Theodore Quester spent three years after college in Europe and now speaks seven languages; he spends his days teaching two of them to high school students. He is obsessed with all things coffee—roasting, grinding, pulling espresso—and with food, especially organic and locally grown. He earned his geek street credentials decades ago, publishing an article in 2600 magazine as a young teenager, then writing reviews for SF Eye and interning at Omni magazine. In his spare time, he swims, bikes, runs, and reads a little bit of everything; when inspired, he writes fiction, mostly for children and young adults.
Author Spotlight: Chris Willrich
Jennifer Konieczny
What inspired the Bone and Gaunt series and “The Mermaid and the Mortal Thing”?
Several years ago my wife gave me good writing advice—stop trying so hard to outguess editors and write something you’d enjoy reading, whether or not you think it can sell. Surprisingly that turned out to be sword and sorcery. At the time I’d been noticing a thread of influence leading from Lord Dunsany through H.P. Lovecraft and on to Fritz Leiber, and I wanted to write adventure stories that captured that particular vibe.
“The Mermaid and the Mortal Thing” is of course indebted to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” It’s also inspired by all those amazing constructions you can see in sand castle competitions. A long time ago I’d had the idea of a mermaid building such sand castles, and it would have turned out she was a fan of human architecture. For some reason that old idea came up when I was thinking about Gaunt and Bone, and the combination clicked.
Where do the events of “The Mermaid and the Mortal Thing” fall in the chronology of the Gaunt and Bone stories? When in the series did you write it?
In the chronology it’s the second Gaunt and Bone story, right after “The Thief with Two Deaths” (F&SF, June 2000), but in order of writing it’s the sixth.
Could you share the process of writing a short story series? What’s the easiest part of returning to familiar characters? What’s the hardest?
I’ve tried not to plan too far ahead, and instead let things develop organically. I’ve even resisted making a map, even though I love fantasy maps. I’d also like each story to have its own flavor, and to be an enjoyable experience even if you know nothing beforehand about the series.
The easiest thing about writing the series is the “want ad” factor. If you’ve got characters who can reasonably get involved in lots of crazy adventures, there’s this wonderful moment when you introduce them to a new scenario and see if they want the job. You can practically hear them sizing up the situation and exchanging grim jokes about their odds of survival.
The hardest part is trimming the series of baggage. If I want readers to be able to come to the series cold, to pick it up at any point, then I can’t overcomplicate the overall storyline. Gaunt and Bone’s larger goals have to be fairly simply stated. Get rid of a magic book. Get away from trouble for a while. Start a family, but find a way to stay safe while doing so. Luckily, as a couple with an evolving relationship, they also have this built-in story arc that’s easy to relate to.
Faced with Bone and Gaunt’s choice, would you have saved the mermaids’ victims or hesitated? Do you relate more to Bone or Gaunt?
Oh, I’m definitely with Bone on that one. I’m a little in awe of people who behave heroically. It’s hard to say which character I relate to most overall, though. They’ve gotten so familiar now it’s easy to slip behind either one’s eyes.
“Bone recalled the old philosopher’s conundrum: If you replace all the wood of a vessel, is it the same craft? If you replace all the particulars of a man’s life, is he the same man? What, then, of self-knowledge? It seemed the only answer available was for the man to board the ship that life offered.” Is Bone’s conclusion yours or do you have different answers for the questions?
I didn’t want to present an absolute answer—I doubt there is one—but I’m basically with Bone here and his practical response. I want to believe there’s a divine, irreducible spark of selfhood in each of us, but given how mutable thought and memory can be, and how circumstances can change our perspective, sometimes it seems a very sputtery spark indeed. So I think in that sense our actions define us. We may always be in flux mentally, but our choices have concrete consequences that for better or worse can’t be undone. So Bone defines himself, in a small but real way, by beginning a new stage of his journey with Gaunt.
What’s next for you?
Right now I’m working on a story, set in Gaunt and Bone’s world, about a black cat who genuinely causes bad luck, and how she deals with this power. I’m sketching more Gaunt and Bone pieces, and also working on a sequel to my space opera “Sails the Morne,” (Asimov’s, June 2009.)
Jennifer Konieczny studied English and History at Villanova University and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She currently resides in Philadelphia and enjoys volunteering as a slush reader, author interviewer, and editorial assistant at Lightspeed Magazine, and inflicting her medieval-studies self on her students.
Author Spotlight: Genevieve Valentine
Wendy Wagner
With the magical spring and the struggle to keep the spring’s secret, “The Gravedigger of Konstan Spring” reminded me greatly of Tuck Everlasting. Did you read that book as a kid?
Nope. But there definitely is an homage of sorts in this story, drawn from the feel-good Westerns I saw as a kid, where it seemed as if there had to be something dark under the surface of all this getting along, and in which someone is always treated horribly, often for laughs (and, according to everyone else, justly). In Konstan Spring, the thing that keeps the peace is knowing you have the best person for each job, no matter what that really means.
You do a wonderful job capturing the endless speculation of small town life. Do you have any experience in small towns?
