What were some of your early visual influences as a child?
My childhood was spent watching a lot of animation. Warner Bros, MGM, and Disney played key roles in my life. I was enthralled by the physical processes of creation of this animation.
What sorts of projects are you working on presently?
I work on designing landscapes and characters for games, matte painting for websites, and other aspects of digital design for a leading design company called We Are Designers in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
What is your dream project?
To one day be part of a world-renowned team of artists working on a feature film animation production.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Henry Lien is an art dealer in Los Angeles (www.glassgaragegallery.com). He represents artists from North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. His artists have appeared in ARTnews, Art in America, Juxtapoz, the Huffington Post, and Time Magazine, and been collected by and exhibited in institutions and museums around the world. Henry has also served as the President of the West Hollywood Fine Art Dealers’ Association and a Board Member of the West Hollywood Avenues of Art and Design. He is also the Arts Editor at Interfictions. Henry also has extensive experience as an attorney and teaches at UCLA Extension. In addition, Henry is a speculative fiction writer. He is a Clarion West 2012 graduate. His work has been published in Asimov’s, Analog, and Interfictions, and been nominated for the Nebula. Visit his author website at www.henrylien.com.
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT:
ADAM-TROY CASTRO
Jude Griffin
Ouch. Poor Phil. Strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) are a really scary trend for corporations seeking to silence any consumer voicing their dissatisfaction with products/services. Was this story inspired by any lawsuit in particular?
Yes, actually. I had just read a news story about a couple who were billed for thousands, all for the grievous sin of giving a company a bad review online. The contractual provision that gave the company leave to charge such fines was not added to the boilerplate contract until several years after the couple and the company had concluded their business, but the company went after their credit rating anyway, to ruinous financial effect. This is the world we’re living in, the status quo we’re headed for; if there hadn’t already been some resistance to the more extreme trespasses, it would already be much worse.
Please tell me all the provisions after the first are made-up with no real-world examples.
There are some that are almost as bad.
This actually happened a few years ago (and forgive me, I read the story when it appeared in Harper’s but no longer have the citation; this is a casual interview). One company advised its employees that they had to submit a weekly report on the books they had read, the TV shows they had watched, the movies they had seen; that if the report was not on their superior’s desk by seven a.m. Monday morning, it was grounds for dismissal. They had to document that they had attended a church and they had been in bed by ten p.m. Certain newspapers not on the approved list could harm one’s employment.
Another company, rather than cleanse its workspace of substances that were dangerous to pregnant women, declared that all of its female employees had to either seek hysterectomies or seek employment elsewhere.
Some HR Departments are already searching your Facebook statuses to make sure that you have the correct opinions.
This is not only anti-corporate ranting. It happens to be a function of the human animal that when people are given power over you, whether as employers or governments or even as condo associations or family members or lovers, they continue to test the limits of that power until you say, “No, that’s all you get, no more, the line is drawn here.” It is possible for such a negotiation to be friendly. It just also needs to be firm.
I found myself wincing as each new provision went into effect. Do you find it hard to put your characters through such suffering or is each new idea to add a source of creative glee?
Fiction writing has always been acceptable sadism, and one of the first lessons I ever learned, taught me by a very successful editor and novelist, was that when you worry that you’ve gone too far, that’s when you know you’ve gone far enough.
No happy endings, right? Was this story always going to end badly for Phil, or did you consider other endings?
I can’t imagine any happy ending, for this story, that wouldn’t be a lame cop-out.
The story details a horrifying spiral in a very effective way, but with a brisk, almost clinical detachment. What made you choose this approach over, for example, a deep third-person POV where Phil’s emotions and reactions would be more deeply plumbed?
Form follows function. Stories dictate the voice. I tried to tell this one in precisely the POV you describe, including a long Monty Pythonian opening scene where Phil and the tow truck driver have a conversation of rapidly increasing absurdity, but the results were ghastly; I realized that this was the kind of tale that needed to be a thundering drumbeat of injustices, in as brief an interval as possible, and that left little room to give Phil the necessary personal agency.
You’ve said that the way to make readers care about your characters was to “Make the characters hurt unnecessarily. Make them harder on themselves than they have to be. Make them fail at some elemental element of human interaction. Make them less than fully competent in at least one way.” Phil doesn’t seem to fit this mold, but I still cringed for him. Why?
Because in this particular case, when you take away everything that makes Phil a highly specific person who collects stamps and watches Law & Order: SVU and has a trick knee, he becomes an everyman, and your own point of view intrudes. Neato-keen, huh?
I kind of wished you made Phil a Mr.-Shnodblatt-type character. A little schadenfreude to ease the pain of watching his travails.
