“To minds that crave binary order, and the simplicity of the male-female dichotomy, the study of gender can lead to despair. They say that women with Y chromosomes and men with two X’s are abnormal. But normal is just a word that gets thrown around when we try to make sense of biology.”
-Scott Fotheringham – The Rest is Silence (Goose Lane Editions, 2012)
A review of Peter Watts’ Blindsight (Tor, 2006)
By Derek Newman-Stille
Cover photo courtesy of http://us.macmillan.com/blindsight/PeterWatts
Life itself is strange, odd, and unordinary. We try to create ideas of normalcy to impose order on the world around us and end up limiting our perception and understanding of that world. We categorise, we cut things that we don’t think should belong, and we butcher reality to make it somehow easier for us to understand. In Blindsight, Peter Watts challenges ideas of normalcy, warps our understanding and questions the privilege we give to certain bodies, certain modes of interpreting and thinking, and the limitations we impose on categories around us.
Watts presents us with truly alien aliens, not stereotypes of Earth civilisations with miniscule differences in behaviour and appearance. He explores what a diverse universe could be like – so different from human understanding that their biology defies our understanding and the aliens themselves see our cultural modes of behaviour as almost viral, as so foreign that we can’t be anything but a threat. He questions our privileging of self awareness, consciousness, and our assumption that this is necessary for intelligent thought.
Instead of presenting the dichotomy of “normal” people facing the “abnormal” alien, Watts assembles a group of human outsiders, because who is better suited to understand the alien than those who have been alienated on our world? People embedded in and performing ideas of normalcy would be too invested in seeing that normalcy to really understand the experience of the “other”. The crew of the exploratory ship Theseus is made up of a man who has been partially lobotomised as a way of “correcting” his seizures and has lost the ability to really empathise, a woman with compartmentalised consciousnesses, a group mind that we would have labelled “Multiple Personality Disorder” (but is recognised in the future as a form of multiple intelligences), two men who are spliced with technological prosthetics allowing them an expanded view of the world and an interrelationship with a mechanical sensory network, and… a vampire, a figure from human history who was extinct but was brought back to existence through bio-technology and has a sensory and interpretive framework so different that he sees things that human beings could not, and yet is harmed by images like the cross because of the intersection of 90 degree angles. These characters are so completely different than the human “base norm” that they require interpreters to relay the complexity of their speech and behavioural patterns to the general public, a majority that cannot understand them and is content in their lack of understanding.
Siri, the interpreter, trained to be separate from the events occurring and to present a non-biased interpretation/translation of the behaviour of his colleagues for the majority back on Earth, is himself an outsider, and this leads to his ability to interpret since he sees all of humanity (including those who would consider themselves “normal”) to be foreign and difficult to understand. He serves as the gateway between his crew of outsiders and the people back at home, waiting from some insights into the aliens that the crew is seeking to encounter. His sociopathic characteristics mean that he is able to look at the people around him with an outsider’s understanding, lacking empathy and the ability to collude or feel akin to those around him. He sees himself as a vessel of translation facilitating communication between his crew of outsiders that seem foreign to him and a foreign and odd humanity that although considering themselves “normal” are equally odd to him.
The crew of the Theseus has been sent to find out about a new alien life form that has disrupted the human notion that we are probably alone in the universe. These beings, encountered for the first time when they showed up in our atmosphere and photographed the Earth, present a puzzle to humanity, and, of course, are considered a potential threat. When the Theseus first encounters the alien ship, it calls itself Rorschach, reminding the reader of Rorschach blots used in psychological procedures to allow the patient to project their understanding onto the image in order to get at a greater understanding of the patient, their motivations, and their understanding of the world. Watts points out that this is precisely what we do with the image of the alien, we project our own understandings onto it, our own insecurities, our own ideas, and ultimately shape aliens in ways that reveal more about us, the viewers, than they do about the alien itself. Rorschach becomes a vessel for all of the projections of the crew’s understanding of the world. It’s foreignness, and the foreignness of the “Scramblers” that occupy the inside of Rorschach become a way for the crew to debate the nature of human consciousness, ideas of normalcy, and the privilege we place on our modes of interpretation.
You can explore more of Peter Watt’s work at his website http://www.rifters.com/real/author.htm . To find out more about Blindsight, visit Tor’s website at http://us.macmillan.com/blindsight/PeterWatts
An editorial on Science and Speculative Fiction By Derek Newman-Stille
Although as a society, we often create an impenetrable barrier between the arts and sciences, seeing each as separate and distinct from one another, these barriers are historically created and are social inventions. The origin of science is through philosophy, remember. Science Fiction (or more widely, Speculative Fiction) is one of the arenas where there are still obvious bridges between the arts and sciences – being a production of artistic endeavor, but also dealing with ideas coming out of technology and sciences.
Several Canadian SF authors including Julie Czerneda, Scott Fotheringham, and Nina Munteanu have operated in the field of science, noticing the opportunity that SF provides to explore critical questions around science. Czerneda has even used science fiction as a mechanism for teaching students about science, allowing them to play out scientific ideas in a science fictional setting.
SF allows authors to explore the social implications of science, the social contexts and ideological underpinnings that accompany scientific endeavors. SF explores the social ramifications of scientific ideas and developments, exploring what could happen, where things could go, what social issues could develop in correspondence with technological invention, seeing the sociocultural aspect of science rather than viewing scientific ideology as separate from the social sphere and divorced from its ideological implications. SF can provide a critical lens to scientific pursuits, providing writers and readers the opportunity to insert the deeper questions into scientific explorations: asking “Why?”, “What happens if…?”, and “What could come from this?”.
So often, scientists are wrapped up in the act of invention, in the process of discovery, that they ignore what the implications of their research could be, how it could be used (and for whom), and how it could be made to serve purposes for which it was not intended. The research for research’s sake mentality sometimes cultivates an ideology that ignores social implications. SF can provide social warnings about where things could go, bringing ideas back into the world and seeing how they could play out within a political, societal sphere.
SF often displays scientific ideas magnified, extremified, exaggerated to illustrate possible implications, highlighting the dangers as well as the potentialities that could be embodied in the process of discovery, and the hazardous places that society could take scientific invention to. SF can be a place to explore moral issues in relation to technology – what are the implications of invention? How will inventions shift our consciousness and the way we view the world? Will we still capture what is fundamentally human if we switch our basic behaviours, our patterns of thought, or even our bodies themselves?
Writers can use SF as a medium for exploring whether the social or the technological will be a greater mechanism of change. Scott Fotheringham’s The Rest is Silence explores whether social change or technological change will be the thing that will deter the destruction of our natural environment and deal with the development of pollutants. Will we be able to shift our way of thinking about the world to be more ecologically safe, or will we once again try to rely on a technological invention to solve our problems?
SF can illustrate the limits of science to repair our social problems. We tend, as a society, to put a lot of faith in the idea that science will solve our problems, whether they be environmental (as illustrated by our trend to introduce new species into ecosystems as an attempt to control those ecosystems) or medical (believing that the medical profession can solve our bodily ills).We often take science as a given solution, as an ideology founded in concepts of “Truth”, rather than a set of theories that is open to challenge and is historically contingent (formed from a specific line of thought that has developed over time). SF provides a space to question the unquestioned authority of science and our social belief that science can solve our world’s ills.
One of the fora of scientific exploration that SF has been doing a great job of critiquing is the field of medicine, and, particularly, the ideologies that are created from viewing the body mechanically (as something that can be fixed through forced normalisation). One of the areas that is most affected by the medicalised ‘normalcy’ forced on bodies is the area of diverse bodies, and people with disabilities, who are often subjected to painful procedures in an attempt to normalise their bodies rather than shifting social ideologies to allow for more diversity and more accessible spaces for diverse bodies. Leah Bobet does a great job of critiquing the medicalised body in her YA novel Above, where she presents readers with a group of individuals who are mutated or bodily different in certain ways (either with crab arms, the ability to transform into a bee, lion feet, or the ability to speak to ghosts) who have escaped from medical facilities that broke their feet, cut off their arms, and subjected them to harsh medical drugs in order to force their bodies to resemble the human ‘norms’. These people created a community called “Safe”, a place of safety away from the “Whitecoats” (doctors, scientists, psychiatrists, and other medical practitioners). The ideas of healing used by the Whitecoats were shaped by the idea that only certain bodies are normal, and any others are threatening and would be changed (even in painful and destructive ways) to represent that norm.
Camille Alexa, in her short story “All Them Pretty Babies” (from OnSpec Vol 24, No 3) takes this idea even further, presenting a future in which the population is limited, and yet, the society that is fighting for its own survival is still willing to cast out those who are bodily different, those mutations that threaten ideas of the normal. Scientists cast bodies out into areas of intense radiation while they try to preserve their ideas of what is and should be human, allowing anyone who deviates from that idea of humanity to rot in radioactive woods.
In Sparkle Hayter’s naked brunch, a doctor tries to medicalise the werewolf. Rather than accepting it as a figure of legend, he ascribes a disease to this different body: “Lycanthropoic Metamorphic Disorder”. He treats these medically diverse bodies as threatening, trying to force the werewolves to pass as human, subjecting them to harsh treatments that lead to chemical addictions and often death in an attempt to have them be more like ‘normal’, ‘regular’ human beings. He and his society deny the possibility that diverse bodies are useful and even necessary in a social system, that this diversity can be healthy.
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake illustrates the extremes of danger that could be involved in the economicisation of medical technology. Her future is one in which pharmaceutical companies have solved all of the medical problems, but periodically release viral epidemics to spur the social need to buy more advanced cures and spend more money on medical advances to fuel the pharmaceutical industry. She shadows the issues we see in our society now where a great deal is medically possible, but the access to that medical technology is often restricted by wealth, and where often research is focussed on treatment (which is a greater long term investment) than on cures.