As an army brat, I have more experience passing through them than living in them, but I’ve spent enough time in some of them to recognize the familiar patterns of annoyance and tolerance in whatever places are small enough where those patterns are still potent. The same patterns play out in larger cities, except that the more people in the city, the longer you can avoid them. (There’s some kind of breaking point there, too, though, since every time you walk somewhere in New York you will run into three people you know, and we’re right back to the small-town cycles.)
The setting of this story is fascinating—I wasn’t quite sure if it was a magical town in a real-world setting or a slightly alternate version of the world. Also, there was a delicious Norse-Wild West hybrid flavor. Could you tell us a little about the worldbuilding in this piece?
Norse-Wild West it is indeed; in addition to the small-town decay going on in the Spring, I wanted to highlight how a town can often lock out the world around it, if its concerns are all of itself. The world around them is a significantly different North America, in which the early Scandinavian settlers maintained peace with the First Nations, and settled accordingly, in smaller numbers and farther apart. This insulates Konstan Spring even more, both geographically and thematically, to have a new world out there that they care nothing for.
There are so many different kinds of stories about immortality, from vampires to gods, from the cursed to people, like those in Konstan Spring, who have drunk from the fountain of youth. What’s your favorite kind of immortality?
None of them. I think immortality is a supremely creepy thing to actually have to deal with, and as someone who freaks out every time someone changes my email interface, I am guessing I am not particularly suited to endless years of adapting to circumstance.
We all know you love movies. If someone made this piece into a film, who would you want to direct it? Any actors you’d envision in any of the roles?
The Coen brothers really know how to make a landscape and characters work together, and have this beautiful language of isolation they always bring to their work, and I would love to see what they could do with this story (or, let’s fac
e it, with any other story).
Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece or about any upcoming works?
In addition to the novel I’m working on, I have some short stories slated to come out next year, like “A Game of Mars” in Under the Moons of Mars, “The Segment” in After, and “The Dancing Master” in Willful Impropriety. And this alternative North America was a lot of fun to think about, and I would actually love to explore it a little more, someday—hopefully with more open-minded people than the folk of Konstan Spring.
Wendy N. Wagner’s short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and the anthologies The Way of the Wizard and Armored (forthcoming). Her first novel, Dark Depths, is due Summer 2012 from Dagan Books. Ms. Wagner lives in Portland, Oregon, and blogs at www.inkpunks.com.
Author Spotlight: Robert Silverberg
John Nakamura Remy
Even after thirty years, “Not Our Brother” continues to be a powerful and relevant work. What led you to write this story?
I was experimenting with writing horror/fantasy stories as a change of pace from science fiction. And I had just come back from a trip to Mexico.
The masks, the jungle village setting, the dramatic transformation of Ellen Chambers, and even the mundane things Halperin comes into contact with are richly described. What sources did you draw on to inject such lush detail into this story?
As I said, I had just come back from Mexico. (Though nothing like the events of the story had happened to me down there!) I have collected Mexican masks myself and the house is full of them. Some of the ones I describe in the story are hanging on my own walls.
The instant that Halperin breaks the taboo against trying to buy the masks, Ellen Chambers ensnares him. To me, it almost seems Edenic—in the paradisiacal garden of the gods, there is a prohibition, a temptation, a transgression, and a fall. How do you feel about such parallels? Were they intentionally written into the story?
Probably not intentionally. For me a story has its own logic, and I let things unfold without consciously trying to impose a substructure (or superstructure) of myth on it. Of course, if I do things the right way, the mythic parallels will turn out to be there anyway.
Halperin begins the story a confident explorer, eager to experience life, and ends it a broken man. Is there a cautionary tale here about how we should approach the world?
Again, it’s the logic of the story. Obviously we all begin our lives eager to experience life, and end up dead, but I don’t think that that’s a very profound point. A story is about a transformation: this was Halperin’s.
I found myself making comparisons to Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway as I read “Not Our Brother.” Are they influences on your writing? What are your favorite and most influential authors and works outside of SF?
Conrad is a big influence in my writing—not his style or technique, but his sense of the moral forces governing our lives—and I have acknowledged that many times by giving my characters and even my stories names out of his work. I’ve studied Hemingway closely too, and from him I learned not to spell things out too heavy-handedly, but he has not been a major influence otherwise. Other writers I’ve paid close attention to include Graham Greene, Robert Stone, and John Updike. And the Greek tragedians.
Do you ever pick up one of your older works and find that you’re surprised or amazed by it? Is there any piece from your body of work so far that you’re particularly proud of?
I always read some older work of mine and wonder how I thought of it and got it done. Always. As for pieces I’m particularly proud of, I’d cite the novellas first—“Sailing to Byzantium,” “Born with the Dead,” “Hawksbill Station,” “We Are For the Dark,” and a few others. Among the novels, Son of Man, Dying Inside, Book of Skulls.
Your cumulative output is extraordinary. It’s difficult for me to imagine anyone writing in the sustained manner that you have at times. Where do you turn for ideas and inspiration, especially in your most productive periods?
