Leticia Lara interviews Gareth Hanrahan, author of The Gutter Prayer

I am very happy for having the opportunity of publishing this interview of Leticia Lara with Gareth Hanrahan, author of The Gutter Prayer, one the most interesting fantasy novels that has been published so far in 2019. Hope you enjoy it, and remember that you can read the interview translated into Spanish at Leticia's essential blog, Fantástica Ficción.  

Leticia Lara: We met at Dublin at the Worldcon. Do you usually go to these conventions? What do you think about them? 

Gareth Hanrahan: I go to a lot of gaming conventions, which are very similar but aren’t quite the same thing. The Dublin Worldcon was my first fantasy/sci-fi con in a very, very long time. Conventions can be wonderful experiences if you approach them in the right state of mind, or once you make the right group of friends; there are some conventions that are like annual reunions, and I look forward to them all year. 

LL: You used to work as a game designer and now you are writing novels. Which are the common points (if any) in both worlds? 

GH: I still work as a game designer – my day job is still making up stuff about elves and vampires. There’s a host of common elements; they’re both modes of storytelling, both involve shaping character and backstory and plot to create an emotional experience. The difference is where that shaping happens – a novel is more-or-less fully formed when the reader encounters it, whereas a game only comes alive at the table. 

The biggest difference, I find, is open-endedness. A novel needs to drive towards a conclusion; games, by contrast, tend towards sprawling or even meandering plots and don’t always have a conclusion at all – and where they do, it’s more of a capstone than a carefully planned and foreshadowed conclusion. 

LL: What is your favourite RPG? What do you like best: being the master or being a player?

GH: I don’t really have a favourite RPG – I mean, if you held a gun to my head and said ‘choose’, I’d probably blurt out ‘Call of Cthulhu’, but there are so many games I adore. Dungeons and Dragons, Nobilis, Night’s Black Agents, The One Ring, Unknown Armies… Right now, I’m playing in a Warhammer Fantasy campaign and about to start running a Yellow King game…

I prefer running games, in general, but it’s a good idea to see the game from the other side of the GM screen, too. It keeps you humble…

LL: Does your background as a role player help you while writing fantasy?

GH: Yes, immensely – up to a point. Certainly, a lot of the tools and techniques are hugely useful, especially for world-building and small-scale plotting, for making the fictional world coherent and plausible within its own crazy rules. There are a few places where my instincts as a roleplayer and game designer clash with what works in novel writing and I’ve had to unlearn some lessons, but overall it’s been very helpful.

LL: What can you tell us about your ENnie awards? 

GH: The ENnie awards are one of the big awards in tabletop gaming. I’ve picked up a few, most notably for a project I co-wrote with Kenneth Hite (and, technically, with Bram Stoker) called the Dracula Dossier. We turned the novel Dracula into a game supplement, revealing its secret history as an after-action report written by British Intelligence after their failed attempt to recruit a vampire. We filled it with annotations, added characters, and connected it all into an epic campaign of modern-day espionage and horror. That pretty much swept the awards in the year it was released, which was incredibly gratifying. 

LL: What would be your sales pitch for The Gutter Prayer? Who is your favourite character from this book? 

GH: In a city of alchemists and strange gods, three thieves stumble upon the fantasy equivalent of the Manhattan Project – and, not understanding what they’ve found, try to use it to overthrow the corrupt master of the thieves’ guild. Many things explode or get stabbed. 

My favourite character… hmm. Weirdly, I’m very fond of Effro Kelkin, who’s a comparatively minor character. He’s an ambitious and cranky old politician who used to rule the city before he was forced out by the alchemists. I’m a big fan of political intrigue and double-dealing, so it was nice to be able to indulge in that on the sidelines of the fantasy carnage.

LL: Can you tell us something about your new book, The Shadow Saint? 

GH: The Shadow Saint is the sequel to The Gutter Prayer, set about a year later. The city of Guerdon’s recovering from the events of the first novel, and new factions and powers are moving into the wreckage. The story follows the efforts of two of these factions – the warring powers of the necromancers of Haith, and the fanatical followers of the mad gods of Ishmere – to seize control of Guerdon, as well as those caught in the middle of their intrigues. 

LL: Have you been contacted by a Spanish publisher interested in your work? 

GH: I don’t believe so – at least, I haven’t heard of any offer. The Russian and Turkish rights have been purchased, but that’s all so far. I’d love for it to be translated into Spanish – there are some Spanish fans and bloggers who’ve really enjoyed the book, and it’d be nice for it to have a wider audience there.

LL: Is there anything else you would like to comment? What can you tell us about your new projects?

GH: I’ve just finished up writing some of the dialogue for the Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory computer game. My Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops game – a game for one player and one Game Moderator, think Jason Bourne vs Dracula – just came out, as did Hideous Creatures: A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos. I’m in the middle of working on a campaign for the One Ring RPG entitled Errantries of the King, which is set in Gondor in the years before the War of the Ring. Oh, and I’m working on another novel…

Leticia Lara interviews Emma Newman

I have the distinct pleasure of publishing Leticia Lara's interview with the great science fiction and fantasy author Emma Newman. You can also read the interview translated into Spanish at Leticia's blog, Fantástica Ficción. Hope you enjoy it!

Leticia Lara: If you are able to, would you mind letting us know if you've ever been contacted by a Spanish publishing company to publish your books in translation? What would be your sales pitch for your Split Worlds Series in Spain? 

