Lightspeed Issue 46

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Phalloon is one of the few who know that the change is coming. Ineffectual under the regime of science, he expects to come into his own once the rule of magic is reestablished. He has been studying old books from the last such period and acquiring ancient magical paraphernalia. He is, like most wizards, a thoroughgoing narcissist and rather emotional when his own perquisites are being trod upon.

  What’s one aspect of “Phalloon the Illimitable” you would love to have explored more?

  I’m not sure he has any that attract me.

  Each story in Kaslo’s serial has remained strong and powerful. What, or who, draws you back to this universe?

  It’s space opera combined with Dying Earth fantasy. What could be more enjoyable to write about?

  Outside of Kaslo, what can we expect to see from you in the future?

  There’s a historical novel I’ve wanted to write for forty years. I hope to begin, at least, this year. I’m also doing a series of fantasy stories about a thief named Raffalon that appear in F&SF. And I’ll surely write more space opera.

  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: Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick

  Jude Griffin

  Michael blogged about the genesis of “The Armies of Elfland” and “The Trains That Climb The Winter Tree,” mentioning that, while the opening paragraphs were written about twelve hours apart, the writing of “Armies” came much later than that of “Trains.” Was anything different about your process or your approach to collaborative writing for “Armies” than for “Trains”?

  Eileen: We have a process? We have at least two processes. Michael is a great idea-guy, plus he writes rich, assured prose, filled with dynamic characters vying for the reader’s attention and suggesting a dark underside to the strange world of the story. Right from the start. Michael’s beginnings always terrify me, because they are coherent. Generally, I have no idea where I’m going, and if a story starts to make sense early in the writing, I get worried that the story will be too conventional.

  So, in this case, he sent me the beginning of “The Trains that Climb the Winter Tree,” complete with title. It was just a paragraph or two, but it had elves in it, and they came out of a mirror. I thought, “Why is Michael trying to get me to write about elves and mirrors? Is it just to torture me?” I didn’t realize he had a plan, and that it involved a lot more than a mirror and a handful of elves. I also didn’t realize the elves and the mirrors were actually my own fault, tossed off glibly in a moment of whimsy. (Michael explains all this in his aforementioned blog post (http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-to-write-collaborative-story.html), so you can get his side of the story there, and the details of his plan.)

  At any rate, I thought, however unjustly, “Ha! Two can play at this game.” And I turned his opening paragraph inside out, making the mirrors come out of the elves. In short, I was misbehaved. I did not hear Michael’s anguished scream, 2,827 miles away, when he opened my email, but there was definitely a disturbance in the Force. The next day, I received an email saying, “Now we have two stories.”

  I think what keeps the game of collaboration going (for me, anyway) is that it could change at any moment. At some point, Michael would yell, “Okay! We’re done! Don’t you do another thing! I’ll write the ending!” And then he’d finish it and send it back to me with the warning, “Don’t you change anything!” And I would change something.

  Now that I think of it, our collaborations were a lot like the part in our elf-free story, “Zeppelin City,” where Rudy is running hell-bent-for-leather through the underground tunnels, chased by the cops, following little glow-in-the-dark markers he has placed there himself, when all of a sudden, he realizes he’s been following someone else’s markers, and he has no idea of where he is.

  This is not probably the healthiest way to collaborate, but writing with Michael kept my mind alive and taught me how to plot energetically instead of passively. I have no idea what collaborating with me did for him.

  Michael: As I recall, we used my usual method for collaborations: One of us has control of the story for a month to do as much or little as he or she cares to and then has to surrender it to the other. Who then has license to make any changes whatsoever—including restoring material the other removed. Ultimately, the person with the stronger vision of how the story should go will prevail. In this case, it was Eileen. In “The Trains That Climb the Winter Tree,” it was me. But I found the endings for each. That’s one of my talents: If a story is good enough, I can figure out how it wants to end.

  Will there be any more stories of elves and mirrors or any more collaborations?

  Michael: There was no thematic reason for there to be two elves-and-mirrors stories. But I had written a lovely opening to a story, with elves coming out of the mirrors and when I offered it to Eileen, she immediately changed it to a very different story opening with mirrors coming out of the elves and then fell in love with the new version. So the only way to get the story I’d originally envisioned was for us to write them both. It’s unlikely, therefore, that we’ll extend the franchise.

  As for other collaborations, that’s entirely up to Eileen. I am the most easygoing and cooperative of men.

  Eileen: No more elves, if I can help it. And probably no more collaborations, as we are hoping to remain friends. Instead, Michael has sent me, every so often, a very detailed description of a story he has decided I should write, along with the suggestion that writing it will be very good for me, and will take only four hours of my time. He has also said “These are not collaborations!” and suggested that if I link the finished story to him, he’ll deny all knowledge, just like the government in Mission Impossible. So my lips are sealed. I cannot guarantee, however, that—no matter how much readers may prefer never to read another story of the deeply conflicted Swanwick-Gunn elves—Michael will not someday take it into his head that he should make me write another damned elf story, and I may be powerless to stop him. I may not even recognize it as an elf story until it’s too late.

