From Earth to the Stars

In this week’s blog post, we chat with Ursula Whitcher, whose latest Asimov’s story, “The Fifteenth Saint,” appears in our [May/June issue, on sale now!]. Read on to learn about what inspired “The Fifteenth Saint,” and discover how Whitcher balances her fiction career with her work as a mathematician.

Asimov’s Editor: What is the setting of “The Fifteenth Saint”? Is this story part of a larger universe, or is it stand-alone?
Ursula Whitcher: “The Fifteenth Saint” takes place on the far-distant planet of Nakharat. That’s the same setting as several of my other published stories, including “The Last Tutor,” which came out in Asimov’s in 2022. But “Fifteenth Saint” is set quite a few years earlier than “Last Tutor”: the characters and situations stand alone!

AE: What was the inspiration for this piece?
UW: The spark for this story is extremely erudite—maybe that’s fitting for a piece involving a judge obsessed with poetry! In his dissertation on the early modern Ottoman empire, Jonathan Parkes Allen describes a sprawling book written by a sixteenth-century Sufi mystic and equipped with a marvelous technology: an index. By consulting the index, a reader could find whichever piece of the holy man’s advice was most relevant to their specific problem. The book simulated the mind of the saint.
I loved the way Allen’s analysis highlighted the disruptive potential of the lowly index, a technology we take for granted. I also knew that my far-future Nakhorians were intensely suspicious of certain technologies—specifically artificial intelligence, which they viewed as destructive and amoral. I wondered how they would respond to a simulation of a saint.

AE: The protagonist of “The Fifteenth Saint” is named Sannali Emenev, but some characters call him Sani or Nalek. What’s with all the different nicknames?
UW: If Tolstoy’s characters can have a stack of different names, so can mine! But more specifically, the man Emenev is in love with calls him Sani, while Emenev’s family calls him Nalek. Nalek is the normal Nakhorian nickname for a boy named Sannali; Emenev’s family has used it ever since he was a little kid. Sani is a gender-neutral nickname, and by using it, Emenev’s friend acknowledges that Emenev’s approach to gender and sexuality is more complex than one might guess from his very conventional public presentation.

AE: It sounds like you do a lot of research for your writing. What’s the most surprising piece of research that went into “The Fifteenth Saint”?
UW: I learned that nobody manufactures snow tires for buses! I replayed the same thirty seconds of a news story on Montreal bus maintenance on a loop, watching city workers adapt tire surfaces for winter weather and imagining how the process would look different with lots more robots.

AE: The artificially intelligent book in “Fifteenth Saint” often quotes poetry. What’s your favorite poetic form?
UW: I’ve never met a poetic form I didn’t enjoy, from Latin hexameters to iamb patterns inspired by Yoon Ha Lee’s dystopian hexarchate. But one of the forms that has most fascinated me in recent years is the duplex, an English form involving cascading couplets that Jericho Brown invented after experimenting with ghazals. I first encountered the duplex in a poem that ends:

What’s yours at home is a wolf in my city.
You can’t accuse me of sleeping with a man.

AE: A fraught, queer relationship and hints of the supernatural—I can see why this poem resonated with you! What other poetry have you been enjoying recently?
UW: I really enjoyed Alycia Pirmohamed’s collection Another Way to Split Water, especially the poem “Meditation While Plaiting My Hair.”

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There are ways in which fiction can feel more personal than math—but I never have to worry that a fictional lemma will be false!

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AE: In an earlier interview, you mentioned Le Guin as an influence. What other science fiction writers are major influences on your work?
UW: When I was twelve or so, I read and re-read R.A. MacAvoy without knowing how to explain why: her books weren’t conventionally escapist in a way I recognized, and there were definitely pieces I was too young to understand. I think some of MacAvoy’s meditative approach from books like Tea with the Black Dragon seeps into “The Fifteenth Saint.”
On a more recent re-read of C.J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station, I was startled by her invocation of “the Deep”! In Cherryh’s work, the Deep is the parts of the galaxy that aren’t well-traveled, while in the universe of Nakharat it’s a different kind of space that enables faster-than-light travel. But I unconsciously picked up on Cherryh’s use of the Deep for symbolic effect!

AE: Writing and submitting creative work can entail setbacks and heartbreak. Why do you keep doing this?
UW: I think I have a different take on this process than many newer writers because, in my day job, I’m a mathematician. The cycle of submission, rejection, and resubmission is broadly similar across disciplines. But when doing research mathematics, not only do you inevitably worry about whether your project will be popular, you have to confront the possibility that you might be utterly, incontrovertibly wrong. I spent three months last summer trying to count solutions to the same equation in three different ways and getting three different answers, and this is a story with a happy ending: I eventually figured out which of those numbers was correct!
As a PhD student, I spent a lot of time being scared, first that I would never prove an original result, and then that the first time was a fluke. But as I matured as a mathematician, I realized that every project had its share of confusion and uncertainty, as well as flashes of joy. I began to treat managing the swirl of emotion around research not as separate from the work, but as part of the work.
I took some of that acceptance of the swirl with me as I started to submit fiction for publication. There are ways in which fiction can feel more personal than math—but I never have to worry that a fictional lemma will be false!