Emma Newman: I have not been approached regarding a Spanish translation of The Split Worlds series. If I were able to pitch it to a publisher there, I think I’d say;

The Split Worlds is a completed urban fantasy series filled with mad sorcerers, evil faeries and feuding dynastic families vying for power. It explores personal freedom, social responsibility and the way that patriarchy can destroy the lives of both men and women. It also has a talking gargoyle and a kickass feminist heroine.

Leticia Lara: You write fantasy and science fiction. Which genre do you prefer to write? Do you use a different approach with each one?

Emma Newman: I don’t think I have a preference; for me the story-telling is the most important thing, rather than the genre that story happens to be in. I love different things about both. In science-fiction I really enjoy looking at current technology and thinking about how it could develop into the future, and how those changes impact upon the human experience.

When I write fantasy (and I have only written urban fantasy so far), I enjoy thinking about how magic influences power structures and the impact that would have on society and everyday life.

Leticia Lara: You are well-known as a writer and also as a reader of audiobooks. Is it very different to perform your own audiobooks in contrast with those written by other authors? 

Emma Newman: When I narrate my own books there is very little prep to do beforehand! I already know the story and the characters, and which accents are required to perform it. I love having the opportunity to perform my own work, as it means I can portray the characters exactly as I imagined them.

When I narrate books written by other authors, there is a lot of work before I even get to the studio. I read the book through, making notes about what happens in each chapter, and detailed notes about all of the characters. I look out for words that I am not sure how to pronounce and highlight dialogue that needs to be read in different accents. If there are characters who speak in accents that I am not able to perform, I need to acquire that skill. That can be a lot of work.

I enjoy audiobook narration very much, as it is challenging and interesting work. It’s like stepping inside the book. It is also very tiring!

Leticia Lara: Do you read your sentences aloud while you are writing to have an idea of how it will sound as an audiobook?

Emma Newman: I always read my work aloud as a fundamental part of my writing process. I think it is the best way to smooth the prose, and to get a sense of whether the dialogue sounds realistic. Sometimes the things characters say seem good on the page, but then when you read it aloud, you realise that no-one really speaks like that in real life!

Leticia Lara: In a recent newsletter, you told us that you were thinking about self-publishing new instalments of the Industrial Magic series. What can you tell us about this?

Emma Newman: That’s the plan! At the moment I am focusing on producing audiobook versions of the first two novellas (which were published by Tor.com), which I’m doing in partnership with the recording studio where I do most of my narration work. Once those are done and released, I’ll be writing the next novella in the series and plan to publish it later in the year.

Leticia Lara: I have eagerly read the three published books in the Planetfall Universe series. They are so different from one another but they also share some characteristics. How did you plan the series to develop this way?

Emma Newman: To be honest, I never planned a series at all! When I wrote Planetfall, I knew it was a stand-alone novel, and I had no idea if anyone would want to publish it. When Ace/Roc bought it, they asked for a second novel. I had some vague ideas about a baby left behind by one of the colonists in Planetfall, and I wanted to explore what the Earth they left behind was like. 

Planetfall was such a success that two more novels were bought, and by that point I’d had an idea for a psychological thriller set on Mars, and once that was written, I knew what I wanted to explore in Atlas Alone. As they are all set in the same universe, it made sense to have connections between the books in the form of common characters, and for important events to have ripples that affect all of them. It’s been a lot of fun tying the books together in a shared universe, but having the freedom to write stand-alone novels. 

Leticia Lara: Many of the characters in the Planetfall Universe series struggle with mental disorders (anxiety, depression…). I was specially touched by the postnatal depression in Before Mars. How did you manage to write such complex personalities with these problems?

Emma Newman: It’s a combination of drawing upon personal experience and doing a lot of research. I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder many years ago, and while it is not the same mental illness as Ren has (the protagonist in Planetfall), there is enough of an overlap that I can write about common elements with authenticity. There’s a scene where she has a panic attack that many people have commented on as being hard to read, as it is so realistic because I wrote what I have experienced myself. As for the other aspects of Ren’s illness, writing those needed research and empathy.

I also suffered from post-natal depression, so again could draw upon my own memories of that time when I wrote Before Mars. That was really tough, actually.

Leticia Lara: In After Atlas we can see some of the problems that continued surveillance and the loss of privacy can cause in a society as well as the power of gigantic corporations. Were you trying to write a “cautionary tale”?

Emma Newman: That was certainly on my mind, although the thing that I was really concerned about at the time of building the world of After Atlas was the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) deal that looked like it might be agreed at the time. I was really worried about how that could have given corporations the power to sue governments, and in the historical timeline of the Planetfall novels, the TTIP was agreed and corporations used that power to cripple governments financially so they could effectively commit a coup and take over all aspects of society, leading to the ‘gov-corps’ of After Atlas.

Thankfully the TTIP didn’t get through in the real world, but things have become worse since then in other ways. My novels are political, as science-fiction always has been. I do want people to look critically at the way things are now, and writing about how things could be if they carry on in this way, is my way of drawing attention to them.

Leticia Lara: There is a lot of expectation about your next novel, Atlas Alone. As the “end?” of the Planetfall Universe series (so to speak), what can we know about the book?

Emma Newman: I don’t see it as the end of the series, as I’d like to write two more novels set in that universe, but I may take a little break from the series before I do.

