Lightspeed magazine issu.., p.27
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 51, page 27
I’m sure you know, since this is a podcast, a lot of our listeners might be interested to check out the SF Squeecast, which you’re a regular cast member of. What’s been going on with Squeecast lately?
New format this year, actually. We used to do a sort of show-and-tell format, where everybody brought something awesome to talk about. The Squeecast is a podcast that is myself, Lynne Thomas, Michael Thomas, Seanan McGuire, Cat Valente, and Paul Cornell, and various guest stars. The object of the Squeecast is to talk positively about stuff we love rather than being all critical and negative, because we can do that on Twitter.
Or YouTube.
Or YouTube! But to just really get excited and talk about awesome stuff in the best geek fashion, and we were doing a sort of show-and-tell format for two years. This year we’re shaking it up and doing more of a panel discussion of awesome stuff. So, we’ve talked about our Hugo nominations. These are the things I really loved in the last year. And since we were a two-time Hugo-winning podcast, we have recused ourselves so it doesn’t become the “Best Squeecast Award for Best Squeecast.” So obviously everybody should be voting for you this year.
Unfortunately, since we’re a professional podcast, we’re not eligible in the podcasting category. But they can nominate us for Best Related Work, but that’s a rough category.
That is a rough category. That’s tooth-and-nails clawing up a pile of corpses. “Best everybody we don’t have an award for.” Well, I tried.
I appreciate that. We’re pretty much out of time here, so I’m going to thank very much Elizabeth Bear for joining us on the show.
Thank you, David.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast hosted by David Barr Kirtley. David is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.
Artist Gallery: Vitaly Timkin
Vitaly Timkin works as an artist for the games company Wargaming. His projects include the World of Tanks game. He lives in Minsk, Belarus. His works can be viewed at vagrantdick.deviantart.com.
[To view the gallery, turn the page.]
Artist Spotlight: Vitaly Timkin
Henry Lien
Can you explain the difference between 2-D and 3-D art for our readers?
These days, it does not matter much, 2-D or 3-D. 2-D is painted with brushes and oil. 3-D is molded in special programs as a sculpture, which allows you to create an object in a 3-D space. The main factor impacting quality is time. That is the same regardless of 2-D or 3-D.
Your work seems to sometimes combine imagery from different times and places in unexpected ways. For example, you have one landscape that is filled with architecture suggesting that it is a high fantasy setting, but the sky shows multiple planets and moons. The Geologist is a futurist science fiction image, but the suit worn by the figure seems to have echoes of 1960s and 1970s space/aeronautics styling. What were you trying to achieve with these anachronisms?
It is interesting for me to create a story, which gives the chance to reflect and think about the world where this might happen. Linking contrasting elements helps that process by creating a huge flight of fancy. The story is what fills in the gap between the contrasting elements.
Do you feel that there is any particular aesthetic flavor to artwork coming out of Belarus, or do you feel that science fiction/fantasy artwork is post-geographical now, in the early twenty-first century?
These days, it isn’t important where the artist lives. The Internet unites all of us in one information space.
Your work seems very cinematic in composition and feel. Does cinema influence your work? If so, what are some of the films that have influenced your work the most?
I am attracted to cinema’s brevity and central focus on the main object. The movies that inspire me include Alien, The Terminator, RoboCop, The Matrix, and Oblivion.
Much of your work seems to show the beauty of destruction in war. Do you have a particular interest in war imagery?
Not per se. However, I am attracted to the opportunity to work with a dynamic plot. Obviously, war creates lots of opportunities for plot.
The landscapes and vistas in your works are often startling. Can you discuss how you created them technically? Are they based on photographs of existing locations?
My landscapes are not based on existing locations, but I do base my work on moods I find from existing inspirations. I create landscapes in these stages: (1) search for a plot; (2) compose a sketch; (3) prepare basic elements of the piece; (4) create a photo collage; (5) do final color correction.
What is your dream project?
I would love to do concept art for film.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Henry Lien is an art dealer in Los Angeles (www.glassgaragegallery.com). He represents artists from North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. His artists have appeared in ARTnews, Art in America, Juxtapoz, the Huffington Post, and Time Magazine, and been collected by and exhibited in institutions and museums around the world. Henry has also served as the President of the West Hollywood Fine Art Dealers’ Association and a Board Member of the West Hollywood Avenues of Art and Design. He is also the Arts Editor at Interfictions. Henry also has extensive experience as an attorney and teaches at UCLA Extension. In addition, Henry is a speculative fiction writer. He is a Clarion West 2012 graduate. His work has been published in Asimov’s, Analog, and Interfictions, and been nominated for the Nebula. Visit his author website at www.henrylien.com.
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS
Author Spotlight: An Owomoyela
Jude Griffin
“Undermarket Data” has a noirish feel to it—what are joys and pitfalls of this genre?
