Lightspeed Magazine - September 2016

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  But people don’t understand, when you have to deal with that every single day … I hear that from guys all the time, “Well, if somebody hit on me, I think that’d be great.” It’s like, you have never been on Chicago public transit for fifteen hours a week and then hit on three times a day. It is exhausting, and it’s scary because you don’t know what people are going to do if you say no. People scream at you. People have pulled knives on people. People could assault you. That happens all the time. And people don’t realize that after a while, doing that again and again, and again, like I talked about earlier, it’s made to wear you down.

  Seeing that all the time, and experiencing that all the time, it gets to you. It does get to you. And it ends up meaning that, yeah, you have to fight harder, and it shouldn’t be that way. We shouldn’t have to fight that hard just to have a job or just to write a book and tell a story. But there are those barriers.

  As a woman writer, you’ve got to be louder, and you’ve got to put yourself out there more, and you’ve got to do this and this because you’re not going to come first at the top of the mind. I love this exercise to do with people where I say, “Those of you who can imagine things in your mind—recently I’ve read there are some who cannot—but if you can imagine things, say, when you hear the word writer, what is the first vision? What is the vision that you associate with the word writer?” For me, it is an image of Walt Whitman. White man, long beard.

  So, we start with that, with our language, with how we learn language. Policeman: What is the picture you see in the little book? Oh, it’s a man, and it is a man who is in a police uniform. That’s how we associate all of those things going forward. So, we’re fighting against all of these things that we’ve been taught from a very, very young age. In order to completely reconceptualize how we think about things is very challenging. I think it’s very useful, but also very challenging. Even now, when people ask me, “Who are your favorite writers?” dude writers go to the top of my list. Does that mean those are only my favorite writers? Absolutely not, you know? I love Joanna Russ. I love Cat Valente. I love tons of writers, but the first thing I do is, “Oh, those top three.” And that’s how we were raised. That’s the world we live in. It sucks. But, if you want to make it better, you actually have to acknowledge that this exists, and then you have to work to change it.

  You make the point in the book that when a lot of these hurtful things … it’s not just this one incident, it’s this long pattern that really wears people down. You give an example, like, you wrote a story early on where you had a gay male character die, could you talk about that?

  Sure, yeah. I wrote a novel called God’s War, and it’s this big old matriarchy, actually, and tons of women in same-sex relationships. I did only have one gay male character in that particular book, and it so happened that as I was working through the plot of the book, there was an incident and he ends up dying. It wasn’t until I got to the end of the book, and then I realized, I was like, “Oh my gosh, there is the kill-the-gay-guy character. Oh, the best friend who dies who’s gay. The only gay male character.” And I couldn’t figure out how to have the plot do the same things it needed to do and keep him alive.

  Now I can. Now, five years later, I’ve been thinking about it forever, now I can figure it out. But I was not at the point in my career where I had the technical proficiency to figure out how to get myself out of a plot thing that I had dug. I said, “Okay, I’ll add some more gay male characters. They’re going to have some supporting roles, so at least it’s not the only gay male character.” But it still showed, and it still hurt. This was a thing that I went to, and I knew it was problematic. It’s going out the door, dammit, but that’s how it is.

  Sure enough, I went to a convention, and as soon as I got off the panel, I had a young woman come to me, and she said, “I’m in a reading group, we read your book, we all really loved it, but I have to tell you, there were a lot of gay men in my reading group, and it really bugged them that he had to die. It really hurt them. It always happens. The tragic loss of the gay character.” I told her just what I told you. I was like, “I knew it was a problem, and that was stupid, and I apologize. I’m not going to do it again.”

  In subsequent books, I was like, “I have to make sure that if I’m going to add in a character that I’m not just, oh, plot reason, I need to kill them.” And I did, going forward, I made sure to be much more aware, and that’s with all sorts of characters. I have to be aware of that. The best way to get around that, of course, is to just have lots of different characters who have lots of different backgrounds and different representations, so it’s not, “Oh, that is the one gay character, and they’re going to die tragically,” or, “The one trans character, and oh, they die tragically, but luckily, our heroes are all fine.” But, if your heroes are gay or trans or whatever, it doesn’t feel like it is a purposeful slap in the face. A lot of what this comes down to, and I tell people this all the time, is not being a lazy writer. Don’t be lazy. Those things we were programmed with, we see these things in media, we see these tropes, and we just perpetuate them. I’m like, “You need to sit down and go: Is this really the story I want to tell, or is this the story I’ve been told I should tell?”

  I thought it was interesting that you say, “The solution to this is not just to go through the story and take out anything that people might find problematic, but to understand what’s problematic, and to take responsibility and own the things that you’re choosing to leave in there.”

  Absolutely. That’s what gets me all the time. I own up to what I did to that character, because at the end of the day, it went out the door, and I knew what I was doing. It’s all perfectly fine and good for you to get on to the social medias when Twitter comes at you and be like, “Hey, well, I wanted to write a misogynist, horrible society where women have a terrible time. That was my purpose and that was my artistic choice.” Fine. Great. But don’t get up there and say, “It’s not misogynist. And I didn’t write this.” That’s what you wrote, just own up to it. That’s what you wrote. If that is a conscious, artistic choice you have made, and there is a purpose for you doing it, then you go right ahead.

