Lightspeed Magazine - December 2016, page 23
As I progressed through my career, my style got harder and more spare. I was surprised reading some of those early stories that I had been that lyrical once, so yes, that was a surprise, since I haven’t looked at them in decades. But there were many of them I still like. Many of them I don’t like at all. And many that I wish I could go back and rewrite and edit because I might do it a little differently now.
You mention that you got more into hard science fiction as you wrote, and in the note for your story “Trinity” you say that when you wrote that story you hadn’t yet discovered how much fun it is to build on actual science to create fiction. I was wondering, was there a particular moment where you discovered how much fun it is?
I don’t think so. I only know that it was after Beggars in Spain. Although, I did research sleep a little bit in order to write that, because it’s about people who are genetically engineered to never need sleep. I didn’t research it way down to the molecular level—I was content with a couple of broad generalities and a few theories. So, it was post-that.
I think it was somewhere in the late ’90s or early 2000s that science began to genuinely catch my imagination. Maybe it was the human genome project. That was gearing up at that time. Since then I’ve tried to educate myself as much as I can. I’m not scientifically trained, and that has been a drawback. I have to read, I have to research, I have to pester experts to help me. I have to do all of those things in order to make my stories as believable as I can.
Right, so if there are other writers listening to this who aren’t scientifically trained, do you have any advice for them for how to go about doing that sort of scientific research?
I subscribe to Science News and to MIT Tech Journal and a couple of others that have science in a popular form for the laymen. When something catches my imagination, then I go online, and I research in areas that I trust. For instance, the CDC site. Places that are not strange. Because as you probably now, the Internet has a lot of strange stuff on it.
I will research and research and make notes, copious notes, until I have the idea of how the science is going to fit with the plot, and then I can proceed from there. If there are things that I can’t find, and that I need to have, there are some microbiologists that I can email and they will help me. For instance, I needed to know for one story how a virus can become airborne. I emailed one of the microbiologists, and she very, very helpfully sent me a long email and the kinds of changes that have to happen in the envelope protein of a virus in order for it to go transmissible by contact to transmissible by air. That kind of thing. So, if you don’t have a bunch of microbiologists already—I collect them like butterflies—you need to research even more carefully on acceptable sites. Also, books, but the problem with books is that by the time they’re in print they tend to be outdated. Science is moving so fast.
That was your story “Evolution,” right?
Yes.
Do you want to talk about that story?
That story was written in 1994, and I could see it coming, well, so could the whole scientific world, that we were running out of antibiotics that would work against microbes, pathogens that were mutating so fast. Bacteria can, under ideal circumstances, produce a new generation every twenty minutes. Obviously, we cannot do that, and right now it is getting to the point where it is becoming really scary, because there are not that very many new antibiotics in the research pipeline. The reason is that they are not profitable. They are not as profitable as other kinds of drugs like, for instance, Viagra and all of its spinoffs. So, pharmaceuticals are not invested as much in antibiotic research.
Most cases of infection from drug resistant staphylococcus aureus are contracted in hospitals. And we are getting to a point where many people don’t want to go to the hospital, especially for something that isn’t major, because the chances of picking up a pathogen there, a hospital-born pathogen, can sometimes be greater than the chances of actually getting help if it’s not for anything major. So, that’s what my story “Evolution” is centered on. That was 1994 and twenty years ago, and it is, alas, starting to become more and more true.
You mentioned that you got interested really in the hard science stuff from the human genome project, and this book has a double-helix on the cover. Biology is really a focus of your writing. What interests you so much about biology, and particularly the genetic engineering of humans, as a theme that shows up again and again?
Well, somebody said, and I can’t remember who, that there are three very small things that are shaping science and have been shaping science for the last hundred years. In physics it’s the atom and its subdivisions. In information technology, it’s the byte, and all of what that has led to in terms of computers and eventually AI. In biology, it is the gene.
Of those three, the gene is the one that really interests me. Physics seems very esoteric, which of course it is. I just read the very popular book Spooky Action at a Distance about quantum entanglement, and I have to say that if I understood a quarter of it, that was a lot. Also, computers completely baffle me, as you saw the trouble we had just getting Skype to work. I’m not good at that. But, biology is something that not only I can follow, but that really, really interests me because this is a chance for us to actually direct our own evolution and the evolution of other things on the planet, and I really don’t understand why anybody isn’t interested in this.
When I talk to young people, to colleges, and even occasionally high schools, I say, “Your generation is the one that is going to have to make these decisions about genetic engineering. What are we going to engineer? How much are we going to engineer? Who is going to control it if it can be controlled, which I’m not sure is true. With what consequences?” These are going to be political issues. They already are, but they’re going to be really major issues, and it’s important that the right information get out there, which alas, does not always happen.
Speaking of that, you mentioned your novel Beggars in Spain, which is one of your best known works. Do you want to say more about that story?
