The Reality Break Interviews: Volume #0 Read online

  DS: You get the story, and you get to pick the genre to fit the story you've got to tell.

  EB: Yeah, kind of. And that there are a lot of ways even to tell that particular story, and the way that I happen on more often than not is fantasy or science fiction because I like it. But I don't really think of what I'm writing in relation to the rest of fantasy and science fiction.

  DS: Okay. Fair enough.

  EB: Yeah. I don't know if that's exactly saying what I mean, but that's all right. I'll listen to the radio show and I'll find out either yes, that's what I meant, or no, that's not what I meant.

  DS: We'll let it ride.

  EB: Okay.

  DS: Now, in your book Finder, obviously, some of this will have been established by other people, but your book turns on the fact that the elves are the elite of the society to the point that people who are not elves wish that they were elves.

  EB: Well, yeah. The elves think that they're the elite of this society, and some of the humans think that they're the elite of this society. More it was kind of thinking back on my high school days and realizing everybody thinks they're a geek in high school. Even the people who are, like, the head of the cheerleading squad, or the quarterback on the football team, or the editor of the newspaper, they all think that they're geeks. They certainly don't fit in. They're having a horrible time. Everyone assumes that all those other people in high school are having a better experience than they are and no one is as miserable as they are, and they're all as miserable as you are. The idea is that you can come to the Borderlands, run away from home; run away from all the things that you had been and say, “Okay, now I'll be a magical person.” You would get there, and you discover this was in some ways worse. Now the captain of the football team and the head cheerleader and the editor of the newspaper really are magical people. They're unbelievably beautiful. They have these magical talents. They come from this great place. How can you compete? And for people who really were having trouble finding their place, either in the human world or in the world of the Borderlands, it would be really attractive to think, “That's it. Bingo, right there. I really can become somebody else, finally.” That would be almost an irresistible lure to people who are really hurting about their self-image and about their capabilities.

  DS: Also in the book you've got the theme running through it of friendship and the book really hinges pretty heavily on that. Do you like writing about these strong friend relationships and deep emotions of that sort?

  EB: Yeah, and that, I think, I can even pinpoint my formative influences on that. I grew up during the heyday of “The Man From Uncle” TV show, “The Avengers", and I was a junkie for these things—just loved them. Part of what I liked was that wonderful, intimate, off-hand interaction between the characters, who were clearly very good friends, were always right there for each other. I mean, they literally trusted each other with their lives, but also had that kind of wise-cracking, you know, wiseguy kind of attitude. Another reference is “The Wild, Wild West". James West and Artemus Gordon were this wonderful team, you know, and you could tell that neither of them would work as well apart, and I think that was a formative influence. TV made me what I am today.

  DS: That would be a great pull-quote on a book or something.

  EB: I've got a button that says it. I wear it proudly. I suppose it's not a very good thing to say on the radio, jeeze.

  DS: We're running drastically short on time, and there's so much more to cover. Tell us a little more about your children's book, The Princess And The Lord Of Night.

  EB: That was really a treat for me, because I didn't even know that that was what I was doing. I wanted to write a story as a present for Steve Brust's daughter, Caroline, and I wrote this short story and read it out loud to Caroline's class, and I thought, “That's that; and that was really fun, and I liked that,” and Jane Yolen, who is not only a real swell writer, but is editing a line of children's books for Harcourt Brace heard that I had done it and said, “Why don't you send it to me? It's a story for kids; I write kids’ books, I could maybe tell you what to do with it.” And she read it, and she said, “Well, the Jane Yolen book line doesn't usually do picture books, but I would like to do this as a picture book. Why don't you sell it to me, and we'll find an artist, and see what happens.” I was delighted. I hadn't even realized I'd written a picture book, and my god, it's beautiful! It's illustrated by Susan Gabriel, who has done several other really swell picture books for kids. Her illustrations are influenced by Renaissance painting. It's got some of that kind of composition and some of those kind of glowing colors. It's just a great, great book. I love her paintings. They're wonderful.

  DS: What works do you have that'll be out? Do you have any short fiction that's in scattered places?

  EB: No, I don't actually write too many short stories. The ones that I have written friends have asked me to write for particular anthologies or collections or things, and something will spark an idea and I'll write that. Usually all of my ideas grow and grow and grow and grow and grow until they're immense. I did write a novella for the collection that came out last year called After the King. It was in honor of the J.R.R. Tolkien centennial. I'm busy turning that into a young adult novel for Jane Yolen, which is much more like the sort of thing she usually does for the Jane Yolen books line. Part of the reason why I don't have to expand it very much is because I wrote this story as a novella and it got swollen up until it was 15,000 words long, which was the longest story, I think, in the entire collection. It was a veritable Godzilla of a story. So I'm working on that, and that isn't scheduled yet.

