From Earth to the Stars

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

by Peter Wood

When should authors keep writing, and when should they stop? Peter Wood discusses his answer along with a handful of examples of where science fiction writers may have gone too far. Check out Wood’s latest story for Asimov’s “The Less Than Divine Invasion” in our [January/February issue, on sale now!]

People used to discuss things. Now, there’s always that guy at lunch or  on a long car ride who whips out his phone and answers a question that nobody wants answered and stops the conversation dead in its tracks. Writers shouldn’t make the same mistake.

Fellow Asimov’s alum Jonathan Sherwood and I just finished editing the Odin Chronicles, a collection of thirty related flash stories about the deep space mining colony of Odin III. We realized pretty quickly that the supposedly free-standing stories raised a lot of questions about the colony and its ever-growing cast of characters. We’d give the authors nudges sometimes to answer those questions. But we also came up with a list of questions that we didn’t want the stories to address in too much detail.

Sometimes it is better not to know.

A question might be better off left alone if it can’t be answered. This is true with most time travel stories. You can’t  explain away paradoxes. I love the first two seasons of Dark, but the last year of the time travel series explained too much.  A Sound of Thunder doesn’t need a sequel where Ray Bradbury breaks down the time travel technology and what exactly happened at the end of the first story.

Then there are questions that just aren’t relevant. We don’t  need a backstory

You want an example of what can go wrong if one question too many is answered? I’ll give you three. Alien, The Terminator, and the original Planet of the Apes. Each of those classic movies raised a lot of questions. The studios churned out a series of increasingly mediocre sequels that gave way too many answers. We were better off not knowing how the apes took over Earth. Moviegoers didn’t demand the xenomorph alien’s origin. We sure didn’t need to have the entire terminator timeline explained to us including why the terminator spoke with an Austrian accent.

Did you leave the theater desperately yearning to know who created the aliens or how the terminator got its accent? Me neither.

The thing is that there are no good answers to the questions those initial movies raised. There is no logical way the apes took over, for example. When sequels tried to explain things, we’re left with nonsense like a space virus that killed all the cats and dogs and morons who replaced the extinct household pets with orangutans and chimps and time traveling apes who taught their ancestors to speak in less than a generation and—God, my brain hurts. Why couldn’t they have just left us with the wondrous shock of seeing the Statue of Liberty on the beach?

We all know why those questions had to be answered.  Money. That’s why every Star Wars movie keeps going back to the well over and over and over and answering questions that nobody had. Did it really add to the story to know that Anakin created C3P0 and R2D2 or that a trade dispute started the Emperor’s rise to power? You’re better off skipping the first three movies.

David Gerrold’s time travel masterpiece, The Man Who Folded Himself, raises a lot of questions and answers damned few of them. And that’s okay.  The book is  more than a WTF time travel tale. It’s also an in-depth examination of self. The time traveler learns who he is in ways that I will not even attempt to summarize. Do yourself a favor. Read this book.

Good fiction is about how characters cope with a situation more than explaining every nuance of whatever world the characters find themselves in. The Man Who Folded Himself is more about how the time traveler reacts to finding a time machine than about how the time machine works or who built it.

Good fiction is about how characters cope with a situation more than explaining every nuance of whatever world the characters find themselves in.

The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t a primer for how to build a theocracy. It concerns how people like Offred survive when they find themselves trapped in Margaret Atwood’s nightmare. Atwood keeps the historical details vague and it works. If we know too much of how the religious zealots took over, the message is diluted, because we can reassure ourselves that the scenario just isn’t possible. That would be like expecting George Orwell to detail exactly how the totalitarian regime rose to power in 1984 so we can breathe a collective sigh of relief, because it’s only a story. Orwell doesn’t fall into that trap. He keeps the historical background nebulous.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that an author should be completely unaccountable.  The premise has to be somewhat plausible at least within the parameters of world building.

Compare the ending of the 1968 Planet of the Apes with Tim Burton’s remake. The original takes place far enough in the future that when the credits roll  the wheels can start spinning and we can speculate about what might have happened. It’s a mike drop moment and it should have been left alone. Then the sequels inserted dates for everything. Knowing we started using apes as pets in 1980 and those apes took over in 1991 does not enhance one’s viewing of the first movie.

In Tim Burton’s remake the stranded Earth astronaut escapes back to Earth. Burton in a watered-down moment that rips off the original has the astronaut find  Lincoln has been replaced in the Lincoln Memorial by a statue of the disgraced ape general. Except, that the ape had been, um, disgraced, and the apes lived in an agrarian society without any sort of technology. And a million other problems. It made no sense that that particular ape somehow managed to build a space fleet and conquer Earth in his lifetime. None whatsoever.

Yes, some questions should be answered. Agatha  Christie’s And Then There Were None is the greatest murder mystery of all time precisely because Christie explains in a very satisfying and plausible-enough way Who Done it.

But sometimes fiction isn’t about getting all the answers. My novella, the Less than Divine Invasion, leaves some questions unanswered, but I think the story and the reader would be worse off if I tried to explain everything. I didn’t want my story to end up like the  gangly overstuffed Looking Backwards where Edward Bellamy has to explain absolute everything in a never-ending conversation that is like a fever dream of My Dinner With Andre.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan works, because Nicholas Meyer and Jack Sowards lifted a great villain from the tv show and wrote a new story. They did not concoct a Khan origin story and ultimately didn’t answer a single question raised by Space Seed, the episode that introduced Khan. Would a studio have the guts to write a new story today? Based on Prometheus and Solo and Terminator Salvation, I have my doubts.

