Lightspeed Issue 33

by Tad Williams

  Earnie Sotirokos grew up in a household where Star Trek: The Next Generation marathons were only interrupted for baseball and football games. When he’s not writing copy for radio or reading slush, he enjoys penning fiction based on those influences. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.

  Author Spotlight: Robert Reed

  Robyn Lupo

  How did Eight Episodes start for you?

  What I recall is imagining a television show that didn’t survive and that slowly, stubbornly revealed its true meanings. When I began work, I probably had only a rough idea of what the mystery was.

  What led you to using a TV show as the bones of this story?

  When I was a kid, I watched certain series/cartoons again and again. Even the dreariest crap has those moments when you think to yourself, “I never noticed that before.” What if something amazing was hiding in Gilligan’s Island?

  What’s a day’s writing like for you? Have any tips or tricks?

  Lately, I write all the damn time. I used to fill my morning with words and then feel done, but I have obligations and opportunities of late, and there are deadlines. There are always deadlines. Thankfully, I passed that arbitrary 10,000 hours of practice rule long, long ago, and writing is what I do. Writing is what every writer should do. But that isn’t always the case.

  Do you think you’d be a fan of Invasion? Why or why not?

  I would watch it once, maybe twice. But I think I have a fair sense of its mysteries and potential already. Or maybe I missed something and it deserves a third look.

  What’s next for you?

  I have a trilogy to finish that will be published—this surprises me—as a single volume. At this moment, I call it The Memory of Sky. The setting is my Great Ship universe.

  I have an e-pub, POD book arriving soon. The Greatship has most of my Great Ship stories strung together in some proper order, rewritten slightly and with new material between.

  I continue working on other short fiction, and I occasionally do some contract labor for a small, struggling game company.

  Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

  Author Spotlight: Mary Soon Lee

  Christie Yant

  I sympathized deeply with Pauline as she discovered that motherhood is nothing like we imagined it would be. You’re a mother yourself—what were some of the things that didn’t turn out the way you imagined them? Any particularly nasty shocks, or pleasant surprises?

  I hadn’t realized how exhausting motherhood would be. My husband, who is an entirely wonderful father by day, left the nighttime parenting to me. Since both my children woke frequently at night, after each of them was born I spent over a year before I had a good night’s sleep! As for pleasant surprises, I knew I would love my children, but I didn’t realize how strong that emotion would be, nor how much I would enjoy simple activities such as reading to them.

  I think any parent can identify with the contempt directed at new parents when they bring their infants out in public. Your story opens with an infant on a transatlantic flight, a nightmare to many passengers. How did this story originate? Did the idea of the pauser occur to you before or after you had children?

  I wrote the story when my first child was eleven months old, by which time we had taken him on his first pair of transatlantic flights. My husband and I took turns entertaining William on the flights: We managed to keep him happily occupied, so the other passengers weren’t disturbed. But it is an odd thing not only to be worried that your child might be unhappy, but also to be worried that strangers might be annoyed that your child is unhappy … I think the idea of the pauser was my husband’s.

  Your story illustrates the darker side of how technology might replace parenting. Do you think there is potential for technology to make early parenting easier? Are there problems technology could solve for parents without parents relinquishing their roles as mothers and fathers?

  Yes, technology can definitely help with some aspects of parenting. Old-fashioned technology provides invaluable help in the form of washing machines, dishwashers, fridges, and vacuum cleaners—not to mention vaccines and other medicines. Newer technologies such as video conferencing mean that you can communicate with your child when you are away from them. In the future, I expect there will be excellent software to entertain and educate children. Instead of a child passively watching a TV program, children could interact with the program.

  Pauline is a single mother, but based on her own experience as a child, it’s certainly not only single parents who paused their children. Was it an important decision for you to make Pauline a single parent?

  I didn’t deliberately set out to write about being a single parent, and I rarely make such decisions consciously—instead I come up with a character or a situation that draws me into a story. On the other hand, I can think of at least three more stories that I’ve written about mothers who are single parents (at least one of them written years before I had my first child), so there may be something in that situation that resonates with me.

  Are there any new projects in the works? What’s in store for you next?

  I am currently writing poetry rather than short stories. Most recently, I have been absorbed by a particular sequence of poems, and I am looking forward to writing more of that sequence. I have poems forthcoming in the Bryant Literary Review, the Evansville Review, the Green Hills Literary Lantern, and Red Rock Review. Thank you for your questions!

  Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, and Assistant Editor for Lightspeed Magazine. Her fiction has appeared in magazines such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, and Daily Science Fiction, and in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, and Armored. She lives on the central coast of California with her two amazing daughters, her husband, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @christieyant.

  Author Spotlight: Carrie Vaughn

  Kevin McNeil

  I was excited to see a new story featuring Harry and Marlowe, especially one exploring how they met and their early relationship. What led you to write “Harry and Marlowe Escape the Mechanical Siege of Paris?”