  Michael: That’s actually not a bad idea. I’ll give it some thought.

  From the opening paragraphs of each story, it seems like you both had a clear and consistent vision of the nature of elves. Whose elf stories have you enjoyed? Were they all in the same cold, cruel camp of elvish characterizations?

  Eileen: I enjoy Michael’s elves in stories that we have not collaborated on, because in those stories, the elves are not torturing me. Michael’s the one with the consistent vision of elf-nature, and he takes a very dark view of the elven psyche. He’s sort of the anti-Tolkien: His elves are not tall, wise, silver-haired elders. They’re more Icelandic elves, and they do not have your best interests at heart. Of course, his humans often don’t have anyone’s interests at heart but their own, either. My current favorite is his story “A Bordello in Faerie,” which is in his collection The Dog Said Bow-Wow, from Tachyon Publications.

  Michael: My vision of elves is shaped by years of reading in mythology, where they’re consistently portrayed as being soulless, capricious, and without conscience. Their value seems to be in holding up a steely and pitiless mirror to the human soul. Poul Anderson’s novel The Broken Sword and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s collection Kingdoms of Elfin are big favorites of mine, and the elves of both are cold, cold, cold. Tolkien’s elves have more than a touch of that too.

  What was behind the trolls and reflexive behavior?

  Eileen: I don’t really know: they don’t have a very substantial role—mostly they loom, holding clubs or books. But not knowing the answer has never kept me quiet before, so I’ll go ahead. I thought of them as being sort of meat puppets, synthetic creatures that have a certain scripted conversational ability, perhaps derived from humans they have eaten, but no e
motional capacity at all. Trolls of legend are generally large and strong and dimwitted. These particular trolls seem to be violent but without any particular malice, which is what makes them, in my opinion, more than a bit creepy. Mean and violent, that seems comprehensible, but disinterested and violent is subtly more disturbing. It never occurred to me to ask Michael what he thought the trolls’ psychological underpinnings were, and I doubt he would have told me if I’d asked.

  In some way, perhaps that’s probably an indication of our process: Michael might know what’s happening, but he doesn’t tell me for the longest while, and I certainly don’t ask what’s going on, because I think the clues are there in the text, and it’s my job to figure them out. Michael won’t tell me, anyway. But I’m pretty sure he knows.

  Michael: Half of it was just for the weirdness of it. But also, the trolls were essentially slaves and so not responsible for what was done to the human race. If they were conscious beings, the story would have had to find a just way of dealing with them—and that would have distorted its shape. I believe that the elves too were ultimately revealed to be non-sentient, though at a much more high-functioning level. Simply because neither Eileen nor I wanted to have a happy ending involving genocide or racial enslavement.

  I won’t explain to Eileen anything that hasn’t already been written because she has a perverse streak and will immediately set out to subvert it. If I don’t tell her what I have planned, she can’t prevent it.

  All this stems from the fact that Eileen is at heart a trickster. If I could only get her to understand that, it would double her productivity overnight.

  Euclidean geometry and elves—how did that come about?

  Michael: Well, the elves came out of the mirrors originally, and objects in mirrors are stranger than they appear. But also, the point of fantasy is not to take elves, queens, trolls, knights, and the like, and arrange them in new patterns like so many action figures. It’s to create impossible worlds of such surpassing strangeness—and beauty, too—as to tell us something about our own. By contrast, if in no other way. But I think we achieved something meaningful here too.

  Eileen: The elves came to our world from another dimension, and they are basically two dimensional, so when humans rotate or move quickly in three dimensions, with curving motions, the elves can’t actually see them. It made sense to me, because, although I did very well in high school geometry, I have never really understood vectors. I don’t see mathematics well in three dimensions—perhaps I have elven ancestors. At any rate, the geometry underlying the elves makes this a science-fiction story, in my opinion, rather than strictly a fantasy story.

  Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

  Michael: I’ve just finished and turned in to my agent my latest novel, Chasing the Phoenix. This is the second book-length adventure of post-Utopian confidence artists Darger and Surplus, and in it they accidentally acquire armies and conquer China. These things happen to them. And Eileen has a new collection in the works, but I’ll let her talk about that.

  Eileen: I have a new short-story collection, Questionable Practices, coming out on March 18, from Small Beer Press, and I’m hysterically excited about that. The book was designed by the very talented typographer and book designer, John D. Berry, who is also my husband, and who designed my previous two books. Also, I’m hard at work on a novel. Yes, Michael gave me the idea for it, but he thought it was a short story …

  Michael: It could have been a short story, too. But I told Eileen it was. So of course she had to turn it into something completely different.

