Locus, January 2013

by Locus Publications

  DA: ‘‘So we had a conversation where we said, ‘Let’s just not do that.’ People in this world talk about the things that the people living in this world would be talking about. When I turn my car on, I never think about how an internal combustion engine works – ‘‘

  TF: ‘‘– unless it’s not working.’’

  DA: ‘‘So we just sort of stripped that stuff out. Ty has a story about Alien, the movie. You’ve got Harry Dean Stanton looking for the alien, and he’s got a tool belt on, and he enters a room full of chains and dripping water. Why do you have a room full of chains and dripping water in a spaceship? That doesn’t make any sense, but it looks real cool. Having the story feel right is actually more important than having it all rigorously make sense.

  ‘‘Plausibility can be purchased fairly cheaply. People who like our books really enjoy that gravity works the way it really works. When you run the drive at high acceleration, you get press-back and G-forces for that, and when the drive is turned off you float around because there’s no gravity (and no ‘gravity plating’). You can buy plausibility by doing that.

  TF: But another thing we talked about is that we’re not going to put anything in this world without really thinking through how it would change the world. I hate it when I’m reading a book and somebody goes, ‘Well, I’ll just use XY Gizmo, which does this.’ I think, ‘But that would change the whole world! If XY Gizmo existed, everything would be different!’

  ‘‘If gravity plating exists, everything in the world is different. If we have the ability to control gravity, nothing works the same anymore. But we still have escalators and elevators. And if you can duplicate people – make a new person from an old stored pattern – why aren’t people on Star Trek immortal? ‘Oh, I broke my leg. Well, I’ll just make a new copy.’ I’m a Star Trek fan, so I’m sort of teasing something I love. But that was our level of plausibility.’’

  DA: ‘‘In the real world, four generations from now we will be utterly archaic. But I don’t want to read stories set in something so far ahead I can’t relate to it. And that’s a good thing.’’

  TF: ‘‘Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination is probably the single most influential work of literature on my view of what science fiction should be. I read it at that teenage moment when my brain was ready to be programmed, and it changed everything. I still love it. I see the really terrible gender politics in it, and I cringe a little. But the thing that really programmed me was this idea that he wrote about a fully populated Solar System, and he doesn’t tell you how. He never says, ‘And then we went to Mars, and from Mars we went here….’ He just says there are people living on Mars, on the Moon, on the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, and here are the disagreements they’re having, here’s what interplanetary shipping looks like.’’

  DA: ‘‘The other thing we talked about was telling a scientific adventure story as if it were OK to emotionally invest in that. I think we live in an age of preemptive irony: ‘I’m writing science fiction, but it’s OK because I’m sort of undercutting it.’ Being willing to emotionally invest and treat this seriously – take all the jokes away, put aside all the literary pretensions, and have it just be genuinely fun. If people laugh at us for doing this, we’re not going to worry about that.

  ‘‘More than a science fiction story, we’re telling an adventure story. Adventure stories have a reputation for immaturity and adolescence, and that is presented as if it were a bad thing: the joy that we all took when we were reading Bester or Arthur Clarke –’’

  TF: ‘‘– or the first time we watched Star Wars –’’

  DA: ‘‘– when we weren’t sophisticates. Looking back on those kids we were before we became sophisticated and embarrassed by them, cringing a little: ‘I can’t believe we were so stupid!’’’

  TF: ‘‘But we were able to embrace what was happening and invest emotionally in the story.’’

  DA: ‘‘It’s really hard to do that when you’re 40, because we’re supposed to be all sophisticated and shit.’’

  TF: ‘‘Actually, it’s harder to do at 35. At 40, it starts getting easier again. I never stopped, though. When we were writing Leviathan Wakes, people were asking me what Daniel and I were doing, and my joke was, ‘We’re writing lurid tales of space adventure.’ We were writing space-adventure tales, with horrific elements. We took every genre we liked, and just stuck their tropes in because it was fun.’’

