Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 94

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Audience: What about you doing the screenplay for the movie?

  That’s a very good question. Because it’s a first person narrative and film is third person, they’re going to have to make radical changes anyway to make the first movie, so I don’t really have a problem with someone else doing the screenplay. If it was somebody other than Scott Rudin Productions, maybe I would have a problem.

  Well, thinking about the film, are there things that you are concerned about?

  I’m concerned about a few things. These are not four white women running round in Annihilation, as you learn in the second book. They’re also not a bunch of men, and my concern would be that they would change the gender of the characters or something like that. I’m less concerned on the diversity issue because it’s more about getting the right actor. [Regina King] who was on Southland who I think would be perfect to play the biologist, even though you learn the biologist is not African-American in the second book. It’s more getting the mix right, getting the right actresses, sticking with women for that expedition. Those would be my main concerns would be casting concerns.

  In fact, that’s what I was thinking about. I would hate to see them change the female expedition because we’ve got to have a guy in there. There’s a tendency to do that with a science fiction thriller, to not have it all be led by women. That concerned me too.

  I read somewhere recently that a lot of the top blockbusters have had female leads, so maybe that’s changing.

  Your parents, growing up in Fiji, what kind of influences has that had on your writing over the years?

  There’s a scene in Annihilation where she goes out at night, and she finds this glowing starfish. This is actually something that happened to me when I was in Fiji at like the age of six or seven. We were out on the reef at night, and . . . at a certain point I had no idea where the heck I was and which way land was or anything else. I could kind of see flashlights in the distance, and I came across this Crown-of-Thorns starfish, which does kind of have a phosphorescence at night. It kind of acclimated me to exactly where I was.

  Other than that, I haven’t been able to write about Fiji, and I don’t know if it’s because I was so young when I was there or because being embedded in another culture doesn’t really mean you become an expert on where you are. Definitely, it was an influence because instead of taking raises or sometimes pay, what they did is they took travel vouchers and at the age of, I think, I was eight or nine when we came back from the Peace Corps from Fiji, we spent nine months traveling around the world, mostly Southeast Asia and Africa and places like that, and it was the perfect age for me to soak up a lot of it and, of course, have an influence on my fiction and how I think about fiction in general.

  Your parents, I think, somewhat show up in the books.

  They do a little bit. They’re kind of transformed. They appeared a little bit more in my prior novels. My dad’s an ant scientist. He’s a research chemist with the USDA working on fire ants. My mom’s a biological illustrator and currently studying French graveyard art for another Ph.D. over in France. In fact, she once got caught in a graveyard after hours and was detained by the police and then emailed me and said, “You wouldn’t believe how many weird people there are in this graveyard after midnight.” I was like, “Yes, mom, you were there.”

  How important is research in your writing? In this particular, in the first book, Annihilation, you’ve got a biologist and a psychiatrist. You’ve got all these scientists. How important is it for you to kind of know where they’re coming from?

  Even though my dad’s an “ant scientist,” he has interaction with other kinds of scientists, and there are certain things that are common across in terms of scientific theory and pursuit. That I already kind of had down, and then I did do some research. I always wanted to be a marine biologist until I discovered I didn’t really want to study biology—I just wanted to look in tidal pools—and so I had some background there.

  I also had the idea that the biologist is not the world’s best biologist. I mean, you notice in the book that she gets fired from an awful lot of jobs. I used that in part because I didn’t want to over-research it and then kill the spontaneity of the book with too much of that. There’re actions that she takes that are not really by the book that wind up being important to the plot in the second and the third book.

  You know, you also write things that kind of take place in imaginary cities and involve history. Do you spend a lot of time researching that sort of thing?

  For the prior books, I studied pretty much all of Byzantine history. I must have read twenty to thirty books on Byzantine history and Venetian history. There’re some really weird things in there—like you find out that the Visigoths made cloaks from the pelts of field mice and that the leaders who had the most power had the most field mouse pelts in their cloaks. That sounds very powerful. [Laughter]

  For the Southern Reach novels, it was more the sense of place that was really important, and so I reached this point in writing where I knew I needed to have a different environment because at some point one of the characters leaves the South basically, and I was a little bit frantic about that because everything in the books that’s about the South is something that I’ve seen, observed, know the texture of, and I didn’t want a single received research detail in there.

  So my wife and I actually took two weeks off to just go up the coast of California as basically a research trip, and what I was doing was collecting textures and smells and scents and talking to people. You can’t feel like you live there obviously if you’ve only been there for that amount of time, but in terms of the actual landscape, you can pick up enough detail, enough sense of it, that you’re not giving reader received secondhand information.

  Audience: What did you study in college?

  Well, I went to the University of Florida, and I took some creative writing classes. I started out as a journalism major and then went to English with a Latin American History minor, and then by the second year I pretty much I knew I didn’t really feel like graduating. I know that sounds weird, so I just took every class I wanted to take that I hadn’t taken because the poet Richard Wilbur had come through a couple of years before, and he basically said don’t get a creative writing degree—just take as many different courses as possible. Learn as much as possible, soak everything in.