Canadian SF can also point out our reliance on technology. Joseph Macchiusi’s The Betelgeuse Oracle shows a world after the release of a massive EM pulse and the challenges of a world without technology. Urban spaces become deserts cut off from the modes of production, and characters have to adapt to a world that is different from the one that suffused their existence since birth. One character is so dependent on his connection to technology and particularly to communications technology and the need to be connected that he carries his dead cell phone everywhere with him and spends precious moments alternating batteries to try to re-activate it. Scott Fotheringham’s The Rest is Silence illustrates the world’s reliance on plastic and the social breakdowns that occur when plastic is removed from our society.
One of the issues with science is that it often limits things into easy (and uncritical) categories (such as binary notions of gender), and good Canadian SF complicates these theories, disrupts this boundaries and categories and shows the complexity of the issues involved. It questions the foundations of categorization altogether.
SF doesn’t just critique scientific endeavours, SF also provides the opportunity for creative thought. So often people become limited in their outlook, navel-gazing within their own field and looking only at what is currently possible instead of what is impossible. Often it is in the sphere of the impossible where new ideas are found, new visions of things, and new ways of considering things outside of what is ‘normal’. Reading and writing SF allows for the development of insights into the impossible, the places of new innovation and new ways of thinking about the world.
SF explores the “what ifs” that are the foundation of scientific hypothesis building.
Science and SF can provide a powerful conversation with each other, changing, questioning, and challenging each other.
Here are some points that SF authors have raised about Science in their Interviews on Speculating Canada:
SCOTT FOTHERINGHAM
(https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/interview-with-scott-fotheringham/ )
Scott Fotheringham: I wanted to use what I had learned of biology to perform a thought experiment: What would happen if plastic began to disappear? Because
Author photo courtesy of Scott Fotheringham
that probably won’t happen because we choose to make it happen, I wondered if organisms could digest plastic.
Scott Fotheringham: “much of science is goal-driven or product-driven. Scientists create things that are worth a lot of money but have little social value or actually harm us.”
Scott Fothertingham: “The questions I’d like to see asked – particularly by the scientists themselves – are, What value does the work I’m doing have to society? How will this be used and, if it has potential for harm, should we pursue the research at all? So often scientists shrug their shoulders and say it’s not up to them how their inventions and discoveries are employed. This is a grievous abdication of their responsibility.”
Scott Fotheringham: “Right now our intention is to use technology to make money. Only if that changes will we able to work to heal what we’ve wrought.”
Scott Fotheringham: “Reading gives us insight into how other people view the world. If all I had was my experience, and that didn’t include reading, my view of how the world works would be narrower than it is.“
JULIE CZERNEDA
(https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/interview-with-julie-czerneda/ )
Julie Czerneda: “From the beginning, to me, biology and science fiction differed in degree, not substance. Biology filled me with wonder and curiosity. All science
Photo of Julie Czerneda by Roger Czerneda
does. The universe does. Reading science fiction did that. Writing it? Ah, there was the legal, moral, and fun way to answer my own questions.”
Julie Czerneda: “what I write, the stories I tell, come from what interests me. So there are cool real bits of biology everywhere in my stuff. I couldn’t make up the weirdness of real life.”
Julie Czerneda: “Because nothing lives in isolation, an ecological approach gives a writer the opportunity to fit the puzzle together. To have alternative points of view and unintended consequences. All the intricate and messy ways things happen.”
Julie Czerneda: “The more the merrier! Or, in the case of living things, the more stable and resilient the community. It’s interactions that interest me. The interface between any two or more creatures is full of change and adaptation and lovely icky bits. In storytelling — and real life — I’d rather toss a problem at a group of people (or whatever I have in mind at the moment) who’ll each have a different approach to a solution, if they see it as a problem at all.”
Julie Czerneda: “I believe, passionately, that science fictional thinking is a crucial survival skill. We all need to ask questions, to speculate about possible consequences in an imaginative, yet as close to real fashion as possible, and to become able to assess incoming information in a critical, not cynical manner. Imagination is of immense use, too often undervalued. We who live and breath SF rarely appreciate what a strong and active muscle our minds have developed. I’d like everyone to have the same advantage. To ride society’s changes, rather than be swept away. To decide where and how technology best fits our needs, before it’s in our homes.”
Julie Czerneda: “I’ve had success using science fiction with students to get them “talking science.” SF provides useful vocabulary, presented in context. Story dialogue gives examples of conversations centred about science as something immediately important to the characters.“
Julie Czerneda: “I’ve also worked with a professor who, for many years now, has used science fiction as an integral part of his first year astronomy course. Students take what they’ve learned about the science and apply it to alien world-building as an SF writer would do it. I’m proud to say this class has been using Beholder’s Eye (my second novel) as part of this process.”
Julie Czerneda: “We need people who can bring science to life, who can clearly express complex ideas in meaningful ways to a varied audience. SF? Does it all the time.”
Julie Czerneda: “What we can’t imagine, we can’t create, so there’s one. What we can’t imagine, we can’t prepare against or for, so that’s another. Imagination is essential to our survival, as individuals and as a species, and has been for eons. The sad thing is that it can atrophy from lack of use or be stunted by those who’ve lost their own. The best? The more it’s used, the stronger it becomes.”
Julie Czerneda: “What technology is to science, I suspect curiosity is to imagination.”
Julie Czerneda: “I take pleasure and pride in what makes science fiction a speculation about the real world, by asking that one “what if …” then building a story framework that lets me play with an answer, while keeping as much of what we know factual and true to life. I’ve no problem inviting a reader to play along with FTL and aliens, but I won’t mess with anything more and there’s always a science question at the heart of my plot. What if life evolved this way or that? How might biological imperatives affect technological civilizations? Who might we become in the future? What cost is too high or risk too great, when manipulating genetics? I love how science fiction gives me insight into these and any other questions I might have.
KARL SCHROEDER
(https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2013/01/23/interview-with-karl-schroeder/ )
Karl Schroeder: “We spend much of our lives programming ourselves to react automatically rather than to think. It’s faster, costs less energy. Part of that process involves the ossification of our basic categories: man/woman, human/nonhuman. SF deliberately blurs these categories in order to almost literally wake us up. It’s strangemaking, which is a very valuable capacity, especially in the present situation when the world needs innovative new solutions to some pretty dire problems. It’s not that SF presents, or even can present, the solutions to big issues like global warming or global poverty; it’s that it helps educate us in the kind of thinking that can lead to them.”
Karl Schroeder: “Realism, in literature, painting, and science, is just the rule of the lowest common denominator. It’s not actually a successful stance in science, for instance; strictly realist approaches to quantum mechanics fall into paradox pretty quickly. Realism achieves some stability in understanding the world by simply discarding 99% of all the available data (whether that be measurements, opinions, or political stances). That’s what the muggles do in the Harry Potter stories… They only think about, and therefore can only see, those things they’ve decided are ‘real.’ What’s that saying? “If all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” That’s muggle thinking.”
Karl Schroeder: “There’s lots of technologies that are flashy, or might have this or that big effect on the world. Nuclear fusion, augmented reality, nanotech… yeah, they’re all great. But we don’t need them. There’s only one development that we need at this point in our history: better methods and systems for decision-making, both individual and collective.”
Karl Schroeder: “We have all the technologies—all the tools and capabilities and understandings—to create a Utopia on Earth now. We can absolutely solve the problem of global warming, for instance; we even know how to reverse it with technologies we currently possess. What’s become abundantly clear in the past couple of decades is that the only thing we lack is the ability to make, and follow-through on, the right decisions. So much of my work right now is dedicated to asking what we need to do to get to such capabilities.”
Karl Schroeder: “Do you imagine or write a future where anything is possible except the invention of prostheses to compensate for the inadequacies of human decision-making? Does your worldbuilding encompass universes with star flight, robots and nanotech—yet accept royalty, corporations and bureaucracies as inevitable?”
NINA MUNTEANU
(https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/interview-with-nina-munteanu/ )
Nina Munteanu: “The literature of the fantastic: speculative literature, science fiction, fantasy… explore—nay—celebrate and bridge the gap between logic and
Author photo courtesy of Nina Munteanu
imagination, the mundane and the extraordinary, the known and the strange, order and infinite possibility.”
Nina Munteanu: “Speculative fiction predicts consequence to current conditions. It projects into the future or alternate reality from current paradigms in science, technology and society. Speculative fiction uses the premise, “What if?”: “What if this continued?” “What if we used that this way?”; “What if this caused that?”. It provides the proverbial “canary in the mine” on society. Where realist fiction makes commentary on our current society, speculative fiction takes that commentary into the realm of consequence by showing it to us in living colour. It is the ghost of future, present and past to our Scrooge. The arm of speculative fiction reaches far. This is its power over realist fiction and why, I think, mainstream realist authors like Margaret Atwood have discovered and embraced this genre (her latest three books are all speculative fiction). Speculative fiction doesn’t just “tell us”; it can “show us”.”
Nina Munteanu: “Both ecology and science fiction explore consequence in a big way.”
Nina Munteanu: “My ecological interests and experiences have influenced my writing in every way: in providing me with ideas, in world-building, and in the interactive fractal nature of plot, theme, character and premise. For me, the two are intertwined. Writing science fiction has opened the doors of creative problem solving in my scientific pursuits; and my science has opened windows of possibilities in my writing. It’s a win-win situation, really.”
Nina Munteanu: “Most science and technology presents itself in literature through premise or plot, which influence various characters in their life journeys. Ecology—like setting—manifests and integrates itself more in theme. This is because, while most of the hard sciences study the nature and behavior of “phenomena”, ecology studies the consequences of the relationship of these phenomena and the impact of their behaviors on each other and the rest of the “world”.”
Nina Munteanu: “Environmental issues are largely a global phenomenon—concerns like water quality and quantity, air pollution, resource acquisition, allocation and sharing, wildlife extinction, etc. Science fiction is the literature of consequence that explores large issues faced by humankind; it can provide an important vehicle in raising environmental awareness. Literature in general has always served as a cultural reporter on themes important to humanity….The science fiction genre—and speculative fiction particularly—explores premise based on current scientific and technological paradigms. What if we kept doing this?…What if that went on unchecked?… What if we decided to end this?… These are conveyed through the various predictive visions from cautionary tales (e.g., Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake”) to dystopias (e.g., Huxley’s “Brave New World”).