  After writing the first two stories, I knew I was going to end up writing a whole series of stories about this world and these characters, but before I went any further with it, I really needed to figure out how these two met, and how they became partners on their action-packed adventures. I knew they had to meet by chance in the middle of some crisis, preferably full of explosions, and that would set the tone for their relationship moving forward. I had fun dropping them into them middle of that situation and then seeing what happened next. I also very much wanted to include Harry’s brother George, the future King George V, who’s been mentioned in the stories but we hadn’t met yet.

  Harry is such a great, complex character. She’s independent and capable, but also restricted by society’s class structure and her role as royalty. How did you develop this character? Is she fun to write?

  Harry, aka Princess Maud, was a real person. I’d wanted to write about a Victorian woman adventurer for a long time, and I decided I’d love to make her one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters. Skimming the history of the period, Maud jumped out. She really did have the nickname Harry as a child, apparently for being rambunctious and tomboyish, which was just perfect for my purposes. The rest of the details for my Harry diverge pretty significantly from the historical one—who eventually married Karl of Denmark and became the first modern queen of Norway. But that’s why they call it alternate history, isn’t it? I do plan on sprinkling my Harry’s life with select details from the historical Maud’s life. Of course this makes her great fun to write. I’ve made her someone who’s living in a world in transition, who respects tradition but at the same time isn’t going to let tradition keep her from her goals.

  This
story’s setting has something for everyone—Victorian Paris, steampunk, and even science fiction elements. What inspired you to combine all of these ideas when you created this world?

  Really, that’s what steampunk is, what the attraction of steampunk is, at least for me. It’s piling together all these disparate aspects and finding a way to make it all work. One way to look at it—this is Jules Verne’s Paris, and the thought of dirigibles mooring to the Eiffel Tower just seems so perfect you wonder why it never happened for real. The flight from the war-torn foreign city is also a familiar trope. I get to do all these venerable, wonderful stories in a way that I hope comes across as natural and seamless. Setting the steampunk elements in such a concrete setting makes it all the better for me.

  As I read the story, I thought about how technology is often developed and used for violent purposes before consideration is given to how it might be used to benefit society in other ways. Is this a theme you feel strongly about?

  It’s a theme that’s been growing as my conception for the entire series of stories is coming together. In one sense, war is what spurs technological development in the first place, and some people would argue you don’t get technological development without it. But in this world I’m setting up a war that’s happening because of technology. It’s an arms race that’s both a result of the war, and the impetus for the war in the first place. It’s a world that has a brand new technology and has mostly been fighting over it—and can we do anything else? I like to think we can. Personally, I’m essentially a pacifist—but I’m also a military brat and the daughter of a Vietnam vet, so my feelings about the issues are complicated and quite emotional. I came of age in an era where we were all pretty much convinced that our technology was going to destroy the world. With these stories, I’ve introduced an admittedly outlandish technology. But that mindset will end up being the same.

  This story ends with a promise of future adventures for Harry and Marlowe, a few of which we’ve already seen. Can we expect more stories set in this world? What’s next for you?

  Oh yes. Just this month, even: John Joseph Adam’s anthology The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination includes my story “Harry and Marlowe Meet the Founder of the Aetherian Revolution.” Beyond that I have plans to send Harry and Marlowe to a lost island, and I dearly want Harry to meet H.G. Wells so he can tell her his idea for a cautionary tale about an alien invasion … In the meantime, I’m continuing with my urban fantasy series—Kitty Rocks the House will be out in March, and the sequel to my superhero novel, After the Golden Age, should be out later this year as well.

  Kevin McNeil reads slush and helps out with a few other things for Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines. He is a physical therapist, sports fanatic, and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2012 and Kij Johnson’s Novel Writer’s Workshop in 2011. Kevin is a New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter @kevinmcneil.

  Author Spotlight: Marly Youmans

  Christie Yant

  What an amazing story. I felt like I was reading a story about my own family. What was the reader response when “Chílde Phoenix” first ran in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet? Did most people seem to find their own story in yours?

  The head of an over-busy writer and mother of three bears a fair resemblance to a sieve. I don’t recall any responses clearly, though I met some younger writers in the city who were fascinated by the story. I read it at KGB several years ago (Dan Braum was the other reader). My daughter asked me about the links between my life and the story. I rarely use elements from my life in fiction, but she recognized a relationship.

  One of my favorite lines belonged to the grandmother: “The works of the little bodgy devils are many, many.” Her fingers twitched as she crossed herself. “Never name them, no.” It was delightfully out of context, as Phoenix points out. I took this to be a metaphor for the secrets any family has, the things we all understand must not be discussed. Are there specific devils-we-must-not-name that you had in mind at the time?