So readers know what you’re talking about, “Mr. Shnodblatt” is my name for a real-life son-of-a-bitch who I had to deal with on one very bad day working retail over a quarter of a century ago. I don’t endorse what I did to him, but yes, one possible approach to this story would have been to make Phil deserve everything that happened to him. If that helps you, please make him a total piece of crap, in your head. In the meantime, I offer this link to the Saga of Mr. Shnodblatt—tinyurl.com/shnodblatt—as I told it some time ago.
Any new projects you want to tell us about?
I’ll point out a certain story appearing in Nightmare’s May 2014 issue: “In the Temple of Celestial Pleasures,” which is extremely nasty. Less nasty: the latest volume of my middle-grade series about the adventures of a very strange young boy named Gustav Gloom, Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel, coming out in August. Prime Books just published Her Husband’s Hands and Other Stories. I am working on a number of other projects that are not yet ready for big reveals, but those reveals are coming.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT:
JO WALTON
Patrick J. Stephens
Lead us through the inception of “The Panda Coin.” When did you discover that it was a story you wanted to tell, and how?
I read Marguerite Yourcenar’s “A Coin in Nine Hands” and I thought that it would be interesting to do in a science fiction context. It’s purely an experiment in playing with form.
Which character did you most identify with when writing? Who did you find the most intriguing to write?
Definitely the android sex-worker who wants a keyboard! That’s the answer to both of those questions.
“The Panda Coin” has a strong element of class struggle ingrained into the narrative. Why do you think science fiction can tell stories about struggle in such compelling ways?
Stories let us simplify an issue so that we can see the essence of it. Science fiction lets us get closer to actual struggle by letting us find new contexts for telling stories so we can see them from new angles.
As the reader, we follow the coin as it traverses this world, hand-by-hand. What convinced you that this was the most effective way to tell the stories of these characters? How do you think the story would have changed if you’d not originally begun with the coin?
I don’t think I’d ever have thought of these stories or characters away from the coin—the coin was my starting point. I have written another story set in this universe, so the idea of the space station with the twelve seasonal sectors was already in my mind.
What can we expect to see from you in the future?
I hardly ever write short fiction, I’m afraid. I have a novel coming out on May 20th called My Real Children, which is alternate history, and then next year The Just City, which is a fantasy about people and Greek gods setting up Plato’s Republic.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick J. Stephens recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh and, after spending the entire year writing speculative fiction, came back with a Master’s in Social Science. His first collection (Aurichrome and Other Stories) can be found on Kindle and Nook.
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT:
HOWARD WALDROP
Kevin McNeil
Thank you for taking some time to chat about your story, “All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past.” Growing up in New England, I spent every Saturday morning glued to the television watching Creature Double Feature, which aired monster movies from the 1930s through the 1960s, so I really enjoyed reading this story. Can you elaborate on the origins of this story?
My first story, “Lunchbox”, Analog, May ’72, was accepted my fourth day in the US Army (a draftee) in October 1970. I got to enjoy the sale about four minutes after mail call ’til I had to go back to doing pushups.
I realized, the eighteen months I was in the Army, that if there was an East Coast Monster Emergency, I would be one of the guys sent out to stop the Rhodosaurus (or whatever). Hence, the deep origin of the story.
It was originally accepted by David Gerrold, for one of his Dell anthologies (“AASMOTRPast” was my second story sale, although others were written before, later sold.)
Bad things happened at Dell: Gerrold had to turn three anthologies into two, or one, and my (and a dozen other writers’ stories) shook loose.
After I got out of the army, I sent this story everywhere with no dice.
Eventually this may have sold to Chacal, the precursor to Shayol (Arnie Fenner was co-editor of Chacal), but when that died and he and Pat Cadigan began Shayol, they wanted it from me (I may have sold an intervening story to them somewhere in there.)
If I’m not mistaken, it was one of the five stories that premiered (in different venues) at Mid-American in KC in 1976 (Shayol, Nickelodeon, Faster Than Light, Orbit 18, and something else—all appeared at various dealer tables at the con.) I believe I had Pat and Arnie bring the money in cash, as I knew I’d need it to eat (The Pioneer Grill) at the convention.
Glory days . . .
Your work is varied, sometimes combining alternate history and popular culture, and has been described as distinctive, unique, quirky, and unclassifiable, among other things. What advice would you give to aspiring writers trying to find their own unique voice?
If I knew how to tell writers how have a unique voice, I’d be a rich man and out of business.
Is there anything else you’d like to share about “All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past”? What’s next for you?
