Lightspeed Magazine Issue 37

by L. Timmel Duchamp

  Report from Planet Midnight. Terry approached me while—see, partly my memory’s bad because of the ADD and the learning disability and the fibromyalgia, but put it through then five years of destitution, and it gets even worse. So I remember Terry approaching me, I don’t remember when or how, whether it was in the flesh or whether he sent me an email, but he told me about the Outspoken Authors Series that he edits, that are chapbooks where one author is sort of featured. They will have a story or two in there, an interview with Terry, and an essay. And I said, yes, I thought I could do that, and we worked on it. Terry was very, very patient as I went through homelessness and clambered my way back out to sort of having a home to really having a home to being able to think about writing at all, and, bless his heart, he kept waiting, and he remained patient, but, you know, kept on at me until we had Report from Planet Midnight.

  It’s got two of my short stories; I didn’t have the brain to write new ones at the time, but I picked two that most people would not have seen because they got published in such obscure places. One of them wasn’t even published as a short story, and it wasn’t published under my name. Then he did the interview, and I took an address I had given to the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA). I was the guest author in a year where the theme of the conference was race in the literature of the fantastic. It was about a year and a half after RaceFail, so I knew it was going to be touchy, and I did part of the address as a performance piece that talked about translation, about what we mean when we say “I’m not racist.” So all of those are in the chapbook, which I really liked. I really loved the work that Terry did, the editing he did, the way he put everything in context, I loved the way the book looked, I loved working with the editor and the publishing house, but since it was a chapbook—and I know, particularly in this genre, we’re size queens; a book’s not a book unless it’s at least four hundred pages, preferably twice that—so I figured it would mostly be of academic interest. To my surprise, people have been buying it and reading it and talking about it and it’s got legs, it’s doing quite well. I’m very pleased. I’m proud of having done it, proud of the fact that Terry asked me. Terry’s been an outspoken writer for a very long time, and that he thought what I had to say was important enough to be heard is a lovely thing.

  In this performance piece you mentioned, you actually enacted it as if you were sort of channeling an alien intelligence. Could you talk about why you decided to present your remarks that way?

  I had been trying to write—I knew almost two years ahead of that particular ICFA, that particular year of the conference, that I was going to be a guest author, and I had been trying to write my speech for most of that time, and you know how touchy things got around RaceFail, and the kinds of stuff that was happening, and I’d start trying to write it, and I’d get a combination of scared and furious, and I’d go take a walk around the block, and plus I was, you know, still homeless and hungry. No, by then I actually had an apartment, a room in somebody’s apartment, but the words weren’t coming in a way that felt strong to me or felt like people would find them “listenable to.” Until it was the day before the conference, I was actually already at ICFA, and I took my notes down and started going over them again, and it may have been something my partner said that made me start writing in that mode of a translator from another planet, and I was mixing all kinds of modes because I have the translator sort of inhabit me, so we have the very science fiction/fantasy notion of possession, but the notion of possession is also one that you find in the Afro-Caribbean spiritual systems that I talk about in my writing. Only it’s not a scary possession, it’s not a ghost taking you over so that they can vomit out every fluid you’ve ever had in your body; it’s in the course of a religious service, you open yourself to the deity, you invite the deity, one of the deities, to come down and inhabit your body for a while so they can talk to their parishioners, so I was evoking both simultaneously, because I can’t … my world is a hybrid one, my references are hybrid references, so I just really worked that. And I had this translator from another planet inhabit me as a horse, which is what you’d call the person in the spiritual service who has a god riding on their head, and he and his team of translators have been listening to transmissions from Earth and having to translate them, and they’re not sure they’re really getting them because the translations they’re getting aren’t really making sense to them. So he’s asking for clarification, and when they tried to translate “I’m not racist,” they got something like “I can swim in shit without getting any of it on me.” And he looked at their own translation and thought, “That doesn’t make any sense. What sensible race would say this?” So they’ve come down to ask for clarification, always with a confession every so often that, you know, “sure you guys do some crazy things, we do some crazy things too,” because I didn’t want to give people the notion that I was standing there with some notion of purity, of being unaffected by racism. And it was a fascinating performance to give. I was shaking; I was shaking because I knew who attended ICFA, and I knew that some of the people who were there would not be fond of what I was saying. But I could also hear the supportive people in the audience who did get it and who encouraged me and I actually cut it short as a speech, because I just couldn’t bring myself to keep standing up there feeling as vulnerable as I did, but to my surprise, when I stopped, I got a standing ovation from the audience. So Terry had me take that speech and put it in context for people who don’t know the science fiction community and for whom RaceFail would not make any sense just as a phrase, and then I put the speech in with some additions.