JEROME STUEART
(https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/interview-with-jerome-stueart/ )
Jerome Stueart: “Speculation is about seeing natural consequences, about thinking about choices and figuring out where they will lead, and about large-scale
Author photo courtesy of Jerome Stueart
societal consequences. I think speculative fiction is the reason we don’t condone cloning, or have nuclear war—science fiction showed us that there are no good ways of having those, and we believed them.”
Jerome Stueart: ““I would put MORE speculative literature in the classroom…. I would teach kids to imagine their own futures—what will they be doing 20 years from now, and what will society be like. What do they WANT society to be like? And where do they see the forces in control trying to lead us? Kids can be taught to think speculatively and use it wisely. “
Jerome Stueart: “I think SF can help us get ready for change, and see change as positive and desirable. We get in our ruts. If we want the Star Trek universe—we’re gonna have to work for it. LOL. But I think it can examine multiple paths for us—examining all possible scenarios and showing us a positive path.
Jerome Stueart: “Maybe that’s the greatest strength of SF—it has a wide angled lens. SF is about commenting on societal problems more than character problems. Maybe that’s why the characters can be more universal, and sometimes flatter, because SF is interested in the “what if” of the story—the what if of the society. It can handle a universal character because the society is what we want to examine in SF, and the choices a society makes.”
Jerome Stueart: “I think the current problems with getting the world to understand climate change is directly related to an inability to speculate—or see the future from the evidence you have. Society has equipped scientists to extrapolate from their research, but we don’t take their recommendations because we don’t trust science anymore, or intelligence. Unless the majority of the population respects knowledge, has a healthy speculative mind, they can’t see consequences.”
DOUGLAS SMITH
(https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/interview-with-douglas-smith/ )
Douglas Smith: “That’s the power of SF and fantasy (and I’d put SF as a specific subset of fantasy)–there are fewer (no?) limitations to the types of stories that I 
can tell.”
Douglas Smith: “If there is a social issue that a writer wishes to explore and bring attention to, speculative fiction provides the freedom through its “distorted mirror” to let a writer bring whatever focus they desire to that issue.”
An Interview with Scott Fotheringham
Author photo courtesy of Scott Fotheringha
By Derek Newman-Stille
This was a great interview to follow up with our interview of Julie Czerneda since Scott Fotheringham also has a background in biology and has experienced both the worlds of science and Canadian fiction authorship. I have been pondering the relationship between speculative fiction writing and science for some time, and have enjoyed this opportunity to talk with authors whose fiction broaches the speculative.
Spec Can: You were a molecular biologist before becoming an SF author. What was the transition like? How do you straddle the worlds between academia and fiction authorship?
Scott Fotheringham: It seems like such a long time ago that I was a research scientist. I’ve done a lot of things since then that had little to do with science. I have learned to cook at restaurants and for large groups, I worked as an organic gardener, I spent five years working in the mental health field in Halifax, and now I do PR for arts and technology companies.
The transition was clunky at the beginning because I went straight from a career path in academia to working as a short-order cook in a vegetarian restaurant. Because so much of how I self-identify is through my work, it wasn’t always easy. I’m glad I left research science, but I do miss aspects of it. It’s so interesting and stimulating.
I don’t really straddle those two worlds. It was more of having both feet in academia years ago and now having one foot in fiction writing and the other devoted to everything else.
Spec Can: What inspired you to change careers from being a scientist to being an author of fiction?
Scott Fotheringham: I left science for reasons that are still not completely clear to me. I think it’s a tricky business to look backward and analyze how we made decisions in our lives. All I know is that I wasn’t happy spending most of my time in a lab and that I didn’t see what I was doing as socially relevant. It was interesting, to be sure. That, and I wanted to live closer to the ground, possibly near a lot of trees.
Spec Can: In what ways can biology inform Science Fiction?
Scott Fotheringham: I wanted to use what I had learned of biology to perform a thought experiment: What would happen if plastic began to disappear? Because that probably won’t happen because we choose to make it happen, I wondered if organisms could digest plastic. I went looking in the literature for references to bacteria and fungi that ate plastic and found them. From there it was a matter of perfecting the process, setting it loose, and watching what happened.
I loved reading Frankenstein because of how contemporary it feels. Shelley could have written that today about a genetically engineered organism. All the details and philosophical passages in that book are relevant to questions we have today about the worth of genetic engineering.
Spec Can: As a scientist yourself, you do an excellent job of bringing critical attention to some issues in scientific discourse. What were some questions about science that you hoped to raise for readers when you wrote The Rest is Silence?
Scott Fotheringham: The research scientists I admired most were those who were doing it because they loved to discover the mysteries of life. That was one reason to do science. It is quite a thrill to discover something about the world that nobody else has ever seen.
Then, there are scientists who are trying to solve a problem. Cure or find treatments for disease, develop a cheaper water pump for developing nations, or breed a drought-resistant crop.
However, much of science is goal-driven or product-driven. Scientists create things that are worth a lot of money but have little social value or actually harm us.
The questions I’d like to see asked – particularly by the scientists themselves – are, What value does the work I’m doing have to society? How will this be used and, if it has potential for harm, should we pursue the research at all? So often scientists shrug their shoulders and say it’s not up to them how their inventions and discoveries are employed. This is a grievous abdication of their responsibility.
Spec Can: In The Rest is Silence you bring a lot of attention to society’s need for easy categories and particularly binaries like male/female that limit our
Cover photo of The Rest is Silence courtesy of the publisher
understanding of the world. Why are limited categories so damaging and how can SF help us to resist applying outmoded and limited categories?
Scott Fotheringham: Lao Tzu says, “In naming is the origin of all particular things.” Once we’ve named something, we can feel that we understand it and can ignore it. Often, for example, I can see a bird, identify it, and not pay any more attention to it. Imagine the world of wonder if we don’t do that, if we follow that nuthatch and see how it forages, where it lives, how it flies.
The same can be said for something like gender. It’s too easy to divide the world into male and female and ignore the wealth of experience that comes from seeing that gender is fluid and expansive. Realizing that allows me to explore who I am more deeply. A wonderful example is Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Here’s a book that lets you think about a world in which the gender binary doesn’t exist. What does that say about love?
Spec Can: Obsession plays a large role in the Rest is Silence. How did ideas about obsession inspire you and shape your novel?
Scott Fotheringham: I have a somewhat obsessive personality. In small ways and in large ones. Unfortunately, one of my obsessions is with getting this life thing right. Like Benny, I strive to improve, I strive to make things better. Of course, this is fallacious thinking as the world is perfect as it is and doesn’t need me to fix it. But that’s a hard lesson to incorporate. I hope to accept that by the time I’m eighty.
Spec Can: The Rest is Silence tackles the issue of social versus technological means of dealing with pollution. Which do you think is going to have a more significant impact?
Scott Fotheringham: Can I say both? Only once we agree that the pollution problem needs to be addressed and that the natural world is our primary concern – more than economic growth, more than standard of living, more than our comfort – will we see a change. Then, we can safely apply both social and technological means because our intention will be clear. Right now our intention is to use technology to make money. Only if that changes will we able to work to heal what we’ve wrought.
Spec Can: What inspired you to write about an intersexed person?
Scott Fotheringham: I don’t know. Partly it comes from caring about underdogs.
Spec Can: What inspired you to write about a world without plastic?
Scott Fotheringham: I thought it would be fun to imagine such a world, and it was.
Spec Can: In what ways can SF and fiction writing in general change social perceptions and ideas? How can SF help readers to think outside the box and question things?
Scott Fotheringham: Reading gives us insight into how other people view the world. If all I had was my experience, and that didn’t include reading, my view of how the world works would be narrower than it is.
Spec Can: Are there any other thoughts or ideas that you would be interested in sharing with readers?
Scott Fotheringham: I’m thinking about the tar sands a lot these days. They are a good example of how our goals are primarily economic and comfort-related. If our children and grandchildren look at pictures of the tar sands fifty years from now are they going to thank us for digging up all that bitumen? Will their quality of life be better because we are destroying a large part of Alberta?
I want to thank Scott Fotheringham for this great discussion and for raising a lot of questions in our minds about science and the current devastating effects that economic ideas are having on the environment. You can explore his website at http://scottfotheringham.blogspot.ca/ to find out more about him and his current projects.
This is a great interview to follow the interview with Julie Czerneda. Join Speculating Canada on Friday March 8 to hear another scientist who has turned to fiction writing discuss their ideas, thoughts, and inspirations.
Author photo courtesy of Scott Fotheringham
Scott Fotheringham is a former molecular biologist who is currently a fiction author. Although he does not identify as an author of SF, much of his fiction work has speculative elements in it that should excite you. Scott discusses ways that science can change to be more understanding of the impact of scientific endeavors, breaking down binary gender categories, the moral implications of science, developing fiction from thought experiments, and the importance of protecting our environment.
Here are some teasers for our upcoming interview:
Scott Fotheringham: “I left science for reasons that are still not completely clear to me.”
Scott Fotheringham: “I wanted to use what I had learned of biology to perform a thought experiment: What would happen if plastic began to disappear? Because that probably won’t happen because we choose to make it happen, I wondered if organisms could digest plastic. I went looking in the literature for references to bacteria and fungi that ate plastic and found them. From there it was a matter of perfecting the process, setting it loose, and watching what happened.”
Scott Fotheringham: “The questions I’d like to see asked – particularly by the scientists themselves – are, What value does the work I’m doing have to society? How will this be used and, if it has potential for harm, should we pursue the research at all? So often scientists shrug their shoulders and say it’s not up to them how their inventions and discoveries are employed. This is a grievous abdication of their responsibility.”
