‘‘I read quite a lot of non-fiction about Vikings for these books. When you research you come upon telling details that are quite fascinating. Things come up like the fact that they had good teeth because they didn’t have sugar in their diet – much better teeth than we have generally. You wouldn’t know that. Everyone thinks people have awful teeth in that era. You’ll come upon interesting things and try to work those details in, but a lot of that rises in writing from tight point of view. Tolkien had quite a diffuse point of view in his writing. He had the roving eye, the omniscient viewpoint, the big wide shot, the huge landscape, which is fantastic – I don’t mean to impugn that at all, except insofar as it came to dominate the way fantasy was written. It lost that sense of tight involvement that you get with someone like James Ellroy, who’s all about being in the head of a character. That was the type of writing I wanted. I wanted it to be an uncomfortable close-up. Like, with John Ford’s films it’s a huge landscape, and with Sergio Leone’s it’s one eye, uncomfortably close, and strange perspectives on the hands. Films about the people, not the landscapes. I was interested in focusing on the people and experience. I wanted to get a sense of real life. Aragorn never needed to wee, did he? You’d need to wee a lot on a journey of that length. Especially if you have a bad prostate or something, which you might well have in that era. A lot of people in normal life have problems of this kind they’ve got to deal with. In a world like that, where medicine is so rudimentary, everyone would be struggling with one thing or another. I think it makes the characters more relatable.
‘‘There’s no right way to do anything, particularly. There’s a way that feels right to you as a writer with a certain story. I never feel like anything I do is a manifesto of how it should be done. It’s healthy that we’ve got a bit more edge, a bit more range, in epic fantasy now. There’s no shortage of stuff that’s quite traditional if that’s your bag. I’m always surprised by people saying, ‘Fantasy’s so dark and horrible now. It’s really upsetting.’ I believe Tolkien’s still on the shelf if that’s what you’re after. You get people who complain about one thing or another. People complain about the cynicism of this kind of fantasy, who find it unrealistic. You get people who complain about the swearing. I had a guy e-mail me the other day and say that he was reading The Heroes and he was really enjoying it, but then he had to burn it. He was concerned his book group would see what he was reading and be upset by it, and he wanted me to know there are still people who can’t tolerate blatant sin. The great thing about book burnings is, they still have to buy the books. You get people who are upset because they feel they’ve been tricked, because they thought they were getting a story in which you had redemption, where these nasty things would come good, because that’s what they’ve got in similar stories. When they don’t get that, they feel they’ve had the rug pulled out from under them. Because you ‘pretended’ to be a fantasy story, and they know how those stories go, and you surprised them, and that’s upsetting. You gave them a can of Coke and it actually had piss in it – that’s their reaction. Some people don’t want to be surprised. I do want to be surprised!
‘‘Half a King is not explicitly Viking, but the atmosphere and the texture of what the society was like before Christianity was what I was after. That is not the stuff people think of when they think Vikings. They think of guys in longships with dragon prows with horns on the helmets. There’s a lot of interesting stuff about religion and how they saw the world, and how Christianity changed the way the Vikings saw the world. The relations between men and women, and what women’s role was, and how women were powerful in the household, especially when the men were away for years at a time.
‘‘I have two girls and a boy. I was very keen to get a lot of varied and interesting women characters in these books, because I’ve not always covered myself in glory in that respect in the past. I wanted the world to be arranged in a way that would make that easy to do. As a straight white guy you have the privilege of never having to think about these issues. You read Tolkien and its imitations, and they’re all about men. Naturally you reproduce that when you write, because you’ve never had to think about it, but now people bring you up on that. The first reaction is, ‘How dare you – I’m progressive and great.’ Then you think a bit more, realize, ‘Oops.’ It’s a long process of reflection and thinking about what you’ve done. Then you start to notice the horrible lazy writing of women characters everywhere, especially on TV. It’s very easy to become defensive when people bring this up, sexist writing and so on – that’s the natural first reaction – but you’ve got to see it as one kind of bad writing that you need to be watchful to try and avoid. I’ve tried to get more varied and interesting women into the books as I’ve gone along. The other thing I’ve found helpful is, I plan a book and think about the characters I have, and think which of them need to be men and which need to be women, and whether any can be swapped. What I found is, I’ve got a tendency to write certain kinds of characters as women all the time. Real life has all kinds of different people in it. Suddenly you find that swapping the gender creates a fascinating character when what you had before was just obvious. It’s an interesting exercise.
‘‘I’ve got a commitment to do another trilogy in The First Law world at some point. A lot of the characters that were central in The First Law will be the parents and the generation above the current characters. The points of view will move, but a lot of the established characters will be in the background. I like that because it gives people a feeling of continuity, but at the same time you’re not treading water, you’re moving on to new characters. The world goes on, life goes on. The first of those won’t appear until 2017, or 2018 maybe. It’s far better than the alternative, but you can’t help seeing all these books stretch off into the distance and thinking ‘Christ, I’ve got a lot of work to do.’’’
–Joe Abercrombie
Return to In This Issue listing.