You know, I never considered this to be a noir story. I’m not sure I can speak intelligently about the joys and pitfalls of the genre, as I don’t have a lot of experience in it—reading, writing, or watching.
I actually set out to write a cyberpunk story, when I sat down to write this. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I set out to write a story that would appeal to the sensibilities of a friend, who happens to enjoy cyberpunk stories, among other things. As cyberpunk is another genre in which I have read less widely than I ought to have, I’d hesitate to say that I set out to write a cyberpunk story. More like a vaguely cyberpunk-flavored story about data and privilege.
Fortunately, this is not a novel, and doesn’t need to be marketed according to subgenre. Unless someone starts linking to the story with a line like “Check out this cyberpunk story by An Owomoyela!”, I shouldn’t have to worry about readers coming in with that genre’s expectations and being completely disappointed by what they find. Hopefully.
I frequently don’t pay attention to the genre of a story when I’m writing it. (To occasionally hilarious results: I have a short story I’m working on right now, and I honestly don’t know if it’s science fiction or fantasy. On the one hand, it’s on another planet, there are aliens, and one of the major arcs of tension involves the politics of energy management. On the other hand, the main character is very clearly a lightning mage whose work involves creating lightning spells. If I ever manage to finish it, I’m going to have an interesting time deciding which markets I can send it to.)
This means that I can, apparently, write myself into genres without realizing it. That’s a little odd, but I guess it’s a neat skill to have!
The ending gives the impression that the story of Jace and Culin is still unfolding—will we see more from you in this world?
If all goes as planned! I did specifically write the ending to leave myself an in for further goofy buddy cop movie adventures between Jace and Culin, and there’s a lot about the collaborative and crowdsourced aspects of the Undermarket that I want to continue exploring. I also have a story in the works right now about an Upcity hacker who gets involved in a conspiracy surrounding falsified energy market reports.
Energy as a public utility seems to be one of the themes I’m fascinated by, at the moment. Other themes I’ve noticed cropping up in a disproportionate number of my works include generation ships and their effect on culture, and power distance/hierarchical interpersonal dynamics. I’m also hoping that someone will come along and write pykrete-punk naval fiction so that I won’t have to.
You’ve said that you know an xkcd for every topic: Which ones relate to the ideas in this story?
Hah! You know, I think there’s a lot of xkcd that has thematic resonance with this, but there’s at least one that deals explicitly with Markov chains: “Swiftkey” [xkcd.com/1068]. (Though that Markov chain is considerably more coherent than many.) Though for autonomous bits of code running rampant on networks and complicating matters, I’d have to recommend “Network” [xkcd.com/350].
Recently, I’ve been devouring the new xkcd “What If” articles as they come out, and those frequently prod you to think about data and language in a new way. For example, the Twitter “What If” [what-if.xkcd.com/34] answers the question of how many unique tweets exist, but also hits on information density in English and how the information content of written English words shows a direct correlation with how much a text file can be compressed by a file compression algorithm. It also contains this bit of insight:
“This example hints at a very deep idea, which is that information is fundamentally tied to the recipient’s uncertainty about the message’s content and their ability to predict it in advance.”
… which is more or less what a Markov chain is all about.
Somewhat relatedly, there’s a party game for parties attended primarily by writers, wherein everyone writes a paragraph of a story and passes it to the next person, who writes the next paragraph—and then folds the paper over, so that only their paragraph is visible before they pass it on to the next person. The end result is a Markov-chain-like story where any two contiguous paragraphs make sense in the context of each other, but the story as a whole is usually hilariously incoherent.
Any progress on your green dystopia story idea?
Like most of my stories, the end result seems to be deviating quite a lot from the idea seed [magistrate.dreamwidth.org/36170.html]. I’m having a great deal of fun with the worldbuilding—the current idea has a planet with high concentrations of radioactive minerals in the crust, which supports a dense jungle that can take energy from photosynthesis at the canopy and radiosynthesis at the roots. The only practical places for human habitation are places where the geologic strata have broken in such a way that the radioactive materials aren’t present where people are trying to build. Which leads to several small-land-area cities in places like beaches and valleys, largely isolated geographically from each other. I’m also thinking of ways that cities could be built out into/onto bodies of water, given that water works well for radiation shielding [what-if.xkcd.com/29]. I need to work out how readily available the materials of industry would be on this planet. I suppose that if you squinted and looked at it at an angle, you could call it the prequel to a green dystopia.
What I haven’t actually come up with … is a plot. I should probably find one of those at some point. I am reliably informed that stories with plots fare better than stories without.
Any new projects you want to tell us about?
I’ve been having a lot of fun with algorithmic creativity aids recently. For example, I whipped up a creative prompt bingo generator [an.owomoyela.net/fun/bingo_generator] a while ago, and I’ve been adding on to it as more and more people get interested and want to see additional features. (Prompt bingos are popular in fanfiction circles [allbingo.dreamwidth.org/profile] as a kind of gamified way to generate a lot of stories/art/etc. in a communal way: Everyone gets a bingo card with different creative prompts in the squares, and they try to make a bingo by creating works which engage with the prompt. They’re tremendous fun.)