Scott Fotheringham: “It’s too easy to divide the world into male and female and ignore the wealth of experience that comes from seeing that gender is fluid and expansive.”
Scott Fotheringham: “Only once we agree that the pollution problem needs to be addressed and that the natural world is our primary concern – more than economic growth, more than standard of living, more than our comfort – will we see a change.”
Scott Fotheringham: “Reading gives us insight into how other people view the world.”
Like many Canadian authors who write about speculative topics, Scott Fotheringham raises questions for readers to ponder and consider. If you haven’t had a chance yet, you can read my review of Scott Fotheringham’s The Rest is Silence at https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/loss-and-changes/ .
An interview with Julie Czerneda
By Derek Newman-Stille
I want to thank Julie Czerneda for being willing to do this interview and for her enthusiasm for these questions. I am truly honoured that she took the time to participate in this interview. Ms. Czerneda’s work was an incredible source of inspiration to a friend and colleague of mine at Trent University, Ellen Bentzen. Julie Czerneda’s incredible ability to be equally comfortable in both the worlds of the sciences and humanities informed a lot of my discussions with Ellen about the interconnectedness of science and humanities discourse and I am hoping that this interview honours Ellen’s memory.
Julie Czerneda is a former biologist and current author of both Science Fiction and Fantasy. She is a prolific author in both genres as well as a prolific editor. Her SF works include works such as the Clan Chronicles, Species Imperative, and Esen and Her Web series
Spec Can: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself to start this interview?
Photo of Julie Czerneda map-building by Roger Czerneda.
Julie Czerneda: I was born on an air force base, spent my childhood in the Maritimes, then my teens on the shores of Lake Ontario. Met my other half (Roger) at the University of Waterloo, in Calculus class (but didn’t realize it until we were chem partners), married, then went to the Universities of Saskatchewan and Queens to study the evolution of chemical communication in fish. After working for a while at the U. of W. (life can indeed be circular), produced offspring and began writing biology textbooks, in that order. While in the midst of a successful career as an author/editor in educational publishing, someone (Roger) thought I shouldn’t write science fiction as a mere hobby but should actually show someone. Years later, having been introduced to fandom, conventions, and many folks of the Best Sort, my first novel was indeed bought by Sheila Gilbert of DAW Books, and I’ve been doing this for a living ever since. Yes, my life is insanely fun and I’d not change a thing.
Spec Can: You were a biologist before becoming a Science Fiction and Fantasy author full time. What was the transition like? How do you straddle the worlds between academia and fiction authorship?
Julie Czerneda: Thursdays. Seriously. While I still earned my living from non-fiction, I wrote fiction on Thursdays, and only then. I remember loving Thursdays. But that came later, once I was actually trying to finish something to, as mentioned above, show someone. I also used different desks. Where I worked on physics curricula or designed exams was there. Where I worked on imaginative, go with me or not, story-telling? Way over there. With posters of Godzilla and a subwoofer of unusual size.
From the beginning, to me, biology and science fiction differed in degree, not substance. Biology filled me with wonder and curiosity. All science does. The universe does. Reading science fiction did that. Writing it? Ah, there was the legal, moral, and fun way to answer my own questions. I was hooked.
Spec Can: In what ways can biology inform Science Fiction and Fantasy? How much do you rely on your repertoire of biological knowledge when you create your fantastic worlds?
Julie Czerneda: Every way and in everything and all the time. Firstly, what I write, the stories I tell, come from what interests me. So there are cool real bits of biology everywhere in my stuff. I couldn’t make up the weirdness of real life. Secondly, I recognize the trust a reader places in me when they pick up one of my stories. They have a right to expect that I’ve done my homework, and what needs to be credible is. (Plus research is something I adore.) Last, and not least, the more I know about something, the more questions I have and the more intense my exploration of that idea will be. For Species Imperative, I spent five years reviewing biodiversity, salmon research, and the evolution of distinct populations before writing a word. I remain very proud of the result.
Spec Can: What do you enjoy most about doing research for your novels?
Julie Czerneda: Ah, research. It’s like that first cold beer on a hot afternoon. So satisfying yet potentially distracting.
What I enjoy most is learning stuff. Any stuff. Particularly stuff I’d never thought about knowing before, although more about the familiar is fine with me too. Having to do research for a new story? Really? Does anyone think that’s anything but joy?
For my latest book, the fantasy A Turn of Light, I spent wonderful hours and days and months delving into pioneer history, which was new to me. Antique lamps and razors. How to grease a barn door track or how freshly milled flour feels to the skin. For every piece I set out to learn, there’d be so much more I hadn’t expected. How recent in our history it was to have clean light for work at night. How new a concept to have separate bedrooms. The names of tools and how very old some are. I’d read letters written two hundred years ago and catch myself nodding with agreement or laughing, for the voice I was hearing in my head could have been that of any of my peers or friends.
The distracting part? Research can seem like progress when, on its own, it’s merely an investment. It’s what you do with it that matters. Once I have enough stuff in my head to feel confident, I focus on the writing and avoid more research unless I need something specific. Case in point, Turn. I was well into the writing when I came to a scene where I needed to put something personal in my character’s hands that would show who he is now but also something of what he’d left behind. Reading what a military kit of the era should contain gave me the essentials. An hour’s pouring over images of antique razors, mirrors, and other personal items provided a sense of the real things. (Plus I dug out my Grandfather’s bristle brush.) I found links to descriptions of hard soaps and small ornate mirrors. The little scene that resulted is one of my favourites and does everything I could have asked, with significant charm.
There’s one small downside. I can’t stop myself from spouting fabulous new facts at supper. The month I studied the history of cod fishing may go down in infamy in our family. They still bring it up. (As they should. It’s fascinating stuff!)
Spec Can: Why do you write speculative fiction? What drew you to it?
Photo of Julie Czerneda by Roger Czerneda
Julie Czerneda: Curiosity. I turn over rocks. I long to see over hills. When I was 10 I read my first SF book (Andre Norton’s Star Ranger, now called The Last Planet) and realized there was fiction that did the same. I was hooked and never stopped.
Spec Can: What experience first told you “I need to be a storyteller”?
Julie Czerneda: Oh that. There was an actual moment. Thinking back, I believe it was late one Saturday afternoon in January. My Dad had bought me the first two Tarzan novels, but only gave me one. I devoured it only to be infuriated by the ending. The weasel of a cousin gets everything! I stormed into the kitchen and complained to my parents, something I’d never done before. Rather than give me the next book, in which all is made right, my Mom, with a perfectly straight face, suggested I use her huge Underwood manual typewriter to “fix it.”
I did.
What Power!!!! I was a storyteller from then on.
Spec Can: Ecologies – flora and fauna – play an important role in your work. What important role can ecological knowledge play in the works of SF authors?
Julie Czerneda: Two, I feel. One is the obvious, that when world-building one should consider the life of a place. The other? Because nothing lives in isolation, an ecological approach gives a writer the opportunity to fit the puzzle together. To have alternative points of view and unintended consequences. All the intricate and messy ways things happen.
Spec Can: A Lot of your work involves meetings between diverse species. What important role do you hope to convey to your audience about cultural diversity and perhaps ecological diversity?
Julie Czerneda: The more the merrier! Or, in the case of living things, the more stable and resilient the community. It’s interactions that interest me. The interface between any two or more creatures is full of change and adaptation and lovely icky bits. In storytelling — and real life — I’d rather toss a problem at a group of people (or whatever I have in mind at the moment) who’ll each have a different approach to a solution, if they see it as a problem at all. That’s the joyful surprise of it all.
I also have no problem letting my love of wild places show. Some writers love food or detailed descriptions of hardware. For me, it’s passages like those in Species Imperative that exist for no reason other than to show how much ours or any world with life risks losing if life itself is endangered. I heartily and passionately include us in there, by the way. I’ve never distinguished between the human fauna and all the rest. We’re part of the living landscape, simply a little too clever for our own good sometimes, but not always. Sometimes, we get it just right.
That was the long answer. The short? Diversity is, to me, a sign of robust health and a source of possibilities, regardless of where I find it.
Spec Can: Can SF and Fantasy have a role in changing people’s thoughts about the environment?
Julie Czerneda: On their own, I doubt it. We pick what we want to read, so someone who reads my stuff, for example, will already be someone firmly a fan of slime. And nature. And messy compromise.
That said, there are always stories that catch a wider audience. The film Avatar was exotic and new to non-science fiction readers (read Andre Norton’s Judgement on Janus for a familiar one), not to mention gorgeously made, so its message had to have an impact.
I don’t write fiction with a message or intent to change anyone’s mind. I do it for the story. If someone nods along to that story, I take it as a sign we’d enjoy each other’s company. What I write is who I am.
Spec Can: What pedagogical role can Science Fiction and Fantasy have to open up new questions about the environment?
Julie Czerneda: I believe, passionately, that science fictional thinking is a crucial survival skill. We all need to ask questions, to speculate about possible consequences in an imaginative, yet as close to real fashion as possible, and to become able to assess incoming information in a critical, not cynical manner. Imagination is of immense use, too often undervalued. We who live and breath SF rarely appreciate what a strong and active muscle our minds have developed. I’d like everyone to have the same advantage. To ride society’s changes, rather than be swept away. To decide where and how technology best fits our needs, before it’s in our homes.
Another aspect is science as a human activity. There are works of science fiction that do an admirable job of making science accessible, relevant, and, best of all, something people do. The X-Files drew a host of young women to forensics and other sciences who might otherwise have gone elsewhere. Fringe is another show that comes to mind.
Spec Can: Communication plays an important role in your work. How can SF teach us to communicate better, and – especially – to listen better?
Julie Czerneda: The issues involved in communication between organisms who may not even share the same sensory equipment, let alone intentions, fascinate me. They form the foundation of my Web Shifter series, in fact. Tremendous fun. In this case, I’m using SF to explore and investigate.