The protagonist of Atlas Alone is Dee, Carlos’s best friend from After Atlas. It follows on six months after the end of that novel. It’s all about recovering from trauma, immersive gaming and revenge.

Leticia Lara: Do you like going to literature festivals like Worldcons? What do you prefer to do in these places?

Emma Newman: I do! I have been to several Worldcons and am looking forward to the one in Dublin this year. 

As someone who finds crowds difficult, and who is quite shy, I do find them hard work, but worth it. I have many friends that I only get to see at these events, so it is lovely to catch up with them, and also with industry professionals like my editors and my agent. 

I like to keep busy at them if I can, and am always very pleased to get on the program, as I see those events as a way of giving back to the community. Whenever I can, I run my workshop on writing and anxiety, which lots of people have found helpful. It’s also wonderful meeting people who like my work.

Leticia Lara: What can you tell us about your new projects?

Emma Newman: I have started to write regular short stories set in the Planetfall universe for my newsletter subscribers, which I am really enjoying. 

I recently took up painting, and to my surprise, have sold some of my first ones! I have my first exhibition coming up at a UK convention which is so exciting.

As for my next novel, well, I can’t quite say what that is yet, as I am waiting for some news. But whatever happens, I do plan to write more Industrial Magic novellas and I’m also planning a new YouTube offering. I will certainly be busy!

Leticia Lara interviews Adrian Tchaikovsky

Leticia Lara has interviewed science fiction and fantasy author Adrian Tchaikovsky and has been so kind as to letting us publish the English version here, on Sense of Wonder. Remember that you can read the translation into Spanish at Leticia's wonderful blog, Fantástica Ficción. Enjoy!

Leticia Lara: Your novel Children of Time has been published in Spain as Herederos del tiempo and in the future we will also see Spiderlight translated. What do you think about getting published in our country? Can you tell us something about the translation process?   

Adrian Tchaikovsky: I’m absolutely delighted that I’m now published in Spanish, and it’s especially nice to see Spiderlight get the attention. I visited Spain for the Celsius festival a few years back and was delighted by the enthusiasm and energy of the fantasy fans there, and I’ve been desperate to get into print in Spanish ever since.

LL: Recently, you have announced the beginning of your new career as a full-time writer. How did you manage to write so much while still working as a lawyer? Have you noticed any difference in the way you write now?

AT: I think my natural writing style tends to be fairly economical – I don’t do a lot of multiple drafts or re-writing, but try to get things as prepared as possible before I embark on a book, meaning, hopefully, I can use my time efficiently. I am also lucky enough to write well late in the evening.

LL: This year you are going to publish three books (that we know of…): Cage of Souls, Children of Ruin and Walking to Aldebaraan. (Seriously, when did you invent the time-travel machine?). Maybe the most waited-for is the sequel to Children of Time but... what can you tell us about the three of them?

So Children of Ruin is indeed the sequel to Children of Time, and picks up from the hook in the very last epilogue chapter of that book, with the expedition to another terraforming site. Cage of Souls is a very different book – and the write-up on Amazon that my editor provided is probably a better pitch for it than anything I could do, but it’s a book set in the far future when the world is simultaneously dying and erupting with new life. The hero is a political dissenter sent to a prison out in the hostile jungles, and from there he gets to watch his world fall apart. Plus lots of monsters and some duels and murders. Walking to Aldabaraan is a novella about an astronaut who is sent as part of a team to investigate a bizarre alien object out around the orbit of Pluto, and who gets lost inside its impossible interior, which defies time and space. He’s trying to get home but he’s beginning to understand that if he does, neither his home nor himself may be the same as they were.

LL: Some of your books have an audiobook version. For example, Guns of the Dawn was performed by the wonderful Emma Newman. What do you think about this way of reading?

AT: I have become a big fan of audiobooks myself, and I’ve been very lucky that everyone picked to read one of mine has done a really good job of it. Audiobooks for me are a great way to re-experience books that I’ve read on paper because the narrator’s voice adds so much additional context.

LL: Are spiders your “trademark” as a writer? They seem to appear in different ways in a lot of your books. 

AT: I am very fond of spiders, although I’m also fond of arthropods in general, plus octopuses, reptiles and just about anything else that most people don’t like. Spiders have proved to be a particularly useful tool to write about because, of all Creatures, they are probably the most despised by most people. Hence if you want shorthand for an outsider or something inhuman, spiders are a Good bet.

LL: In Spiderlight you take the preconceptions readers may have about the classic D&D partyRedemption's Blade the story starts at an unusual point: the Big Bad Guy has been already defeated and the characters try to find a sense of purpose. These are very far from what one usually expects about this genre. What are you trying to achieve by introducing these changes into a classic fantasy story?
and you twist them with the introduction of a wild card. In

AT: Well, first off, the regular way of telling epic fantasy stories – Good defeats evil in a big fight – has been done a lot, and the one thing I do feel I have to try for is originality. Hence I love fantasy stories, but I want to give them my own spin. Also traditional fantasy (at least the post-Tolkien wave of the 80’s and 90’s, say) had many Works that didn’t really examine the implications of the worlds they were setting up – characterising everything as Good or evil means that Good gets to slaughter evil without remorse, and in both Spiderlight and Redemption’s Blade I really wanted to deconstruct this genre tradition and challenge it a bit. 