AE: Can you tell us about some mathematics you’ve been enjoying lately?
UW: I loved playing with the tools on Gabriel Dorfsman-Hopkins’s website that offer ways to visualize arithmetic in the p-adic numbers. Individual p-adic numbers are familiar fractions, but the notion of distance for p-adics is very different from our usual ideas of what makes two numbers close together. These tools suggest different kinds of intuition—and they’re full of rainbows!

AE: Are there more Nakharat stories in the pipeline?
UW: Yes! I am absolutely thrilled to tell you that North Continent Ribbon, a collection of Nakharat stories including an all-new novelette, is coming out from Neon Hemlock Press in 2024. When you put all the Nakharat stories together, the society itself becomes a character, with its own sort of arc plot. I’m so excited to share that transformation with the world.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing?
UW: I’m on Twitter as superyarn and I’m yarntheory@wandering.shop on Mastodon. My website is yarntheory.net, and if you want updates about what I’m writing and publishing, you can subscribe to my newsletter at buttondown.email/yarntheory. I try to make sure every newsletter issue has at least one really good cat picture.

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Ursula Whitcher is a mathematician, editor, and poet whose writing can be found everywhere from the magazine Cossmass Infinities or the anthology Climbing Lightly Through Forests to the American Mathematical Society’s Feature Column

by Andy Dudak

Find out how, spy novels, the nature of propaganda, and a Peter Gabriel song inspired Andy Dudak’s latest Asimov’s story, “Games Without Frontiers” in our [May/June issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
Andy Dudak: I had the notion of a KGB assassin lining up a snipe that’s meant to look like a missed kill, resulting in paralysis, so that a Russian mole can gain trust in the State Dept. I came up with this after digesting various spy novels, including The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carré. Then this sniper story lined up with an older sci-fi idea I’ve tried to use before: an entertainment future where the superstars are improv actors/gamers interacting with complex game worlds and AIs.

AE: How did the title for this piece come to you?
AD: The title is a Peter Gabriel song. I was a kid during this era and I later got into shows like The Americans and Deutschland 83 which juxtapose the music and the geopolitics of the time—the Cold War set to ‘80s pop.

AE: What are you reading right now?
AD: I’m currently translating “Hyper Distance” by An Hao for Clarkesworld, which certainly involves reading. I have books lined up for when I have time/bandwidth: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincey, Invasion of the Spirit People by Juan Pablo Villalobos, Frog by Mo Yan, Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt, and Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend.       

AE: What is your history with Asimov’s?
AD: “Games Without Frontiers” will be my first original in Asimov’s. My translation of Chen Qiufan’s “Forger Mr. Z” was in the Nov/Dec 2020 issue. I think I was submitting during the before-times of paper submissions, but I know I got serious again around 2012.

AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing?
AD: I often come back to the nature of propaganda, secret police, paranoia, fear, PTSD, and re-education. That’s partly down to some strange life experiences, but also great books like The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, and The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa.   

AE: What inspired you to start writing?
AD: Dungeons & Dragons, without a doubt.

AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
AD: I just finished novelizing my short story “Salvage” (Interzone Jan/Feb 2020, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 6 edited by Neil Clarke, and The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories #5 edited by Allan Kaster). Now begins the great querying challenge.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing? (IE: Social media handles, website URL…)
AD: andydudak.home.blog
Twitter: @andy_dudak

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Andy Dudak has translated 39 stories by 24 science fiction luminaries, including Liu Cixin, Chen Qiufan, and Bao Shu. His original fiction is featured in Neil Clarke’s Best Science Fiction of the Year, Jonathan Strahan’s Year’s Best Science Fiction, and three volumes of Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. His story “Love in the Time of Immuno-Sharing” was a finalist for the Eugie Foster Award. He believes in the healing power of Dungeons & Dragons. 

Lavie Tidhar can find inspiration in almost anything, from space junk to vending machines. Find out what Lavie is reading these days in today’s blog post, and read his latest story for Asimov’s, “Zoo Station,” in our [May/June issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
Lavie Tidhar: I was really interested in space junk for a number of years, having met someone who was working on it in Hong Kong, and then discovering the work of Australian space archaeologist Alice Gorman. I eventually did a short story called “Junk Hounds” to explore some of that stuff, but it was still sort of itching at me. I think I was looking into what it would take to keep livestock in space, and these things sort of converged, and combined with my being into re-reading (or in some cases, discovering new) some of that low-key 1950s SF, which is quite downbeat, like Fredric Brown’s “The Last Train.” So those things all came together at the same time, and this was the result!

AE: Is this story part of a larger universe, or is it stand-alone?
LT: Weirdly, this one is stand-alone. Most of my SF stories take place in a shared universe—I guess we’re calling it the Central Station universe at this point, just because that book did quite well—but that world is brighter than the one in this story. I have a bunch of stand-alone SF stories (I’m thinking of something like “Blue and Blue and Blue and Pink” from Clarkesworld) but they’re relatively rare!