As for our own communication? We’re a chatty species. We should chat about the science and technology that matters to us as easily and well as any daily topic, but few do. I’ve had success using science fiction with students to get them “talking science.” SF provides useful vocabulary, presented in context. Story dialogue gives examples of conversations centred about science as something immediately important to the characters. With a bit of care to choose age/experience-relevant SF, the playing field levels off. Students who’d otherwise struggle with English become just as passionately outspoken as their peers, and they do it about science.
Spec Can: As an occasional university instructor, I am most interested in how SF can be used in a university environment. Could you share some strategies and ideas with us about SF in higher education?
Julie Czerneda: Interestingly, one of the uses I’ve been involved with has been SF as part of science courses for non-science majors. The emphasis is on science in society, with science fiction basically used to deliver the big science ideas within the context of consequence and change. The desired outcome is to instill a questioning, curious, and aware attitude in these students, rather than a breadth of science knowledge.
I’ve also worked with a professor who, for many years now, has used science fiction as an integral part of his first year astronomy course. Students take what they’ve learned about the science and apply it to alien world-building as an SF writer would do it. I’m proud to say this class has been using Beholder’s Eye (my second novel) as part of this process.
Going back to your earlier question, the University of Wales offers degrees in science fiction and communication, with an enviable employment rate. We need people who can bring science to life, who can clearly express complex ideas in meaningful ways to a varied audience. SF? Does it all the time.
Spec Can: What is the most exciting moment you have experienced where you saw the impact your authorship had on a student’s knowledge and excitement about science?
Julie Czerneda: It’s always exciting, seeing that spark take hold. But the best moments haven’t been exciting. They’ve been powerful. I’ve sat, spellbound, in the midst of kindergarten students so caught up in imagining they lived in a space station that they began to sway as if weightless. I watched a group of noisy grade 8 students grow quieter and quieter as they worked through a science fiction scenario about limited resources, only to burst into tears when they realized that their character would sacrifice herself for her younger brother; my eyes were no drier than theirs. The shared experience. The power of imagination. The swell of emotion no less real for coming from a story. Those are the moments.
Spec Can: What is the importance of imagination and a sense of wonder for our world?
Julie Czerneda: What we can’t imagine, we can’t create, so there’s one. What we can’t imagine, we can’t prepare against or for, so that’s another. Imagination is essential to our survival, as individuals and as a species, and has been for eons. The sad thing is that it can atrophy from lack of use or be stunted by those who’ve lost their own. The best? The more it’s used, the stronger it becomes. I’m a believer.
As for a sense of wonder? That’s how imagination connects in the most positive sense to the world around us. That’s how we know we belong.
Spec Can: What important role can curiosity play in creating a better future?
Julie Czerneda: What technology is to science, I suspect curiosity is to imagination. The hands at work. The application. The impulse to look beyond, because there might be more, turned into the act of looking. That make sense? Curiosity, to me, demands an open yet questioning mind. When you talk to post-adolescents, curiosity sounds like something kids do, but it’s primal and important to all of us. Children are curious in order to investigate and learn. Society has a tendency to assume the curious should become scientists or explorers or artists, but I think everyone should be, in every aspect of life.
None of which answers your question, does it? Questions of privacy and personal space aside, I think we’d be better off for more curiosity in our citizens. Where you see people encouraged to be curious and ask questions for themselves, is where you see improvements being made.
Spec Can: Your work seems to bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities. In what way are these disciplinary boundaries artificial? How can we do more to evoke scientific interest in people focused on the humanities and vice versa?
Julie Czerneda: I’m a lumper. When I started university, I did my utmost to combine biology, physics, and geography. (With other stuff.) My schedules blew up with conflicts every term because those were supposed to be separate. Once I accepted that I’d have to stick to biology, not being a Time Lord, I resisted specialization to a ridiculous extent. Everything mattered to me; everything connected. (And it’s all so amazing …)
I understand the need to compartmentalize in order to focus, but even today, nothing pleases me more than blurring those edges. Nothing, in my opinion, does science a greater favour than the healthy mixing of disciplines. In my non-fiction science writing, I wrote in every science, but it was applying my work within the humanities, describing the people who work in science and the interactions among science and society that stands the test of time (and curriculum changes) best.
It’s about listening and respect, really. Good manners rule. Everyone’s work or field is personally important to them as well as to society. Terms like “soft” or “hard” science were never useful. Yes, there’s rigour and reproducibility, but there should also be room, because any human endeavour is an art, for observation and discourse around what doesn’t lend itself to measurement. The payoff? Synergy.
One of my fondest experiences of that in action was with a group of psychology graduate students. I’d been asked to bring my SF-self to the table, to help them develop testable hypotheses. They knew their field but were having trouble reaching out from it into new ground. What I brought to the discussion was a well-oiled imagination and curiosity, as well as an awareness of experimental design. We had a blast. They developed great ideas and I came away with some of my own.
Spec Can: Your work alternates between Science Fiction and Fantasy and you excel equally in each. Is it tough to alternate between genres? Are these genre categories that separate?
Cover Art for A Turn of Light by Matt Stawicki
Julie Czerneda: ::blush:: Thank you. I enjoy both and yes, tough describes it. But in a good way.
For me, both as an author and editor, they are different and separate. Even as a reader, I look for work that is clearly one or the other as well. Every so often I’ll read something that blends all manner of genres into a great story. Some authors can do that and I’d never suggest they stop. But it’s not an approach I’d find satisfying for myself. There’s too much risk of losing what’s special about each. Let me explain.
I take pleasure and pride in what makes science fiction a speculation about the real world, by asking that one “what if …” then building a story framework that lets me play with an answer, while keeping as much of what we know factual and true to life. I’ve no problem inviting a reader to play along with FTL and aliens, but I won’t mess with anything more and there’s always a science question at the heart of my plot. What if life evolved this way or that? How might biological imperatives affect technological civilizations? Who might we become in the future? What cost is too high or risk too great, when manipulating genetics? I love how science fiction gives me insight into these and any other questions I might have. Imaginative, yes, but in a sense, imagination with gloves on, respectful of what we know. The setting of a science fiction story must be solidly built, its plot and premises credible enough that the ultimate answer presented will be accepted by the reader. That’s when, in my opinion, it works best.
Fantasy, on the other hand, takes those gloves off. It must. Its questions are every bit as important as science fiction’s, but they are no longer about the world outside, but the one within. What makes us tremble in dread or exclaim with joy? Who do we want to be? Who are we now? How far could we rise — or fall?
To examine those sorts of questions, fantasy shakes us from this world, the one we’re so comfortable and sure about, and drops us into one with new rules. Here be dragons. In an science fiction story, explain their presence to me or I’m gone. In a fantasy? Oh, in a fantasy, I’m wide-eyed with wonder and eager to fly too.
Some stories give us clear warning of those new rules. Gates, as in Andre Norton’s Witch World series. Lewis’ wardrobe. Step through and nothing will be the same. Or no warning at all. Preconceptions must be abandoned as the fantasy weaves the strange and different around the willing reader. That interplay is when, to me, fantasy is at its best.
As for what’s tough about working in fantasy as opposed to science fiction? Certainly the editing is pure joy. I’m happy with my personal “this is science fiction/this is fantasy” radar, and have thoroughly enjoyed editing anthologies of one or the other.
The challenge was writing my own. I’ve admired authors who do both well. C.J. Cherryh. Patricia McKillip. For many years I contemplated trying fantasy, because I love reading it, but didn’t see myself as having the skill. To create a wholly new world for readers, a convincing fantasy world, takes a daunting command of language and exceptional writing craft. To be blunt, I find starships and slime pretty easy. Readers meet me more than halfway, so I just blurt out the ideas as a story and we’re all happy. But an immersive, wondrous fantasy world, where everything has to be created, including the rules? That was a huge undertaking.
Before that point, I had to find out if I could even tell a readable fantasy story. Every so often, rather quietly, I’d write one. For those curious, my first was “’Ware the Sleeper” in 1998, published in Battle Magic edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff. My novella Gossamer Mage: Intended Words came out from Baen’s Universe in 2008. The gloves were definitely off. (I’ve done a couple of horror stories, not willingly; friends made me. I’m proud of them but that’s not what I am.) A funny aside to my efforts to figure out fantasy: I wrote an okay-I-suppose story called “Peel” for what I thought was an SF anthology. Turned out I hadn’t read the invitation properly and it should have been fantasy. As an experiment (and because I was embarrassed beyond words) I rewrote the story. To my astonishment, as a fantasy it was much better — powerful and dark and second person to boot. You can read that one in In the Shadow of Evil edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers.
I apologize for being long-winded here, but you’ve struck a chord with this question. You see, my first fantasy novel, A Turn of Light will be released in stores about the time this interview goes up, and writing that book was the most difficult, time-consuming, and terrifying task I’ve ever done, as well as the most rewarding. It’s made me a better writer without doubt, but the numbers behind it appall even me. I wrote the first paragraphs over twenty years ago. I deleted well over 400K words during the writing process. Three years to write, during which I worked daily on it and couldn’t touch anything else. A final word count of epic proportions, but I’d made up my mind at the start to write a complete story. If I was going to commit fantasy, I was going all the way.
Having had some utterly wonderful early feedback about Turn, not to mention it being picked up by the SFBC and Audible.com, has eased some of my anxiety, but not all. Don’t get me wrong, I love this story and believe in it. I’ve put everything I had into it. But at the end of the day, I’m a biologist turned science writer turned science fiction writer. Starships or slime, I’ll stand up to be counted. Fantasy? I enjoy and respect it. Can I write it for others to read?
That’s up to my readers to discover.
Spec Can: What is distinct about Canadian Speculative Fiction? Is there anything distinctly Canadian about the worlds and characters you create?
Julie Czerneda: I believe I have the first alien pick-up hockey game. Ties of Power. I wrote it in a rink while watching our offspring play, hence the authenticity of the cold seat. I’ve named starships after our astronauts. In the Company of Others. There’s a distinct possibility that beer occurs at least once in every book I’ve written and I’ve set portions of a trilogy in Canada. Species Imperative.