  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: Kim Stanley Robinson

  Jude Griffin

  You described your writing process as typically like this: “It usually starts with an idea, fairly simple and basic … Then I build from there. Often it takes many years, and eventually I have a sense of the story’s basic outline, with some events, and the climax or ending, but a lot of vagueness. Eventually I need to figure out a form, and then a narrator. The story tends to create the characters necessary to live the story. And so on it goes. Much is never decided until I am faced with writing particular scenes. That’s when it gets really hard.” Can you talk about how the writing of “The Lucky Strike” followed or diverged from this?

  It fit this pattern really well. The original image that came to me was the Enola Gay tipping over and flying down into the Pacific. That only survived as a thought in my protagonist’s head, but it set me to thinking what it meant, and started the research and all. When I saw it was somehow about not bombing Hiroshima, much was set; an alternative history, and a need for a character that would do something different than what really happened. I read all I could about what really happened, and wrote the story rather quickly after that, in a month or less sometime in 1983, in Davis while teaching at UCD.

  In your research for the story, were there any surprises? Anything that reshaped your vision for the story?

  I was surprised that when the Hiroshima plane got back from the bombing, they had a barbeque. I was surprised that the Nagasaki plane got back to Tinian Island with “no more gas than would fill a cigarette lighter.” I was also surprised to learn of Leo Szilard’s attempts to advocate for a demonstration of the bomb, and the whole decision process around Truman. Much of John Hersey’s book Hiroshima is “surprising” if you can call it just that, which you can’t.

  What worried/challenged you the most while writing “The Lucky Strike”?

  The main problem was this; the more likely Frank January was to have decided to do something different as bombardier, the less likely that he would have been in the position to do it. So the whole crux of the story was to try to make plausible a bombardier secretive about his doubts and his potential to disobey. Thus the name January, from Janus the two-faced; and every detail of his biography is in support of making his act seem plausible.

  Of all the reactions you have gotten to “The Lucky Strike,” what were some of the most interesting?

  WWII vets told me Lucky Strike packets were white during the war because the green dyes were used elsewhere in the war effort. I was also given details of the B-29 bombardier’s compartment that I had gotten wrong, and some encouragement from vet readers who liked the basic message of the story.

  You’ve expressed your admiration for Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. What other alternate histories did you enjoy?

  The Man In the High Castle by P. K. Dick, and Pavane by Keith Roberts. These along with the Chabon are my three favorite alternative histories, although I also will include my own The Years of Rice and Salt.

  January finds the resolve/courage to not drop the bomb on Hiroshima through a series of empathetic moments: a shattering dream; the face of the truck driver; the burn on his arm; the similarity of Hiroshima to his hometown—both river towns. Is empathy the foundation of ethics? The key to peace?

  Yes, I think so. Empathy was a crucial word and concept for Sturgeon. For me in this story, the way I thought of it was more using the word imagination. But being able to imagine oneself as the other or in the position of the other, is a good definition of empathy, so it came to the same thing. One thing that I felt important was to portray Frank January as a man who had loved reading fiction as a boy and youth. Reading literature is an imaginative act, the whole point of which is to try to get inside someone else’s thinking and life. This is a really good exercise for people.

  January focuses his time on imagining what the people of Hiroshima will suffer and how he will feel if he drops the bomb as planned. He doesn’t spend time imagining the myriad terribl
e ways that people on both sides might die, in surpassingly high numbers, if the bomb doesn’t bring about the end of the war, and how he might feel about that. Why?

  Couple things come to me here: He was focused on what he himself was being asked to do. The other considerations were more abstract and distant, thus not as powerful. Also, he had experienced enough to know that civilian suffering was much more than militarily necessary, and that the military decision makers were not all-knowing wise people. If he had known how completely defenseless Japan actually was in the summer of 1945, these ongoing excuses for the nuclear bombs would have had even less force for him. But those things he couldn’t have known. Lastly, the atom bomb was a new thing and could be considered unnatural, beyond all that had come before; perhaps a bombardier would see this best of all, by comparison to any previous bomb. So I think he was shocked by what he was asked to do.

  Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

  My novel Shaman will be out in paperback in June 2014.

  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

  Coming Attractions

  Coming up in April, in Lightspeed …

  We have original science fiction by Linda Nagata (“Codename: Delphi”) and Shaenon K. Garrity (“Francisca Montoya’s Almanac of Things That Can Kill You”), along with SF reprints by Gardner Dozois (“Morning Child”) and Ted Chiang (“Exhalation”).

  Plus, we have original fantasy by Carmen Maria Machado (“Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa”) and Thomas Olde Heuvelt (“The Day the World Turned Upside Down”), and fantasy reprints by K. J. Bishop (“Alsiso”) and C. J. Cherryh (“The Only Death in the City”).