As soon as the eye surgeries are over, it’s back to The Moone World (a short novel) and The Search for Tom Purdue (ditto.) Wish me luck.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin McNeil is a physical therapist, sports fanatic, and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2012 and The Center for the Study of Science Fiction’s Intensive Novel Workshop, led by Kij Johnson, in 2011. Kevin is a New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter @kevinmcneil.
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT:
CARRIE VAUGHN
Andrew Liptak
Hi, Carrie! Thanks for taking the time to chat with us about your latest Harry and Marlow story, “Harry and Marlowe Versus the Haunted Locomotive of the Rockies.” When we last left off with “Intrigues at the Aetherian Exhibition,” the pair were headed off to the United States. What prompted you to take them across the Atlantic?
I actually know more about this side of the Atlantic! Seriously, though, sending Harry and Marlowe to my neck of the woods offered a great way to introduce “weird west” type stories and milieus to their world, and to see what Aetherian technology is doing in other places. Additionally, adventures in the “exotic” American west were a staple of Victorian adventure stories—see the Sherlock Holmes story “A Study in Scarlet,” for an example. I wanted to play with that trope.
You live in Colorado, and our heroes stop in the same neighborhood. How did it feel to set a story so close to home?
I’ve come to really enjoy setting stories in Colorado. Especially since, after considering myself rootless for most of my life, I’ve realized Colorado really is home, I have deep roots here, and I like showing off this region in my fiction—it’s diverse in many ways, historically fascinating, and has a lot to offer. It’s been a crossroads for many different cultures for 500 years, and the place reflects that. I got the idea for the haunted locomotive from a book of Colorado ghost stories. I was actually reading the book while doing research for my Kitty urban fantasy series, but was happy to snag this idea out of it for Harry and Marlowe in the meantime.
One of the things that interested me about the story—it’s set in the 1890s, which is well after the period that most people think of as the “Old West.” But the idea of the Old West is so pervasive and attractive that the tropes continued to influence people for a long time after. They still do, in some cases. But by that time, Colorado’s town and cities were modern (for the period), there were colleges and universities, museums, industry—a far cry from the wild west that a lot of people expect from the place, even now. I worked to depict what 1890s Colorado was actually like, rather than fall back on expectations based on tropes that really only existed in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show by that time.
In this story, the Aetherian tech plays a much larger role, and we get a sense that there’s more that came down than just random parts or tools. Does this hint at larger things in this particular overarching story?
Why, of course it does! We are building toward something, and part of that is Harry and Marlowe discovering more evidence and artifacts than they ever thought they would.
There’s a neat moment when Harry and Marlow come face to face with something that had been elevated to an almost legendary status, and it reminds me of Clarke’s “law”: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Is that the case here?
I think what’s meant to be happening is the characters are realizing that they really have very little understanding of this technology that has formed the basis of their modern world, and that should be terrifying.
Now that Harry and Marlow have stopped by the United States, what’s next for them?
Westward, ho! I’m working on yet another Harry and Marlowe story, which will send them across the Pacific. I can say no more.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal, and Tor.com, and he can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT:
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
John Joseph Adams
This story first appeared in my anthology HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects. Besides writing a story with the theme in mind, what was the genesis of the story?
I’ve actually always kicked (ha) around the idea of writing a Kickstarter-shaped story, but this anthology gave me the kick (HA) in the pants that I needed. I really liked Keffy’s “Help Fund My Robot Army!!!” story that inspired the anthology, and I wanted to try the form while taking a less humorous approach. I wanted to use this very modern conceit to illustrate a tragedy.
Was this story a particularly challenging one to write? If so, how?
It was! The structure was complicated because Kickstarters have so many moving parts, and there are so many decisions to be made: Do I put the updates in chronological order, or backwards like they appear on the site? Do I try and write a transcription of a video? In what order should I present the comments, updates, and messages? Because a Kickstarter page is so visual, I had to try and figure out the most natural and dramatically appropriate order in which to present these sections.
That being said, it was a pleasure to have those concerns—it pushed open some new creative paths for me that I might not have otherwise taken. I love conceits and formal constraints for this very reason. In his book Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, Daniel Levin Becker quotes one of the founders of Oulipo, a French constrained literature movement, who said “In the world we live in, we are beholden to all manner of terrible constraints—mental, physical, societal—with death the only way out of the labyrinth. The least we can do is mark off a little section where we get to choose the constraints we are mastered by, where we decide which direction to take.” I love that.
Most authors say all their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way was this story personal to you?
It’s definitely personal for me, but in a way I don’t want to (or should have to for the reader to appreciate the story) talk about. Death of the author and all that.
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50 Page 28