That said, I have an American publisher, so my words lack “u’s.” (I make a conscious effort to avoid the ones that would bug me, like colour and behaviour, but honour and armour are less easily avoided. I can live with that.) I would like to point out that my American publisher, DAW Books, treats its Canadian authors (we are legion) extremely well and we try to do the same in return. Of course they do well by all their authors, but we Canucks are something of a club and proud of it.
On a more serious note, and “u’s” aside, how could my work be anything but Canadian? for that’s what I am. My stories lack villains. I like resolving incompatible-seeming goals. I value diversity and expect everyone to queue nicely, even if they can’t quite get along or smell funny. Weather’s often an issue. The endings I prefer don’t have winners and losers, but change and accommodation. I’m optimistic, not solely a Canadian trait, but something being Canadian makes me determined to share.
As for Canadian SF? We have wonderful, imaginative, thoughtful, ground-breaking authors all across this country. If I had them in a room, I’d give them each a beer (or beverage of choice) and force them to wear a pin that says “World-class Talent” for an hour. Of course they’d take it off outside the door. Yes, being Canadian makes it slightly naughty to tell anyone how great we are, but there is a way around it. I sincerely hope we learn to talk more about each other’s great stuff. You there. Reading this. You’re GREAT! Now get back to your own writing.
Spec Can: Do your characters ever take you to places that you didn’t intend to go? Do they take on personalities of their own?
Julie Czerneda: No to the first bit. My characters are very much my creations and serve the story. I don’t start writing until I know how they would react in any given situation. I’m always aware of the need to convince my readers these “folk” are real and if a character doesn’t fly as he/she/it should, to me that indicates a problem to be fixed.
That said, I love how a story, through its characters and plot, develops momentum and direction once there’s critical mass. The notions my “hindbrain” comes up with when I’m in the shower or about to doze off delight and sometimes surprise me, but I consider that still part of my process.
As for personalities? Oh yes, if I’ve done my work properly, characters develop personalities that resonate for me and hopefully for readers. I adore Esen. I have my Mac moments. I wouldn’t want to face such difficult trials as Aryl or Sira or Aaron but I assuredly know their natures and trust they can and will face them. Jenn Nalynn, my latest, is different again and I can “hear” her laugh. Such are the end results of the craft, of putting enough into each character that they are believable and, I hope, as admirable/vile/adorable/or annoying as I intended.
What does amaze me is how readers respond to minor characters. I expected the main characters to take hold of a heart or two but not that my walk-ons would have their own fans. These days, I take such great glee in adding details where I know they’ll be appreciated.
Spec Can: What is your favorite mythical creature and how has it inspired you?
Julie Czerneda: “I was never a unicorn or fairy type. Dragons called to me. Power, attitude, age. Those are the ones I like. Tea with the Black Dragon by R.A. MacAvoy remains a favourite. The early Pern novels. There’s a YA I remember very fondly from long ago and have tried to find again, about an injured dragon whose wing is darned with spider silk. If anyone can tell me the title/author, I’d appreciate that. I’ve waited until my latest novel to put forth my own version. Ironically, though I once daydreamed about having dragons on one of my book covers, I produced a dragon who couldn’t be.
Spec Can: What current projects are you working on?
Julie Czerneda: If I could write more than one book at a time, I’ve readers who’d be happy. I’ve six novels contracted with DAW at the moment: the concluding trilogy of THE CLAN CHRONICLES, another Esen story (yay!), a new standalone fantasy, The Gossamer Mage, and, much to my delight, a sequel to Turn called A Play of Shadow which I truly hope won’t take as long to write. It shouldn’t. I’ve some confidence now about that fantasy stuff.
I’m also making notes for some other projects. I’ve questions, you see.
Spec Can: Are there any other ideas or thoughts that you would be interested in sharing with your readers?
Julie Czerneda: Whether it’s fantasy, science fiction, or answering thoughtful and thorough questions such as these, what you read is me. Give A Turn of Light a try, even if you’re unsure about fantasy. I hope, if you do enjoy the story, that you’ll read the acknowledgments at the back of the book as well, for DAW’s given me several pages to talk about this book, my journey through it, and to thank the very many people I owe.
Now? It’s time for a new story to come to life in your hands, dear readers, and for me to settle back and create the next.
Hmmm. Where was I? Right … Winter stretched its icy fingers across Marrowdell in the early hours before dawn, crisping leaves and polishing the commons pond with a skin of ice. It breathed traces of snow over the crags and into crevices, snow that, like rain, avoided the Bone Hills altogether. It sighed at the rising sun and retreated, for now, leaving the air sparkling with frost.
What can I say? I’m Canadian.
I want to thank Julie Czerneda for doing this interview and sharing her incredible insights with Speculating Canada. I am hoping that her insights about the environment and ecology as well as the importance of a good imagination will help us to speculate a new and better world for tomorrow.
To read more about Julie Czerneda’s work, please visit her website at http://www.czerneda.com . Her website also includes sources on teaching the sciences through SF, so if you are a teacher, there are incredible resources that you can bring into your classroom.
I first encountered Julie Czerneda’s work through my friend and colleague Ellen Bentzen, who was, among other things, a
Photo of Julie Czerneda by Roger Czerneda
limnologist (a biologist focussed on the study of lake ecosystems) as well as a brilliant teacher and friend. Ellen and I had often talked about the link between science and the arts and the mutual need of science and the arts to support and be in conversation with each other. I was therefore extremely excited when Julie Czerneda said she would be willing to do an interview with me and I am excited to share her insights with all of you readers about the links between speculative fiction writing and science.
In our upcoming interview on Thursday February 28, Julie Czerneda reveals to readers how she balances a life of scientific academic research and science fiction and fantasy writing, reminds us that life itself is weird and well suited for speculative fiction, shares her joy and excitement at the prospect of doing research for a novel and learning something new, and the importance of biology in science fiction writing, the importance of diversity (both ecological and cultural). She reminds us of the importance of curiosity, imagination, and communication for creating a better tomorrow.
Here are some teasers from the upcoming interview:
Julie Czerneda: “From the beginning, to me, biology and science fiction differed in degree, not substance. Biology filled me with wonder and curiosity. All science does. The universe does. Reading science fiction did that. Writing it? Ah, there was the legal, moral, and fun way to answer my own questions. I was hooked.”
Julie Czerneda: “What I write, the stories I tell, come from what interests me. So there are cool real bits of biology everywhere in my stuff. I couldn’t make up the weirdness of real life.”
Julie Czerneda: “The more I know about something, the more questions I have and the more intense my exploration of that idea will be.”
Julie Czerneda: “It’s interactions that interest me. The interface between any two or more creatures is full of change and adaptation and lovely icky bits. In storytelling — and real life — I’d rather toss a problem at a group of people (or whatever I have in mind at the moment) who’ll each have a different approach to a solution, if they see it as a problem at all.”
Julie Czerneda: “Diversity is, to me, a sign of robust health and a source of possibilities, regardless of where I find it.”
Julie Czerneda: “What I write is who I am.”
Julie Czerneda: “I believe, passionately, that science fictional thinking is a crucial survival skill. We all need to ask questions, to speculate about possible consequences in an imaginative, yet as close to real fashion as possible, and to become able to assess incoming information in a critical, not cynical manner. Imagination is of immense use, too often undervalued. We who live and breath SF rarely appreciate what a strong and active muscle our minds have developed.”
Julie Czerneda: “I’ve sat, spellbound, in the midst of kindergarten students so caught up in imagining they lived in a space station that they began to sway as if weightless. I watched a group of noisy grade 8 students grow quieter and quieter as they worked through a science fiction scenario about limited resources, only to burst into tears when they realized that their character would sacrifice herself for her younger brother; my eyes were no drier than theirs. The shared experience. The power of imagination. The swell of emotion no less real for coming from a story. Those are the moments.”
Julie Czerneda: “What we can’t imagine, we can’t create. What we can’t imagine, we can’t prepare against or for. Imagination is essential to our survival, as individuals and as a species, and has been for eons. The sad thing is that it can atrophy from lack of use or be stunted by those who’ve lost their own. The best? The more it’s used, the stronger it becomes.”
Julie Czerneda: “Curiosity, to me, demands an open yet questioning mind. When you talk to post-adolescents, curiosity sounds like something kids do, but it’s primal and important to all of us. Children are curious in order to investigate and learn. Society has a tendency to assume the curious should become scientists or explorers or artists, but I think everyone should be, in every aspect of life.”
Julie Czerneda: “How could my work be anything but Canadian? for that’s what I am. My stories lack villains. I like resolving incompatible-seeming goals. I value diversity and expect everyone to queue nicely, even if they can’t quite get along or smell funny. Weather’s often an issue. The endings I prefer don’t have winners and losers, but change and accommodation. I’m optimistic, not solely a Canadian trait, but something being Canadian makes me determined to share.”
Julie Czerneda: “Being Canadian makes it slightly naughty to tell anyone how great we are, but there is a way around it. I sincerely hope we learn to talk more about each other’s great stuff. You there. Reading this. You’re GREAT! Now get back to your own writing.”
I hope you enjoy our upcoming interview on Thursday February 28, and if you are unfamiliar with Julie Czerneda’s work, please check out her website at http://www.czerneda.com and I hope you enjoy her work as much as I have.
A review of Nina Munteanu’s Outer Diverse (Starfire World Syndicate, 2011)
By Derek Newman-Stille
Cover photo of Outer Diverse courtesy of Nina Munteanu
The world has changed. Humans have been forced off of the planet Earth by their supposed ‘saviours’, the Eosians. Humans were threatened by a race called the Vos, a race that desired the destruction of humanity, but the Eosians drove them away… only they decided not to leave. They claimed origin from the Earth, claimed that they were the alien hybrids of humanity and the Eosian gods, the Epoptes. They have appointed themselves the Guardians of the galaxy, in charge of maintaining their own ideas of law.