LL: Dogs of War and Ironclads are two novellas set on a near future. Both present to the reader possible problems of warfare-applied technology. However, Children of Time is set in the far future, Earth is not a relevant scenario and the spotlight is shared between a ragtag assortment Humanity's leftovers and a brand new species and its evolutionary road. What kind of science fiction do you like the best to write? 

(NOTE: Dogs of War is a full novel, albeit a shorter one)

AT: Honestly it’s a matter of letting the key concept of the book dictate the setting. Children of Time could only be a far future book because the spider evolution needed time to work. Ironclads and Dogs of War are both very much about the Now – our attitudes to wealth and privilege, to class and service and to the immediate future of humanity, hence if they’d been set in the far future they wouldn’t have the same impact.

LL: You've written many different books besides the previously mentioned like Guns of the Dawn a sort of Pride, Prejudice and Women at War, the Echoes of the Fall trilogy and the very impressive Shadows of the Apt (10 novel plus short stories!). At this rate, you'll end up writing on every format and about every main topic in science fiction and fantasy. Why is your range that wide?

AT: Thus far, I have stayed very much within genre, and I like to stretch myself about that far. I don’t tend to write horror (although there are some sections of some of my books that go there, a Little), I have occasionally cast looks at neighbouring genres like historical or crime/thriller, but I’m not one to assume that shifting styles like that would be easy, and I know I’d need a proper period of acclimatisation before I tried it.

LL: Maybe it is not well-known that you are a frequent boardgame player. Do you think some of your stories could be taken as a basis for developing a game? Which kind of games are your favorites?

AT: I would absolutely love to see a board game (or any game) based on my work! I’m personally something of a Eurogame player a lot of the time, and I like games that generate an emergent story just from the way the rules and player choices interact.

LL: What can you tell us about your new projects?

AT: I have just sent my agent the manuscript for a book called “The Brain Garden” (although it could be called something quite different by the time it hits the shelves) which is a great big story about parallel timelines and evolution and a whole load of other stuff. There’s also a novella I’ve just finished which is partly about wizards and partly about mental health, which was interesting to try. I’m still searching around for a title for that one.

Leticia Lara interviews Max Gladstone

Max Gladstone's Last First Snow will be soon published in Spanish as La primera y última nieve. The wonderful Leticia Lara has interviewed the author and has kindly allowed us to reproduce here the English version of the interview. Hope you enjoy it (and remember that you can read the translation into Spanish at Fantástica Ficción).

Leticia Lara: We are very happy about the publication in Spain of Last First Snow. What do you think about publishing The Craft Sequence in chronological order? Can you tell us something about the translation process?   

Max Gladstone: The Craft Sequence is a story of people living in a world that’s just passed through a century of calamitous change. In this way, the main characters of the story are a lot like us—even though some of them are wizards, some are skeletons, and some are made of stone. I wanted to tell that story the way Terry Pratchett told a story of the Discworld—by moving between different perspectives, and highlighting how many different kinds of stories the world might hold. So, while I wrote the series out of chronological order, I meant for them to be read in an order the reader might choose. (Though there are some orders that might make a little more sense than others.) It’s exciting to see how the tale strikes readers who pick it up at (or close to) the “beginning”! Though as we all know, there are neither beginnings nor endings on the Wheel of Time…

I haven’t been heavily involved in the Spanish translation process, though I have been available to answer any questions people have raised.

LL: It is said the narrative in books and in videogames is very different. How did you manage to write not one but two videogames in the Craft Sequence?   

MG: With a bit of sweat and a lot of typing! Videogame narrative and traditional linear storytelling have a lot in common, to be honest. In each scene, you need to find out what the character wants, in response to external conditions. That choice shows you who the character is, and brings them into conflict with their surroundings in interesting ways. In linear narrative, the writer controls the character, and the reader’s free to speculate about what the characters’ choices mean—why did she kiss her friend, rather than hug her or slap her on the back? In an interactive story, you have to give the players opportunities to choose what they’ll do, and then follow through with what that choice might mean. Games might seem to offer free will, but it’s free will within specific bounds, and the designers have accounted for (most) of the possibilities. So, is the will free? That’s a question for theology, I suppose. I loved the challenge of letting readers forge their own place in the Craft Sequence. 

LL: What can you tell us about your collaboration with Amal El-Mohtar in This Is How You Lose the Time War? Did you write each part on your own or was it written in a more complex way?   

MG: The main characters of This Is How You Lose the Time War are Red and Blue, secret agents on opposite sides of a war in time. They’re enemies at first, fighting battles throughout history; they start writing letters to one another as a form of dare or taunt, but as their dangerous correspondence deepens they realize they have a great deal in common—both warriors in the depths of the war. Amal and I each wrote one of the characters, and their letters, the stories weaving together as we worked. For most of the writing we were right across a desk from one another. It was an electric process!

LL: Empress of Forever is coming out in 2019. It is described as science-fiction story, "a feminist Guardians of the Galaxy crossed with Star Wars". But my favorite part is when it is compared with Iain M. Banks books. Is it a tribute to his figure or is it a subtler influence in your writing?   

MG: I love Banks! I’m a huge fan of his work, and I find its central question, the big “what if we win,” endlessly fascinating. What would a culture (or Culture) look like if we got more or less what we wanted, a world without material constraint? What stories would we tell? How would it interact with the rest of the universe? I think Empress of Forever takes a darker spin on that—a vision of where the power and logic of posthumanity might lead—along with a lot of love and a lot of blowing things up. I wouldn’t say I sat down to write a Banksian novel—but my admiration for his work shines through. And there’s one major hat-tip, which I won’t spoil.

