Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50

by John Joseph Adams

  What kind of research did you have to do for the story?

  Mostly I looked at dozens of random Kickstarter pages to get a sense of the form and see what people did with real projects. I also did some cursory investigation into the magical properties of certain herbs.

  What are your thoughts about crowdfunding generally? Do you back a lot of Kickstarters, or at least find a lot of interesting projects because of crowdfunding?

  I’ve backed a bunch of Kickstarters—lots of anthologies, the occasional video game, film, or album, the recent one to bring back Reading Rainbow. It’s never very much, but if I believe in the project, I try to contribute in some small way.

  How do you think Kickstarter and self-publishing platforms (like Amazon’s KDP, etc.) are changing publishing?

  I like how anthologies can get a jump-start via crowdfunding. It helps amazing projects come to life and allows writers to get paid, which are two of my favorite things.

  What are some examples of fiction you like in which the format helped dictate the story?

  The list is too long to include in its entirety, but some of my personal favorites are: Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica,” Kevin Brockmeier’s “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device,” Nicholson Baker’s Vox, Alice Sola Kim’s “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters,” Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, C.C. Finlay’s “Footnotes,” Paul Violi’s “Index,” Matt Bell’s “An Index of How Our Family Was Killed,” J.G. Ballard’s “The Index,” and Harry Mathew’s ”Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double).”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. He has been nominated for eight Hugo Awards and five World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine, and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

  AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT:

  THEODORA GOSS

  Lee Hallison

  The setup for this story is clever—a meta-structure where the visitors to the world know they were the creator(s) of the world. How did you come up with the idea?

  The idea came to me many years ago, after rereading one of my favorite stories, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges. The Borges story is about a secret society that creates the encyclopedia of an imaginary world, Tlön. Eventually, items from that world begin appearing in ours. Archaeologists start finding artifacts from Tlön. The story is about how imagination creates reality. I started thinking about what those archaeologists would do, and realized that they would have to publish their findings somewhere. That’s when I came up with the idea of the Imaginary Sciences, each of which would have its own journal: Imaginary Archaeology or Biology, for example. The Journal of Imaginary Anthropology is just one of them. And then, from somewhere or other, I got the idea of Cimmeria. I’m not sure where that came from, actually. But I come from that part of the world, from Hungary. So the history of the region has always fascinated me.

  I should say, though, that the Americans in the story think they’ve created Cimmeria. The Khan of Cimmeria would disagree, and would call their assumption part of an imperialist way of thinking. If you flip the story, it’s about how a group of people, in this case American academics, believe they’ve created a culture that the people of that culture insist has been there all along. Has it? I don’t know, but aspects of Cimmeria certainly surprise its supposed creators.

  You have said adult relationships can be vampiric. The other Shaila could be seen as a vampire—can you elaborate on how the story developed once you had the main character fall in love with the first sister?

  It’s difficult to say because I waited so long to write this story—I had it in my head long before I wrote it down, so it sat up there, in my head, developing. And when I finally sat down to write it, most of the story came out in one draft. But I think the other Shaila can also been seen as a victim, the one who is silenced, who is not allowed an existence. Is she vampiric? I’m not sure, unless we think of vampires as part of ourselves. She is the shadow self, both identical to and the opposite of Shaila. Perhaps she represents our inherent duality. I think of her as strong, actually. I admire the other Shaila, although I think she’s also a little scary. She’s going to make a great Khanum.

  The students and faculty of the story create Cimmeria for the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology with a middle-Eastern flavor. You often write fantasy set in vivid and almost realistic worlds. Did the setting drive the story or did the story beg for the particulars of this world?

  Cimmeria has a middle-Eastern flavor because the ancient Cimmerians are supposed to have been linguistically related to the Iranians. What I wanted to make clear is that Cimmeria is a melting pot of cultures and religions, since that’s true for the region in general. It’s both exotic and modern. It’s a kind of dream, but also a country enmeshed in contemporary political reality. As all countries are, actually. After all, every country is partly imaginary, created through storytelling. Think of the American story, or the competing American stories. Our country is as imagined as Cimmeria. We do part of the imagining, but so do people all over the world who have some idea of what America is, whether that’s based on the news, or magazines, or the latest movies. Reality is always a collaboration between what actually exists outside ourselves and how we perceive it.

  In this case, I think Cimmeria came first, and then the story wove itself through the setting, like a vine on a trellis. The trellis gave shape and support to the vine, so you can’t really separate them any longer. They are one thing.

  There are several themes running through this story—which is the one you wrestled with and/or find most interesting?