In her Outer Diverse, Nina Munteanu creates a human future on the edge of chaos, and a multiverse that flows back and forth, one universe feeding into another. Religion and science are not entirely separate in this world as ideas of the spiritual and the rational interact with each other.
Nina Munteanu illustrates her love of diverse ecosystems, richly describing complex alien eco-webs. Rich descriptions of biodiversity populate her narrative, making the alien environment feel real, feel close, and engage the senses. She evokes in the reader a desire for exploring the miraculous diversity of life.
Often SF focuses on physics and related sciences, creating detailed descriptions of space-warping abilities and the technologies of the future, but Munteanu reminds the reader of the importance of exploring the biological sciences in SF, exploring the richness of alien environments, the relationships between diverse organisms, and technologies that incorporate the organic and principles of biology. Nina creates aliens that make sense in ecosystems that fit with them.
Munteanu’s narrative focuses on a woman who identifies as human but discovers that her body contains a richness of diversity, skills beyond human ability and often beyond her control. She is the only non-Eosian allowed to be a Guardian, a police officer of the future with a mission toward preserving galactic order and security and preventing criminal activities. Despite working with Eosians, she harbours racist notions about them, fearing them and viewing them as a threat to humanity. She is an insular character, fearing dependency on others and the loss of her own independence. She is fundamentally unwilling to let her guard down, to see herself as needing others and afraid that trust may weaken her. It is ironic that her final willingness to trust another who eventually takes advantage of her encourages her to make networks of friends, to learn to rely on others and accept them rather than spurring her into further insularity.
You can explore Nina Munteanu further at her website: http://www.ninamunteanu.com/ .
An interview with Jerome Stueart by Derek Newman-Stille
Author photo courtesy of Jerome Stueart
There is nothing quite as fantastic as an interview that begins by thanking reviewers! It was truely a pleasure to talk to Jerome Stueart and I hope that all of you enjoy his insights as much as I did. I will let him introduce himself to you.
Spec Can: To begin this interview, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Jerome Stueart: Sure, Derek. First, thanks for interviewing me, and taking an interest in my work. Reviewers mean the world to writers!
I’m the son of a Texas Baptist preacher who grew up in a lot of small towns in the Midwest and Southwest US. My mom read me and my brother and sister myths, fairy tales, and the Chronicles of Narnia in our hallway between our bedrooms. I grew up loving Bradbury, Clarke, King, and Piers Anthony, and studying animals and science. I took a left turn away from science and into writing when I was a junior in the smallest high school in Texas because a teacher said she would mentor me. (Teachers make a difference). I went to college for literature and writing, attended Clarion in 2007 in San Diego, and then immigrated to the Yukon to write about science research here. Stayed because the people were awesome. I started out an English and Writing teacher, and became a marketer for an arts centre.
Spec Can: As an author from the Yukon, do you find that the environment of the Yukon influences your SF writing?
Jerome Stueart: You can’t help but see the Yukon’s exotic environment—light all day in the summer, darkness in the winter, extreme temps, strange wildlife, and a plethora of scientist all trying to find treasure up here. Geoscientists after marketable minerals; biologists after wilderness preservation. Passions run high here. I think I was surprised at how much my relationships, and the way the Yukon changes people quickly have both found their way into my writing. As I was working on my immigration in Texas, after having visited the Yukon for three years, I was yearning to come back to the Yukon—and now I find I have a lot of characters outside the Yukon yearning to get back in.
Spec Can: What is the SF community like in the Yukon? Has it been easy to create a community of authors and SF aficionados?
Jerome Stueart: There’s a healthy readership up here for scifi and fantasy, and there are several writers too—about 8 or 9. We formed a small group of SF/Fantasy writing adults, and then I started teaching a small group of high school students, and they stayed together for four years. Two of them are part of our adult group now. It’s not been easy to form the groups—as the Yukon is a very busy place, and writing is sometimes a very solitary profession—but we get together as often as we can.
Spec Can: Your short story One Nation Under Gods (from Tesseracts 14) speaks to your birthplace in the United States. What was the inspiration for this short story?
Cover photo of Tesseracts 14 courtesy of Jerome Stueart
Jerome Stueart: My stories tend to be a hodgepodge of different things. Jeff VanderMeer at Clarion gave us an exercise that sparked the idea of imagining an alternate world. The young boy’s voice came out of that exercise. Two questions helped developed the story while I was at Clarion. I remembered some teen asked me while I was subbing a high school class, “Why do I need to know about history?”—hehe. Trying to convince her why history was important wasn’t easy. I found the answers too pat. The other question that helped develop the story was a question that many religious faiths grapple with: Why can’t God be more real? And what would that mean if we could actually see and touch our gods? My relationship with my younger sister and her dyslexia formed the emotional core of the story, and my feelings against a one-style fits all teaching method that favors memorization. I watched her struggle with a feeling of inadequacy because school didn’t “find” where she was brilliant.
Spec Can: One Nation Under Gods has a lot to say about the education system and its focus on memorization instead of developing a good questioning mindset. What could help to improve the education system? How important is speculation and the question ‘why’ to a healthy education system?
Jerome Stueart: It’s funny—I became a teacher—writing and literature—so I found myself having to deal with both sides of the issue. I had students who were not going to learn in the classic memorization way. I made my classes entertaining and engaging. But I still had to have standards of learning—and that’s where it broke down.
Everyone’s concerned with their grades. Students determine what they need to do to balance their lives and get just the grades they need to pass—or to get scholarships. It’s hard to generate an interest or love of reading if you are worried about your future. When it’s your Beowulf or their biology exam, biology wins.
Now, with the American government grading schools, schools have the same mindset. Schools want to pass—so out goes anything that’s not going to help them pass. Students are even more focused in high school on memorization to pass state exams to help the school out. We’ve turned schools into manufacturing plants with a QC officer standing at the door of the school waiting to lock it up if the “plant” doesn’t produce good enough product.
Society doesn’t back up any need to think as teachers might want their students to. Society wants skilled workers and consumers, not skilled thinkers and changers. We are a consumer culture. The most important day is not Election Day, but Black Friday.
Colleges have begun enhancing only programs that are funded by big business, and charging students a lot of money for tuition. [My student loans are crushing.] We’ve become training facilities for those businesses. Who’s gonna directly fund liberal arts courses—or provide jobs for thinkers? Imaginative students? We need them, but we don’t know where to put them in society. And burdening students with debt in college means that they only go into practical professions afterwards.
I think the current problems with getting the world to understand climate change is directly related to an inability to speculate—or see the future from the evidence you have. Society has equipped scientists to extrapolate from their research, but we don’t take their recommendations because we don’t trust science anymore, or intelligence. Unless the majority of the population respects knowledge, has a healthy speculative mind, they can’t see consequences.
I think this contributes to a rise in crime, a rise in mindless consent to whoever speaks the loudest, a rise in selfish individualism (rather than community), and a rise in a consumer culture.
Spec Can: What can speculative fiction do to help readers to question things and advocate for change?
Jerome Stueart: Speculation is about seeing natural consequences, about thinking about choices and figuring out where they will lead, and about large-scale societal consequences. I think speculative fiction is the reason we don’t condone cloning, or have nuclear war—science fiction showed us that there are no good ways of having those, and we believed them. Silent Spring is a “speculative novel” written as nonfiction by Rachel Carson with such an apocalyptic vision of the dangers of DDT and other chemicals we were putting on crops and in the air—with real evidence– that it scared people into regulation. Carson used speculative tools to give reason to turn the boat around.
Unfortunately, speculation in the wrong hands can just be fear-mongering. Recent commercials against Obama speculated a world four years from now full of apocalypse! Without any evidence. It was cheap scare tactics, but they worked on some people who couldn’t extrapolate from evidence, or who couldn’t question the premises or the evidence. I saw that in both political parties. If we don’t “produce” thinking minds—in every place in society—fear mongering will work, evidence won’t count. That scares me.
Climate Change has to find a way to alert people to change without becoming alarmist—but we have a society less-inclined to think for themselves now, and less-inclined to value knowledge and preventative measures. We’re all about reacting now. We’re all about consuming. We’re living like it’s the last days on Earth and we want our feast. Anyone who says we have to “cut back” which is the message of climate change—restraint—is taking away “our fun.” We are such a Mine Culture, not a Mind Culture. We may live together, but we don’t think together.
I would put MORE speculative literature in the classroom starting with Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate change series, Science in the Capital—or his Three Californias. I would teach kids to imagine their own futures—what will they be doing 20 years from now, and what will society be like. What do they WANT society to be like? And where do they see the forces in control trying to lead us? Kids can be taught to think speculatively and use it wisely.
Spec Can: In One Nation Under Gods you propose images of what American gods would be like if the United States were pantheistic. What gods would Canada have?
Jerome Stueart: Haha. I’m not going to tell you that! I really do want to do a sequel in Canada. But I’ll tell you this much—as an American living in Canada—it seems that Canadians think of themselves more regionally than Americans do. With larger “states”/provinces and territories, there’s more a chance for people to think regionally: Maritimers think of themselves very differently than Ontarians or Albertans, and I think their gods would have to reflect that. I think Canadian gods, too, would have less power over their people than what I’ve set up for the US. My point with One Nation is to say that the US has given too much power to their gods. I still treat the States as a “great experiment”, though, so the gods there did something very different than any other country’s gods.
Spec Can: Your story Lemmings in the Third Year (from Tesseracts Nine) deals with a group of researchers who are able to speak to animals – almost combining the fields of biology and anthropology. How would giving animals voice change the role of science and particularly the way biology sees the world?
