Ficlets

1. Quick! Tell us a little about yourself and Spindrift.

Quick? You want a quick answer from someone who could spend an hour telling the story about how he once helped an animal control officer shoot a rabid skunk? Well, umm … all right. After leaving behind a career in journalism, I’ve been a self-employed, full-time writer for the last twenty years, most of which has been devoted to science fiction. During this time, I’ve published thirteen novels, about seventy-five stories, and a boatload of essays, for which I’ve received a number of awards, including two Hugos, two Locus Awards, a Seiun Award, and a half-dozen or so readers-poll citations. My first novel, Orbital Decay, was published in 1989, and my most recent novel, Spindrift, came out earlier this year.

That was rather quick, wasn’t it? Okay, then … I also live in western Massachusetts, which is a rather odd place to find someone with a Southern accent. I’m married to my my college girlfriend, with whom I’ll be celebrating our twentieth anniversary later this summer, and we have two dogs who are, in effect, our four-legged children. Our house is jammed with books, ceramic and stained-glass artwork, and spaceship models, and I’m able to come up with the most amazing excuses for not mowing the lawn. For example: “Sorry, honey, but I’m busy doing an interview with John Scalzi.”

2. One of the things I found interesting about Spindrift is that it takes place in a universe that you’ve used before in another set of books – your acclaimed Coyote Trilogy – but the story itself is largely independent of the events of those books. Why did you choose to “recycle” the universe. Was it just a matter of convenience? Or does doing so offer some structural or narrative advantage?

Setting Spindrift in the same universe as the Coyote series – which may not be a trilogy much longer, incidentally, since I’ve begun work on a fourth volume – wasn’t a matter of recycling so much as it was expansion. One of my guiding principles as a writer is something that the late Theodore Sturgeon once said: “Ask the next question.” That is to say, if you’ve set up a situation that’s open-ended, then that’s a question, and it behooves you to answer it. At the end of Coyote Frontier, I depicted the aftermath of a first-contact situation which had its genesis in the first volume, Coyote. When I reached that point of the narrative, I realized that I had posed a question – what happened to the starship that had vanished fifty-six years earlier, and how did the survivors meet an alien race? – and saw that this was an opportunity to write a novel that had been lingering in the back of my mind for the past five or six years.

This approach also gave me the ways and means of using the background I’d developed for the first three Coyote novels to go further out into the galaxy, perhaps to see what else lay out there. So Spindrift has become the branch point from the central storyline of the Coyote novels. My next novel, Galaxy Blues – which will be serialized in Asimov’s Science Fiction later this year, and published in hardcover by Ace next April – lifts off from the events of Spindrift and continues this thread. This way, I’m able to write novels and stories that are anchored to Coyote, but not necessarily confined to this one particular world.

3. In your Coyote universe, you have what is currently the land mass of the United States broken up into a number of political states, whose politics over time range from extreme right to extreme left – and in all of them, there’s something for your characters to rebel against. Are you using these political systems in your books to comment on politics in the real world? Or is it simply a matter of doing what’s interesting for the story?

One science fiction trope I find unbelievable is the idea that, in the future, we will all belong to the same political party. We will all be Republicans, or we will all be Socialists, or we will be card-carrying members of the United Earth Federation of Planets or whatever. But even a glance at our own times, not to mention human history, shows us just how unlikely this will be. One-party systems, no matter how benign the intentions of their founders, are seldom successful, mainly because they depend on everyone working for the commonwealth, while experience shows us that, sooner or later, someone will try to rig the system so that they get a bigger slice of the pie than anyone else.

When I was a journalist, I got to see politics at close range … first when I was in Washington D.C., covering Congress during the Reagan administration, and later in Worcester, Massachusetts, when I regularly attended City Council meetings. And one thing that I observed over time is that ideologues rarely make any progress, largely because they’re too busy preaching to the choir, while the politicians who are successful over the long run are those who are able to cross party lines and talk to the other side. My favorite incident was seeing a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat savage each other’s positions on a particular piece of legislation, then privately discuss their golf game while in the men’s room. To me, this is the way a healthy democracy really works. You duke it out in public, then reach compromises in private.

