Alas, a Blog

Brooke Bolander

Rachel Swirsky: Frankly, your fashion is amazing. I would be happy to listen to you talk about it in whatever way you want. If you’d like some prompting – what’s the basis of your aesthetic? How do you find clothes?

Brooke Bolander

Brooke Bolander: Thank you so much! Man, I don’t know if I have an aesthetic per se so much as I just try to find whatever works for me, and what apparently what mostly works for me is loud, shiny, and more often than not vintage. There was a time when I dressed low-key, because I was trying to more or less blend in with the background. It didn’t work. I have never been good at blending in. I only evolved into my current sense of fashion, for what it’s worth, when I accepted that and started wearing the loudest shit I could find in the store. 

Besides the cardinal fashion compass of “What Would Bowie Wear?” (WWDBW), my process is mostly going into vintage clothing stores and rooting around until I find the most ridiculous thing, at which point I will say “this is utterly ridiculous and will never work on anybody, let alone me” and then I try it on and it inevitably works. Last time it was a sequined jumpsuit. You also can’t go wrong with effectively cosplaying concepts of things, ie “today I am going to stealth dress as a tree/dinosaur/book.” 

RS: Your Wikipedia page informs me that you spent time in college studying archaeology. How has that influenced your writing? (and/or what’s the weirdest thing you learned which hasn’t made it into common knowledge?)

BB: That was actually one of the earliest points at which I started getting the urge to write original fiction. I had dabbled in fanfiction before, but sitting in class studying the Mesolithic in particular–a very interesting period in human development well before we actually started writing stuff down–put questions in my head. Why was this woman buried with a swan’s wing? Why was this one wearing a golden prosthetic eye? History is full of mysteries, and mysteries want to be explained. Sometimes that involves making stuff up. Call it historical fanfic, if you like. 

I think the coolest thing we read about in my degree was St. Bees Man. “St Bees Man” was the name given to a knight by the name of Anthony de Lucy who died in 1360. He was buried in a priory in Cumbria. His coffin was sealed in lead, which, combined with the bitumen-soaked shroud his body was wrapped in, created an anaerobic environment that preserved him almost perfectly for the next 600 years. When the University of Leicester exhumed the corpse in 1981 his cheeks were still pink, there was still blood in his body, his irises were intact, and his stomach contents were preserved almost perfectly. 600 years! You can find the photos online if you poke around, and they are amazing, if pretty gruesome. 

RS: In another of your short stories that I like, you write about Laika the dog who was sent into space. Laika was the first living being to be launched into Earth orbit. It was onboard the Soviet satellite Sputnik 2 in 1957. It was always understood that Laika would not survive the mission, but her actual fate was misrepresented for decades. (If you’ve seen Bojack Horseman, by the way, the show features intelligent, humanoid animals, and I really liked that, in their universe, the first woman in space was Laika.) What about Laika pulled at you? Are there other stories about the experiences of real, historical animals which have tugged at your imagination?

BB: Laika was a sacrifice and the tragedy of that haunts me. The scientists working on the project knew she most likely wouldn’t survive, unlike most of the dogs in the space programme that came later like Strelka and Belka, but her survival was never a primary concern. She was a street dog acquired from the pound because they figured strays would be best equipped to handle the harsh conditions that might result from being shot into space, and she just … got unlucky. She won the anti-jackpot. You get to be the first Earth animal in orbit, but also you die alone! Cool cool. We’re sort of bred dogs to be the perfect victims and this is like the depressing culmination of that layer of our relationship with them. 

I seem to be doing a series on historical animal tragedy as a throughline of my career. “Sun Dogs” was the first. Since then, I’ve published The Only Harmless Great Thing (partially about Topsy, the elephant electrocuted at Coney Island in 1903 whose death was recorded & distributed by the Edison Film Company as Electrocuting an Elephant) and No Flight Without The Shatter, which features Benjamin the last surviving thylacine & Martha the last passenger pigeon as lead characters. I guess it’s a trilogy at this point.

RS: I’ve only asked you questions about your very early work — because that’s when I was reading all the time! What silly questions should I be asking you about your more recent stories?

BB: No question is silly! But if you were inclined and asked me where to acquire my most recent work, I’d point to Apex’s “Do Not Go Quietly” anthology that just came out this very month (I have a Little Match Girl retelling in that one) or to Tor.com (which featured “No Flight Without The Shatter” last year & published The Only Harmless Great Thing, my very first book-shaped object, in January 2018). 

RS: What projects are you currently working on?