AE: What made you think of Asimov’s for this story?
LT: I never assume anyone is going to publish anything I write, so all I ever do, and have done since the beginning, is write the stories that come to me and try to send them out. I don’t have some magic wand! So Asimov’s is one of the magazines I will always try, and hope, and sometimes, like with “Zoo Station”, I just get lucky!
Saying that, I do find SF is usually easier to place for me. It’s when I go wacky and wild that it becomes more of a challenge. The same for crime stories—they’re very hard to place, unless there’s a rare anthology open. But that’s the nature of it! I think it’s pretty amazing I still get to write and publish short stories!

AE: How much or little do current events impact your writing?
LT: I obviously try to keep up with what’s going on, and there’s always inspiration hiding in plain sight. So reading an article about as unlikely a topic as vending machines—something I never paid any attention to in my life!—led to a story called “Sirena” (in The Dark magazine), all because it had a line in it about vending machines killing people every year. I mean, how! And of course with “Zoo Station”, questions of conservation, rewilding, space junk, all of this stuff is really important, not as fictional constructs but as urgent real world issues. So I try to keep up, but also, putting on my SF writer hat, try to take a much wider perspective, beyond the present. If that makes sense!

AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
LT: What aren’t I working on . . . My other “hat”, which is more recent, is as a more mainstream writer, writing these sort of big novels, starting with last year’s Maror and continuing this year with the only-slightly-smaller Adama. My UK publishers, Head of Zeus, are incredibly supportive on that side, and I’m really enjoying suddenly being so . . . respectable. Ha! So I’m working on a third novel, which sort of goes from the 1850s to the present. No elves or aliens! as I like to say.
On the SF side, Tachyon in the US have been equally supportive, and I’m lucky to keep doing genre books, or weird mixes—I really love The Escapement, from 2021, and last year was Neom, a science fiction novel set in that wider world of Central Station. This year we’re doing The Circumference of the World, which is all about science fiction—it’s a weird, mixed-genre novel that circles around the idea that an L. Ron Hubbard-like, Golden Age of SF writer just happened to have—maybe—figured out the true secret of the nature of the universe. Or did he?
I also have The Best of World SF: Volume 3 coming out this year, which has been a joy to edit. The full series is now over half a million words of fiction!
And then, I just keep writing short stories, which is the only part I really love doing. So yes, busy!

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I obviously try to keep up with what’s going on, and there’s always inspiration hiding in plain sight.

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AE: If you could choose one SFnal universe to live in, what universe would it be, and why?
LT: I’m not sure I would like any of them! But the post-scarcity utopia of Iain M. Bank’s Culture novels is certainly appealing . . .

AE: What SFnal prediction would you like to see come true?
LT: I think it’s a bit like the historian who was once asked, if they had a time machine, what period of history they would like to visit—“none before the invention of antibiotics.” Medical science is something we take so much for granted in SF—autodocs and nanobots and effortless organ replacement and so on (I just did a story about growing replacement organs, a la the planet Shayol in Cordwainer Smith)—but so little in real life. I’d love to see some of that start to come in, just as it’s amazing to see how much of it is already here, from brain scanning to new approaches to vaccines.

AE: What are you reading right now?
LT: I just finished an epic re-read of all the Amber novels by Roger Zelazny. That was so much fun! I mostly read for research these days, so my shelves sort of go from circuses to the Thames to Israeli spies to the Romans, depending on what my present obsession might be—right now it’s an academic dictionary of Northern Mythology. For fun, I’ve started re-reading Barry B. Longyear’s classic Circus World, a mosaic novel first published in a series of short stories in Asimov’s! Such a brilliant book.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
LT: Write the things only you can write.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing?
LT: My website it at https://lavietidhar.wordpress.com/
And I’m on Twitter https://twitter.com/lavietidhar And I sometimes post random stuff on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lavietidhar/

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Lavie Tidhar is the author of the World Fantasy Award winning Osama and the Campbell Award winning Central Station, along with many other recent novels. His latest, Neom, began as a short story in Asimov’s. “Zoo Station,” he tells us, was inspired by reading about the challenges of raising livestock in space, which combined improbably with discovering Fredric Brown’s classic story “The Last Train.”

Laurel Winter is a frequent contributor to Asimov’s who has won our Readers’ Award for best poem twice. In this blog post, she discusses her unique writing process, her favorite themes, and why she’s leery of warp drive. Check out her latest poem for Asimov’s,”What if Pomegranates,” in our [May/June issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
Laurel Winter: It’s possible I was eating pomegranates. Grin. Besides that, I’m fascinated by both Persephone and Eurydice, inhabiting the underworld against their will. I’ve written several poems about both of them.

AE: Do you particularly relate to any of the characters in this story?
LW: I can relate to both Persephone and Demeter. Avenging mother goddess energy—but also the idea that she could have decided to let the girl make her own decisions and live with the consequences. And Persephone might have actually appreciated hanging out with the bad boy for half of the year, as long as she could go home to mama the other half. The best of both worlds.

AE: What is your history with Asimov’s?
LW: I’ve published numerous poems in Asimov’s and won the Reader’s Poll Award for best poem twice. “Why Goldfish Shouldn’t Use Power Tools” and “egg horror poem” each received a Rhysling Award as well. The latter was then picked up for multiple 9^th grade literature textbooks.

AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?
LW: I have a particular fondness for characters who think they’re ordinary and find out they are not. Also coming of age stories, rites of passage. I seem to write a ton about music, although I am not musical myself. I have quite a few stories and poems about food.

AE: What is your process?
LW: A while ago I started computer dating. As in dating my computer. An hour a day, six days a week. I also set times on it—if I hadn’t started my date at one, I had to start it by four. That way, I didn’t get to bedtime and blow it off. I got amazing amounts of work done, finishing a middle grade novel I’d abandoned in 2006 and writing a first draft of another one, as well as numerous stories. Every once in a while, if the date was going really well, I fudged a little and gave the computer a little more attention. (I think it likes me like that. Grin. So it didn’t mind.)

AE: What inspired you to start writing?
LW: Being a total bookworm. Words were my friends. Books were my refuge. Notebooks were my infinite possibility.

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I have a particular fondness for characters who think they’re ordinary and find out they are not.

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AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
LW: I’m spiffing up several novels. The Secret Life of Suzuki England, about a girl who’s three-quarters elf. Lucy, Lucy, and Liz, which is related to Suzuki, about an alien, an elf, and a human girl tasked with saving the world—with their piano trio. And my newest, Eleven in Wonderland, about an eleven-year-old genius who has to navigate alcoholic parents and eighth grade and the wild new wonderful world of drama club. Plus—always—poetry. And I’ve recently begun to get story ideas from fragments of anything or nothing. So, busy busy.

AE: If you could choose one SFnal universe to live in, what universe would it be, and why?
LW: My first thought was Middle Earth. Hobbits and Elves and Wizards—but no, maybe Redwall—but, ooh, yes, for sure, Pern. Telepathic communication with flying dragons. Fire lizards. Going between. The pick me, pick me, pick me feeling of a hatching. Yeah, that’s it.

AE: What SFnal prediction would you like to see come true?
LW: At this point, definitely NOT warp drive. I think we need to get more civilized in our local neighborhood before we go gallivanting off across the galaxy. Probably the replicator, because that might ease food & water problems across the globe. Then the Federation could come in and ease us into full galactic citizenship.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
LW: Celebrate baby steps. (I submitted a poem/story/novel! I must take myself out for tea!) Embrace baby goals. If you can’t manage an hour for computer dating, write two sentences every day on the current project. If you write, you’re a writer. If you send something out—please do!—start working on something else. And the next something else. Especially if you write novels. It can literally take years for an editor to get back to you with a No, thanks. (And once I had to withdraw a manuscript after said years, because the editor did not respond to any queries, or to the news he was out.) I let myself sour on novels for some years after that. Sometimes it takes creative work of a different sort—even collaging magazine cut-outs for your delight only—to get you back in the swing of things. Also, writer’s groups are good, unless they’re bad. Fortunately, I have not had this experience, but some people delight in being cleverly and cruelly critical. Run! And don’t be that guy. Also, celebrate vicarious accomplishments of your friends or acquaintance and keep on keeping on with your own work.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing? (IE: Social media handles, website URL…)
LW: Facebook Laurel Winter
Twitter @LuvLaurelWinter
laurelwinter.blogspot.com
laurelwinter.com

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Laurel Winter is happy to report that every decade of her life is the best so far. She has two amazing sons she both likes and loves, as well as three bright and shiny grandchildren. She lives in southern Oregon and is doing a good job of practicing house-in-order, creatively and physically and soulfully. She is a proponent of cheerful self-appreciation and believes you can only love others if you love yourself.

by Sheila Finch

Sheila Finch reflects on the little sparks of inspiration that sometimes become her short stories. Read her latest work Asimov’s, “Wanton Gods” in our [March/April issue, on sale now!]

“Where do your ideas come from?” Harlan Ellison used to reply: A post box in Schenectady.

No, but really. Where do your ideas come from? Readers want to know the truth.

Would you believe me if I said I often don’t know? Once the story is underway, I’ve forgotten all about its genesis. Sometimes I consult my trusty notebook for the very first mention of a story. Often the entry I find is incomprehensible: “Czerny would’ve had to write eight-finger exercises.” Where did that come from and where is it going? It refers, I remember now, to a book of five-finger piano pieces for beginners. Ah. But why was I thinking about that? I have no recollection, just that ambiguous note. And the next clue is a quote from a book I was reading at the time: “Evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” That’s from Other Minds by Peter Godfrey Smith, my notebook tells me, and refers to an octopus. I’m a charter member of the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific, and my all-time favorite marine animal is the Big Red Pacific octopus. So—an octopus, a child playing a piano . . . A story is born, “Czerny at Midnight.”

And away my mind goes. Sometimes I refer to this creative, unconscious part of my mind as Murgatroyd.  (Some writers name theirs something more prosaic, like “Fred” which was apparently Damon Knight’s choice for his creative muse. Perhaps that’s a better choice. Murgatroyd gets swollen with his own importance.) 