Having done that, I decided to start working on a demographics generator [an.owomoyela.net/fun/demographics_generator], which is turning into a multi-purpose random sets generator. The original idea was that you could set up a list of, say, genders, ethnicities, and personality types, and spit out a randomized cast of characters you could play with. Then I realized that I could do things like throw in a list of tropes and word counts and challenge myself to write ultra-short fiction exercises. (Given that I have difficulty writing anything under 4000 words, 100-300 word challenges are something I’ve been playing with to teach myself economy of prose.) And then I realized that I could take the randomly generated sets of tropes, word counts, and fictional universes, and generate bingo cards with them [magistrate.dreamwidth.org/38138.html], so I built in functionality to port the generated random sets into the bingo generator.
The demographics generator is still in alpha, the underlying code is a mess and needs to be reworked, and I’m not sure anyone derives quite as much delight from it as I do. But whatever.
I keep thinking about creating a random plot generator where you could feed in parameters for what kinds of protagonists you want to have, what family of plot events and plot contrivances you want to play with, and what basic plot arc you want to fill in, and then it would generate an extremely sketchy outline of a story that you could flesh out, play with, subvert, or do whatever people do with outlines as writing prompts. I also keep thinking about developing a fiction-writing AI, but I’m fairly certain that’s beyond my skill level …
As for fiction projects, my writing process is chaotic enough that I could list off two dozen things I’m working on (for some value of “working on”), but I have no idea which of them will be completed at all, let alone which you should be looking out for.
One project I want to start in on is ideological: a set of works in shared worlds [an.owomoyela.net/fiction/shared_worlds], released under a Creative Commons license designed to keep commercial control of individual works with their creators but allow other artistic folks to expand on those canons and publish their work commercially. It’s an attempt to tap into/support the kind of community-based writing that supported and nurtured me while I was learning the craft. Of course, like a lot of my projects, the limiting factor seems to be that I don’t write nearly as quickly as I wish I did.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.
Author Spotlight: Gardner Dozois
Jude Griffin
How did “Morning Child” come about?
I started “Morning Child,” then an untitled fragment, about ten years before I finished it. I wrote a few pages, then lost steam on the story and put it away in a file drawer. Ten years later, I was going through old files, happened to pick up the fragment and looked at it, and suddenly saw how I could finish it. A couple of days later, I had. This shows you why authors should never throw anything away. You never know when an abandoned fragment or draft is going to rekindle and grow into a completed story, even years later.
The unfolding truths about John are handled so delicately and so beautifully: Can you talk about the challenges of the pace and nature of the revelations in the story?
The key to this story is misdirection. I wanted to plainly give you facts that are valid at the moment but that will become subject to a different interpretation in the light of new knowledge you’ve gained by the end of the story. In the original story fragment, the first couple of pages, which survived into this draft almost unchanged, the old man is really an old man and the boy is really a boy. In the final draft, I started playing with assumptions, having fun with the idea that although everything I’d said was the truth at the moment I’d said it, nothing was really as it seemed, and it was all going to turn out to be totally reversed by the end. All the assumptions you make when reading the opening turn out to be “wrong,” or at least turned on their heads, by the end. The story has to be paced carefully, so that your recognition of that doesn’t happen much before you hit the actual end of the story itself, for maximum effect. Ideally, the reader won’t understand what’s really going on until a few paragraphs before the end of the story, on the last page. Has more impact that way.
Did your vision for the story change during the writing of it?
Yes, quite a bit. In the original fragment, it was the story of a man and a boy surviving out in the woods after a traditional atomic war scenario. That may be why I ran out of steam on it—it was too familiar a scenario, with nothing to be done with it that hadn’t been done before a dozen times. In the final draft, I made the war a lot stranger, weirder and more bizarre, not just your typical After-the-Bomb scenario, which made it a lot more interesting to write about, and which also provided a moderately “scientific” justification, or at least a rationalization, as to what happened to the boy to make him the way he is. As a consequence of exposure to some unimaginable, alien, high-tech weapon or procedure, it’s acceptable enough to get you through the story, whereas there would have been nothing to explain it or justify it if it had been the standard After-the-Atomic-War scenario.
The other thing, the major thing, that changed between the first draft and the final was the inclusion of the time-shifting gimmick, which wasn’t going to be part of the original story, where everything was straighforward and the boy was really a boy and the old man was really an old man. The time-shifting thing came to me as an image in a dream, of a boy growing old and then growing young again; the dream faded when I awoke, taking with it any concept of what was happening that might have existed in the dream, but the image lingered. A day or so later, when I was looking through old story fragments, I chanced upon the fragment that became “Morning Child,” and saw how I could use the existing fragment as a vehicle to allow me to present the dream-image, and express it in story terms.
