Shaun’s Rambles 011: Michael R. Underwood (Interviewing the Fans)
What makes Mike Underwood tick? What did he read when he was a kid? What inspired him to become a member of QUEST and invade the Free Worlds of the Noble and Benevolent Multidimensional Imperium? I try to get to the bottom of some of these questions in an interview with the infamous figure! I hope you enjoy it! Some useful links: http://media.blubrry.com/shaunsrambles/archive.org/download/ShaunsRambles011InterviewingTheFansMikeUnderwood/ShaunsRambles011–InterviewingTheFans–MikeUnderwood.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Shaun’s Rambles 004: Interviewing the Fans — Paul Weimer
…in which I continue this podcast thing on my new website by talking to Paul Weimer about how he became an sf/f fan. In this episode: http://media.blubrry.com/shaunsrambles/ia801505.us.archive.org/9/items/ShaunsRambles004InterviewingTheFansPaulWeimer/ShaunsRambles004–InterviewingTheFans–PaulWeimer.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Week of Joy (Day Six): Heart of Fire by J. Damask (A Mini Interview)
J. Damask (a.k.a. Joyce Chng) was kind enough to answer a few questions about her new book, Heart of Fire, which hits digital shelves in September. The book comes from Masque Books, a digital-only division of Prime Books, a notable small press genre publisher (notable most recently for releasing the absolutely amazing Yoon Ha Lee collection, Conservation of Shadows — check out the Skiffy and Fanty interview here). In other words, Heart of Fire is sure to be damned good! Though you’ll have to wait for a little while, you should bookmark this page and remember to buy it in a couple months! Now for the mini interview: If you had to describe your novel to someone who doesn’t read a lot of genre fiction, how would you describe it? It is set in Singapore, has a lot of mythological animals and creatures and Singapore food. And oh yes, it has werewolves. What do you think makes fantasy such a compelling genre for so many readers? I think it’s compelling, because it allows readers to slip into other worlds. You know, make-believe world. It’s like Narnia! How would you say Heart of Fire fits in with the rest of your work? Does it share certain sensibilities or thematic concerns? It does, come to think of it. I tend to examine tropes of transformation and transfiguration, as well as motifs like family ties and relationships. To me, the family is central and it does appear in many of my stories. I often wonder if this is an Asian thing, to feature the family as an important motif/theme. As a Singaporean author writing in English, what would you say are your greatest challenges in terms of reaching audiences abroad (particularly in other English-speaking parts of the world — not just “the West,” mind you)? Authenticity? (Then again, what is authenticity?) I am Singaporean Chinese. So, I sometimes feel that people would want me to write in Mandarin Chinese (no, I couldn’t – and my last (and only) Mandarin spec fic story was written when I was a kid as a school composition). I think people want to see an “authentic” voice, so to speak. I think there are no such things as authentic voices. What one thing that you know now do you wish you’d known when you first started treating writing as a professional endeavor? That it couldn’t be a full-time job. That it won’t be easy for people from Southeast Asia? (Wait, that’s two things…) And, last, for a silly question: If you had to choose an animal to write your next book for you, which animal would you choose and why? A wolf. Because it’s cool. (But hey, it doesn’t have opposable thumbs…) —————————————————— About the Book: Jan Xu, wolf and pack leader, faces more dangers when she saves a foreign male wolf in love with one of her ancient enemies, a jiang shi, a Chinese vampire. Throw in a love-struck drake—and Jan finds her situation suddenly precarious, with her reputation and health at stake. How much is a wolf going to take when everything is out of control again and her world thrown into disarray? How is she going to navigate the complexities of Myriad politics while keeping her pack and family intact without losing her mind? The third book of the Jan Xu Adventures will see Jan Xu’s continual fight as pack leader, her clan’s Eye (seer) and mother of three young children. Her mettle, courage and love for her family will be tested to her utmost limits.
Week of Joy (Day Five): Neil Clarke and Upgraded: A Cyborg Anthology (Mini Interview) @kickstarter
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!
Week of Joy (Day Two): Rainbow Lights by Polenth Blake (A Mini Interview)
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!
An Interview w/ Maureen McHugh (Author of After the Apocalypse)
You can check out my review of After the Apocalypse here. Now for the interview: First things first: What initially drew you to writing, and why genre fiction in particular? I was drawn to writing because I loved to read, and when I was reading a story I really really loved, I hated for it to end. So to find the stuff I really really loved to read, I started thinking about writing it myself. It turned out that writing didn’t necessarily lead to making the stuff that I loved to read, because my best writing seems to be about the things I am most uncertain about. I write to find out what I think. It turns out that a lot of what I love to read and a lot of what I think about falls best into genre. A question I often ask myself, and others, is what drives people towards post-apocalyptic (or apocalyptic) fiction. Your collection is perhaps on the cusp between “a world crumbling” and “a world crumbled.” What do you think accounts for our fascination with catastrophe in its various forms? What about your fascination? I think there are a lot of reasons to be drawn to the apocalyptic. We are all headed towards a personal apocalypse in that we are all going to die. That’s a terrible thing to truly comprehend, and apocalyptic fiction is a way to rehearse our existential dread, so to speak. There’s the playground fun of destroying everything. There’s also the idea that if all the clutter was swept away us (insert ideology here) could rebuild it right. There is often something Utopian about the catastrophic. For me, there were a couple of stories, particularly “Useless Things” that were ways to explore my own fears. What if the infrastructure is buckling under the pressures of climate change? What if the poor are getting poorer? I have a strong sense that I may not behave well under that kind of stress. I don’t think of myself as very noble. Did you always have a sense that these stories, which were published in multiple magazines between 2007 and 2010, were going to revolve around the same theme, or did each story come into existence out of its own individual context? In other words, were you thinking these stories would deal with a semi-shared world when you wrote them, or was it an accident? No, not at all. I realized at some point that there was this metaphorical connection, and then I wrote a story (the title story, “After the Apocalypse”) to reflect that. But of course, many of the stories are not apocalyptic in the general sense at all. I don’t really believe in the sudden end of things. Not that it couldn’t happen. One big asteroid and there we are. But at an emotional level I am so much more familiar with the decline of things, the gradual slide into some different state. So even though I know that the world could end with a bang, my feeling is that most endings are like old age, the gradual loss of options, abilities, and choices. In an interview/conversation with David Moles at Small Beer Press, you said that “all of my apocalyptic stories are not of the people who become Mad Max, but they’re of the rest of us, you know.” It might be fair to say that the characters found in so much apocalyptic fiction are larger-than-life heroes, villains, or anti-heroes — people who exceed the realities of their situation in ways that almost seem unrealistic or too-perfectly-designed-for-the-screen. But you are, as you say, concerned with “the rest of us.” Who are “the rest of us?” Why write about them and not, say, the other kinds (Mad Max, etc.)? I guess because I have never felt that I was going to be able to hold my own in a battle between heroes. I have always been the person picked second-to-last for the team. I’m near-sighted. I like to read. None of my salient characteristics exactly suggest that I will be great at converting cars into stripped down dune buggies, building stills, lethally defending myself. I am really well adapted to be what I am—a middle class woman who sits at a desk. So what happens to me when the apocalypse comes? There’s a good chance, based on my life experience, that I’ll end up washing the dishes or something. Right before something eats me. Another aspect of that conversation I found illuminating was your acknowledgment of your weakness in the field of plot. Particularly, you mention that many of your stories which have plots are about things getting worse, rather than better. Do you think your admitted faults as a writer influenced how you approached the stories in this collection? Or did it evolve organically as you developed your characters? Most plots involve things getting worse, when you strip them to their barest essence. Each solution to a problem leads to a worse problem. I work best when I have a character and I think of an unstable situation—they react, I have a story. There are writers who are better at situations and the intricate construction of a series of interlocking events that move the characters through ever more complex situations. Me, I have to resist the impulse to have my characters just think about how bad things might get. One of the compelling aspects of your collection is the honest exploration of the indifference human beings sometimes show to one another, or to the situations surrounding them. In the case of After the Apocalypse, each story shows people surviving in a world where civilization has already unraveled, though without the absolute end-of-the-world-ness typified by the genre. An example of this indifference would be the protagonist of “The Naturalist,” who traps his fellow inmates in a kind of makeshift scientific experiment to do with the zombies who inhabit the city-prison. Could you talk about why you decided to approach this theme,