In the Coyote novels, along with its spinoffs, I deliberately put in place a variety of governments that are in conflict with one another. They range from the United Republic of America, which is far-right radicalism carried to its worst extreme, and the Western Hemisphere Union, which a deeply flawed form of socialism, to the European Alliance, which is capitalist democracy with both its benefits and drawbacks, and the Coyote Federation, which is sort of a cross between representative democracy and a decentralized form of socialism. This has enabled me to do a couple of things. Obviously, it sets up the sort of internal conflict that drives a story, but it has also allowed me to comment on current affairs. And if that gets under the skin of people who are beholden to one particular ideology or another… hey, books are supposed to make you think, aren’t they?

4. Share a piece of advice you’ve been given about writing.

The best piece of advice ever given to me came from one of my journalism professors, the late Roy Fisher, the Dean Emeritus of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where I received my master’s degree. Roy was my editor when I was in the Washington Reporting Program at Mizzou – which was how I came to be a Capitol Hill correspondent for five or six months – and one day I turned in a story that was long on style and short of substance. Roy kept sending me back for rewrites, again and again, while another editor several hundred miles away was breathing down my neck for copy. I finally caved in and did it Roy’s way, and although this meant that my precious little ego took a blow, damned if it didn’t produce a story that you could understand on first reading.

At which point, Roy said, “Allen, it’s not enough to write to be understood. You must also write so that you can’t possibly be misunderstood.” Now, he meant that in the context of conventional journalism, but I’ve discovered that it also works well for fiction … and SF in particular. I experiment quite a bit in my work, playing around with different styles, but I always try not to lose my reader. I want them to know what’s going on, and not have to struggle to figure things out.

5. So much of your writing takes place in a plausible near future – one where there’s actually a push toward colonization of space. You yourself have testified before Congress about space exploration, so let me ask you: Are we still headed into space? And do we need to head into space?

Yes to both questions. Yes, humankind is still headed into space… but perhaps not the way we originally expected, or by whom. As I write, the space shuttle Atlantis is currently on its way back to Earth from another mission to the International Space Station. This alone tells us quite a bit about the durability of manned space exploration. Despite great sacrifices, we continue to make the effort, not only because humanity has an instinctive need to explore new frontiers, but because our long-term survival demands that we do so.

However, I think the days of space travel being the sole province of NASA are coming to a close. First, we’re seeing the emergence of private enterprise as a prime mover, with various companies developing their own spacecraft. Second, other countries are getting into the game. China, Japan, and India have all announced their intent to send people to the Moon within the next couple of decades, and I’m giving any one of them 50-50 odds of having the first person walk on the Moon since Apollo 17. Although I’d rather have the next moonwalker be an American citizen, I’d be just as happy if he or she was Japanese, Indian, or Chinese. Or better yet, an employee of a subsidiary of a large dot-com, which is another distinct possibility.

The last time I saw someone walk on the Moon, I was thirteen years old. I’m now six months shy of my fiftieth birthday, and I’m still waiting for someone else to do it again. I’m confident that this will happen, sooner or later… but, hell, it’s hard to be patient for so long. I’m just happy that I was able to go before Congress and blow off some steam.

6. You are a multiple award nominee and multiple award winner for your writing. In the grand scheme of things for a writer, what does winning these awards do for you? Does it have a practical benefit beyond the admiration of one’s fans and peers?

Winning a Hugo is a huge boost to the ego. Having it happen twice is even better, and I wouldn’t mind very much if it happened again. Even those times when I’ve sat in the audience and watched while someone else went on stage to pick up a Hugo or Nebula that I half-expected to be mine weren’t all that bad. “It’s an honor just to be nominated” may be a cliche, but it’s also true … and having “Two-Time Hugo Award Winning Author” appear as a banner on the covers of my books don’t hurt sales one bit.

But, y’know, you have to put all this in perspective. Jack Williamson had a career that stretched across the entire history of the genre, or at least as it’s been known as “science fiction,” but his work never received either a Hugo or a Nebula until the last few years of his life. That didn’t seem to hurt him. Robert Heinlein had four novels nominated for the Nebula, and they lost every single time. I don’t think he suffered much either. And I could name a half-dozen successful authors whose work has never received any awards, and a half-dozen other writers whose books or stories have won major awards but who have since vanished without a trace.

After Orbital Decay received a Locus Award for Best First Novel, I spent the next six or seven years of my career without any nominations whatsoever. For awhile, that really bugged me. Finally, though, I got tired of griping about it, and said to myself, “Aw, screw it, just go out and write the best stories you can, and the hell with awards.” And when I put that behind me, that’s when my stuff started picking up awards.

I’ve been doing this for two decades now. And as tough as it may be at times, I can tell you this … it beats hell out of covering City Council meetings.