  That doesn’t mean people aren’t going to critique you. As an artist, you’re going out into the world. You need to understand you’re going to hear from everybody, and I think that’s the shock that’s happening to a lot of creators; they’re saying, “Oh my gosh, all these people, who I had the privilege of never hearing from before.” Because again, little white town because it was manufactured that way. Now the internet has brought everybody together in wonderful ways, absolutely, because we have not heard those voices. We never had anybody saying back, “Hey, actually, no, that’s totally messed up.” Some people are reacting to that in an awesome way and going, “Oh my gosh, you’re totally right. That’s messed up. I will fix that next time, and I own up to it.” And some are going, “Noooooooo,” like babies. I’m like, you’re not twelve. Come on.

  That was one thing that really struck me about this book is how much of it is concerned with how a writer needs to comport themselves online, which I think says so much about what it’s like being a writer today, and how you have to think in terms of your presence and how you interact with readers and things like that.

  That clearly is just coming from my own experience. I started my blog in 2004, and I have been waging battles on the internet ever since. Lots of people are like, “Oh, it’s so much worse now.” I would say, “Well, yeah, Twitter can organize mobs a lot faster, but you didn’t see my comments sections in 2004.”

  I had a blatantly feminist blog called “Brutal Woman” of all things, and man, the stuff I would get on there was just awful. And, at least with this, Twitter especially, I can mute accounts and mute keywords. I don’t see a lot of things anymore, which is fabulous. When the mob comes, it’s like, okay, I’m going to be mobbed for two days, and I’m going to mute a lot of accounts, and then it’s over.

  Whereas, yeah
, man, the comments section of the blog was just awful. But, again, I actually felt very fortunate having come up through earlyish internet days. I was on the Blogger platform. Because I got to learn, hey, do I really want comments on my blog? I decided I didn’t. I don’t have comments anymore because I don’t want to go through with that anymore. I’ve been able to look at my social presence and keep it very cultivated and make sure it is working for me, and I’m not being overwhelmed by it. That’s something a lot of women especially deal with. Everybody deals with this to some extent. Women get the worst of it. Women of color the absolute worst.

  What I wanted to do was provide some guideline instruction, be like, “Hey, just so you know, you can do this. This is okay. And, yes, we’re all dealing with it.” Clearly, there are lots of problems. You also need to teach people how to respect each other on the internet, and there’s a lot of issues with etiquette and tools to manage harassment, which of course, Twitter fails at completely. But anyway, what I’d say is, “Okay, let’s all work together on this, and let’s strategize.” Because it’s really lonely.

  I won’t say who, but there was a creator in the geek space who was very upset by some things that were said in a comment section, and was just crying and sobbing on Snapchat about they were just going to give in and quit, and it just broke my heart because I look at this huge generation of creators who are so talented and so fabulous, and I don’t want to lose them because of some assholes on the internet.

  I thought it was interesting because you say on Twitter specifically that you think you should mute people rather than blocking them, because if you block them, that’s kind of a sign that they got to you, in a way.

  That’s a personal thing. I know lots of people who are like, “I just block everyone I want.” Unfortunately, what you end up seeing is they get real weird and obsessive. Like, “I won points against her. I really screwed with her.” Because what you’ve got to get, again, with some of these people, they’re sadists and drama queens, and it makes their day when you’re like, “Ahh, you hurt my feelings.” They love that.

  So, my personal way to deal with it is I just mute. I just mute like crazy. I’ve had the creepy ones who are like, “I can see that you’re on Twitter. You haven’t blocked me. Why are you not listening?” Which someone else had pointed out to me because, of course, they were muted. And I’m like, “Woah, this dude needs to do something else.” But, again, they’re only going to go at it for so long before they get bored. That’s my approach. Does that work for everyone? No, absolutely not.

  But, the real issue of course, is this is a systematic problem that Twitter needs to deal with, and they’re not dealing with harassment in a way that is very beneficial to anyone. So in the meantime, we have to all find our way to make it a useable platform.

  There were times before I started muting accounts and muting keywords, especially, where it was just a load of noisy garbage. It was getting so bad for me. The problem is I make so many really great contacts, not just with fans, but with other creators that have led to real life friendships, and I don’t want to lose that. It’s an incredible tool for people. And to drive everybody off it is just, again, we look at systematic issues that lead to lost opportunities for people, and that’s one of them there as well. If women and people of color, women of all races, and men of color, can’t use these platforms, then we’ve cut off this entire area of opportunity, which again becomes a systematic issue of oppression, which we need to really consider and think about.

  You say, “I spent a great deal of my life trying to be quiet and nice and not piss anyone off. I was miserable. It served no purpose. And they still came for me.”

