s room at Flashforward’s offices on the Disney lot in Los Angeles, to say to the staff writers, “Sorry guys, I gotta leave early today. I’m heading off to a taping of that show that kicks our butt every week in the ratings that is about three physicists and an engineer,” which of course was Big Bang Theory. In 2007 Big Bang Theory was not the breakout hit that it became in 2009, so yes, absolutely, those rules made sense at the time they were articulated, which is now six years ago.

  You think those were true at the time, though? I heard you say that, when you first started out, everyone told you not to write books set in Canada because it wouldn’t sell, and that just turned out to be superstition or something.

  Yes, it turned out that nobody had empirically tested that, that people writing popular fiction in Canada, mystery and science fiction, fantasy, were shying away from any Canadian content or reference, because they had assumed that it would not work. Now, there had been TV shows about scientists. I can name a bunch from the 1970s that lasted a single season or less. Gemini Man is one. That starred
Ben Murphy. It was actually a riff on The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. It lasted, I think, one season. It was about scientists. Didn’t last. Man from Atlantis was a TV series about scientists at the foundation for oceanic research and their discovery of a living, breathing, Aquaman kind of thing. It did not last. The ones that did last, The Six Million Dollar Man, when they went from being pilot film and the first two subsequent 90-minute movies, when they went to an hour-long format, I did not like this move, but what did they do? They took the three characters they had, the superhero, the government bureaucrat, and the scientist, Dr. Rudy Wells, who had made Steve Austin into a cyborg, and dropped the scientist. So he was gone as a regular from the first three seasons of The Six Million Dollar Man, because people don’t tune in to watch scientists unless they are forensic scientists. Dexter is a scientist. He’s a forensic scientist, which is close enough to being either a cop or a lawyer or a doctor to be palatable. But yeah, it was advice that actually made sense. I wish it wasn’t true. I wish that, more than just as comedic figures, people would rally around the interesting lives of scientists in television drama. But it’s been a very, very hard sell to the public to make that happen.

  So I saw on your Facebook page that you recently appeared on Naked News?

  I did, for the third time!

  So what’s that like?

  Well, Naked News is the longest running pay-per-view show on the internet. And I think it was the New York Times that said it has the best international coverage this side of the BBC. It’s a legitimate news program that happens to be presented by beautiful women who strip naked while they’re presenting news stories. And they also do lighter, magazine-style pieces, including interviews, occasionally with authors or actors or musicians and so forth. And it happens that a lot of people at Naked News are fans of my books, which I’m very, very grateful for. And they love having me on and I love talking to beautiful naked women so it strikes me as a win-win scenario. Victoria Sinclair was the name of the woman who interviewed me this time. She’s the senior anchor. She’s also the longest-serving anchor, the original anchor, at Naked News. She’s absolutely brilliant, and I will tell you this, and let’s say present company excepted, no reflection on the current interview that we just did, it was the best interview that I’ve done in the last year. And last year when they interviewed me about Triggers, I can confidently say now—that was my previous book. We’re no longer talking about Triggers,rather my new book Red Planet Blues—they did the best interview of all of the dozens and dozens of interviews I did about Triggers. Why? One simple expedient: The interviewer actually reads the book from cover to cover. Most interviewers don’t. They rely on secondary material, press releases, jacket copy, what have you, Amazon write-ups. She read the whole book, thought deeply about the issues in the book, asked probing questions, and was willing to let me answer at length, which a lot of television interviews won’t let you do.

  I saw that you just donated your papers to McMaster University?

  They’re actually sending the truck on Monday, so the paperwork for the donation has been done. The actual physical donation is happening, as you and I speak now, five days from now. Yeah, absolutely. McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario approached me. They’re not my alma mater. I’ve never taught there. I have no connection to them, but they have very large holdings in the field of Canadian literature. Now, I’ve been approached by a lot of institutions, including the University of California Riverside, the University of South Florida, and various other places who wanted my papers for their holdings in science fiction. And at the end of the day I thought, “You know what, my legacy in science fiction is secure. I’ve won the Hugo for best novel. I’ve won the Nebula for best novel. I’ve had a TV series adapting one of my books.” My legacy in Canadian literature—it’s always been an uphill climb for anybody who writes genre fiction to be taken as part of the literary establishment. I was very flattered and moved that McMaster wanted to put me along the side the papers of great Canadian writers and editors, including Pierre Berton, whose retreat I started Red Planet Blues at. I’m thrilled at this opportunity and very much looking forward, not just to the donation of the papers, getting all the stuff out of my home will free up a large amount of space, but McMaster is actually hosting a three-day academic conference this fall, the fall of 2013, called “Science Fiction: The Interdisciplinary Genre,” because so much of my science fiction crosses genres. Red Planet Blues is exobiology, paleontology combined together. That kind of juxtaposition is the hallmark of my work. They’re doing a conference about the juxtaposing of interesting things within science fiction in honor of this. I’m really thrilled about that. “Science Fiction: The Interdisciplinary Genre,” September at McMaster University in Hamilton. Free and open to the public.

  And how about the Lifeboat to the Stars award?

  Yeah, gee, I’m the coordinating judge, which means that I am the chief cat herder of all the other judges who are looking for a work published in 2012 or 2011 that deals realistically and significantly with interstellar travel, not interplanetary, but interstellar travel. And surprisingly, as we’ve gone hunting for these, there have been very few in the last couple of years. It used to be such a mainstay of science fiction and it just isn’t really that much anymore. But we’ve been looking at—I’m not giving away our shortlist because that hasn’t been decided yet, but amongst the books the I’ve been looking at, of course, are Larry Niven and Gregory Benford, who have their first collaboration out, The Bowl of Heaven,which is a wonderful book. I say that because my cover blurb appears on the front cover of that book. Kevin Anderson and Steven Savile have a great book out called Tau Ceti, about the first generation ship voyage to the star Tau Ceti, one of our near neighbors. There’s wonderful stuff out there that we’re sorting through and looking for the best of the best, to give an award, and to bring it all full circle at the end of our interview, at the John W. Campbell conference, which is held each year at the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, Kansas. The Lifeboat to the Stars awards $1,000 to be given at the Campbell conference in June.

  That about does it for our questions. Are there any other new or upcoming projects that you would like to mention before we go?

  Well, I am very excited about the fact that I’m just embarking on an adaptation of my novel Triggers as a screenplay. I’ve been commissioned by a production company, a very credible one. I won’t say the name right now because we’re still dotting Is and crossing Ts on some of the paperwork. But they want to adapt and make a very big-budget feature film out of my novel Triggers. In most cases somebody else does the screenplay [but] I’m a trained broadcaster, my degree is in radio/television arts, I’m a member of the Writer’s Guild of America and the Writer’s Guild of Canada. I’ve been doing scriptwriting professionally for twenty years and those credentials were sufficient to convince them that I had the chops to tackle this and I’m really, really enjoying that project and very, very excited about the prospect of it moving ahead and actually getting made.

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

  John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed (and its sister magazine, Nightmare), is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

  David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and
The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.

  Interview: Nalo Hopkinson

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

  Jamaican-born author Nalo Hopkinson burst onto the publishing scene in 1997, when her novel Brown Girl in the Ring, set in present-day Toronto and featuring supernatural events drawn from Caribbean folklore, won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. She followed that up with a string of other successes, including 2001′s short story collection Skin Folk, which was acclaimed by The New York Times. Her two latest novels are Sister Mine and The Chaos.

  This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

  Your new novel is called Sister Mine, and it’s about a pair of sisters, Abby and Makeda. Could you just tell us a little bit about those characters and how you came up with them?

  I’ve been trying to remember that, and I’m really not sure. Part of it is because I’ve always been intrigued by “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti. It’s from the nineteenth century, and it’s about two sisters, one of whom saves the other from goblins. I wanted to write about two sisters who were very, very close, as these two were, so I came up with Abby and Makeda, who were born conjoined. They got separated at birth, and when they got separated—you know, when you separate conjoined twins, often they’ve been sharing some part of their body, so one gets it and the other one doesn’t—so when Abby and Makeda get separated, Abby gets the magic and Makeda doesn’t.