Eileen Katherine Gunn was born June 23, 1945 in Dorchester MA and grew up south of Boston. She attended Emmanuel College, a Catholic college, earning a BA (1967) in History with a minor in English, began working as an advertising copywriter, then moved to California to pursue fiction writing. In 1976 she attended Clarion, and afterward wrote while supporting herself by working in advertising. She was an early employee at Microsoft, where she worked as director of advertising and sales promotion in the mid-’80s, finally quitting because she couldn’t concentrate on writing while working 100+ hour weeks. In 1988 she joined the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and in 2001 began editing online magazine The Infinite Matrix, which ran until 2008.
Gunn’s first story, ‘‘What Are Friends For?’’, appeared in 1978. Never a prolific author, Gunn produced only a handful of stories over the next decades, including two Hugo nominees, ‘‘Stable Strategies for Middle Management’’ (1989; also included in The Norton Book of Science Fiction) and ‘‘Computer Friendly’’ (1990). Collection Stable Strategies and Others (2004) gathered most of her prior output, along with several new stories, including Nebula Award finalist ‘‘Nirvana High’’ (with Leslie What) and winner ‘‘Coming to Terms’’; the collection itself was a finalist for World Fantasy and Philip K. Dick Awards, and was shortlisted for a Tiptree award. New collection Questionable Practices (2014) includes stories written in the past decade, plus two unpublished stories and collaborations with Rudy Rucker and Michael Swanwick. Her essay on science fiction and the future appears in the May, 2014 issue of Smithsonian magazine.
Gunn lives in Seattle with typographer and book designer John D. Berry, her partner of 35 years.
•
‘‘Just to be absolutely clear about it, science fiction does not predict the future. Science fiction may address the future, some stories may be set in the future, but it’s not about the future, although sometimes it’s about creating the future. When I interviewed William Gibson a couple months ago, I whined, ‘Why do people want SF writers to predict the future
?’ I thought Gibson’s answer, which was edited out of the final article, was particularly informative: he said (and I quote): ‘I take it for granted, both as a reader and a writer of SF, that one aspect of the potential pleasure of the text may be pretending to believe the future as presented is a likely outcome.’
‘‘But the usefulness of science fiction is not that it predicts the future, and to come up to a writer afterwards and say, ‘You got that wrong’ is dumb – although, of course, everyone is happy to think they got it ‘right.’
‘‘What science fiction does, especially in those works that deal with the future, is help people understand that things change and that you can live through it. Change is all around us. Probably things change faster now than they did four or five hundred years ago, particularly in some parts of the world. As Gibson said decades ago, ‘The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.’ And it’s uneven in interesting ways: there are people in some parts of the world for whom change is slow, and life is much the same as it was when they were born. But because they don’t have the old technology, the dead weight of the infrastructure (telephone wires, say), they can leapfrog ahead of us.
‘‘Writers don’t use science fiction to understand what’s going to happen. They use it to examine what’s happening now – and yet everyone’s reality of that is a bit different. We don’t live in ‘‘a science fiction age,’’ as the puffery goes: we live in the present. It’s always the present where we live.
‘‘Human beings want to know the future, and we want to plan for it, but we usually plan for alternatives. Only charlatans pretend to predict the future.
‘‘Looking backwards in time at science fiction, it’s always tempting to say, ‘That was a very clever prediction: it came true,’ but in fact it might be an extrapolation from known data (like Hugo Gernsback’s supposed invention of the submarine) or (my favorite) a contrarian extrapolation that simply starts with the opposite of conventional thinking, and walks it back. Assume that everything you know is wrong: you’re bound to hit the sweet spot, once in a while, with that tomato.
‘‘But what is the future? Ursula Le Guin said she finds the future is ‘a safe, sterile laboratory for trying out ideas.’ I’m not sure that I agree that it’s safe –- ideas are never really safe – but it is a place where a writer can explore ideas and their implications, without the constraints that reality imposes. Companies and think-tanks now employ that that particular aspect of SF as part of the research process, hiring SF writers to create what’s called ‘design fiction.’
‘‘All fiction has value, whether it’s science fiction or not. It helps people deal with their lives in the present, helps them understand their own emotions and the emotions of people around them. All fiction can take you to other lands, and introduce you to people whose lives and struggles and opinions you can’t even imagine until you read their stories. It’s not just science fiction that does this. But science fiction editors have certain goals, and the audience has certain expectations, of what kind of imaginings they’re going to read, and hard SF offers a special –- even peculiar – view of the universe and how it works.
‘‘When I was a kid, I adored reading Heinlein’s explanations of engineering. I wasn’t a 12-year-old who read engineering books: my parents were artists. But Heinlein opened up that part of the world to me. I really like engineers, and I went on to have a career where my job was to go out and talk to engineers, think about what they said, and then re-say it in a way that non-engineers can understand. My mind doesn’t work like an engineer’s, but I’m interested in how they think, and can share their thoughts with other people. Heinlein took me in that direction.
‘‘I don’t read as much fiction as I used to. For one thing, good fiction is immersive, and when I’m writing fiction, I don’t want to immerse myself in someone else’s imaginative world and writing style: I could co-opt those things without even knowing I was doing it. Not that this would necessarily spoil my flawless prose: it might actually improve my flawless prose. But I have my own voice, and I don’t want to be overly influenced by someone else’s.