  DA: ‘‘I think what happened with the Expanse books is that it got to be fun – partly because we were ready to be funny. We had no pretensions; we had no expectations. In a lot of current genre fiction, there’s a tremendous stigma about being unsophisticated. We have to apologize for what we’re doing, and we apologize by adopting the power of our critics, by saying, ‘We’re more serious than thou, more joyless than thou.’ And God forbid sentimentality! I’m deeply sentimental. I grew up reading Dorothy Sayers mysteries. I don’t remember who did it; I remember those human moments that are just gorgeous.

  ‘‘This is more in fantasy now than in science fiction, but I think a lot of fiction is being written in worlds without laughter, worlds without joy. The hardest parts of my life I have gotten through by being able to joke about them. Having humor and joy be part of the story is very nice. The moment in Leviathan Wakes where Miller is accepted into the crew – this guy who has been profoundly alone – it becomes clear that he has a place here now. It’s a beautiful and affecting moment because it’s joyful, it’s wonderful. And we have something like that in Caliban’s War: moments when people feel lost and are pleasantly surprised by the universe.

  ‘‘Dark is cheap, dark is easy. If you really want to have an emotionally affecting story, you just have to have something awful happen. If you give a 10-year-old a kitten and then you murder the kitten, it will be sad every single time. And because of that, if you don’t have anything else to do, it’s easy to go there. If you want to have an emotionally affecting moment, it’s much easier to evoke ‘Horrible!’ Evoking pleasure and joy is hard.’’

  TF: ‘‘In science fiction, you will be punished for that kind of writing. We have vicious critics who do not like our writing straight-ahead adventure stories with no ironic detachment, not making fun of the reader. If you’re heavily invested in the idea that good literature requires ironic detachment, when somebody comes along and is successful in spite of that, then They Must Be Destroyed! I think there’s some of that going on. ‘We’re all being ironic over here. Why aren’t you being ironic with us?’’’

  DA: ‘‘And there are ways in which writing low-prestige literature (science fiction, fantasy, genre stuff) offends them. These are the folks who say bestselling books are crap.’’

  TF: ‘‘I have way more people that are happy with what we’re doing than are unhappy with it, but the ones who don’t like it are really unhappy! I’m not gonna apologize. I don’t care, though it’s interesting to see it.’’

  DA: ‘‘I write solo science fiction and fantasy, and Leviathan Wakes is doing better than anything else I do.’’

  TF: ‘‘After the first book came out, Daniel and I talked to our editor and said, ‘We know what the last two books look like. If we’re just going to do a trilogy, we need to do those. If we’re not stopping with three, you need to tell us.’ They immediately sent us a contract for three more, and five novellas (for e-books), which I had never seen before. So now there’s going to be a ‘Jimmy Corey’ gig coming up every six months: a novel in the summer, and a novella around November. Those are going to make more sense if you’ve read the other stuff, but our intention is to write (as much as possible) standalone novellas. For his anthology The Edge of Infinity, Jonathan Strahan bought ‘Drive’, an expanded story about Solomon Epstein, the guy who invented the Epstein Drive.’’

  DA: ‘‘In Leviathan and sequel Caliban’s War, the people who are from Earth all think about race in terms of Earthly subcategories, but for people who have grown up in the Belt or Mars – developing in chi
ldhood in low gravity – that doesn’t matter. Gravity winds up being the dividing line. Part of what we were doing with the books is saying, ‘Here’s humanity going out into the larger universe, humanity spreading out. And the things that are going to fuck us up when we get there are the things we brought with us. The biggest danger we have is the one we packed.’’’

  TF: ‘‘As much as I have loved the Big Dumb Object stories, it always struck me as very unrealistic that the superhero spacemen go out, run into an alien problem, defeat the alien problem, and then move on. It’s like humans have figured out all of their problems, so we have to have something else be the problem. Where’s the bickering? I’ve been in confined spaces with people. After a couple of weeks in a spaceship, you’re not going to like each other. I wanted to write a story in which something else really is the problem – and we’ll get to that, as soon as we stop fighting with each other. Caliban’s War is about humanity not being able to stop fighting with each other long enough to fix what is clearly a real problem over here. That is so human. When I read a story in which that doesn’t happen, it throws me out a little bit. Then it turns into a Puzzle Story, where the scientists will figure out the solution.’’