BB: Forever and always my novel, but I’m very much hoping to finally have a draft of that done by the end of 2019. Otherwise I’ve got a short piece coming out with Lightspeed later on in the year, and am currently putting the finishing touches on another story I’ve pitched as “Drive meets Spirited Away.” We’ll see if that one turns out as silly as it sounds.

Aliette de Bodard, Photo Credit: Lou Abercrombie

Rachel Swirsky: What is the best part of living in Paris?
Aliette de Bodard: The bread. Or possibly the éclairs. I have a weakness for coffee éclairs, and they’re just not the same abroad (I’ve tried!).

RS: What is the worst part of living in Paris?
ADB: We don’t really have snowy winters, snow melts before it hits the ground. Wait. Maybe that’s a positive.

RS: You do interesting combinations of fantasy and science fiction. What about genre mixing appeals to you?
ADB: It just happens I guess! I think of fantasy and science fiction as a large continuum of things, and I tend to pick and match the bits I like for a given project. I find it’s very helpful for atmosphere, but there’s also serious reasons: scientific rigour when world building a fantasy world helps a lot (even if there’s a lot of overt or hidden magic with fuzzier rules), and projecting science beyond, say, the 50-year-mark is always going to lead to technologies that feel like they’re breaking the current rules (aka seem like magic, as Clarke said).

RS: What is the tastiest part of living in Paris?
ADB: The Vietnamese grocery stores are only 40 minutes away (I live in the wrong area of town lol), which gives me the perfect excuse to grab a bowl of phở before going shopping.

RS: I kind of want to go back to Paris.
ADB: Everybody should! I grouch a bit, but I love the city. So many things to see (and so much food. I kind of always go back to the food).

RS: You’ve said your writing process when you were tackling “Immersion,” my favorite of your short stories, evolved out of anger, and that was unusual for you. How was that writing process different from your normal one? Have you written out of anger again since?
ADB: The issue with anger is that I can’t really sustain it for long (and that it takes a toll on me I’m not a big fan of). My writing process generally has its roots in curiosity: I have an idea and go research some more on details, and shape the plot that way.

I do get angry when researching stuff: for The House of Shattered Wings I had to research the Vietnamese diaspora in Paris, and there’s quite a few hair-raising tales of people being conscripted into making weapons and being used as indentured labour for years after the war was over. But there’s definitely no way I could write an entire novel fuelled on anger, it would be too painful.

RS: What is the most beautiful piece of art you’ve seen in Paris?
ADB: Uh, there’s a lot of them around! It’s a bit of a silly thing, but last time I was in Musée Cernuschi (the Asian Arts museum), there was this huge bronze statue of an (Asian) dragon leaping from the sea by the staircase. I’m not sure who made it or when it dates from, because there was no label on it, but it struck me as pretty amazing because the artist had captured the sense of flowing, arrested movement I associate with dragons.

RS: Can you describe what you call the Lovecraftian plants taking over your living room? Pictures more than welcome.
ADB: When we moved in, my in-laws gave my husband a cutting from a plant they had at home–it started as this really tiny handful of vines, and then it wouldn’t stop growing! It’s slowed down a bit today because we put it a little away from the light and decided not to water it quite as much (not being big fans of the plant invasion). At one point, when we moved out of our old flat, its roots had pierced the pot it was in and were busy trying to find some purchase on the parquet–it was a good idea to move the pot, or I fear we’d have had to tear the plant from its spot!

My colleagues gave me another one which is a kind of rubber tree, which also started as a tiny thing not much higher than my waist–over the summer it drank an entire bottle of water per day and made clusters of leaves every three days. It was double the size by the time I brought it home–same thing, we took it away from the windows and tried to water it a little less…

RS: If you were forced to enter one of the worlds you’ve written about, which would you pick, and what would you do there?
ADB: Uh. Probably the Xuya universe because a lot of the others are very bleak! I’d be a builder of Minds for spaceships and space stations, I suspect–I’d quite like to be like Lady Oanh in On a Red Station, Drifting, fixing problems with Minds and making sure everything runs smoothly.

RS: Anything else? Take it away!
ADB: Phở. Everyone should try phở if they haven’t already (ok ok, I’ll grant that you can try bi cuốn if not phở. They’re rice paper rolls with marinated pork rinds and fish mint, which is a herb with a very particular taste that I haven’t seen much outside of Vietnam. There’s very few ingredients in them total, but they taste *so* good).

(This interview was posted one week early for my patrons on Patreon. Thank you!)

SL Huang. Photo Credit: Chris Massa

Rachel Swirsky: When you were at MIT, did you take any writing classes? What was it like studying writing in that environment? 

SL Huang: I did not!  Which is kind of strange given that MIT has a ridiculously good creative writing program, but I was in my “writing is the one thing I do that I will not stress out about or set any goals for” phase. (You can see how that has worked out for me, she says, eyeing the current mountain of deadlines.)