  At that point, I just had lost focus because I didn’t want to become a teacher or journalist. I just wanted to write fiction. I dropped out halfway through my senior year, and I got a tech writing job, and then I just wrote on the side until I could become a full-time writer. I wouldn’t necessarily advise that as a path. It’s just what happened to me. It’s very difficult when you go in thinking you want to do one thing and then you realize it doesn’t really matter what you do because all you want to do is write fiction. That’s very destabilizing when you’re in a situation where you need to have discipline.

  Audience: Do you have a good idea about the characters’ names and who they are and where they are? Since there are no names in Annihilation and you don’t know exactly where in the world it’s set.

  In Authority, you get a better idea of most of them. You get some names. You may never get a name for the biologist; I’m not telling. And you get more of a sense of place, very specific. Like, the Southern Reach building in Authority is based on a combination of really crappy 1970s concrete government buildings in the United States and like the worst possible Soviet architectural disasters, so it’s this kind of U that has all these weird baffle issues and all these gutter issues. I had a lot of fun with that where actually, for the second novel, I have a diagram of the building and how everything matches up.

  We mentioned that the story has a kind of espionage thing going on. What was your inspiration for that?

  I’m a huge John Le Carre fan. I think he is a brilliant writer, and for some reason—and this doesn’t lessen the accomplishment—in his best novels, I think he’s just an absolutely master of the art
and craft of writing, but because they’re espionage novels and therefore they have this particular focus, it’s easier to see how he uses craft than in some mainstream literary novels that are not in a particular genre. Even though, like I said, I think he’s absolutely a master of that.

  I love the interiority of some of his characters, the way that he makes all his characters incredible lived-in, and you just see everything from their perspective in such an interesting way and how they get involved in these very intricate puzzles. I’ve taken a lot of craft lessons from reading Le Carre’s books, and I wanted to do kind of a deconstructed spy story mixed with kind of a horror story.

  You’ve mentioned your wife a couple of times. I know you edit anthologies together. What’s the working relationship like.

  It didn’t start out very well. We met because she came down to Gainesville where I was organizing some literary events, and she was asking for advice about her magazine, which she just started. I promptly then sent her a story. This was very early in my career. It was a terrible story about a talking magic frog going to the prom, and I don’t even . . . I mean, it was really, really early in my career.

  She rejected it, and then I sent her a letter back saying that I was glad she rejected it. It had been a test to see if she was a good editor. [Laughter] Which it had not been. It was just a crappy story that I had not recognized was a crappy story. Our relationship built on that. As most relationships do.

  For a long time, we kept our editing separate because we wanted to have separate identities, and we were both afraid, just because of sexism in the field, that if we combined forces everything would be about me. Then eventually, it made no sense because she was helping on all the projects I was doing, and I was helping on all the projects she was doing, so we combined forces, and now we’ve edited all these anthologies together, and it’s proven very good.

  I’m a good skimmer if that makes any sense, on these anthologies. I will go on ahead like a golden retriever bringing back interesting stuff, and she will tell me, “That wasn’t actually very interesting at all,” or “This was.” She’s the more in-depth reader for the anthology. She’s also a very good general editor, and I’m more about the line edits and getting into the manuscript, and so we work very well in that regard.

  After the third novel comes out and you’ve finished your travels where do you go from there? I know you’re not going to think about writing fiction for a year, right?

  Right. Well, I’m working on editing for our own press an omnibus of a really interesting Finnish writer, Leena Krohn, a nine hundred-page volume of her work. I think she’s an amazing fantasy writer who’s very underappreciated, and my hope is that when all of these reviewers get this doorstop of a book, there’s absolutely no way that they can ignore her work.

  I’m also working on something called The Book Murderer, which I meant to be the last novel I ever wrote but probably will be the next one, which is a sendup of all aspects of book culture. From publishing to reviewers to everything, every aspect of it, literary festivals. This festival nothing weird has happened, so I have no material.

  Well, yeah, it’s not over yet.

  Ha! Yes, and, you know, the book addresses issues like blurbing. Blurbing can be a very kind of incestuous thing where you blurb somebody, and then they ask you for a blurb, and so there’s a section in The Book Murderer where he does a rant on his blog about blurbers, and the whole incestuous nature is completely over the top. The reason I know this might get me in trouble is I posted on my blog just as an experiment to see how people would react, and I got so much hate mail from this thing that was meant to be a parody or a satire.

  Thank you very much.

  Thank you. Thank you for some great questions.

  About the Author

  Ben Fry is the General Manager of UALR Public Radio.

  Another Word:

  Reclaiming the Tie-In Novel

  James L. Sutter

  Our society has a weird relationship with logos. Put a popular brand name on a t-shirt, and you’ll find people happy to pay fifty dollars (or two hundred dollars for Gucci!) to be a walking billboard. But put the logo of a popular game or film property on a novel cover, and suddenly genre readers will be falling all over themselves to tell you how they love fantasy and science fiction, but they don’t read those novels.