  DA: ‘‘Though there are at least another three books after Book Three, Abaddon’s Gate, the thing that kicked off in Leviathan Wakes gets to where it’s going there.’’

  TF: ‘‘The first book was noir detective meets science fiction, and the second book was political thriller meets science fiction. The third book…. It’s sort of a religious haunted-house story, with science fiction. The thing that we’re contrasting is not religion vs. atheism; we’re contrasting two versions of religion. There’s the religious faith that takes new knowledge and absorbs it, and there’s the faith that takes new knowledge and denies it – tries to destroy it. As the universe of the Expanse opens up, there’s going to be some real challenges to long-held beliefs. How will people react to that? So we have two characters with two different ways of looking at things.

  DA: ‘‘I heard somebody say once (and I think this is one of the most profound things I ever heard about religion) that everybody belongs to a religion with one member. Sometimes we share titles; sometimes we share a description. But we don’t share a religion, even if we were raised in the same one. The minute you realize that is the minute you realize it doesn’t matter. Everybody’s living in a religion of one.’’

  TF: ‘‘When we first conceived of the project, we thought, ‘There’s a lot of science fiction set in the near future (cyberpunk and all that), and there’s a lot set in the distant future (Iain Banks’s kind of galaxy-spanning civilizations), but there’s this space in-between that no one really does.’ That’s where we wanted to go: to start out with Solar System-bound stuff, where people fly around in these crappy little spaceships that can’t go very fast, and go to different moons and so on, and then take it and end with humanity making the big decision on how it wants to approach the idea of the galaxies.

  ‘‘We wanted to go through that space, and it’s about deciding who you are, as a species. There’s the Pizarro/Cortés version, where you just go and murder the shit out of everybody who already lives there and you take their gold. And then there’s (hopefully) the more sophisticated version. Who do we want to be, as a species, and what are we willing to give up to become the galaxy-spanning empire? That’s the story we want to tell. And it ends with their decision.’’

  DA: ‘‘If we’re lucky, if folks enjoy what we’re doing enough, we have a lot of stories to tell in this universe before we get to the ending that we’re working toward. The next three books will have some of the same characters coming back. Our plan is for each book to have one or two familiar characters, and then several new ones. We’ve discovered that we really like the way that new characters give us the ability to show parts of the universe that we haven’t shown before.’’

  –Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  Cordelia Caroline Sherman was born 1951 in Tokyo, Japan, and grew up in Manhattan. She attended Vassar, then earned her MA and PhD in Renaissance Studies at Brown University. She has taught at the university level, including at Boston University and Northeastern University. She has also taught numerous writing workshops, including Clarion and Odyssey, among others.

  Sherman began publishing SF with story ‘‘Runner Beans’’ in 1985, and many of her early stories were reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies. On the strength of those stories and first novel Through a Brazen Mirror (1989) she was a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1990. Historical fantasy The Porcelain Dove (1993) won a Mythopoeic Award and was a New York Times notable book. She co-wrote The Fall of the Kings with Ellen Kushner (2002), set in the world of Kushner’s Swordspoint. With Changeling (2006) Sherman turned to writing for children, continuing with sequel The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen (2009). Standalone time-travel fantasy The Freedom Maze (2011) won the Andre Norton Award, the Prometheus Award, and the Mythopoeic Award.

  She has co-edited numerous anthologies, including The Horns of Elfland (1997, with Ellen Kushner & Donald S. Keller), The Essential Bordertown (1998, with Terri Windling), Interfictions 1 (2007, with Theodora Goss), and Interfictions 2 (2009, with Christopher Barzak). Sherman has served as a judge for various awards, including the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the World Fantasy Award, co-founded the Interstitial Arts Foundation, and has served on the Motherboard of the Tiptree Award.

  After spending more than 30 years in Boston, she returned to New York in 2006, where she lives with her wife Ellen Kushner.