  Transcribed by l.j. anderson, [email protected]

  Nicola Griffith Introduction

  This interview is the first of the four I have done with Nicola Griffith, the only interview in this eBook of the infamous “Gang of Four” interviews from the first day of the radio show. It's not the best one, but it is interesting in a number of ways. The first is that it's pretty good, which is Nicola's work and not mine. She is always a thoughtful and incisive guest. Another is that it is somewhat more revealing in places than you might expect. This was fairly early in her career, and she didn't have the “firewall” that comes with having to talk about yourself and your work over and over. Sometimes, the people who get interviewed the most are the worst guests, because it is so hard to shake them out of that well-worn groove.

  I was put in touch with Nicola by Mark Stevens at The Science Fiction and Mystery Bookshop. As I was soliciting donations of books to the cause, he mentioned her as a first novelist who might like to be on the radio. At the time of this interview, the only work of hers available in an American edition was one short story that had been reprinted in Aboriginal SF from Interzone. Ammonite hadn't come out yet, her other stories were either in Interzone or British anthologies. Despite all this, we talked about Ammonite and I really enjoyed the conversation. It's not that common for me to read or finish a book from an interview after it is no longer necessary. This is not because I don't want to, but when I was doing one of these every week, there was no time. Ammonite I went back and read and liked a lot.

  Nicola Griffith

  This interview was recorded in the WREK studios in Atlanta, Georgia in December 1992.

  DS: You are just publishing your first novel, and the name is Ammonite.

  NG: I don't know if you are familiar with what an ammonite is, but it is a fossilized shell that curves around in a spiral a little bit like a chambered nautilus. They're about 150 million years old.

  DS: What is the novel about? What is the theme?

  NG: That depends upon whom I am talking to. There are three basic sound bite ways to describe it. One is that it's a neat biological puzzle with some genetic engineering. One is that it's a radical reexamination of gender and one is that it's an adventure story set on another planet, so it really depends on who I am talking to at the time. I tend to think of it as a story about one woman who goes to a new place and discovers things about herse
lf and other people. She does that in various ways.

  DS: You've been selling short fiction for 4 or 5 years.

  NG: I sold my first story in 1987, which didn't appear until 1988. Most of my work, in fact, all of my work apart from one story, has appeared in the United Kingdom.

  DS: That one story was “Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese” which was in Aboriginal SF last summer. What provoked the swap between Interzone and Aboriginal?

  NG: I believe that it was a marketing idea. It meant that they could all relax for one issue and go on holiday. They had one editor in America that was doing the work for one month for the British people, and then for one month the British people did the work for the Americans. David Pringle, the editor of Interzone, got to go on holiday for a few weeks.

  DS: At the time, that being your only exposure in this country, that was probably a bonus for you.

  NG: Oh yes. I had written this story, and I was very pleased to sell it twice. It was great.

  DS: Did you get any feedback from America having published it here, it being your only appearance at that point? Did it open up the American market for you?

  NG: Not at all. It pretty much sank without a trace. I got a letter from Bruce Bethke, the SFWA treasurer at the time, who said that he read it and that he understood that I had chronic fatigue syndrome, which of course I do, and he said that it was very poignant knowing your story. It was just a little note. That was it, that was the only feedback I got apart from my friends who all phoned up, and said “I thought it was a great story.”

  DS: When did you move to America?

  NG: That's a long story. In 1988 I came over to MSU for six weeks to do a writing workshop—Clarion. The teachers were people like Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm, Lisa Goldstein, Tim Powers, Kim Stanley Robinson, Chip Delany. I had no idea that they were going to accept me because it was one of those things that you would read in magazines that “So and so went to Clarion” and think that it must be some mythical, magical thing that people go to. This was before I had published any work and had just applied and thought that they probably wouldn't take me but it would be nice to go to America for six weeks. Lo and behold, they wrote back that they'd love for me to come. Then I panicked because I hadn't expected to get accepted, and also I was the first UK citizen to be asked there so I didn't know what a person did, and I had no money, etc. I finally got here, and during those six weeks I met Kelley, the woman I now live with. I had to come back to England for a year and sell my house and so forth, and then I came back to this country in December of 1989. We lived in Duluth, and then Decatur, and now Atlanta.

  DS: That's pretty interesting. All of your work is still selling in the UK but you've been living here for three years now. Is that because your contacts are still over there?

  NG: I believe it's the difference between the two markets. Most all of my protagonists in everything I've written, except for one in a story I wrote a while back, are lesbians which tends to make some editors a little wary. Not much, it's not enough in and of itself to make the editor go “Eek! I can't publish that!” but the fact is that the science fiction I write isn't rocket ships and blasters and neat computer gadgets. It's very much about people with sometimes just SF window dressing. Over here, editors are more strict about what they classify as science fiction.

  DS: Would you say that the American editors are perhaps a little more shy, a little more mainstream?