They come out of thin air. It’s not a process I want to look at very closely. It just happens, and I’m grateful for that.
As a SFWA Grand Master, you have a unique perspective on the progress of SF through the years. What opportunities do SF writers have in this decade that they did not have in others? What potential pitfalls do you think they should avoid?
I really haven’t been keeping up with the current state of affairs. I’m doing very little writing these days and pay almost no attention to the current state of the market.
What are you working on now?
See the previous reply. I’ve had a 55-year career and written an enormous number of books and stories. These days I’m just kicking back and taking it easy, reading, traveling widely, working in my garden. I have no immediate plans for new work, though of course that could change at any moment.
John Nakamura Remy is a graduate of the Clarion West 2010 workshop. He has fiction published in the Rigor Amortis and Broken Time Blues anthologies, a graphic novel collaboration with Galen Dara released in the Mormons & Monsters anthology, and has a story forthcoming in the Pseudopod horror podcast. John blogs with the Inkpunks, the Functional Nerds and at mindonfire.com. He lives in Southern California with his two Dalek-loving children and partner and fellow SF-writer Tracie Welser.
Author Spotlight: Keith Brooke
Andrew Liptak
Hi Keith, thanks for taking a couple of moments to talk with us about your story, “War 3.01.” First off, how did this story come to be?
In my day job I’m closely involved with uses of social media at my local university, looking at how we can make use of it, how to avoid abuses and so on. “War 3.01” (and the earlier related story, “likeMe,” which appeared in the international science journal Nature in 2010) came from that work. I wanted to extrapolate current social media and try to create a convincing snapshot of how it might change how we live in the not-too-distant future. I’m planning to write more stories in this setting, all of them short pieces, with the ultimate goal of producing a kind of mosaic view of this future scenario. Such a fragmented approach to storytelling and worldbuilding seems appropriate to me for a project like this.
We’re living in a time when computers, apps and interconnected social networks have become increasing involved in our everyday lives; how pervasive do you believe augmented reality will be?
It’s very hard to say, of course, but to take a parallel: Even ten years ago, just how pervasive did we think the internet would be? And now it’s in everything. I was at a huge food exhibition at the weekend, wandering around the stalls, going to demonstrations, talking to the producers. Everyone was giving out Twitter and Facebook information, I was scanning QR codes at the stalls, or if they didn’t have that, simply taking photos on my phone so I could Google their websites on the journey home. The internet is everywhere. Now imagine that kind of exhibition where your reality is overlaid with virtual feeds, and then remember that everyone’s out to get something so those feeds won’t just be augmenting your reality with what you want to know, but also with legitimate adverts, spammed ads (looking at a meat stall and … “Want some Viagra with that?”), marketers trying to friend you and hook you by any means they can use.
You pose a scenario of a war that’s won in seconds, where the winner succeeds by convincing everyone that they’ve won, rather than by force: How do you see military and political forces taking advantage of a networked population?
I see the traditional military and political establishment struggling to keep up, sometimes playing leapfrog but more usually falling at least one step behind. Right now we invest vast sums in cyber-defence and combat and who are we up against? Small, unfunded groups … radical digital-natives with passion and commitment. It’s these militants who could have the biggest impact: Just as one terrorist splinter-group with a black-market nuke could cause devastation, so too could the same group if they can recruit a few angry young hackers and virus-writers. It always costs fa
r more to defend against this kind of thing than to perpetrate it, particularly when it’s established thinking versus can-do radicals.
How do you think that the past decade of international conflict has affected the rise of social media and how we interpret the news and each other?
They go hand in hand, don’t they? Terrorism is as much a media war as a physical one, as we saw with all the Osama tapes as they were drip-fed into the news networks. War and politics is all about winning over the people, and social media offers a powerful way to do this: when a message goes viral it can be fast, a meme that suddenly everyone recognises. But it’s a hard beast to tame: For all the marketers who talk about getting their message to go viral, the vast majority of memes that take off in this way are spontaneous and unpredictable, not engineered by the ‘professionals’ at all. One positive impact is that social media offers a mass of different news channels: it’s clearly played a key role in what’s happened in the Middle East over the last year, and it’s provided a vital alternative view of the Occupy movement recently, too.
Do you see a difference in attitudes between the US and the UK (in reference to the above question)?
Being based in the UK, that’s a hard one for me to answer, really. My gut instinct would be to say ‘no’, though. The way the Occupy movement has used social media seems to have been similar in both countries, for instance: when the conventional news channels appear to offer a very filtered, establishment view of events, social media allowed people on the ground to report and post videos and photographs offering an alternative view, and that happened everywhere. The big challenge for us is to filter and understand all the different versions: while the conventional news channels offer their own blinkered view, so too do the protestors, caught up in their passion and constrained by their own very selective experience of events.
You touch on immigration issues in “War 3.01”: Do you think the controversy fueled by nationalism is going to change as we live in an increasingly networked world?
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 21 Page 26