Jerome Stueart: Wow. In the same way any culture changes outside perception of that culture when they start having their own “voice.” I did take a very anthropological angle with that story to explore how closely related those two sciences are—one is missing the voice. Anthropology realized that at the turn of the last century when they realized that the indigenous people—all over the world—had rights and had voices and couldn’t just be curiosities to be reported on. We’re only just starting, too, to accept those indigenous ideas and ways of seeing as just as valid as Western ideas of civilization, and we have a long to go before they are seen as equally valid ways of life.
Animal communication is being studied right now to determine what animals are communicating to each other. But I would think that biology would be turned on its head if animals ever started really talking. Apes using signs and symbol keyboards are just a first step—and really they can only communicate about their lab environment, not their philosophy of the jungle. But if we had insight into what animals are thinking about their environment—well, we’d have to start granting their wishes, thinking of their rights, their opinions, about the encroachment of humankind. Sometimes I wish the animals would speak to say “you can do so much to prevent some of the consequences of climate change.”
But, to paraphrase what God said to the rich man who wanted to go back and warn his brothers of the coming doom, “If I sent a talking polar bear to you to warn you, you still wouldn’t listen.”
Spec Can: You have a passion and interest in the voice of animals in Speculative Fiction. What important things can animals in SF give voice to?
Jerome Stueart: My real interest in animals in fiction is asking how we’re using them in speculative fiction. Often times, I see authors going to animals to use them a bit as puppets to be the “truth” the author has. Putting it in an animal gives the author innocence and credibility, because there’s no sin in animals, no nuance. Their representation, as far as I can tell—and I’ve read a lot of talking animals in fiction—doesn’t have the character nuance that humans do, or the baggage. So they can get away with being wiser than the rest of us: ala Ishmael (via Daniel Quinn) or all of Rudyard Kipling’s animals (who are characterized more by their species than their particular character) or even Rafi Zabor’s Bear in The Bear Comes Home [which is the author in disguise and is a character more pure than the others in the novel]. More interesting characterizations are being done by Jonathan Lethem in his novel, Gun with Occasional Music, where he gives his animal characters the chance to make life choices with consequences. Joey, the Kangaroo in the Mafia, I think, is a brilliant character. Others have thought about dogs having their own culture.
I don’t think that animals should just give voice to “our wisdom” and become Animal Masks for us the author. We can’t hope readers will take our wisdom better from a non-human. We make them all into Shamans, and I don’t think that’s as interesting.
Instead, I look forward to more nuanced character in the animals you see in SF—animals with choices, pasts, agendas, and cultures that are wildly different than our own, languages and ways of seeing that are entirely new. I think they might be able to give us insight into a world of animals, so we can live like weasels as Annie Dillard talks about in her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. They have the possibility of teaching us how to live more in harmony with the environment—or not. An overpopulation of any animal is bad for the environment. Check out the overpopulation of deer and elk in Yellowstone. So our being able to live in harmony may have more to do with our numbers than the way we treat it. Still, I think we’re smart animals. We can figure this out.
I do think we’ll always be fascinated by the mystery of animals speaking to us—because it’s the closest we get to something alien and new, and, in our minds, divine.
Spec Can: Speculative Fiction is often described as the “literature of change”. What important questions around transformation can SF raise for readers?
Author photo courtesy of Jerome Stueart
Jerome Stueart: I think SF can help us get ready for change, and see change as positive and desirable. We get in our ruts. If we want the Star Trek universe—we’re gonna have to work for it. LOL. But I think it can examine multiple paths for us—examining all possible scenarios and showing us a positive path.
The danger of SF, though, is that it inherently likes NOT so positive paths. They present more of what readers desire: conflict, danger, suspense. So we get much more apocalyptic SF which shows us what NOT to do, but rarely shows us HOW to get to the change.
The challenge for SF writers is to imagine us a path to get to the change and show it as a positive one. And that I think is the most fun. Star Trek cheated a bit by shooting so far in the future that all those things like poverty, greed, violence, were all gone by the 24th century. We’ve been spending the last 45 years trying to figure out how Gene thought that might happen! But at least it modeled diversity for us. I recall Nichelle Nichols’ wonderful story of her encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr. just before she was about to quit the show. He encourages her to stay on because he too believes that SF is the literature of change. He saw her presence on the bridge as a model for behavior and hope for a positive future beyond Race. So in this way, SF is a model for change—it models good behavior, even if it doesn’t have all the answers.
Spec Can: What do you see as a distinctive feature of Canadian SF? Has your work changed in a Canadian context?
Jerome Stueart: I think Canadian SF is darker and more experimental than mainstream American SF. I think the publishing industry allows for more kinds of individual author development—we have smaller publishers with greater weight in Canada. In the States, where every microgenre gets codified and calcified, I see a lot more of the same stuff coming out for consumers. I see a lot more undefinable genre in Canadian SF. A freedom because, partly, there’s not a lot of fame on the table, but also because there’s a desire to create a Canadian SF. It looks like we’re nowhere near nailing a specific kind of SF, though, more inviting people to play. Look at Evolve from Edge—the SF future of vampires; look at anything Chizine is doing, which is so out there! It massacres genre-expectations. It also gives authors so much freedom.
Canada has the opportunity to show what the future of Canada will be through SF, and use our regional identities as a way to forge a truly unique version of Canadian SF.
Spec Can: Your short story How Magnificent is the Universal Donor (from Evolve) features an LGBTQ2or queer-oriented protagonist. Could you talk a bit about the representation of LGBTQ2 characters in SF?
Jerome Stueart: Right now, there’s not a lot of queer characters in mainstream SF, and that’s sad. Writing about gay characters seem to relegate your fiction to only specialty bookstores and markets. I can see some of the reason why: When the LGBT community is looking at a permanent minority (at 10%), a marketer/publisher looks at this and says, wow, if gay characters are the main, or only, characters, then we have a small audience. Therefore, heterosexual main characters would “appeal” to more people—it’s “straight marketing math”. Even when a gay male main character is going to have a gay male love interest, you can’t even get half the LGBT community to read it—no female interest, or vice versa. I don’t read any lesbian SF. But I do read SF that happens to have lesbian characters in it if it’s good story. I don’t read for the LGBT. I read for the plot and interesting characters.
So there’s no reason to NOT write gay characters. If the plot is more than a romance novel, queer characters are just as valid and interesting for their choices, their agendas, their characters beyond their sexuality.
I grew up with strong male and female characters, and I identified with the men as men, and with the women emotionally, perhaps, and certainly on who they were in love with, so I found multiple ways of enjoying SF. But then I didn’t know I was gay till much, much later in life (lots of religious reasons why gay feelings go unrecognized).
But as I write now, I want to include more queer characters because if I’d had more of those characters present in literature I might have a) figured out who I was earlier, and b) found more role models in the literature I read. I write for me, and hope that having positive queer role models for younger queer men helps them too. The models of queer SF protagonists: Samual Delany, David Gerrold and Geoff Ryman—I want to read more of their work.
However, mainstream SF publishers and some editors are still not comfortable with queer characters. Star Trek, which I love, and would love to one day write for, needs queer characters, instead of relegating them to the Mirror Universe where every body is omnisexual and perverse. TV and movies still haven’t caught up, and that’s a shame. Granted, I still find strong male characters in SF, and those traits are universal for me.
I thank JK Rowling for giving us Dumbledore, a flawed, beautiful man that kids will hopefully be able to identify with whether they are straight or gay.
I’m working on stories with gay and straight characters right now, so, hey, I’ll do my part!
Spec Can: How Magnificent is the Universal Donor deals with the conflict of medical technology and the mixed blessing/danger of the medical world, particularly focusing on ideas of medical control of the body. What are some of the things SF can do to raise questions about the use of medical technologies, the medicalised treatment of the body and the health-crisis fear that is repeatedly raised by medical professionals?
Jerome Stueart: More stories and novels that take the medical profession to task. Not create a fear, but certainly raise a concern. I wrote How Magnificent after the Flu scare and what I noticed was that getting a flu shot was starting to be cast in a moral argument—you had a duty to others to get the shot. You were putting lives at risk. That’s when I said—that’s too far. 1) if YOU get the flu shot, me getting the flu isn’t going to affect you, and 2) it’s my body. I get to decide what goes in it. And guilt only makes the medical establishment sound like the Church.
We also need to see alternate medical technologies and treatments. Love to see more SF explore the medical treatment of terminal illness and of the way our society can’t look at death. Saw a beautiful documentary on the last rites/rights, palliative care requested by terminally ill patients. SF is the kind of literature that can tackle a societal issue.
Spec Can: What can Speculative Fiction do that realist fiction can’t?
Jerome Stueart: Maybe that’s the greatest strength of SF—it has a wide angled lens. SF is about commenting on societal problems more than character problems. Maybe that’s why the characters can be more universal, and sometimes flatter, because SF is interested in the “what if” of the story—the what if of the society. It can handle a universal character because the society is what we want to examine in SF, and the choices a society makes.
But again, it also has a chance to be more society-scaled prescriptive—and model societal behavior and model change that realistic fiction can’t. SF is the quantum reality of realistic fiction. While realistic fiction might concentrate on individuals and their changes, SF goes wide to take the choices and changes of a large group.
Spec Can: What projects are you currently working on?
Jerome Stueart: I’m finishing up a novella about a gay park ranger working at Sagamore Hill National Historic Site and trying to pick up tips on how to live right from Teddy Roosevelt. I’m turning One Nation into a novel, which is darn hard. I’m also working on other SF and fantasy short stories, trying to get some things finished by Christmas.
Spec Can: Is there anything further you would like to add to our interview?
Jerome Stueart: The importance of reviewers cannot be overstated. With the amount of novels and short fiction out there, just having one review increases your chances of being read, and that’s very important. Thank you for reviewing authors, especially short fiction, and taking the time to come up with good interview questions too!
I want to thank Jerome Stueart for this fantastic interview and all of his brilliant insights, and, selfishly, for his comments about reviewers – thanks Jerome!!
You can explore Jerome’s website at http://jeromestueart.com/ to find out more about his current projects and where to find his novels and short stories.
Speculating Canada: Canadian Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy 