When I was a wee tad, my tastes in SF&F were not very broad and not very considered. I liked Tolkien until I read a stinging feminist pamphlet on Lord of the Rings, at which point I put the work aside. I got back on the bandwagon when I had kids of my own to read to, and made sure I pointed out the fiddliest and most sexist bits as I went. (Then the movies came out. Thank you Peter Jackson.) I’m still a fan. But I know where the holes are, and I don’t excuse them any more than I let his narrative lapses trouble me.
As these works age (The Upsun Trilogy and its parentheses, Midnite Moving Co and Kima the Salvor) everything mouldy, tired, sexist, racist and homophobic that I didn’t see when I was writing it will be revealed as the muddy tide of oppression recedes.
I’m trying to write scientifically sound sf so it isn’t garbage within the year, but sf fans are very McGuffin-friendly, and that’s not what will age these books fastest.
My refusal to include hentai will be viewed as squeamishness. And it is, but it’s my character that’s feeling squeamish, not me. Given a chance to make time with a betentacled alien, I’d be happy to ask my family’s forgiveness after the fact.
My inclusion of poly people who use different schemas to organize their lives beyond the nuclear family will likely be viewed as too white, too middle class and too tidy. Eh.
My gender neutral character, who started as a nickname for a lab tech, demanded a backstory and a future, and I had to give it to them. Whether any gender neutral person on earth will find it an adequate representation of ‘them and people like them’ is not something I will know for a while. Slider kicked my ass and challenged my prejudices, and in the end I feel like I have made a character who can be as at home with their contradictions as I am with mine.
And this work is, of course, an ongoing commentary about being on the autism spectrum.
I wanted to write a story that my mother, who’s been reading SF for 65 years, and has seen many fads come and go, would enjoy. So it’s not exactly a happy ending, but I’m tired of dystopias, my hand to God, and so I didn’t write one.
I wanted to play with a lot of different ideas, like all of them. I wanted a big sloppy story with lots of unknowns, blind alleys and wacky set-pieces.
I owe a lot to Eric Frank Russell and Zenna Henderson and Kim Stanley Robinson and Robert Heinlein and Joanna Russ, although I think I owe more yet to Dorothy Dunnett and Hunter S. Thompson. I think most of all it’s modern TV, with its snappy dialogue and superheroes, that’s influenced this work.
But really, it’s all my mother’s fault. I wrote it for her; to please her, to limn difficult feelings, to challenge her and make her go look stuff up on the internet.
Most particularly, in making aliens so like and so unlike humans, we’ve been participating in a reader/writer experiment in fixing the details of otherness, as well as locating all the points where a bridge may be built and solidarity between any two groups of people may be experienced; like the visionaries behind Star Trek, I find you have to believe that improvements to all of us as human beings, and to the planet we share and the cultures that bloom here, are both necessary and possible, or the story just ends up being about which asshole wins the prize, rather than being about the hero who goes back to her plough.
It’s the sf writer’s job to make the improvements plausible, which it turns out is a fucking sacred task in terms of inspiring younger people with more rigour and muscle in the brains department to figure out how to realize something sf made them dream. I’ve taken it as my job with this work to examine what an alien would have to do to suborn an entire city to his purposes, and how he’d go about identifying the right people to approach. In doing that I’ve learned a great deal about the city I live in which I really, really wish I hadn’t learned. which is the more usual fate of the heroes who don’t actually die in order for a romantic couple to escape alive from whatever grim dénouement you’ve plotted, pace Slavoj Žižek. Heroes who survive have generally smartened up. I am not the hero. But I had to smarten up while I was writing this, and that was interesting in its own way.
If you don’t like it, this is the Re-Gilded Age of SF (or the Electroplated Age, I suppose since there are good fen and true claiming that little of interest or courage is being written in the genre and it’s all shiny baubles looped ’round exsanguinated tropes which sadly for them is total bullshit). The politics of the state of English language SF aside, there’s tons of interesting stuff being written by writers in translation from Shona and Mandarin and Hungarian, from Spanish and Gujerati and Farsi. Go nuts.