From that initial puzzle of a note in my notebook three short stories about the octopus eventually came into being—two of them published here in Asimov’s. And I’m now expanding the ideas in those stories into a full-length novel. 

What has any of this to do with the current story, “Wanton Gods?” Let me consult my notebook.

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Sheila Finch is currently working on expanding the stories she’s written about Lena Ke’Aloha and her octopus studies into a novel. Sheila’s most recent short fiction collection, Forkpoints, was published by Aqueduct Press in 2022.

by Ray Nayler

For Ray Nayler, Central Asia is a grossly misunderstood region that he happened to spend a decade living and working in. His latest story, “The Case of the Blood-Stained Tower,” is his attempt at accurately depicting this part of the world. Read it in our [March/April issue, on sale now!]

I spent almost a decade living and working in Central Asia, in the countries of Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan. It is a region most Westerners have a fixed idea of as peripheral—a void between Europe and the great civilizations of China. The West has a muddled image of Central Asia, confusing it with the Middle East, with Persia, with the Caucasus and the Balkans. Central Asia is dismissed as a “Silk Road”—as if it were simply a place one passed through on the way somewhere else. And because most of Central Asia was under the dominance of the Russian and then the Soviet (it was no union) Empire, the modern West has long confused it with Russia, and its inhabitants with Russians.

Lost in all this misunderstanding is the fact that, for many centuries, Central Asia was not at the periphery of the world: it was at the center. It was the axis of cultures, the land of a thousand cities—Merv, Bukhara, Samarkand, Khiva, and Balkh, to name just a few. Into its cultures flowed Chinese silks and mythologies, Hellenistic sculpture and philosophy, Indian mysticisms, Slavic and Viking coins, and Arab religion. Into it flowed Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Its syncretic, cosmopolitan kingdoms, with Arabic and Persian as their common tongues, preserved much of Greek thought for the West—not in amber, but in active engagement with its ideas: in centuries-long philosophical arguments and engagements with Greek and other philosophical thought.

Mathematical treatises, and triumphs of medicine and geography flowed from Central Asia. Central Asia’s great thinkers included Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina (known as Avicenna in the West) a metaphysical philosopher whose medical treatises (a side gig for this extraordinary polymath) were the standard for centuries in Medieval Europe, and whose philosophy influenced Thomas Aquinas, among others. His is just one example of dozens.

Central Asia, once the center of the world, is now lumped by the West under the pernicious generalizing term “the Muslim World”—a term which always make me want to refer to the West as “Christendom,” which would be the equally disparaging stereotype. Central Asia is thought of dismissively as a place of religious fundamentalism and “backward” politics, Central Asia’s reputation languishes under stereotypes and misapprehensions applied from afar, with the surety that only ignorance can bring.

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Living in Central Asia taught me one thing above others: this place cannot be generalized or stereotyped.

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In fact, the nations of Central Asia, apart from Afghanistan, are far more secular than the United States or parts of Europe—carrying not only the deep stamp of atheism caused by Soviet dominance, but also a historically pragmatic attitude toward religion—likely a product of being exposed to so many influxes of faiths. (You may not know, for example, that the mighty Khazars, whose empire stretched along much of the Caspian littoral, were converts to Judaism).

What I wanted to do in “The Case of the Blood-Stained Tower” is to present medieval Central Asia much as it may have been in its complexity—a place of science as well as superstition, an urban marketplace as well as a landscape of steppe and desert—and a place very much at the center of the world, drawing the marvelous and strange into itself.

Living in Central Asia taught me one thing above others: This place cannot be generalized or stereotyped. Nothing said of it could ever be entirely true. And it is supremely difficult to write about in a way that allows Westerners to grasp it without their prejudices getting in the way—so difficult that I have had this idea since 2015, without feeling I was a good enough writer to pull it off.

But Central Asia has been such a substantial part of my life that I have to write about it—and that is why I have been honing this idea for a very long time, building my skills until I was sure I could get the voice, atmosphere, and tone just right.

The result, finally, is “The Case of the Blood-Stained Tower.” I hope you enjoy it, and I also hope it encourages you to go beyond stereotypes and learn more about a region that, while it may seem remote today, was once the center of the world.

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Ray Nayler’s critically acclaimed stories have seen print in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Analog, F&SF, Lightspeed, and Nightmare, as well as in many “Best Of” anthologies. For nearly half his life, he has lived and worked outside the United States in the Foreign Service and the Peace Corps, including a stint as Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer at the U.S. consulate in Ho Chi Minh City. Ray currently serves as international advisor to the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Ray’s debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, is out now from Farrar, Straus, and Grioux. You can follow Ray on Twitter at https://twitter.com/raynayler, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/raynayler/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/raynayler.