RS: Your bio says you are a gunslinger. Are you really a gunslinger? I hope so. Feel free to lie if you aren’t (or if you are, actually).

SLH: I am indeed really a gunslinger.  Some number of the following facts are true about me:

• I have qualified at the Expert Rifleman level on a civilian version of the Army Qualifying Test
• I can field-strip an AK-47 in less than seven seconds
• I once fixed a malfunctioning Springfield XD with a piece of duct tape
• I have fired an Uzi in the middle of Market Street, San Francisco
• I’ve had conversations with police officers while hiding five shotguns under my trench coat

(NB, for the NSA agents reading this: the police officers knew they were there.)

RS: What is your gunslinger origin story?

SLH: I learned to shoot at MIT.  No, really.  MIT has one of the best pistol programs in the country.

My pistol coach from MIT now coaches the U.S. Paralympics Shooting Team.  We’re still in touch.

RS: You mention liking the abelian grape joke which I must admit I do not understand. I really like the Heisenberg’s speeding ticket joke. What does our shared love of terrible nerd jokes say about us? I remind you that you are free to lie.

SLH: It means we are spectacular specimens of superhumanity who ride into battle on dragons and eat gas giants for breakfast.

(p.s. I love the Heisenberg speeding ticket joke, too.)

RS: In 2016 you put together an anthology of Campbell-eligible writers so that they can show off their work to potential voters. In the past, it has always been difficult to identify eligible writers, let alone find all their work in one place. How did you figure out who to include? Did you reach out to writers who were in professional TOCs, or did you wait for people to come to you?

SLH: We (my co-runner Kurt Hunt and I) sidestepped the identification-of-eligibility question by pawning off the work on our friends at Writertopia, who maintain a list of Campbell-eligible writers as a genre resource.  Put yourself on their list, we said, and you can be in the book!

In all seriousness, we did not mean to cause so much extra work for them — we figured most people interested would be on the Writertopia list already.  But we figured WAY wrong, and Writertopia got flooded with add requests.  Bill Katz and David Walton over there are absolute gems of human beings — they did an incredible job vetting and adding people before our deadline, and they’ve given us nothing but support.  We owe them big time.

As for how we reached out — hahaha, we had less than two weeks to get submissions; there was no way we could wait for people to come to us.  We posted on forums, blogged, and tweeted.  We sent over a dozen press releases to genre sites and asked for signal boosts from well-followed voices in SFF.  We also wanted to reach out to eligible writers and invite them directly, but could only find public email addresses for about 60% of the people who were already on Writertopia’s list — and here our Writertopia friends did us yet another solid and forwarded an invitation to them all on our behalf.

I was so, so pleased with the response we got.  120 authors!  Over A MILLION WORDS OF FICTION!

We passed the torch on it the following year, and I hope anthologies of the year’s Campbell-eligible writers keep being a thing as often as possible. Some of our authors told us the anthology felt like an enormous group hug, and I’m so proud to have been a part of that.

RS: Looking at the stories in the Campbell anthology, would you say there were noticeable thematic preoccupations? What was the zeitgeist for new writers in 2015?

SLH: The biggest zeitgeist, I think, is that there wasn’t one.  The thematic diversity in this group is incredible.  I wasn’t able to read even close to all million words, but we had stories from F&SF and Analog, Strange Horizons and Mothership Zeta, Angry Robot and Baen.  We had self-published, small press, and Big Five.  We had funny stories and tearjerking ones, swashbucklers and horror, aliens and myths and hard SF and fairy tales.  Flash, shorts, novel excerpts, even a play!  And the authors came from all over the world and from all walks of life — we even had at least one translation.

If this anthology proved anything, it’s that the upcoming generation of SFF writers want there to be room for all types of stories.  And so far we’re kicking ass at making that happen.

RS: Any projects coming up, or anything else you’d like to write about?

SLH: So much!!

My main novel series is the Cas Russell series with Tor Books — the first book, Zero Sum Game, came out last year, and the sequel Null Set is dropping in July. Billed by Tor as “the geek’s Jack Reacher,” it’s about a superheroine — an antiheroine — who can do math really, really fast.
She uses it to kill a lot of people. As you do with math.

I’m also one of the collaborators who wrote The Vela, a serialized novel that was just released from Serial Box. My co-authors are Yoon Ha Lee, Rivers Solomon, and Becky Chambers, and you can read the whole thing right now!

That “let’s not set any goals or deadlines for writing” philosophy from college REALLY was not very successful for me…

(This interview was posted early for my patrons on Patreon. Thank you!)