Summer 2007 (2 page)

On the other hand, I think there’s nothing that inspires
one to write about a place like being an outsider there. When you grow up in a
landscape, you see it as a participant, not an observer. You’re inside.

When you come in as an alien, you start thinking about
how and why things are the way they are. You look for reasons, rather than
assuming–that’s the way things are done.

So Vegas really shattered my preconceptions about what
society and people were like. I learned a tremendous amount about the
entertainment industry, about relating to people with different backgrounds,
and about the base assumptions of other people about New Englanders (we’re
actually not like that at all).

Las Vegas is a city in transition. A city of transition.
It’s always reinventing itself, like a giant television set. It’s very unreal.

In
One-eyed Jack and the Suicide King,
I call it
a mirage. A ghost city. And in a lot of ways that’s true.

Oddly enough, I kind of miss it now. Not enough to move
back. But certainly enough to visit.

Q: Let’s call science fiction and fantasy a single
genre. How does SFF reward a writer?

EB: It’s the ultimate playground, isn’t it? Once you
start discarding, using, alienating, or subverting the genre conventions,
there’s absolutely nothing you can’t do. You have to build your own frameworks
to support the thematic and narrative structures you want to use.

The best game ever.

This is probably why I have this need to swipe elements
from so many different subgenres–because for me, it’s not writing to fit
the various patterns that entrances me. It’s how you can use those different
narrative patterns as frameworks upon which to hang the things you really want
to talk about.

The thing I really want to talk about is human reactions
to stressful situations, when it comes down to it. I am just a sucker for
people who demonstrate unholy grit in the face of the inevitable, and pay
unbelievable prices for it. I love the American folktale of “John Henry,” for
example. People do amazing things, in extremis, and that there appears to be a
biochemical circuit in our head that kicks in, in disaster, and triggers us to
altruistic courage, doesn’t do a thing to diffuse my awe.

Several people have opined that I write in too many SFF
subgenres, but really, I only write in one. It’s just not any of the
established ones, though I am happy to borrow their elements for plots.

But all of my books have similar thematic and character
concerns. (I call the style eco-Gothic, and a few other writers–Peter
Watts, Chelsea Polk, Caitlin Kiernan–have adopted the term. But it’s not
a literary movement: it’s just a description of a particular set of thematic
concerns and stylistic elements.
Stand on Zanzibar
is sort of the Ur-text,
if you’re wondering what I mean when I say eco-Gothic.)

Q: How’s the state of SFF today, from where you’re
standing?

EB:
The state of SFF today is
thriving. It’s going mainstream. It’s all the heck over the place–on my
television, in the movies, in mainstream literary novels.

If you limit SFF to mean the genre ghetto, the answer
might be different. We’re always hearing about how book publishing is in
crisis… but we’ve been hearing that for twenty years, just as we’ve been
hearing that SFF is dead.

I think there’s an element within genre that very much
wants it to stay a club scene, that wants to maintain control. Ownership, if
you will.

I submit that would be the best way to strangle the
genre. As I think that drawing bright lines between SF and Fantasy and Magic
Realism and Mythic Fiction is a great way to gerrymander speculative fiction
and rob it of innovation and power.

The real danger, I think, is navel gazing. Trying to
duplicate the same stuff we’ve been doing since 1933, staying too close to the
existing genre. Writing to the existing audience. That’s no good for anybody:
it strangles innovation. It turns the genre into comfort food. And it’s the
best way to stagnate and die out.

Poetry grows through the broken places, you know?
Through the cracks and interstices.

Q: What have you got coming out in 2007/2008?

EB:
In May 2007,
New Amsterdam
— editor’s note: nearly sold out — from Subterranean Press. In
July,
Whiskey & Water
(A Promethean Age book) from Roc. In August,
Undertow
from Spectra. And in October,
A Companion to Wolves
from Tor (written
with a certain Sarah Monette).

In 2008, another Promethean Age book,
Ink & Pen
(if it keeps that title), from Roc. And then there are two trilogies that will
start coming out in 2008.

The first is the “Jacob’s Ladder” books, from Spectra,
which are science fiction–I keep calling them space opera, but they’re
not: they’re gothic and overwrought, and the pocket description is
Amber:Gormenghast::Upstairs:Downstairs… in spaaaaaaaaaace. This concerns the
attempts of the remaining, highly physically modified crew to sustain a dying
generation ship long enough to find a safe harbor.

And the things that get in the way.

It’s all about cascading failures and people not getting
what they want.

The first book is called
Dust
. It will be out
next spring.

And the second is a thing I’m calling “The Edda of
Burdens,” at least until Marketing makes me change it, which is coming out from
Tor starting next fall. It’s periApocalyptic Norse steampunk noir high fantasy.

When I say periApocalyptic, I mean that there are three
separate and distinct ends of the world in these books, and one that predates
the narrative. It’s sort of super dark, and heroes become villains, and vice
versa.

It’s such a cool world. That series concerns the bad
things (and a few good things) that happen between three mythic beings over the
course of about 2500 years, from an early iron age culture to a
post-spaceflight one, while the world they live in cyclically destroys and
reinvents itself.

Also, there’s a steam-powered cybernetic flying
warhorse. What’s not to love?

Q: And what about those mismatched socks?

EB:
You know, I always used to match
by thickness, in high school. Then I got a real job, and they had to match.

Recently, I’ve realized
that my new job allows me to work in my pajamas, so matched socks are strictly
optional… .

Column:
Bears Examining #4 by Elizabeth Bear

Every time somebody writes Spock/McCoy, God does not
kill a puppy (or) Oh, god. Not this kerfuffle again.