  What’s even stranger is that it’s not even true. Look at the bestseller lists, and you’ll find Star Wars, Halo, and Dungeons & Dragons right up there with George R. R. Martin and Brandon Sanderson. There’s a reason you recognize names like Margaret Weis, R. A. Salvatore, and Ed Greenwood, and it’s that books based on popular properties sell.

  They also inspire. After most of a decade working in the fantasy and gaming fields, I’ve yet to meet an author under fifty who, when questioned, didn’t admit to being inspired by tie-in novels at some point. We all read Dragonlance. We all fervently wished for George Lucas to make Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy instead of the blasphemous prequels. We all know what kind of swords Drizzt uses (twin scimitars).

  So why do so many of us now turn up our noses at such things?

  The easy answer is that a lot of tie-in is bad—literary pap churned out by authors and editors who don’t care about quality as long as the machine keeps turning. But like most easy answers, that’s a bit disingenuous. As Theodore Sturgeon taught us, 90% of everything is crap, and I’ve certainly read plenty of creator-owned fantasy that might fit that description as well. So why do we place tie-in on a lower rung in the artistic hierarchy?

  You’ll notice that I keep saying “we.” This isn’t just a literary device. For many years, I held the same opinion. As a kid, I devoured tie-in for everything from Dungeons & Dragons to Star Wars to Indiana Jones. Yet when I hit my punk-rock teens, I started questioning my former infatuation. The fact that tie-in required an author to work with an IP holder—a corporation—no longer jived with my concept of art. Surely real artists wouldn’t allow themselves to be impacted by the forces of commerce. These authors of “corporate fiction,” as I called it, must be sellouts and has-beens.

  That opinion lasted right up until I started working in publishing, at which point I discovered that my entire concept of how books were made was hopelessly naïve. Authors—even of creator-owned works—rarely operate in a vacuum. The idea of a novel as a pure and perfect transmission from author to reader tends to shatter the first time an author gets revision notes back from an editor. And as for being free from the forces of capitalism—well, maybe in self-publishing, but last I checked most publishers are in the business of making money, and an author who doesn’t work with them to try and maximize sales tends not to be their author for long.

  But the final nail in the coffin of my anti-tie-in prejudice was provided by the authors themselves. You see, there were simply too many good authors doing it. And not just good authors within the tie-in world—big name authors that had won awards and published bestsellers doing creator-owned work kept turning up in the mix. Brandon Sanderson. Greg Bear. Tobias Buckell. If you really want your head to spin, wrap your brain around the fact that Nicola Griffith—perhaps the leading voice in feminist and queer SF, with enough major awards to deck out a Christmas tree—wrote stories for Warhammer back in the 80s!

  These authors didn’t suddenly lose their chops just because they were writing tie-in. If an awesome author can write tie-in, then it must follow that tie-in can be awesome.

  This realization came none too soon for me, as it was around this time that I was put in charge of launching Pathfinder Tales, a line of novels set in the world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. As the Managing Editor for Paizo Publishing, I’ve been on a mission ever since to help tear down the idea that tie-in fiction is somehow inherently lesser than creator-owned fiction. Toward that end, I’ve made it my mission to not just hire from inside established tie-in author circles, but to reach out to mainstream fantasy and science fiction authors as well. Along with popular tie-in authors lik
e Ed Greenwood and Elaine Cunningham, I’ve also been fortunate enough to bring in authors like Hugo Award-winner Tim Pratt, Howard Andrew Jones, and Liane Merciel.

  While tie-in work obviously isn’t for everyone, as the representative of The Establishment, I see it as my duty to give authors as much creative control and ownership as possible over their characters and plots. We provide the world, they provide the stories.

  As a writer, tie-in work is an admittedly mixed bag. I’ve personally written two Pathfinder novels, Death’s Heretic and The Redemption Engine, and while Death’s Heretic ending up at #3 on Barnes & Noble’s Best Fantasy Releases of 2011 did a fair bit to quiet naysayers (especially the ones inside my own head), there were plenty of friends who cautioned me against getting into tie-in. As one longtime editor put it, I ran the risk of getting “stuck in the tie-in ghetto.” Certainly tie-in doesn’t often win awards. And unlike a creator-owned project, if you do get a hit, you don’t own the rights to your work, and that money goes primarily into the IP-holder’s pocket.

  Yet as one of my authors, Dave Gross, once said: “In tie-in, the ceiling may be lower, but the floor is higher.” It’s true that if your tie-in character gets huge and ends up on happy meals and Saturday morning cartoons, you’re not going to see much of that money. At the same time, however, tie-in comes with a built-in audience. Especially for new authors, there’s always the chance that a creator-owned novel will stall out at a few hundred copies (or, god forbid, a few dozen). In tie-in, however, a lot of that risk is ameliorated. You can release your new novel knowing that there are thousands of fans of the brand who’ll buy that book even if they have no idea who you are. And while it’s no guarantee, the hope is that some of these fans will then go out and buy your creator-owned work.