Beggars in Spain came about partly out of sheer jealousy. I need eight hours of sleep. Preferably eight and a half every night, or I get very cranky, and my mind doesn’t work right. I know people who manage to get by with four or five hours of sleep every night and function just fine, and I am enormously jealous. They get more life than I do. Jealousy was one of the things that fed into writing that story.
The other thing was a workshop I had attended for professionals. We were all critiquing each other’s manuscripts, and Bruce Sterling made a comment about one of mine, which was exactly true. He said, “I don’t believe your future society. I don’t believe it takes place on an alien planet. I don’t know who controls the resources. I don’t know who controls the power. I don’t know who is behind all of this. You haven’t shown me the underpinnings of the money and the power. You haven’t followed the money.” So, I went home from this workshop, and I licked my wounds for a couple of weeks, and then I thought, “Damn it. He’s right.” And I started to think about money and power.
The two things on money and power that shaped Beggars in Spain are Ursula le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed, in which power is shared. It’s an anarchist society. Money does not exist because private property does not exist. That’s at one end. The other end is Ayn Rand, whom I think was a dreadful writer, and whose ideas I don’t share, but her basic philosophy was that power and money belong to whoever, basically, can get them. Power should accrue to money and money should accrue to hard work and inventiveness, which is not always the case. And in her world, it does. Her world is everybody out for themselves. Ursula le Guin’s world is a total sharing, and that will eliminate violence. I didn’t believe either one of them.
So, the other thing that fed into Beggars in Spain was the question, what do I believe about money and power? What would an ideal society look like that is trying to deal with those issues along with genetic engineering? This seemed to be a large enough subject that it ended up a trilogy.
In the story you have this character, Kenzo Yagai, who has this influential philosophy. Could you talk a little bit about that philosophy?
That’s pure objectivism. Kenzo Yagai’s philosophy is pretty much pure Ayn Rand. I wanted to show that that doesn’t always work. It leaves too many people out. Ayn Rand was fine with that. Leave out everybody who doesn’t meet her criteria. I’m not fine with that. So, I wanted to talk about the people who are not naturally gifted. Who are not naturally in a position where they can create and become important titans of business. I wanted to talk about those people who are at the lower end of the franchise scale, which is Alice in Beggars in Spain. And the relationship between the two sisters, Leisha and Alice, is what drives the novella and part of what drives the novel.
Right, so you have these two sisters, one of whom, Alice, is not enhanced in any way, and the other sister, Leisha, who is genetically engineered to not need to sleep and so can accomplish a lot more than Alice can.
She’s also favored by her very wealthy father, which has a lot to do with it, as poor Alice is not.
You mentioned earlier that you thought the science in this was not as researched as you would do later, but I thought the science seemed pretty in-depth. I was just wondering how much artistic license you had taken with this idea that sleep is not really biologically necessary?
At the time I wrote it in 1994, there were theories that said that—although there were other theories, of course, that said the opposite. And I picked the theories I liked. In the twenty years since then, we have come to show that a lot more goes on during sleep than we thought. I don’t think you really could eliminate it. For one thing, we have found out that during sleep, certain toxins are flushed out of the brain, and they go down the Vagus nerve, all the way down, which connects to the gut, and eventually get flushed out of the body. We didn’t know that was going on in 1994. We did know that if you’re deprived of REM sleep, psychosis can set in. I sort of covered that in the book, but not at a molecular level. If I were writing that novel now, I think it would be a much different book. Although it would have the same plot spine, the details would be much different. But I’m not writing it now. I wrote it in 1992.
You mentioned that this conversation with Bruce Sterling kind of kicked off an important epiphany for you with this story, but at that point I think you’d been working on it for thirteen years or so, right?
I had not worked on the central economic question of Beggars in Spain, which is “what do the haves owe the have-nots?” That’s the question that Tony asks Leisha over and over, and that she’s trying to grapple with and come up with a philosophy of why the haves owe the have-nots things.
But the question of genetic engineering to not need to sleep, yes I had been working on that for thirteen years. The first story I wrote was completely dreadful, and it was rejected by everybody. Robert Silverberg rejected it twice because I hadn’t realized that he had changed editorial positions, and I sent him the manuscript at his new position, and he wrote back, “I didn’t like this the first time, and I still don’t like it.” Then I put that away, and I tried again several years later, and that story was so bad that I never even sent it out because even I could see it wasn’t working. But the idea was still there. It had been born of my jealousy of long sleepers, so that was still in there. I was still mulling it over, and eventually, thanks to Bruce’s comment, the right format to present it came to me. I wrote the novella in three weeks.
Wow, it’s just so striking to me that it’s such a successful story but it took so long to take its final form and to find success and that you stuck with it over all those years.
I don’t know if stuck with it is the right term because that implies that I was working on it continuously, which I certainly was not. I was kind of thinking about it way in the back of my mind, but writing many other books and many other stories that while I was writing them had my full commitment.
I just think for writers it’s encouraging to hear that just because a story is not working now doesn’t mean that you can’t come back to it in ten years and figure out what’s wrong with it.
Oh, that’s completely true. Yes.