  I suppose the theme I started with is the one I mentioned above, of the interplay between what is and our perception of it, which creates the construct we call reality. And how contested that reality can be, particularly from different cultural perspectives. And then there’s a whole other story running through that one, the personal story of Pat and his relationship with Shaila—and the other Shaila. That’s about how you never really know about people, what they’re like inside. We can always only see a part of them, like seeing one side of the moon. But it’s also about a lot of things: how people can get trapped, for example. How they make compromises. I do think about all those things when I’m writing a story, but readers should of course decide what to make of the story themselves—they will find their own underlying themes in it.

  What are you currently working on?

  I’m currently writing a novel based on a story of mine called “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter.” It’s about how the daughters of the classic mad scientists (Mary Jekyll, Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau, and Justine Frankenstein) all find each other and form a club in late nineteenth-century London. It’s a lot of fun! And it allows me to do what I love most, which is create alternative, imaginary worlds that are nevertheless real, and then tell you what happens in them. In this case, to a group of girl monsters who are trying to fight evil, solve mysteries, and support themselves in a world that barely recognizes their existence. I’m always interested in how women live in the world, how they make lives for themselves. The story of Shaila is partly about that as well.

  And eventually I’m going to
write more about the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology. My doctoral dissertation focused in part on nineteenth-century anthropology, which is filled with racist assumptions and misapplications of evolutionary theory. I’m fascinated by how we speak about and define human cultures, and how we treat people based on those definitions. I’m also fascinated by academic discourse, and of course monsters (those were in my dissertation as well). So, there will likely be more . . .

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lee Hallison writes fiction in an old Seattle house where she lives with her patient spouse, an impatient teen, two lovable dogs, and the memories of several wonderful cats. She’s held many jobs—among them a bartender, a pastry chef, a tropical plant-waterer, a CPA, and a university lecturer. An East Coast transplant, she simply cannot fathom cherry blossoms in March.

  AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT:

  MATTHEW HUGHES

  Patrick J. Stephens

  Kaslo has a unique integrity—both in character and in story. What kind of response have you been seeing to the stories of Kaslo?

  I haven’t had a flood of fan mail, but those who have written have liked the character and the story. He’s a man with a code of honor and he means to stick to it, even if the whole universe has yanked the rug out from under his feet.

  As with the other stories, could you please lead us through the inception of this particular part of Kaslo’s journey?

  The universe has changed its operating principle, from rational cause-and-effect to magic powered by the force of will. The advanced civilization of Novo Bantry, an anciently settled world where Kaslo lives, has collapsed. But there’s more going on than just the great change, terrible as that is. There are other planes than the one that contains our part of the universe, and on one of those planes a power has been waiting aeons for magic to be strong again.

  With a series such as this, how do you approach making each installment autonomous, but connected enough to the other stories to maintain the consistency of such a well-crafted narrative?

  I am an intuitive writer. I don’t outline. So I’m actually not seeing much farther ahead than the reader. I know now (in May 2014) what the story is leading up to. I didn’t know when I was writing this episode (in November 2013) what was waiting for Kaslo. But I knew it would be awful and that he would deal with it.

  In a universe where time and space can change so drastically, what kinds of aspects of life would you pick to change in the real world, and—if it would not interrupt the physics and structure you’ve created—in Kaslo’s?

  You wouldn’t want me in charge of designing the real world. I had an odd upbringing and my standards don’t fit the middle of the bell curve. In Kaslo’s world, I am the designer, and because I am a character-focused writer, what I want is for him to come through in the end. Probably not unscathed, but still punching.

  After Kaslo, what’s next?

  More stories. Maybe another Kaslo adventure. I’m also going to be writing a historical novel that I’ve been thinking about for forty years. And I’m interested to see if my having a story in the latest George R.R. Martin/Gardner Dozois cross-genre anthology, Rogues, (Bantam, June 2014) brings me any new readers. Their last such project, Dangerous Women, was a New York Times bestseller.

  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:

  EMMA BULL

  Jude Griffin

  How did “De La Tierra” come about?

  I was on a writing date with my husband, Will Shetterly, and my friends Doselle and Janine Young. We used to get together at a coffee shop, sit at one table with our laptops open in front of us and our headphones on, and each of us write away at whatever our current projects were.

  That’s how it was supposed to work, anyway. Janine was typing briskly away. Will was frowning at his screen and hitting bursts of keystrokes. Doselle was bobbing his head along with his music as he wrote.

  I was staring at the file of whatever project I was supposed to be working on, and getting nothing. And trying not to hate my hard-working friends for having lots of useful words at their command.