Mark D. Jacobsen history with Asimov’s stretches back 22 years, when he was the first runner-up for the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction. The following year, Jacobsen won that award, and eventually moved on to a career in the U.S. Air Force. Now “The Repair,” his first story for Asimov’s, appears in our [March/April issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly?
MDJ: I sometimes deliberately experiment with different types of stories to stretch my abilities. These typically begin as stream-of-consciousness freewrites, with no expectation they will turn into full-blown stories.
“The Repair” was born when I decided to try writing a cyberpunk story. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I was at a remote lake with my wife and children, hardly the setting in which to find cyberpunk inspiration. I wrote with a pen and notebook. I had no characters or plot in mind, only a mental picture of pouring rain outside an abandoned hotel that took its inspiration from Blade Runner. In that first session I followed my protagonist into the building, up the stairs, and through his first meeting with a haunted, paranoid client who hired him for an illegal job.
I continued to write blindly, trusting my unconscious. I find the writing experience wildly different when I write this way, as opposed to my more usual process of meticulously developing characters and a plot. It is disorienting and a little scary, but I find these stories typically hold more creative power. It’s telling that “The Repair” was my first sale to Asimov’s.
The theme of “cancellation” emerged organically as I wrote. I had no intent to write a story about this topic, but it was something I’d been grappling with for a long time. I think it was Asimov who developed the three postulates of science fiction: “if only,” “what if,” and “if this goes on . . .” In retrospect, I can say this story explores the latter.

AE: Do you particularly relate to any of the characters in this story?
MDJ: The protagonist, Joel, is a disgraced robot repairman who survives on illegal work for desperate clients. In this story he grapples with whether to keep working for a lonely and slightly crazy woman who was cancelled after sending a Tweet judged to be racist. She has spent the years since living under the exploitive protection of an insurance company.
Joel embodies the tensions that many of us feel around online discourse, contempt, and cancellation. Joel’s client is not a likable character and yet we sense that even she, imperfect as is, does not deserve her fate. The story hinges on Joel’s empathy for her humanity. That is an aspirational value for me.

AE: What is your history with Asimov’s?
MDJ: Twenty-two years ago, as a college sophomore, I took 1^st runner up in the Asimov/Dell Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. Sheila Williams and Rick Wilber flew me and the other finalists out to a writing conference, where I sat by the pool and talked writing with Joe Haldeman, Sean Stewart, Kelly Link, Charles Sheffield, Nancy Kress, Daniel Keyes, Ted Chiang, Octavia Butler, Brian Aldiss, and many others. The next year, I won the contest and went back. These were life-changing experiences for a young person with only distant dreams of being a writer. I realized that “making it” was well within reach and began submitting stories, without success.
I got busy after that, with an Air Force career and a young family. Writing came and went. In 2020, amidst the pandemic and a transition into a teaching job, I committed to writing more seriously. It has only taken 22 years, but with “The Repair,” I finally made it into Asimov’s.

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In frequent moments of doubt, I wonder if I should give it up and focus on the “real” world. But I can’t help myself; I need to write.

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AE: How much or little do current events impact your writing?
MDJ: Almost everything I write, no matter how dressed up in SF or fantasy, is rooted in our modern world. I’m a career Air Force officer with a PhD in political science. My professional life is devoted to understanding and managing complex political problems. That is what compels me to write fiction. Academia generally breaks complex problems down into narrow constituent parts, but fiction is a big enough medium to explore the scale and complexity of the whole.
The SF writer who has influenced me the most is Kim Stanley Robinson, largely because his writing reflects his love for and commitment to our own world.

AE: What inspired you to start writing?
MDJ: I’ve been writing since I learned how to read. My dad owned hundreds of SF paperbacks, which gave me abundant inspiration when I was young.
I’m not sure why I feel such a deep need to write. Writing fiction is difficult for me, and from a pragmatic perspective, the returns aren’t great. In frequent moments of doubt, I wonder if I should give it up and focus on the “real” world. But I can’t help myself; I need to write. My studies of foreign affairs feel dry if they stay in the abstract; I’m most interested in individual human beings and their lived experiences. Fiction is where I can explore that.

AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
MDJ: I am slowly chipping away at a novel based on the two years I spent studying Arabic and Conflict Resolution in Jordan. It features a Jordanian-American woman and her daughter, who are trying to cross Jordan and reach safety after a biologically engineered weapon begins killing anyone who speaks Arabic. It’s an ambitious novel about the consequences of unchecked reciprocal hatreds, and about the longing of a woman with multiple sources of identity to find a sense of belonging in a collapsing world. It’s a difficult novel to write, and I can’t tell yet if it will be terrible or brilliant or somewhere in between.
I’m also trying to write, finish, and submit more short work. I’ve been developing a world that will support multiple stories, set multiple generations after a nuclear apocalypse, in which professional “reinventors” who rely on the patronage of warlords aim to reinvent technologies that they know once existed.

AE: What are you reading right now?
MDJ: I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s two new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. Much of my academic work involves complexity theory, so I’ve long been fascinated by the fact that the reclusive McCarthy spent years hanging out with complexity scientists at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). That influence shows in these novels. Coincidentally, it was fantastic to see that Ted Chiang just joined SFI as a visiting scholar. It gives me hope for aligning my academic work and fiction.
On the SF front, I just finished Ray Nayler’s wonderful debut novel The Mountain in the Sea. I discovered Nayler through his short work and fell in love with his writing. Like me, he works on U.S. foreign policy and has spent extensive time outside the U.S., so I felt an immediate kinship with him and his writing.
I’m also revisiting the SF books from my college years that most influenced my writing. I just listened to Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos and am now listening to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.