  NG: They are more mainstream science fictional, yes. I would say the English market is more mainstream in terms of being closer to “literature".

  DS: Are they more adventurous in the UK—more willing to take a chance on the subject matter?

  NG: I would say so. Everything is not done in quite such a committee format. You know what you are going to get when you open Asimov's SF Magazine, you know roughly the parameters that you are going to encounter. You open Interzone and you, well, I, at least, have no idea what I'm going to read. It could be a revolting story like Brian Aldiss's last piece called “Horsemeat” which was frankly disgusting misogynist and so on, and made me feel while I was reading it that I would like to throw the author up against the wall and take a blunt instrument to him. Or it could be a whimsical fantasy or it could be virus and rocket ships and bug-eyed monsters. You really have no idea. That's what interests me about the magazine.

  DS: Do you see that as a weakness of the American market? Do you think that tastes—which comes first, the taste of the American people, or is that all they know because that's all they ever see?

  NG: It's the publishing history. I think science fiction in this country and science fiction in the UK developed along completely different lines. In this country it developed from Hugo Gernsback and so on, it developed from pulp fiction. In England, it developed from H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and so on. It developed parallel with, and often on the same road as, literature. It just has a different history. I think you could characterize it by saying that in England readers expect science fiction to be adult fiction, whereas occasionally readers in this country, and I'm not talking particularly about science fiction readers per se, but the general readers tend to regard sf as a juvenile literature. You can tell that by looking at the covers, I think.

  DS: It's not quite as ghettoized.

  NG: Yeah.

  DS: Is one more likely for a normal person with no particular interest in SF to pick up an SF novel in England than in America?

  NG: I would say so, just because of the way that it is packaged. My book Ammonite, for example, is coming out from HarperCollins in England and the cover of that is just a huge gold ammonite on a deep blue background. I don't know what kind of audience that will immediately attract, but it has a different look to the one that is coming out in this country from Del Rey. This one has a big bright red airlock, a planet and a jelly bean looking spaceship zipping off in the background. That's going to appeal to people who go “Oh, a spaceship!” There just going to see the book differently. I think, because of that, they may read the book differently, too.

  DS: When you first came to this country, you said that you had a lot of problems with INS. Tell me about the idea of being a writer of note.

  NG: That is an Immigration and Naturalization Service definition. How I got my visa to come into this country, I'm on an H1B professional visa. I came in on two platforms. One is by getting a contract for a book of short stories from New Victoria Publishers, which is a lesbian/feminist press based in Vermont, and one is being a “writer of prominence.” That basically means that I could get lots of letters from people like Damon Knight saying “Oh, she's fab; take her.” and I could document the fact that I've published work in the UK and that I was having some work translated into Spanish and a French publisher wanted some of my short work, and I had done some teaching and that, basically, I wasn't some yob off the street who was going to attack people in this country or kill babies or otherwise be antisocial.

  DS: Are you in a situation where you basically have to keep writing? Can they pull the plug on you?

  NG: My visa runs out in February 1994. When that happens, I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do. I could probably get another visa issued by getting another book contract with Ballantine, but really what I'm going to go after is the golden apple. I'm going to try for a green card. There are four basic ways I personally could get a green card in this country. One would be by investing a million dollars in an American company, which will employ twenty or more American citizens; one would be to marry a person of the opposite sex, which, of course, I'm not going to do; one is to have a baby, which also I'm not going to do; and the other is to become extremely famous very quickly, which is the only chance I have. As you can imagine, that's not the terribly likely except it seems to be the only way to go. I can either win the lottery, have a baby, get married, or become famous. There is a fifth possibility. I could get a permanent and very prestigious job, example being professor of comparative literature at Yale, which isn't horribly likely either.

>   DS: Do you feel the pressure from that.

  NG: Just a bit. Yes, I do. Apart from earning my living writing, which anybody here will testify is not easy, I have to bear this double burden. I feel like, as well as getting a book published and making sure people read it and enjoy it, I feel like everything I publish has to be very very damn good. It has to be able to be held up to the light by critics of other literary fields to say “Yes, she is worthy of getting grants” because I'm going to need to get grants, I'm going to need to win prizes to get my green card.

  DS: You've mentioned your work holding up to other critics. You work as a book reviewer, your only work other than writing fiction, for Southern Voice. Is there a dichotomy between reviewing other people's work and writing your own work?

  NG: The important thing to remember I think for me when I'm reviewing is that I shouldn't review other people's work as though it was one of my first drafts. The temptation is to say “Well, I wouldn't have don it that way. God! If they'd just take this character and put her here, or made this happen, etc.” The important thing is to see what is actually there and read it for itself and then look at it. It's also, I review quite a lot of nonfiction, which I can talk about in a bit if you like, and the fiction I do review is lesbian and gay “literature". I keep putting literature in quotes, because it's a genre as much as science fiction or fantasy or horror.