  Sometimes when you’re stuck, it helps to type anything at all, random nonsense, to keep your fingers moving and the inconsequential phrases and sentences squeezing out of your head and onto the screen until you break through your own barriers. I opened iTunes and called up Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which I consider easily one of the fifty best albums of the last century, and started typing any damned thing that came into my head.

  Which, because of the music I’d chosen, was about the sound of a piano, about a woman playing it with fire and bravado.

  All writing comes from a point of view; even an essay has a character behind the narrative, who shares the author’s name and some of her or his characteristics. Someone was watching this woman play piano. But not me. Someone who noticed and described it differently than I would.

  I followed that point of view character. I listened to his voice in his head, used his eyes to tell me where he was. The character established the tone of the story and set it in motion. He was a noir character. He was a hitman. He was about to go to work.

  When the first speculative fiction element showed up, I wasn’t sure if I was writing science fiction or fantasy, though I knew which genre’s language I’d written it in. But somewhere in the back of my head I heard an echo of a conversation I’d had previously with another friend.

  “You couldn’t set a contemporary fantasy like War for the Oaks in Los Angeles,” he’d said. “The veil isn’t thin here.”

  “Not thin?” I’d replied. “In Los Angeles, there’s barely any veil at all.”

  The creatures of Faerie would love Los Angeles. They’re naturals for it. Shape-changing, fairy gold, illusions and wonders, lures of pleasure and riches that lead to death and ruin—surely half the inhabitants of the Hollywood Hills, Topanga Canyon, and the hidden houses along Mulholland Drive had ties to the fey folk on one side or another. It made perfect sense.

  An hour or two later I noticed that what was supposed to be just a wedge to break up the block that kept me from my project was a whole new project. But at that point I needed to get home to the volume of Mexican folklore on my bookshelves, so there wasn’t time to worry about it.

  How much, if at all, was the imagery of the opening scene inspired by your experience in Cats Laughing and The Flash Girls?

  Not a bit, actually. Point of view is the shiny four-dimensional multitool in my writer’s toolkit; it’s the most useful and most demanding piece of craft I know. The point-of-view character in this story isn’t a musician. He’s in the audience, fantasizing about what he might do if he were a musician. The vision he has of what he might do isn’t the one a musician would have.

  Instead, he lets the music affect him intellectually and emotionally without thinking about it critically. He’s just letting the music do its work.

  Chisme, Magellan, Biblio: Is there a link between the names you chose and their contributions to the mission?

  I had fun tagging the protagonist’s names. Chisme is “gossip” in Spanish. That’s the person, or being, or system, or group, in charge of personal information. Magellan’s the cartographer, providing spatial information. Biblio, short for biblioteca, is the library, the database of knowledge of the past. Again, point of view gives me the structure for how to use them. The protagonist doesn’t know the nature of the interface with his bosses; it’s imposed on him, and nobody’s going to explain it to him. But in order to feel as if he has some control over what’s going on, he gives names to the things that invade his awareness.

  Why do you think humans around the world have stories about Others which share such striking similarities?

  We�
��re storytelling animals. We impose narrative on everything, even random events. When something’s important to our survival, like water or the change of seasons, the first thing we’re going to do is turn it into narrative, because narrative makes sense. That’s also true of our own impulses and emotions. Anger, violence, romantic love, humor—sometimes we baffle ourselves, and in trying to explain the things about us we don’t understand, we tell stories about gods, demons, fairies, magicians. We make metaphors, because metaphors let us test our understanding of things we can’t hold in our hands. We even create metaphors to make sense of things we know can’t make sense: Trickster figures can embody the chaos and randomness we see around us.

  Do you have any new projects you want to share with us?

  I’m working on Claim, which is the sequel to Territory and will really truly contain the Gunfight in the Vacant Lot Behind the O.K. Corral, this time for sure. I’m also writing a contemporary fantasy short story, which, if the characters are nice to me, might become a series of stories. Along with Elizabeth Bear and the other creators of Shadow Unit, I’m helping assemble the last episodes of that contemporary science fiction serial thriller that we’ve been offering for free on the web. (See www.shadowunit.org for content.) And I’m hoping to write a mission for season three of the amazingly cool running app Zombies, Run!, about which I’m a huge fangirl.

  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.

  MISCELLANY

  IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF

  Coming up in August, in Lightspeed . . .

  We’ll have original science fiction by An Owomoyela (“Undermarket Data”) and E. Catherine Tobler (“A Box, a Pocket, a Spaceman”), along with SF reprints by Gardner Dozois (“Morning Child”) and David I. Masson (“Traveller’s Rest”).