‘‘However, that adds a level of irony to my current project: the novel I’m working on is based on an idea Michael Swanwick sent me in the mail. (We’re not collaborating: he just said, ‘Write this!’)
‘‘It’s set in the 19th century in the US and Canada, and involves chattel slavery and gender relationships. What do those two things have in common and how do they differ?
‘‘I’ve been researching the lives of enslaved children. What games were they allowed to play? When did they play? A lot of enslaved children were put to work at the age of two or three, and they were taught to do a task by being whipped if they did it wrong.
‘‘I’ve been reading a lot of life histories from the WPA transcripts that were done in the 1930s, in which former slaves were interviewed by researchers who were hired by the government. Most of the people interviewed by the WPA were elderly at the time, and they had been children during the Civil War, so their memories were pretty good for talking about what children’s lives were like, if they were willing to talk about it. Quite understandably, many people did not want to dwell on their childhood experiences.
‘‘In writing this, I am working well outside my comfort zone: there are so many things to overlook or get wrong, in terms of historical and cultural detail and of complex interpersonal relationships. But there’s a lot of historical source material out there, and a huge body of work by black writers –- history, memoir, and fiction – that explores the complex social aspects of being enslaved and recovering from it.
‘‘I’ve written about 35,000 words of the novel, and the two protagonists in it, one white and one black, are coming forth and talking. (But not yet to one another.) I think the character you write are always reflections of yourself and of how you see other people, whether through reading or social interaction. You don’t write other people any more than you predict the future. These characters who come out of your head may do stuff that surprises you, but it’s all stuff from inside you. So in some ways, writing outside your own culture is impossible, as it’s inextricable from how you see the world. But it’s worth doing, if you, as a writer, can get past the fact that you’re a historical artifact, rather than a vehicle for creating the Truth.
‘‘When I think about it, I can see that in many of the stories I’ve written the protagonists have backgrounds that are not mine, and their opinions are not mine. It’s funny – the two stories in which the protagonist is most like me are essentially horror stories. (Let’s not even go there.)
‘‘One of the two new stories in my collection Questionable Practices, ‘Chop Wood, Carry Water’ is written from the perspective of a 16th-century golem. This was another Michael Swanwick idea. I’d been to Prague on vacation, and when I came back I had an e-mail from him that said, ‘Quick! Write about Prague from the golem’s point of view.’ I thought, ‘I bet somebody’s done that,’ but when I checked, the stories are from the point of view of the people around the golem.
‘‘Rabbi Loew, the legendary creator of the Prague golem, was a real person, a Talmudic scholar of great renown and influence, who also had a deep interest in the secular sciences, including mathematics and astronomy. (He had a granddaughter who was also a renowned rabbi, and who was born the same year that he supposedly created the golem. Co-incidence? Perhaps….)
‘‘The golem stories are 20th-century creations derived from relatively recent folktales, as is the image of Prague that is portrayed. The ones that appear commonly in English were stolen from a German Jewish writer, Yudl Rosenberg Rosenthal, by another writer, who grabbed the stories, translated them into English, and marketed them as his own. And those are all we’ve had for close to a century. But when I started my research, a book had just come out with a new translation of the stories – a very authoritative volume. Nobody had gone back to the original source and retranslated, until then.
‘�
�Now, I’m not Jewish, and I’m not a 16th-century golem. There’s so much to get wrong. So I was a little terrified. But I set myself certain rules and regulations. One was to reflect the authentic history of the time, as most 19th-century golem tales do not. At the time that the golem stories are set, the Renaissance had just come to Prague, so it was like this little tiny window when problems were reduced and people were not as fearful of the Jews. There was always a tax on Jews, but there weren’t the huge pogroms where the synagogue was flooded with blood (which had happened in the previous century). Those facts are not in the original tales, which were really about the 18th and 19th centuries.
‘‘I interviewed rabbis. I asked all of my Jewish friends for help. I was afraid I’d have characters doing stuff that they would never do. I always write in fear, thinking, ‘Oh, this is dumb. Nobody’s going to want to read it. This time, I’ve really gotten myself in trouble!’ But while I was working on the golem story, I stopped feeling so scared.
‘‘The other new story in the collection, ‘Phantom Pain’, was based on my father’s experience in WWII. My father lost his leg on New Britain: he suffered from severe phantom pain all his life. That’s where the title comes from, and the plot draws on a story my father wrote, around the time that WWII was ending. He sent it to me in 1992 or so, and said, ‘I wrote this when you were being born.’ He never talked about the incident in which he was wounded, and for which he received the Silver Star. He was carrying ammunition to a field gun emplacement that had been captured by the Japanese. In his account, he said he was yelling, ‘Don’t shoot me! I’m a Yank!’ But they must not have understood, ‘because they shot me.’ He crawled a long distance after he was wounded, as happens in my story, but his story is more about the ambience of the encampment, and how he ended up with the ammunition. (He actually rescued two other Marines, but he left that out of his story.)
Locus, June 2014 Page 2