  I was, clearly, a geek growing up. I was not terribly popular, like most geeks. And I tried to be nice and like the things other people liked and do the things that other people were supposed to do, and what you find out is they’re going to bully you anyway, you know? I thought, “If I’m going to get bullied anyway, I might as well get bullied for making a difference in the world.”

  The thing with internet BS is that for every dude that’s like, “kill yourself,” there are literally hundreds at this point, but dozens that I have seen, of women who come up to me at conventions, and who will just start sobbing. And they’re, “I am so happy to meet you. You’ve changed my life. Your work is amazing and inspiring.” I get emails from people all the time who are like, you’ve inspired me to move across the country or propose to the person that I loved or to stop screwing around and go back to school. Those are the things that you live for. You can tell me to die on the internet all day, but doing that kind of good in the world, it just makes all that other stuff ridiculous.

  It seems like all the kind of bullshit you’re talking about has inspired you to write these essays about it, but it seems like also a lot of your fiction is inspired by pushing back about this kind of thing. Could you talk about what impact these battles have had on shaping your fiction?

  Sure. My first book, God’s War, was actually me saying, “How can I have a matriarchy, but not have all the men be dead?” Because I read a lot of old school feminist science fiction, and a lot of people were just like, “Hey, I’m going to have a disease that kills all the men, and that’s how they have a matriarchy.” I was not buying that. I said, “Well, what if we send them all off to war?” Which is kind of a cop out, a lot of them still die. But then I started saying, “Okay, yes the men are all shipped off to war. There’s a three-hundred-year ongoing war on this colonized planet. It’s 10,000 years in the future. How would that affect everything else in their lives?” I took made-up religions based on a combination of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and I kind of just mashed them all together and made them into their own far-future religions.

  Now let’s explore these two characters, one of whom is very privileged. She’s a woman in this society, and she is a bounty hunter. She’s still on the down and out. She’s not politically powerful, but she’s physically powerful, and the law doesn’t touch her because of what she does. She used to be a government assassin. And I said, okay, now I’m going to take a man from the folks that they’re fighting, and I’m going to throw him into the mix and say, okay, how does he live in that society? How does that compare and contrast with the way she lives?

  Of course, on the top of that—this is how you make a cool, awesome adventure story that also says things—on top of that, they’re hunting down this alien who may have the key to ending the holy war. So, they’re running around through this contaminated desert. It’s Mad Max in space, basically. It’s really fun. It was interesting, because I did have several readers email me, and they were guys, and they were like, “I didn’t really understand microagressions and sexism until I read this book. I totally empathized with Rhys, the male character, who was going around this matriarchal society where he was open game. Stuff could happen to him and there would be no repercussions.” He had to deal with this constant “is this someone who is just making a comment about me on the street, or are they actually going to attack me?” These readers were like, “Wow, that completely changed my understanding.” That was very gratifying, right? At the same time, it also said many other things.

  Then when I went to write my epic fantasy, The Mirror Empire, I said, “I want to make an epic fantasy with actual fantastic cultures.” I don’t just want to be like, “It is pseudo-medieval Europe that is just our idea of Medieval Europe, not how Medieval Europe actually was. And it’s a patriarchy, and horrible things happen to women, and all the menz are in charge, running around with swords that all of them can totally wield.” I’m like, okay, let’s do cool things with consent-based culture that’s polyamorous and matriarchal, and let’s have this violent matriarchy. Then let’s have a patriarchy, but they have three genders.

  So, I took that and said, now that I have all those things, I’m going to put this cool plot on top of it, once again. No one wants to read a lecture. No one wants to read message fiction. That was my biggest
problem with some of the old-school feminist science fiction is that they were very much think pieces, and they felt a little didactic. I want an adventure story where stuff blows up, which also does cool stuff with social mores. On top of that, there’s the plot where these two parallel universes are colliding. One world will live, one world will die, and all of the people who have to fight in this war, and that’s really fun. I took those things, and I said, “I’m going to pair all of the awesome, kick-butt plots that I love.” I love the old Conan novels. Totally problematic, but I love Conan. And Conan is basically Nyx, who is the God’s War former assassin. Who just keeps up and gets going, and she’s a boxer, and kicks everybody’s butt, and has a great time. They are old-school adventure stories. They fight bugs, and they blow things up—she used to be a sapper. I have a lot of fun, while at the same time actually doing fantastic things with the social stuff, which you don’t see as much, which seems crazy. It’s like, hey, we’re writing fantasy, we’re writing science fiction, we can do anything, and it’s like reading the Ray Bradbury Martian stories.

  I tried to get in to them, and literally we’re on Mars and it’s like, “The Martian man reads the newspaper and calls to his wife in the kitchen who is making dinner.” I thought, “Are you kidding me right now?” It’s like 1950s America on Mars. Maybe he meant it in an ironic way, but knowing Bradbury, he’s just having fun. I was like, “No. No, I’m not doing that.” If we’re going to write a fantasy or a science fiction, we are actually going to write a fantasy and science fiction novel.