One story I wanted to ask you about dealing with science fiction writers very directly is the story “Casey’s Empire.” Could you say a little bit about that?
“Casey’s Empire” was one of my early stories, and it too was written out of frustration. Now that I think about it, frustration is driving an awful lot of my stories. The frustration here was that I had begun to sell stories, but not all of them. I could not figure out why some of them were going and some of them were not. So “Casey’s Empire” is about a would-be science fiction writer who is trying very hard to figure out what makes stories work and what doesn’t make stories work while also trying to eke out a living and get a graduate degree in English. All of which I was trying to do at the same time. In some ways, it’s a personal story, although the things that happen to Casey never happened to me.
The other impetus for writing that was the game that Casey played as a child was one I actually used to play with friends: If a spaceship suddenly landed right in the back pasture, would you get on it and take a chance that it would never come back, or kill you, or would you just run away shrieking and go find the police? Some of us said we’d get on, and some of us said we wouldn’t. That game had stayed with me all of my life.
I think that writers use everything. They don’t always use it in as direct a form as I just described, but they use it. It drops into that deep well of unconscious, and it sort of crossbreeds with everything else that’s down there, and what is down there is everything you’ve ever experienced, everything you’ve ever read, everything you’ve ever seen on TV, everything you’ve ever talked to other people about, and it all ferments down there and comes out as something different.
I think that’s so interesting that you played that same game as a child, because the Casey character is somebody who is obsessed with science fiction from their earliest childhood and pursues it non-stop throughout his whole life. Is that what your trajectory was, or did you ever go away from that, or come back to it?
No, my trajectory was much different. To begin with, I didn’t even discover science fiction until I was fourteen. I grew up in the 1950s, so the reason for this could not exist today: The library was divided into a boys’ section and a girls’ section, and all of the science fiction was shelved in the boys’ section. All of the fantasy shelved in the girls’ section. And being very much a goody-goody who obeyed all of the rules, I never went over to the boys’ section. So I read a lot of fantasy. I read Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book and green book and blue book and plaid book of fairy tales. All of them. But I never saw any science fiction.
When I was fourteen, I had my first boyfriend, and I would go to his house after school. He was studying to be a concert pianist. He would practice on the piano, and I would hang adoringly over the piano. Well, I’m tone deaf. I can hang adoringly for maybe ten minutes. Then I would edge away to the bookshelves that were in the room, and I’d pull his father’s books off them, and among them was Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End. I started reading it. I’d never seen any science fiction before, and I was hooked. I was in love. And not with the pianist.
Did you know then that you wanted to be a writer, or did that come later?
No, I became a fourth-grade teacher, and that’s what I was. I didn’t start writing until I was nearly thirty. I was pregnant with my second child, at home, way out in the country. No car. Very few neighbors. I was going nuts. I started writing while the baby was napping to have something to do that didn’t involve Sesame Street. I didn’t take it seriously for a very long time.
But after a year, a story sold. After another year, another story sold. After a third year, another story sold. And then it began to pick up pace, and I got genuinely involved with it because by this time I was reading a lot of science fiction. But, you have to understand, I grew up in a very conservative, Italian-American family in the ’50s. Nobody ever thought a girl should be a writer or anything else. In fact, I thought all writers were dead when I was a kid. The writers who I was reading like Louisa May Alcott and Zane Grey, they were all dead. I honestly, as a little girl, did not realize that more writing was being produced. I thought it was sort of like oil: a finite commodity.
In one of the collection’s notes, you say that when you were first nominated for the Nebula Award you went to the convention, and it was like being in Heaven. That you just couldn’t believe how exciting that was.
It was! I had sold three stories before I realized that SFWA existed, that conventions existed, that fandom existed, that there was an entire universe out there that had to do with science fiction. I had just been reading it from the library and buying the magazines from the news stand and writing it in complete isolation. I had no idea. And then somebody gave me a copy of Locus, which used to do convention listings, but they don’t anymore, alas. And I went to one, and I was completely and totally hooked.
When in there did you do the master’s degree in English?
In my late twenties. I went back to school after I had my two small children, and I got a master’s degree in English and began teaching at the college level. Not tenure track, but as an adjunct, and then filling in for people who were going on sabbatical for six months or a year.
In the story “Casey’s Empire,” he’s kind of trying to pursue this career in academia, and all the academics that he encounters are so unsympathetic to science fiction that they can’t even bring themselves to say the words “science fiction.” It’s kind of funny.
That was much more the case then than it is now. I remember going to an academic conference at the college, and I was seated next to an eminent scholar, and I asked how literature courses were structured at his university, and he was very enthusiastic. He said, “We’re trying to repackage courses so that instead of being historical overviews, they are instead organized around a theme.” He said he was teaching a very successful course on the city in fiction, and he was looking at Dickens and a couple of other books that are centered in major cities, and how those affected the fiction, which was apparently a great success with the students. I said, “Oh, that’s really an interesting idea. Do you use any science fiction about future cities?” He said to me, “Oh, no, no, we try to use real books.” But I think that has changed a lot.