LL: Last time we talked, you were a writer beginning his career and now you have a lot of novels in your account (and short stories, novelettes...). Has your writing style changed? Do you find it easier to sit and write?   

MG: Well, on a certain level writing hasn’t changed—you still have to sit or stand at the keyboard and make the words happen in order. But I think my style has changed. I outline more, since I have to write faster and also since the consequences of getting things wrong have become more dire. I used to care less about months spent chasing narrative dead ends—but now I have deadlines and those deadlines have deadlines. I feel like I owe a certain level of consistency, so I try to play around beforehand, explore dead ends in the abstract, and then dive in to build a house I know will stand on a firm foundation.

Parts of writing are a lot easier. I know that when I get 2/3 of the way through the book, I’ll experience a stab of crushing despair. Happens every time. Knowing that, I can work my way out. But on the other hand, when I sit down to write a particular scene, I find myself haunted by other versions of that scene I’ve written before. Raw composition slows down as I spend more time figuring how to do it better this time, or differently. It’s a fun balancing act.

LL: Do you like going to literature festivals like Worldcons? What do you prefer to do in these places?   

I love big literature festivals. You have such a high quality of conversation there—people from all sorts of backgrounds, all walks of life, who share an interest in books. My ideal convention is just one big rolling conversation—seeing friends, hearing new positions, encountering new artists, and learning more about what brings people together.

LL: What can you tell us about your new projects?

MG: Nowhere near as much as I’d like. I think I’m allowed to say that I’m working on a big landing for the Craft Sequence—but beyond that, my lips are sealed.

Interview with Ada Palmer

Today I have the pleasure of teaming up with Leticia Lara, from Fantástica Ficción, to interview Ada Palmer, the author of two of the most fascinating novels I've read in a long while: Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders. Hope you enjoy the interview and remember that you can read the translation into Spanish at Leticia's blog!

Leticia Lara & Odo: When did you know you wanted to become a writer?

Ada Palmer: I wanted to write fantasy & science fiction novels ever since I was a tiny child.  All through school I worked on extra writing projects in my free time, and did writing courses over the summers whenever I could.  Writing is a skill which comes very slowly, only with practice—some skills like music and mathematics have prodigies, but others genuinely only come with years and years of practice, and I think writing is one of them.  Every word I wrote, whether essays for class, drafts of early stories that will never be published, poems for a poetry course, even e-mails if you work on crafting them well, everyone of them is a tiny step forward for a writer.

LL&O: Which authors have influenced you the most?

AP: My father has a big library of classic SF, so I grew up reading Alfred Bester, Heinlein, Asimov, William Tenn, and especially Gene Wolfe and Samuel R. Delany.  Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun became my model for how dense and real world building could feel, and how complex and intense a first person narrator could be. But I also read a lot of historical literature, so many influences on Terra Ignota come from outside F&SF: 18^th century literature like Voltaire and especially Diderot’s Jacques le Fatalist et son Maitre, and also Robert Graves’ I Claudius was a strong source, both for the narrative perspective and the way of looking at politics through family and dynastic relationships.

LL&O: Is there any current writer that you admire?

AP: Many, yes!  The two who still make me speechless with awe when they walk into a room are Gene Wolfe and Samuel R. Delany.  There are also authors I really admire for how they’ve both produced brilliant work but also used it to address important issues in the world and make real change, people like Ken Liu, Cory Doctorow, and Daniel José Older.  One of the great pleasures of beginning to publish has been getting to know so many great writers as friends, people like Jo Walton, Pamela Dean, and Susan Palwick.  And there are fantastic newer writers that I’m honored to be writing alongside, people like Malka Older, Ruthanna Emrys, Yoon Ha Lee, Charlie Jane Anders, and Max Gladstone.  I especially admire masters of short-form fiction, since I’ve always struggled with shorter form and find it immensely powerful.  Some of the most exciting to me are Ted Chang, John Chu, E Lily Yu, and Alyssa Wong, but there’s so much great short F&SF being written and published now, it feels like living in a fiction treasure trove.

LL&O: Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders have been published as two books but they feel like just one novel. Could you tell us a little bit about their writing and publication process?

AP: Guilty as charged.  I planned the series as two long books, and wrote what are now Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders as one book, but Tor decided to divide it up into four.  For the third and fourth books it works well, since I wrote them knowing they’d divide like that, but the first two were written as one thing, and had to be cut in half after the fact.  I did my best to make the first book give as much resolution as I could, showing the reader shape of what is going on, and bringing lots of threads together, but it was challenging rewriting it to end when so many themes and elements were mid-stream.  I think I did a pretty good job, but I do feel it’s imperfect, and that it’s best to read the first two books close together.  Books two and three both have fine endings to stop on, though.

LL&O: Both Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders are profoundly philosophical (and political) books. Do you think that science fiction is especially suitable for exploring this kind of topics?

AP: Yes, very much so.  Science fiction lets us explore other ways human societies could be set up, alternate kinds of politics and crisis, and it lets us preview kinds of moral dilemmas and moral decisions that advancing technology will cause before we actually get there.

LL&O: One of the questions you pose in Seven Surrenders is whether the end justifies the means. What do you think of mental experiments such as the “trolley problem” in which you have to decide if you “kill” one person to save five? Do you think that these philosophical issues will become more important in the future, for instance with the development of self-driving cars and all that?

AP: The trolly problem is delightful for debate, but happily the real world (and realistic fiction worlds) don’t correspond to it because we have the ability to change the situation over time, to gradually develop better trollies and safer walkways to prevent something like that from happening.  We have the ability to reject the terms of the process in the first place.  For example, one of the steps of the trolly problem is whether you would kill a person to harvest organs you could use to save the lives of five people—the real-world answer is that we are working together to develop artificial organs so everyone can live.  I’ve been following this with self-driving cars, and those who’ve been designing them expected to face the trolly problem, but have discovered that in actuality their simulations can’t design any realistic situations where endangering the driver is the only way to save others; in reality there are always multiple possible actions some of which are good for the driver too, and things which endanger the driver tend to be the same ones which endanger passers-by.  So in many ways the aspect of the trolly problem that the books look at—and which I think is more relevant to real life—is the question of whether or not you accept the status quo.  If trollies are killing a small number of people, does the society leave them that way considering these deaths and acceptable loss for the greater good, or does the society reject the terms of the trolly problem and dedicate itself to solving this so no one has to die?  The Utopians, for example, are dedicated to “disarming death” and whenever anything kills one of their members they put it on a list and keep working on improving the situation until it can’t recur—even if this requires large sacrifices, like using their own flying car network which is slower and thus is a bit of a drain on their economy compared to using the faster ones.  In many ways it’s a question about complacency, and about responsibility—whether society is content to continue sacrificing a few lives in order to enjoy peace and plenty, or whether the society refuses to accept that and continues to work to reduce the body count, even if it means the majority giving up a life of ease for a life of working harder.  To use a real world political example, a few years ago they did a poll in Canada asking if Canadian citizens would be willing to pay higher taxes to give people in the USA better healthcare, saving and improving lives (not Canadian lives, people in the USA).  The Canadians strongly answered “Yes.”  That is a society which rejects the terms of the trolly problem, preferring to work harder to help everyone instead of settling for “acceptable loss.”  The characters in Terra Ignota face a similar question, though with much higher stakes.

LL&O: Another philosophical issue at the root of your novels is what the natural state of people is. Do you think that we are born as “noble savages” or do you agree with Hobbes on this one?

AP: While I’m glad sciences is helping us learn more and more about what part nature plays in human character, studying history makes it very, very clear to me how completely different people are when raised in different ways and different societies.  Children’s brains are incredibly good at learning, absorbing, analyzing patterns, and repeating them, and children raised in different ways can have profoundly different values, world views, and fundamental human capacities.  A few of the characters involved in events in the book believe that humans are naturally bellicose and that violence will inevitably recur no matter what, but most of them don’t—most believe instead (much as I do) that humankind certainly has the capacity to achieve permanent peace, but that doing so will require a lot of cultural, political, and educational development.  That it’s not something we can achieve in a few decades—culture is too complicated, and we are too complicated.  But, just like with curing diseases, if we work at it, study ourselves, learn more, we can take steps toward it over time.  Humanity spent many centuries trying to develop medicines before we finally developed really effective ones like penicillin, but that doesn’t mean that we cured all diseases within a few decades of developing penicillin, nor does it mean that all the early doctors whose efforts didn’t bear fruit didn’t contribute anything.  Just so, some characters in Terra Ignota believe that, while humanity in their 25^th century has gotten very good at peace, we aren’t yet so good at it new outbreaks of violence aren’t possible—rather, like doctors armed with penicillin, they’re better at peace than any earlier age, but still have a lot more to learn.

LL&O: The world we see in Terra Ignota is, to paraphrase Le Guin, an ambiguous utopia. Do you think an actual, stable utopia is really attainable?  Or are social and political constructs always flawed in some way?

AP: Stable definitely not—we keep inventing, discovering, and expanding too much too fast.  Even if we somehow completely mastered all of science (which will take many centuries if it’ seven possible) we’d keep innovating in the realms of art and literature, which in turn stimulate social change.  But I do think society sometimes achieves improvements which would feel impossibly amazingly utopian if we showed them to earlier generations, though often at the same time generating accidental bad side-effects which we then need to remedy, and making other changes people from the past would find dystopian and frightening.  Let’s imagine showing 2017 to someone from 1767.  Our medical advances, our globe-crossing airplanes, our flawless industrial fabrics, our automated washing machines, our 80 year average life span, our greenhouses supplying fresh fruit in the dead of winter—all these would feel absolutely utopian.  Other changes, such as the fall of so many eternal-seeming empires, the transformed roles of women, new weapons, new diseases—these would seem alarming, uncomfortable, frightening, like something has gone wrong.  And certain continuities, such as the continuation of religious violence, famine, controversies over the use of torture, these would seem depressingly familiar.  I set out to create a 2454 which would feel like that: utopian in many ways, disorienting and uncomfortable in others, depressingly similar in others.  Because I think that’s very plausibly the kind of future we are going to make.  I don’t think the flaws and merits of the real 25^th century will be the same ones in my imagined 25^th century, but I do think there will be flaws as well as merits, much as I set out to depict.  Because when we talk about making a better future, we also have to accept that it won’t be in our control precisely what develops in that future, and while it will contain many things we wish for, it will contain a few we don’t.  And it will also keep changing.  Because it’s not a stable utopia—its a dynamic, changing, growing world.  The question is not “Is a perfect society possible?” it’s “When a pretty good society is confronted with its deep and toxic flaws, will it succeed in changing for the better?”

LL&O: The society of Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders has, apparently, given up discrimination for reasons of gender, sexual orientation, religion or political affiliation. However, sex, faith, and power are still strong driving forces. Do you think this kind of “urges” are at the root of all human behavior?

AP: Not unchangingly or permanently so.  Societies, people, brains, are all very complex, and right now complicated cultural attitudes toward gender, sex, race and religion are woven all through our society and passed on to our children in a thousand unconscious ways from early childhood.  These aren’t unchangeable or inherent parts of human nature, but they are facts of our current culture, ones we are still learning to understand and affect.  Thus I think that, while we’re making huge changes in them even now, realistically they’re going to continue to be parts of our society in ever-changing ways for several centuries to come, because they are so complicated it will take us that long to fully understand and change them.  The future of Terra Ignota looks at the question of whether progress on these axes might take a long time, and what might make it more or less successful over the next centuries.  For example, you will notice that, in the Terra Ignota universe, social progress on some of these axes has progressed a lot more than others.  Race relations between people of European and African descent, for example, are in great shape, while race relations between people of Europe and East Asian descent are tenser.  We see no evidence of any discrimination related to sexual orientation, but we do see (especially from the narrator) a lot of tension about gender.  And as we learn more about the society, we also encounter a pattern: the elements which have progressed less are the ones where the conversation has been partly or completely silenced.  For example, there’s a severe taboo on even mentioning gender, so gender tensions are not progressing much because without discourse, study, without talking about things, exploring, innovating, progress has stagnated.  But there’s no taboo on talking about sex or who’s having sex with whom, so there things have advanced.  One of my hopes is that people will come away from these books thinking about how destructive silence can be, how invaluable discourse is to progress.  Because sometimes you hear people say things like “Feminism has done what it set out to do, women have equal rights, we don’t need all this gender stuff anymore.”  Trying to shut the conversation down.  Whereas in fact we’re still in the infant days of truly liberating humanity from old rigid forms of gender, gender binaries, and gender inequality, so shutting down the conversation could lock us into a bad outcome, like Terra Ignota where very little progress has been made on gender in four centuries—four centuries of silence.

Interview with Caroline M. Yoachim

Caroline M. Yoachim is one of my favorite short fiction writers (I highly recommend her collection Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories), so it is a big pleasure for me to team up with Leticia Lara to interview the author. Hope you enjoy it and remember that you can read the interview translated into Spanish at Fantástica Ficción. 

Leticia Lara & Odo: When did you know you wanted to become a writer? Which authors have influenced you the most? Is there any current writer that you admire? 

Caroline M. Yoachim: I wrote fiction when I was a kid, but quit when I started college. Back then I thought writing wasn't something ordinary people did--I knew books were written by people, obviously, but I didn't know any authors, so I figured I probably couldn't do it. Several years later a friend of mine casually mentioned that he was writing a book, and it dawned on me that if he could do it, maybe I could, too!

I grew up reading a lot of classic science fiction--Asimov, Clarke, Niven. I loved the vast scale and the sense of wonder they evoked, but I never really saw myself in any of the stories. At some point I discovered Octavia Butler, who is one of my all-time favorite authors. I love her ideas and her characters.

I admire too many current writers to list them all, but a few of my favorites are: N.K. Jemisin, Ken Liu, Nalo Hopkinson, and Ted Chiang.

LL&O: Does your background in psychology help you with your writing? 

CMY: It does! I think the human mind is fascinating, and several of my story ideas are drawn from by background in Psychology. "Five Stages of Grief After the Alien Invasion" was inspired by the Kübler-Ross model, which was originally used to describe the emotions experienced by terminally ill patients. "Four Seasons in the Forest of Your Mind" incorporates detailed descriptions of neurons. I also have several stories that examine the nature of human identity-- what defines us as individuals and makes us who we are?

LL&O: Lots of your stories are about family and grieving. Has becoming a mother influenced your way of writing? 

CMY: Even before I had children, family and grieving were themes that showed up in my work. I like to explore the relationships between characters, and how those relationships change over time. Having a baby is the beginning of a new relationship, one that is initially very asymmetrical because infants begin with such a limited understanding of the world around them. But as people age, children often become caregivers for elderly parents. Dealing with the loss of a loved one is almost an extension of that focus on relationships--a way of looking at what happens when a relationship ends.

Having children didn't introduce those themes in my writing, but I do think that being a parent gives me a deeper understanding of the parent-child relationship, because I've seen it from both sides now.

LL&O: You seem quite fond of using special structures in your stories, such as the flashmash or the “choose-your-own-adventure” format. Could you explain what a flashmash is and how you use it in your work? Does writing in a particular format influence the way you create your work? Or does the topic you want to write about lead you to a particular format?

CMY: My natural tendency is to write stories that are very short: flash-length stories of around 750 words. One of the things I sometimes do to write longer stories is to write a series of interrelated flash stories, which I can then mash together into one longer story. The first flashmash story I wrote was "Five Stages of Grief After the Alien Invasion," which is a series of five flash stories, each one focusing on a different stage of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) told from the perspective of a different character.

When I'm writing a flashmash story, the structure usually comes first, and then I generate an idea to go with it. At one point I made a long list of things that I could use to divide a story into flashmash sections, many of which have since become stories: rock, paper, scissors; four seasons; five stages of grief; seven wonders of the world.

For most of my other stories, including my recent choose-your-own adventure story, the idea comes first and then I pick a structure that I think might suit the story I want to tell.

LL&O: In addition to writing, you also practice photography. Does seeing the world through the lens of a camera change your vision of the worlds you create (making them more visual, for instance)? Do you think that all arts are somehow related and that techniques can be borrowed techniques from one to another?

CMY: I think one of the reasons I'm so strongly drawn to photography is that I am not a visual person. The visual elements of my memories tend not to be particularly vivid or clear in my mind, and so photographs are sometimes a tool for me to recall the details that are not encoded in my memories. I'm not consciously aware of any ways that being a photographer influences my writing, but I don't have any way of knowing what my writing would look like if I didn't spend so much time looking through a camera lens. I've heard people say that short stories are like snapshots, and I definitely have a tendency to write things short.

I do think there are techniques that are similar between photography and writing. Perspective, for instance. A familiar subject viewed from an unusual perspective can work well in both a photograph and a story. Framing is important, too. What are the edges of your photograph/story--where does it start and end? How much of a photograph/story should the main subject fill and how much background should there be? 

LL&O: In many of your stories you explore the idea of identity and its relationship with our body, with our physical form, referring several times to philosophical problems such as the Theseus Paradox. Do you think that science fiction and fantasy are especially suitable for exploring this kind of questions?

CMY: The ship of Theseus is my favorite philosophical paradox. For anyone not familiar with the paradox, in its basic form it asks the question: If you have a ship and replace it, one board at a time, and all through these replacements it continues to sail, is it still the same ship? What if you take the boards you remove and build a second ship with those--which ship is the true ship of Theseus?

I like the paradox even when it involves ships, but where I think it gets really interesting is when you apply it to people. If you take someone and replace every one of their cells gradually over time, are they still the same person? What do we need to change about someone before we are forced to say "this is no longer the same person" or even "this is no longer a human"?

Science fiction and fantasy are well-suited to exploring these kinds of questions, because they allow me to transform my characters in a wide variety of ways. I've had sugar characters that dissolve and re-form, characters that transition from old bodies to new ones, characters that give up their bodies entirely. My goal is often to raise questions in the reader's mind, rather than to answer them. I hope my stories encourage people to think about what it is that makes us who we are.

LL&O: You write both science fiction and fantasy, and even some horror. Do you think that, nowadays, the frontiers between genres are blurring? Is there any genre that you feel more comfortable with?

CMY: I definitely think that the boundaries between the genres can be blurred. I sometimes play around with post-apocalyptic fantasy (which ends up being somewhere in between fantasy and science fiction), and some of my darker fantasy has a horror element. That said, I'm definitely more comfortable writing science fiction and fantasy than I am with writing horror. 

LL&O: You have written humoristic stories for anthologies such as Alex Shvartman’s UFOs, for instance. Is it difficult to combine humor and science fiction?  

For a long time I assumed that I couldn't write funny stories, but at some point Alex mentioned that some of the funniest stories he gets for his UFO anthology series have come from authors who didn't think they could write humor. So I decided to try my hand at it and submit a story for UFO3. Alex ended up accepting the story for the anthology, and since then I've written a handful of other humor stories.

Combining humor and science fiction was a lot easier than I expected, but only for a small subset of story topics--taxes, dissertation research, medical clinics. Overall I don't get very many ideas that lend themselves to humor, but I do enjoy writing them. 

LL&O: What are your opinions about the situation of women and POC in genre fiction? 

CMY: I tend to be a relatively optimistic person, and I'm encouraged by things that are currently happening in genre fiction. There are stories being published now that are told from a wide range of perspectives, and it is increasingly easy for people in marginalized groups to see themselves in stories, as protagonists and heroes.

I still see a tendency for white males to be the default, and everything else to be the exception. When people make reading lists, they tend not to be balanced. Reading lists that are all male authors will be labeled "top ten SF writers of all time," but a list with all female authors will generally be called "top ten women SF writers."

So overall I think we are making progress and moving in the right direction, but there is still work to do in embracing a more diverse range of characters and voices.

LL&O: Are social networks important for your relationships with other authors and with your readers?

CMY: Absolutely! Writing can be such a solitary endeavor, and social networks are a fantastic tool for connecting both with other writers and with readers. I am friends with authors around the world, and being able to stay connected with them online is immensely valuable to me. Things like fb and twitter also let me keep readers updated on what I'm working on. The main trick with social media is finding the right balance--I think it is good to spend some time there to stay connected with the online community, but if I spend too much time online I don't get as much writing done.

LL&O: What are you working on right now? Could you give us a sneak peek on your future projects? 

CMY: My fantasy story "Carnival Nine" will be out in Beneath Ceaseless Skies later this spring--of the short stories I wrote in 2016, this one is my favorite.

I've also been writing a lot of stories for anthologies recently. I have a few where the table of contents haven't been announced yet, but one that I can tell you about is that my story "Dreams as Fragile as Glass" will appear in The Sum of Us (http://laksamedia.com/the-sum-of-us-an-anthology-for-a-cause-2/), a charity anthology featuring stories about caregivers.

LL&O: Where can our readers learn more about you and your work?

CMY: I have a website: http://carolineyoachim.com and I'm also on twitter as @CarolineYoachim

LL&O: Any other thing you'd like to add? 

CMY: Thank you for inviting me to do an interview, these were fantastic questions!