Neil Clarke, editor-in-chief at Clarkesworld, is currently running a wonderful Kickstarter campaign for an anthology called Upgraded.  Folks like Yoon Ha Lee, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and so on will contribute stories to the collection, and there will be an call for submissions to fill the remaining slots.  In short, this anthology will be wicked awesome!  Support the campaign if you can (stretch goals = awesome). I asked Neil if he would be so kind as to answer a few questions about the anthology, science fiction, and other related topics.  He was kind enough to oblige.  Here is my mini interview with him: As a long time reader and editor of genre fiction, what would you say continues to inspire you to read the stuff?  What keeps you coming back? For me, it’s a combination of the ideas and the escape. Science fiction and fantasy have made me think about things like no other genre has. I find that fascinating. Cyborgs, cybernetics, and other “cyberpunk” elements have been a huge part of science fiction for almost as long as the genre has existed.  Why do you think we are still fascinated by these things today?  Do you imagine that we will live in a fully transhuman world one day? I don’t know that we’ll see a fully transhuman world for some time, but it doesn’t take much of a stretch to believe that most of us will live to see some heavy-duty advances in cybernetics. While the technology in my device is fairly common, there are some incredible advances being made in brain-machine interfaces that make mine look like a primitive toy. One of the reasons cyborgs and cybernetics have endured is that they are a believable future that makes an amazing framework for a lot of social issues. Listen to some of the privacy concerns people have about Google Glass. Now, imagine the cybernetic equivalent built into your eyes and completely hidden. It just ramps it up to another level. What kind of privacy do you have with a device that connects to your mind? At what point do you cease to be human? Who will receive the benefits of this new technology? What if this was the only way you could regain your sight? How far are you willing to go? You suggest on your Kickstarter page that your recent health complications inspired you to put together this anthology, in part because, as you say, you’ve become cyborg yourself.  Aside from the obvious impact a health issue can have, how would you say your new cyborg nature, however small, has impacted your view of the world (however minutely)?  Has it made you think about fiction in different ways? I’m a cyborg by necessity, so it is hard to separate the health issues from my new status as a cyborg. The combined effect has given me a new perspective on life. A lot of things that used to bother me seem trivial and unimportant now. It’s a lot easier for me to let go of thing and overall, I think my quality of life has greatly improved. The only cyborg-related change is a newfound respect for magnetic fields… they can damage the box and the box is my friend. As for fiction, it’s made me realize what an important part of my life it has been. Professionally, it’s pushed me to try to make this a job that pays a living wage. Why shouldn’t we love what we do? I see a future in this. What are some of your favorite stories featuring cyborgs (in any media form)? After my defibrillator surgery, I asked friends on Facebook and Twitter to recommend some cyborg stories to help me pass the time. I read a lot of cyberpunk books in college, so I was already familiar with a lot of stories people suggested. I still have a fondness for Neuromancer by William Gibson and Mirrorshades edited by Bruce Sterling. As for TV, the Borg were always good for an interesting story and I have to give some credit to Neil Gaiman for breathing new life into the Cybermen. It’s about time they learned from the Borg and grew up. Nothing, however, will replace the first cyborg I encountered, The Six Million Dollar Man. Cheezy show, but doesn’t that make them perfect for kids and so much fun? And now for a silly question:  If you could replace one external part of your body with a cybernetic part (a toe, an arm, nose, etc.), what would you replace and why? I’m quite happy with what I have, but if I had to, I’d have to go with my hands.  Just think of all the improvements you could get as upgrades: faster typing, nut-cracker, paper airplane folding, speed dial, juggling, paper cuts prevention, chef-style vegetable cutting, not needing hot mitts… My wife tells me she would object. No deal, I guess. —————————————————– To find out more about Neil, check out his webpage.  You can also find him at Wyrm Publishing and Clarkesworld. Support Upgraded!

The lovely Polenth Blake was kind enough to join me during this Week of Joy to briefly talk about her writing and her collection, Rainbow Lights. Synopsis: A deep-sea robot tells stories in every colour, but no shade can describe meeting a giant squid.  Rainbow Lights is the first collection by science fiction and fantasy author Polenth Blake. Alien scorpions, vampire ice cream sellers and clockwork flies, try to find their place in worlds where being human is optional. These thirty-five stories and poems are a mixture of new pieces and work published in venues like Nature, Strange Horizons and ChiZine. What first inspired you to write genre fiction?  And why do you think genre fiction is such a potent form for storytelling? I grew up in a family of geeks, so science fiction and fantasy were my bedtime stories. Reality is subjective, but realistic fiction often doesn’t acknowledge that. It’s written as though what’s real and what isn’t is a concrete division. Speculative fiction has room for playing for those perceptions. Who are some of your biggest literary influences? Anne McCaffrey and Isaac Asimov were among the first authors I read. The stories that particularly stood out to me were McCaffrey’s brain ship series and Asimov’s robot stories. I recognise the problems with the stories now that I’m older, but the general themes still interest me. The whimsy of E. Nesbit and Lewis Carroll’s work always appealed to me. Whimsical stories are often dismissed as not being serious enough, as though everything in the world is completely serious all the time. In my world, sometimes life is whimsical, and my stories reflect that too. More recent influences are Nnedi Okorafor and Shweta Narayan. Their stories have a lot of layers, which is something I hope to improve on in my own work. What is the weirdest story in your collection?  How did you come up with the idea behind it? It’s always hard to judge what’s weird to other people, but even my family thought “Incident in Aisle Five” was odd. It’s set in a giant supermarket, which the people inside think is the whole world. Their culture revolves around the different departments and the division between shoppers and shelfstackers. My family doesn’t have a car, so I spend a lot of time in the local supermarket. It isn’t my whole world, but sometimes it seems like everything revolves around when I have to go shopping next. I noticed on your website that the title for your book appears to originate from a Word Cloud. Can you talk about how you structured your collection along color lines and how you decided the name? The word cloud came after the book, but I had noticed a lot of my stories mentioned colour. I’m sensitive to colours, and often differentiate between colours others see as the same shade, so colour is important to me. It meant splitting the stories into colours was remarkably easy, as the divisions were there waiting to be found. Rainbow Lights comes from the first story in the collection, as the robot has a fascination with the colour of her own lights. As well as tying the colour theme together, rainbows have other symbolism, such as representing diversity. I write about the people around me, and there are all sorts of people around me. If there is one thing about writing that you wish you’d known when you first started taking it seriously, what would it be? I did quite a bit of research before I started, so I generally had a good feel for things. What delayed me from starting in the first place was the idea that writers start out with natural talent. I’d always struggled with writing and I’m dyslexic, so I wasn’t winning writing contests as a child. I didn’t think it’d ever be a career option. So I wish I’d known that being a child prodigy wasn’t required. And lastly, a silly question:  Do you really own pet cockroaches?  If so, why? After the family cat died, I missed having a pet. I’ve always loved invertebrates, and when I saw hissing cockroaches, I was taken with them. Hissers are clean, easy to look after, don’t bite and don’t mind the fact my room is in perpetual darkness. My current cockroach is Gem, though I plan on getting a few more soon (they’re relatively short-lived, so I’ve taken to keeping my bio in the plural, as numbers change faster than the stories come out). Gem is adventurous and is the only cockroach I’ve had escape. She travelled across my room, climbed the curtain, and fell off (falling a few meters). She survived all this with only slight damage to one antenna. Cockroaches are fun. ——————————————————— To learn about Polenth Blake and her fiction, head on over to her website!