  •

  ‘‘I wrote ‘CATNYP’ about a changeling – a human living in the fairy world. I’d only ever read stories about fairies in the mortal world, not being able to fit in and discovering they were actually changelings, and I wanted to do the other side of that. The character in ‘CATNYP’ was a teenager, but I started thinking about how she’d gotten to the fairy world, and how long she’d lived there, and when she’d been stolen. I started writing a short story about all that, and I gave it to Terri Windling to read and she said, ‘This is a novel.’ And I said a bad word, because I’m constantly writing short stories that turn out to be novels.

  ‘‘So I took the first part of it and started an origin story. I never finished that one – it’s still sitting in my bottom drawer. I will finish it some day. And I took a later part of it and turned it into what became the novel Changeling.

  ‘‘Changeling is a personal story, because I’m adopted. One of the main things I write about is families of choice, about being raised by people who are not related to you by blood, about defining yourself by who you are and not where you came from. And it’s full of fairy tales.

  ‘‘I always read fairy tales. My favorite books when I was growing up were things like Fairy Tales of Many Lands, published in the 1950s, that I just read over and over and over again, along with Andrew Lang’s Fairy books, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales. They just spoke to something in me. I didn’t think of fairy tales as metaphors, and I didn’t know if they were real or not real – that was just where I lived, in that world of very clear moral choices. I liked it that the morality in some of the stories changed: there are some times when you have to be curious, and sometimes if you’re curious you get eaten by the dragon. In a way, fairy tales reflected the unknowable world around me.

  ‘‘The other stories I loved were family books, children’s books about huge families with many siblings. I was not just adopted, I was an only child. To me, the big family worked like fantasy. I had absolutely no idea what that would be like, and I wanted to escape into something I knew nothing about. Swiss Family Robinson was my absolute favorite book of all time. I liked the details of family life, so that it was both very fantastical in that they were living on this deserted island all by themselves, and extremely realistic in how they dealt with it. Fairy tales are the same: they are both hugely unrealistic and very grounded, in a
close-to-the-earth kind of dangerous way.

  ‘‘The Freedom Maze took 15 years to finish because when I started out I didn’t know I was writing a children’s book. I was pacing it much too slowly. I had written The Porcelain Dove, which is paced like an 18th-century novel, and is 600 pages long. It doesn’t move fast, and when you’re writing for teenagers or middle grade, you have to have a plot that moves right along. You can’t let structure stand in for plot, which I have been known to do. So I had to learn how to focus on a close third person narrator who did a lot of thinking and a lot of reacting, but who didn’t always know what she was reacting to. It was also hard to remember what that 1960s racial world view was like, and how to have her live in that world and not be completely hateful, especially since she’s Southern. I was also working on The Porcelain Dove at the time, so I put The Freedom Maze aside to finish The Porcelain Dove, picked it up again, got stuck in the middle, and didn’t go back to it for a long time. I was working on my craft in other books, and teaching, and having a life.

  ‘‘I had a horrible time with The Freedom Maze for political reasons as much as anything else. I realize, now that I look back on the version that I was shopping around originally, it was a good book, but the publishers were right to turn it down. Even though they were turning it down for the wrong reasons, I’m glad they did, because I learned a great deal in the interim, and research material became available to me that was not available in the early 1990s. I finished what I thought was a final draft in 2002 or 2003, and then I wrote another three drafts. There were details I found that didn’t really change the story, but changed the background, and the way I dealt with it.

  ‘‘Middle grade is a growth industry and it’s being treated as one. There are more books being published in YA, but what is appropriate in a YA as both subject matter and structure has changed. It used to be that YA was YA, and there were certain things you couldn’t write about because they were too violent, or about sex, or whatever, but now it’s harder to sell a YA that doesn’t have a central romance, usually a love triangle. But there’s tremendous, audacious stuff being written in middle grade, like Ysabeau Wilce’s and Frances Hardinge’s work. Really beautiful, free, wild stuff, that’s not centered on romance. Middle grade is still a lot freer as far as subjects go. I love the constraints of writing for young people because I like writing with constraints. I like having things I can’t say and finding ways of saying them anyway.