This week, I thought I might dip a toe into the current
debates over fanfic-for-profit (possibly a nice idea, but the execution seems,
um, exploitative) and eternal copyright (obscene) that are sweeping the
blogosphere. But then, I found something related but even more frivolous to
talk about.

Recently, the estimable Cory Doctorow published an essay
in
Locus defending
fanfiction
. Cory is something of an Intellectual Property Rights Bad
Boy, a freethinker, and opinions of him and his convictions vary.

Needless to say there was
outcry
.

Well, May
is
National Masturbation Month. I guess
this is a suitable discussion to have now, on many metaphorical levels.

I’m on the record as approving of fanfic, and have been
for a long while. In fact, when I started defending fanfiction, I hadn’t ever
written any. I was not active in any fandoms, media or print.

I did not start writing fanfic, qua fanfic, until after
I was a published–dare I say award-winning?–writer.

In other words, I came to fandom as a professional
interested in the kinds of storytelling they were doing over there, rather than
coming to prodom as a fanfiction writer with a past to justify.

I think that gives me a novel perspective on the genre.

If you will forgive me a small and terrible pun.

(I did write a certain amount of what I would now
identify as fanfic in junior high, but it was in isolation, and I had no idea
that anybody else did that sort of thing. I thought of it as practice,
actually–I knew about spec scripts, and I knew about students repainting
masters to learn technique. I guess Denis McGrath has never heard about that,
or visited a major art museum and seen the baby artists with their easels
pitched in front of an old master, copying, copying, copying.

(I think it was John Gardner who made his writing
students type out James Joyce’s “The Dead” repeatedly as an exercise, but
memory is fallible. In any case, I’m far from the only pro writer who writes
fanfic, although as far as I know I’m the only one who does it openly.)

The interesting thing is that the reason I started
writing
fanfic was because there were properties that I wanted not to alter, but either
to parody or to talk about on a thematic level, and it was much easier to show
those things–to demonstrate them–than to talk about them. (I’ve
been writing
about
fanfic for a while: a large part of what I wanted to
do in
One-Eyed Jack & the Suicide King
is talk about narratives and
how they build on older narratives–well, that’s the whole gist of the
Promethean Age books, really: it’s all a snake eating its tail.)

We are pattern-finding and story-telling animals. It’s
what we do. We take the real world and turn it into narratives and symbols so
our brains can manipulate them more easily. And once we have those narrative
symbols, if they suit our needs, we don’t
stop
manipulating them just
because somebody says, “well, you shouldn’t do that because it’s nasty.”

Any more than, you know, the vast majority of people
ever stopped wanking because somebody told them it would make them go blind.

Now, writers and creators are, indeed, possessive of
their creations. Which is natural. But fans are also possessive of the stories
that speak to them. And they don’t always have the same ideals or desires that
the creators do.

I write stories to service my own narrative kinks. I am
deeply aware of those narrative kinks. Among them are: death or glory stands,
the cold realities of living with damage, people who are better than they have
to (even at great cost to themselves), the mythologization or valorization of
intellect, situations with no right answer–a comedy of ethics, as I’ve
heard it called–and situations that are both over-fraught and under-sold.

This is stuff you will
always
find in my work. I
can’t help it. It’s my myths.

And it’s the myths that show up in the work I love, as
well. They’re what I react to.

It’s possible that if my hardcore narrative kink was gay
porn, I would be doing nothing but writing slash.

The other thing I’m aware of in my own work is how
highly reactive and responsive it is. For pretty much everything I’ve written,
I can point you towards the ur-text that made me go, “No. That’s just
not
right.
” The Jenny Casey novels are a reaction to a bunch of philosophical
issues I had with the science fiction of the seventies and eighties. Carnival
is what you get when you put a collection of unworkable Utopias in a box and
make them fight (am I the only person who reads Utopias and thinks, “That
sounds like hell?”),
Blood & Iron
is what happened when I read one
too many urban fantasies in which the Us vs. Them was clearly divided, and
clearly All Right-Thinking-People must agree with the Us… And let’s be honest,
A
Companion to Wolves
is what happens when you start really thinking about
the sexual and social dynamics in the Pern novels and their descendents, and
decide to take it on the nose with regard to the inherent moral contradictions
rather than brushing them under the fantasy wish-fulfillment.

You know, so it’s perfectly possible to do that, to take
a thematic argument and show a fresh angle in a work that’s on some level
derivative, but has had the serial numbers filed off enough for legal purposes.

So let’s be honest here. That’s all we’re doing in those
cases. We’re filing off the serial numbers so we can go, “Hey! That’s wrong!”

And then somewhere the work takes on a life of its own
and becomes about more than “Hey! That’s wrong!”

But that’s not fanfiction. So why would anybody write
fanfiction?

I can offer a dirty secret. Or a series of dirty
secrets.

Fanfiction is
fun.
It’s fun whether or not you’re
writing publishable fanfic–by which I mean, fanfic that’s either about
properties that are out of copyright (Hey, Blood & Iron is Tam Lin fanfic!
Check it out!
Ink & Pen
is Christopher Marlowe slash!) or fanfic in
which the serial numbers have been filed off far enough not to get your sorry
rump sued–or you’re writing fanfic that’s identifiable and has an
audience among other fans of the show.

It allows somebody who either isn’t yet skilled enough
or who doesn’t want to be a pro writer to have an audience and express
creativity. It’s the moral equivalent of sitting around a campfire with a bunch
of friends noodling out “Eleanor Rigby” on the guitar–and maybe posting
the video on Youtube. You are unlikely to be mistaken for Paul McCartney, even
if you play guitar left-handed.