  Um, I have forgotten your question.

  The question was just, I guess, why did you choose to present as an alien being, and maybe is there some synchronicity between feelings of alienation and extraterrestrials and race relations and stuff like that?

  Mm-hm. Well, you look at science fiction, and look how often it talks about being alien, being alienated by the Other. Look at the numbers of blue people!

  Yeah, that was funny, you mentioned all that—

  Avatar, looking at you. And it is now easier to find people of color in science fiction literature and media, but the issues of representation are still really, really troubling. The way they took, for instance, Avatar: The Last Airbender, that was in a pan-Asian world, and made the protagonist white. Neil Gaiman talking about—I believe it’s Anansi Boys or American Gods—getting an offer for a film production of it, then having the producers say, “Well, of course, we’re going to make everyone white, because black people aren’t interested in fantasies,” the kind of thing you’ll hear white writers say about not wanting to write any people of color, for one reason or another, but it all boils all down to “because I don’t want people to be mad at me.” So the issues are still very, very much there. Even though we talk about race a lot in the literature, there’s still this idea of “Well, if we make this person blue and give them pointy ears, then we don’t have to actually talk about what’s happening in the real world.” And those of us who live in racialized bodies feel that lack, we feel that erasure, so yes, there was something quite deliberate in my doing half the speech as an alien.

  I think actually a lot of our listeners don’t know what RaceFail was, so do you want to maybe just explain that for them?

  Yes, I believe in 2009, discussions on race and racism in science fiction and fantasy in literature and community blew the hell up on the Internet. There are some ten thousand posts that have been archived, with people of color in the community talking about what our experience has been, with white people in the community talking about what their experience has been, with lots of people who are very proud to say that they’re colorblind opining very loudly on why the people of color were talking nonsense. It just got very productive, and I use that word deliberately because a lot of good came out of it. For one thing, people of our color began to see that there were [others out there], we made contact with each other. Often, yo
u go to a con, and it can still happen that you’re the only, or one of the handful of people of color there. When Octavia Butler was alive, it was the experience of all the other, maybe four, black women science fiction writers in the community that we would go to a con, and someone would assume that that’s who we were, to the point that Toby Buckell suggested that we call ourselves “The Butlerian Jihad.” [laughing] I want t-shirts!

  So a lot of the buried and not-so-buried systemic racism in the science fiction community became laid bare. Lots of people denied it was there, but how could it not be? We’re part of the rest of the world. Like I said, you can’t swim in shit and not get any of it on you. This idea that the worst thing that could happen to you is for somebody to say “That was racist,” and that you should react virulently against the very notion that you can be affected by your own society. People began to talk about that, and people began to make space to talk about it. One of the lovely, lovely things that come out of it was a publishing venture that’s going quite well and got supported by the community beautifully. And out of it came this sort of Fifty Books Challenge where a lot of the readers realized that they weren’t reading writers of color and started challenging each other to read fifty books by writers of color in a year. And they’re doing it. It’s a lovely thing. There’s still this notion that you are somehow morally superior if you don’t know anything about the background of the writers you read, and I maintain that writers have every right to not talk their backgrounds, that’s fine, but when people do and it’s important to their work, to not know doesn’t mean you’re morally superior, it means you are indifferent. And so there’s just all of that going on, still going on, still getting challenged, still arguments going back and forth. It’s a very rich time, I think, in the science fiction community, and a lot of nastiness has come out of it, but a lot of change, I think, is beginning to come out of it, and it’s, at base, a hopeful time for me.

  If people want to embark on that Fifty Book Challenge you mentioned, what would be five or six they should start with that you would really recommend?

  Oh my god. [laughing] You want me to get hate mail. Five or six? Okay, let’s start with one on my desk: The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord. It’s her new one. I am reading it now and really enjoying it. Something I’m teaching my students: Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water. He’s a Canadian First Nations author. Uhm, that’s two. Samuel R. Delany: pretty much anything. That’s three. Hmmmmm … The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by Nora (N.K.) Jemisin. Charles Saunders: pretty much anything. And Love and Rockets [by the Hernandez Brothers], which is a graphic novel/comic, as well as Bayou [by Jeremy Love], which is another set of graphic novels. There! Off the top of my head.

  Actually, speaking of graphic novels, I saw you said that you were very slowly working on a graphic novel. Is there any—

  Progress? No, but I’m still collecting research. It’s something that my life partner and I were working on together, and he’s gone back to school, so it’s on hiatus. But I’m still collecting research and notes for it. I don’t know when it’ll happen; it’s nowhere near imminent.

  Can you say what you’re researching or what the overall topic is or … ?

  Part of what we’re looking at it is discussions of what constitutes a human being at a time between sort of the Second World War and a few years afterwards, where we had the suffragist movement where women were fighting to be recognized as people, we had corporations being designated people under the law, that kind of thing. But I’m also looking at a particular African supernatural creature and the history of black men on the railroad in North America. You know, it can’t be just one thing. It all comes together, I promise you, but I just don’t know when.

  Okay, so that pretty much does it for the questions. Are there any other projects that you’re working or have coming up that we haven’t touched on yet?

  Yes, I am back to working on Black Heart Man, which is a novel that I’ve mostly finished and had to put aside, so I will be working on that over the summer. I am shopping around a new short story collection, and just generally getting about the business of learning to become a full-time professor and getting back into my creative brain. So that’s where I’m at.

  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.

  Artist Gallery: Pavel Elagin

  Artist Showcase: Pavel Elagin

  Galen Dara

  Pavel Elagin is a concept artist living in Australia, working for the entertainment industry. www.artbypavel.com

  Our cover image this month is your fantastical painting, Flautist Woods. As I understand, this was a personal piece of yours and you took it through several revisions and a complete start-over before you had it where you wanted it. [http://www.artbypavel.com/illust/2010/11/17/process-journal-flautist-woods] Where did the idea for this piece come from and how did you know when you were on the right track?

  It started out as a simple exercise in character drawing—a flute player—but the image kept evolving as I worked on it. At first I wanted to keep the location more suggestive and abstract, but in the process of painting, the original intent started to become more complicated. The character felt disjointed from the location I had painted. I had to find a way to solve that problem, so I set it aside. The revision happened when I was working on the moody forest location as a separate image. It was a matter of having the separate ideas click into place and from there I had the final image in mind that I worked towards.

  I think, in the end, it’s hard to pinpoint where exactly the idea came from; it was more a matter of many ideas forming something new.

  I love your environmental paintings! Beautiful atmospheric effects and such a wide range of mysterious and intriguing locations—they make me want to travel some place exotic. I was intrigued to look through your flickr feed [http://www.flickr.com/photos/rayk/] and see that you are quite the explorer yourself with trips to Katmandu, the Himalayas, and Japan (and did you climb Mt. Everest?). Does your traveling feed into your inspiration for these fantastical and other-worldy locations? Where else do you get your inspiration from?

  I didn’t climb Mt. Everest, it was only a simple trek to the base camp, and a climb to Kala Pata for the breathtaking view of Mt. Everest and the surrounding peaks.

  I love traveling and exploring new locations. I think for me the biggest source of inspiration is simply the energy and excitement you get while traveling and not necessarily what you see. Of course, for some things like mountains, you don’t really get to appreciate their scale and enormity unless you experience them for yourself. It’s experiences l
ike these that you can incorporate into your own work, which might not necessarily be of the same location or subject matter.

  My other source of inspiration is definitely books, video games, and animation. I’m an avid reader of science fiction, especially if it takes you on an epic journey through many worlds and locations. Recently I’ve been reading Peter F. Hamilton’s work; I really love the epic setting in many of his books.

  You currently work in the gaming and film industry doing environmental design and visual development. What sort of work does that entail? Can you give us some background into how you became the artist you are and how your gaming and film work relates to your personal work?

  I’ve been very fortunate that much of the work I do professionally is very similar to what I enjoy doing for my personal work. Early on in a project, it’s usually establishing mood paintings for the various locations and environments. Once the initial stage is done, it’s more concrete designs for those locations, color and lighting keys for script, and anything else that needs to be visualized.

  I had wanted to become an artist since I was young, but my journey didn’t start until I graduated from high school. I was lucky to learn about concept design for video games on an internet site. From there I knew exactly what I wanted to pursue as my career. I love creating imaginary locations and I’ve always loved that about video games; I think that common ground has brought me to where I am today as an artist.

  Any exciting projects and trips on the horizon?

  I am very excited about the current project I’ve been a part of, and I can’t wait to see it released. Absolutely looking to travel again: Europe and South East Asia are the two places that are on top of my list to visit, and I hope I’ll get the chance to do that soon!

  Thank you Pavel, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.