AE: What other careers have you had, and how have they affected your writing?
MDJ: I was a C-17 cargo pilot, flew 200 missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and have spent much of my career studying international relations. That included two years of graduate study in Jordan. Much of my fiction reflects my fascination—and disillusionment—with U.S. foreign policy. My novel The Lords of Harambee embodies my decade-long effort to grapple with questions of intervention and responsibility raised by the Rwandan genocide.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
MDJ: It took me 22 years to get published in Asimov’s. Don’t give up!

AE: What’s the best way to follow you and your work?
MDJ: The best way to find me is through my website and mailing list at www.markdjacobsen.com.

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Mark D. Jacobsen is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Studies in the United States Air Force, where he tries to instill wisdom and humility in future leaders navigating global challenges. He enjoys writing humanistic fiction about characters grappling with political, social, and technological change. His short fiction has appeared in War Stories, Derelict, and Inkstick Media. He is the author of one military SF novel, The Lords of Harambee, and a memoir titled Eating Glass. He was a Dell Award winner more years ago than he would care to recount. “The Repair” is his first story published in Asimov’s. 

In this post, longtime Asimov’s contributor Bruce Sterling talks about his interest in the Italian renaissance as well as his thoughts on the importance of short form science fiction. Read his latest story “The Queen of Rhode Island,” co-written with Paul Di Filippo, in our [March/April issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
Bruce Sterling:It’s a collaboration with my long-time pal, Paul Di Filippo.

AE: How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly? 
BS: I’d have to admit that the story seemed to literally germinate out of a swamp. It kinda oozed into being, much like our other SF collaboration, “The Scab’s Progress.”

AE: What made you think of Asimov’s for this story?
BS: Who else?  I can’t help but adore them!

AE: What is your history with Asimov’s?
BS: I don’t want to boast about my extensive survival to date, but my “history with Asimov’s” is  extensive.  For decades on end, the mag has bravely published some of the weirdest stuff I ever wrote. Stories like “The Little Magic Shop” and “Sword of Damocles.” People who succeeded in reading those stories probably still remember them.

AE: Who or what are your greatest influences and inspirations?
BS: I like science fiction. I tend to like other people’s science fiction quite a lot, such as Italian fantascienza and nineteenth-century French science fiction. The general history of science fiction inspires me. It’s great that it refuses to just give up and go away, and that it keeps sprouting up in new places, like crabgrass among cobblestones.

AE: How much or little do current events impact your writing?
BS: I’m a tech journalist and I’m quite the eager trendspotter, but I like events that haven’t happened yet.

AE: What is your process?
BS: I tend to really pile stuff on. I like organic profusion, baroque extravaganza, too many moving parts. I tend to throw in the kitchen sink and then the sink’s full of take-out cartons from some country where they eat a lot of squid.

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The general history of science fiction inspires me. It’s great that it refuses to just give up and go away, and that it keeps sprouting up in new places, like crabgrass among cobblestones

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AE: How do you deal with writers’ block?
BS: Pretty simple; I only write fiction when I feel like it.

AE: How did you break into writing?
BS: I wrote a couple of novels first, but I want to seize this opportunity to say that writing and reading short stories in magazines is really important. In my career I did a lot of my best and most innovative thinking in short forms. A literature of ideas needs to keep things moving, it can’t live off trilogies and endless series all the time; that gets top-heavy. By contrast, one really good issue of one science fiction magazine has the potential to light up the whole genre.

AE: If you could choose one SFnal universe to live in, what universe would it be, and why?
BS: I tend to travel really a lot, so I’m thinking that an omnibus SF Best of the Year Collection would be more my speed. I like to change scenes and topics.

AE: What SFnal prediction would you like to see come true?
BS: Worldwide nuclear disarmament would be interesting.

AE: What are you reading right now?
BS: I’m doing some research about a minor figure in the Italian Renaissance. He was a diplomat, but he was best-known for writing an etiquette book about how decent people ought to behave. Of course he had his own life, which wasn’t much like his moralizing book. How people adapt to their cultural circumstances, that’s of a lot of interest to me.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
BS: Everybody in the business will tell you how hard you have to work, but really, if you’re not entertained by it, nobody’s gonna be entertained by it.   Also, try and put the cork in the bottle—alcohol is the only thing common in the fiction-writing life that is truly dangerous.

AE: What other careers have you had, and how have they affected your writing?
BS: Science fiction has been my career, but I’ve been known to trifle with futurism, travel writing, popular science, true crime, art criticism and teaching design school. “Where do science fiction writers get all those weird ideas?” Well, you should scheme up some situations where you can go out and find some.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing? (IE: Social media handles, website URL . . .
BS: I’m on Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, Pinterest, I have a lot of writing on Medium . . . If you’re interested in technology art, I’m the art director for an Italian media art festival. It’s more a trendspotting blog than something meant to entertain, but there’s some genuinely unusual stuff in the “Share Festival Artmaker Blog.”

https://toshareproject.it/artmakerblog/wp-admin/post-new.php

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Bruce Sterling’s most recent book is Robot Artists and Black Swans, a collection of Italian fantascienza stories. He spends a lot of time wandering Europe and encountering artists and robots.