  Perhaps it is enough to say that my father was an analytical chemist and my mother was a librarian, and that I was an intense and constant reader. The three of us suffered in different ways from the death of a child, who was with us “every furlong and fathom,” though not often mentioned by name. What happens in the story is like and unlike my family—as if taking place in a different, more volcanic realm of the multi-verse, with different and more excessive versions of us. And yet no doubt I am telling and not telling, even as I write these words: “Never name them, no.”

  So you like the grandmother! She is not a bit like either of mine except in that she appears wildly different from those following her in the next two generations. When I visited my grandparents west of Savannah, I could go either to a sharecropper’s poor home or to a Queen Anne house built by my grandfather (belonging to a grandmother who had lost much in the Depression but still had the home). Both places appeared magical and strange, with mysterious nooks and crannies, an overheated landscape, and unexpected dangers. My grandparents appeared very different from my parents, who had been to graduate school. So there was that gap that writers love—the unknown space to be bridged.

  (I was surprised, rereading the story now, that the wild child Orson appeared in it—as he appears in Val/Orson (UK: P. S. Publishing, 2009) in a more important role, also involving a sort of sibling struggle. And the business with the feather reminds me of “The Horse Angel,” published in Postscripts/Edison’s Frankenstein 20/21.)

  You are a poet, with two new books of poetry out this year. Where and how does your poetry cross into your prose? It’s easy for a reader like myself who is not a poet to identify a vivid and lyrical quality to your prose, but is that the whole of it? Do the two forms cross-pollinate in other ways for you?

  Oddly, writing both poetry and fiction made me wish for my poetry to be more like poetry and my prose to be more like prose, as I did not want for the two to resemble each other. At the same time that I moved into fiction, I began using more and more formal tools in my poetry. I threw away most of my prior poetry and became increasingly bored by the writing of free verse (though I still read plenty of it.) I didn’t want my poetry to be mistaken—as so much poetry can be, these days—for what Tom Disch in The Castle of Indolence called prose clipped into pieces and lacking musicality, the mot juste, formal challenges, etc. Likewise, I became more interested in the idea of plot in fiction simply because most poetry has little in the way of plot. That is, I was still chasing the idea of prose being as much like prose as possible and poetry being as much like poetry as possible. My first book was a poet’s fiction that had very little concern for causality and plot and the connective tissue between scenes, but I became more and more interested in the form and shape of fiction as I continued writing novels.

  So I would say that at first the two ways of arranging words pulled away from each other. Yet as I progressed, I was drawn to longer form and narrative in poetry. The Throne of Psyche (Mercer, 2011) and The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press, 2012) have a good many narrative poems and an interest in character. The blank verse Thaliad (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2012) is a post-apocalyptic narrative that picks up the epic conventions and uses them for our own day, at the same time pursuing character development and causal chains of events. My 2012 novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, used a few blank verse lines as a kind of title for each chapter. And as your question suggests, I am strongly aware of sound and rhythm in whatever I write.

  There are so many themes that resonated with me in this story: How we structure our reality around others; about parents as inscrutable beings to whom we don’t often attribute lives and feelings of their own; about letting go and letting the structure come apart and being okay with that. Are these themes that you revisit in your other work? Are there other themes you don’t feel you’ve explored but would like to?

  To tell the truth, I never contemplate
theme in quite that way, and I’d rather hear what somebody else perceived than to try and answer that set of questions. I could do it, but I don’t want to do it. I’d be especially interested in how somebody else saw that business about letting go and letting the structure fall apart! Last year’s novel certainly focused on a character for whom the world ravels before he runs away …

  You’ve also been writing both adult and YA novels for many years, most recently A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage from Mercer University Press, just released this year. What else is coming up for you, and what will you work on next?

  Last year was a busy one, as three of my books jumped into the world (work in three genres published in three countries), and I was also on the judging panel for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature, along with chair Gary Schmidt, Susan Cooper, Daniel Ehrenhaft, and Judith Ortiz Cofer (William Alexander won for Goblin Secrets.) I wrote some poems and fiddled with others until December, when I finally started some serious polishing on The Book of the Red King, a collection of about 140 poems revolving around the figures of the Red King and the Fool and their friends. The Fool undergoes transformation in the course of the sequence, and there’s an alchemical structure to events and his changing life. The Red King, on the other hand, appears changeless despite the fact that his meaning is unpinned, and so he is sometimes one thing and sometimes another. He is all the things he is at once, it seems. I’m plotting with artist friend Clive Hicks-Jenkins to do The Book of the Red King as another decorated book like The Foliate Head and Thaliad.

  I also began revising a set of three novellas that I wrote for my youngest child, now 15. The Aerenghast Trilogy is a three-in-one fantasy (The Infinite Library, Magna Wildwood, and Wizardry.) At the moment I’m dithering over whether there are too many characters, and how fast-paced it needs to be. My youngest likes shorter books and novels with lots of action; I hope it will be a boy-friendly story when finished.