David Cleary discusses the memories, from dancing to David Bowie, to discovering P.G. Wodehouse, that helped spark inspiration for “My Year as a Boy,” his latest story for Asimov’s, in our [January/February issue, on sale now!].

Asimov’s Editor: How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly?
David Cleary: As an eight-year old boy, I obsessed about David Bowie and liked to put on my mother’s makeup and dance in front of the bathroom mirror. As a forty-five year-old man, I obsessed about climate change and thought it would be funny to make an island from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Sometime in the Nineties, I became a fan of P.G. Wodehouse. All these ingredients went into the mix that became this story.

DC: Is this story part of a larger universe, or is it stand-alone?
AE: This story is set in the same near-future Earth as that of “The Kewlest Thing of All,” (Asimov’s, March, 2006), about thirty years after the events of that story. My yet-as-unpublished novel Carbon Manifesto foregrounds the environmental concerns that are more grace notes in “My Year as a Boy.”

AE: Do you particularly relate to any of the characters in this story?
DC: I relate most to Taggie, the narrator: I can be self-conscious and awkward, and have committed some embarrassing faux pas when trying to be gallant.

AE: Who or what are your greatest influences and inspirations?
DC: My influences: first, the SF writers I read growing up, especially Robert Silverberg, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and Ursula K. Le Guin.  Then the writers who taught me at the ’87 Clarion workshop: Lucius Shepard, Karen Joy Fowler, Algis Budrys, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, and Suzy McKee Charnas.  (I’m very sad to learn that Suzy passed away at the beginning of this year.) Next the writers who have twisted my brain over the years, among them: William Gibson, Michael Swanwick, Greg Bear, Christopher Priest, China Mieville, and Greg Egan. Next, fiction writers outside the field: Martin Cruz Smith, Richard Powers, Cormac McCarthy, and David Mitchell. Finally these non-fiction writers: Daniel C. Dennett and Richard Hofstadter for philosophy of mind, Stephen Jay Gould and E.O. Wilson for biology, John Gribbin for physics, Paul Theroux for travel.

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As an eight-year old boy, I obsessed about David Bowie and liked to put on my mother’s makeup and dance in front of the bathroom mirror. As a forty-five year-old man, I obsessed about climate change and thought it would be funny to make an island from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

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AE: How much or little do current events impact your writing?
DC: We are blessed—or cursed—to live in interesting times, and, as a news junkie, I fear that current events may affect my writing—and my psyche—to a greater extent than is healthy for me.

AE: How did you break into writing?
DC: When I was a little boy, I wrote plays to be performed by my stuffed animals and Star Trek action figures. As a teen, I began typing up “serious” stories on my dad’s manual typewriter, sending them off to Asimov’s or Analog to be summarily rejected. 1987 was my breakthrough year; I went to the Clarion workshop in East Lansing, Michigan, and, through some alchemy I’ve never understood—Was it the rigor of the coursework? The excitement of meeting actual published writers?—I transformed into something like a professional writer: I eventually published four of the stories I wrote while at Clarion.

AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
DC: I’m working on an historical fantasy\alternate history set in ancient Greece and Rome, an expansion of my story “How Long the Night, Awake,” (appeared in The Colored Lens, Autumn 2019.) I’m also planning to put together a collection of my steampunk stories this year.

AE: What SFnal prediction would you like to see come true?
DC: I’d like to see some combination of genetic engineering and nanotechnology finally end disease.

AE: What are you reading right now?
DC: In December I read Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr—which was fascinating. Part historical romance, part eco-terrorist thriller, part multi-generational starship SF, compelling enough that I read it in a day. I liked it enough that I’m reading his entire oeuvre; right now I’m reading his collection The Memory Wall.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
DC: As somebody who is easily distracted I cannot recommend too highly a) noise cancelling headphones, and b) browser web-site blocker software. Both help me focus. There’s also something to be said for the standard recommendations: write every day, join a writers’ workshop, read as much as you can both within the genre and outside it, submit your stories and submit them somewhere else if they are rejected. And also go out and have fun with people sometimes.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing?
DC: I occasionally post on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/david.cleary.908). There’s also my website (www.davidiracleary.com) but it is sorely in need of updating.

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I was born in Wyoming and raised in Colorado, but have spent most of my adult life in California, writing manuals for software companies, and science fiction stories when I have the time. After several years, first in San Francisco, and then in the quaint seaside town of Pacifica, I moved to Oakland, where I live with my wife Cheryl (a talented actress) and two cats and a dog. I’ve been published in Asimov’s, Interzone, Persistent Visions, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as in other magazines and anthologies. My first published story (“All Our Sins Forgotten”) was made into an episode of the Sci-Fi Channel’s series Welcome to Paradox. With Lisa Goldstein and Martha Soukup I founded a writer’s workshop that has continued to meet sporadically for three decades. I was a runner until I wore out my right foot. Lately I’ve been learning to kayak, and trying to make myself swim.