Pete Wood is an attorney who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his very patient wife. In his latest story for Asimov’s, he revisits his old stomping grounds, the barbecue-loving and hamburger-loving town of Kinston, North Carolina, last seen in “Never the Twain Shall Meet” (May/June 2019). Pete and fellow Asimov’s author Jonathan Sherwood recently edited The Odin Chronicles, a collection of thirty related short stories about the distant mining planet of Odin III, for Rampant Loon Press. More information about the book is at http://www.theodinchronicles.com. The author tells us, “Kinston is a great place to live, but it’s not as ordinary as you might think. If you look closely, you may discover that something unusual is going on.”

by Genevieve Williams

Learn about the history of Seattle’s Duwamish river, which helped inspire Genevieve Williams’ latest story for Asimov’s, “Woman of the River.” Read it in our January/February issue, on sale now!

Four years ago at a bardic contest, my friend Jim wrote a poem about the river. What river? Any river, and all rivers, though references to a heron on the shore and the life cycle of salmon situate the poem in the Pacific Northwest where we both live. “A river is a verb,” the poem concludes, with certain implications for life, the flow of time, and grammar.

For me, the river of Jim’s poem was the Duwamish, which takes its name from the people who historically—and also today—live within its watershed, and from whose chief at the time of white settlement the city of Seattle takes its name. The river used to wind back and forth across the wide valley between West Seattle, where I live, and Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. Colonization, industrialization, and World War II turned it into a straight and narrow waterway, while two of its three tributaries disappeared; one redirected, the other vanished due to the creation of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, halfway across town. Despite all this, it’s still an active salmon run.

When I moved to West Seattle in the late nineties, I knew none of this. Like many newcomers, I didn’t even know that Seattle had a river; despite which, without the river, Seattle as we know it would not exist. The first I knew of the river and its history came in the form of a mailed bulletin from the Environmental Protection Agency, alerting area residents that two proposals had been advanced to clean up industrial pollution. This included PCBs released into the soil and water during Boeing’s wartime manufacturing for World War II. The river, in a city that prides itself on its environmentalism, is one of the most polluted Superfund sites in the United States. As portals into Seattle history go, it’s a rather ignominious one.

“Map of Seattle showing the former course of the Duwamish River, 1908. Source: US Geological Survey.”

Some years later I came across a map of Seattle from 1908 in the collection of the library where I work. That further fed my curiosity about the Duwamish River and its history; the obviously artificial, hard-angled channel on Google Maps was here represented by broad, curving meanders that shaped the settlements around them, rather than vice versa. Mid-pandemic, B.J. Cummings, a founder of the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition to which I had by then devoted quite a few volunteer hours—mostly removing blackberries and ivy, and planting trees in the forest upslope from the river—published the book The River That Made Seattle. Reading it filled in the gaps between the two images for me. The book details not only what has happened to the Duwamish River since the Collins and Denny Parties arrived in 1851, but the ongoing community-led efforts to guide the river toward a healthier future.

Disconnection looms large in the last 150 years-plus of the Duwamish River’s history—disconnection from its environment, from its surrounding communities, even from parts of itself. When I began developing an idea for a story set on the river, I was reminded of John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer,” a longtime staple of American high school English classes. What I’d always liked about that story—what, for me, edged it just slightly into the speculative realm—was the passage of time within it, such that the healthy and robust Neddy Merrill sets out on a midsummer afternoon, only to arrive at home on an autumn night as an old man, despite only having perceived a few short hours as having passed. Not that Cheever intended the reader to conclude that literal time travel has taken place; there’s a lot more going on in “The Swimmer,” and if you haven’t read it, I’ll leave you to discover those layers and complexities for yourself.

But the other thing that particularly strikes me about “The Swimmer,” supporting its theme of disconnection, is the suggestion that a real river once flowed through what is now Neddy’s suburban neighborhood. Much as Longfellow Creek, a stream in West Seattle that feeds the Duwamish River, runs underneath streets, housing developments, and a shopping center for one third of its length, and enters the river via a drainage pipe. (Despite this, salmon began returning to the creek as soon as barriers and pollution were removed—a hopeful sign for a species widely threatened by both.) In “The Swimmer,” the river has fragmented into dozens of swimming pools, each isolated from one another. Instead, the closest thing that Neddy encounters to an actual river is a multi-lane roadway speeding with traffic, which he struggles to cross with as much difficulty as one might swim the Mississippi. Neddy’s too well off to live in the kind of housing development given a milquetoast name for the landscape it replaced, but the implication is there.

The Duwamish River has likewise been disconnected—but the disconnection is not complete, and is to some degree repairable. Not by returning it to how it was almost two hundred years ago—or at least, that wasn’t the story I chose to tell. Even now, the river is a multi-modal place, from shoreline parks to salmon fishing to recreational boating to commercial shipping traffic. The Duwamish Longhouse overlooks the one stretch of the river left mostly unaltered by decades of industrial transformation; the area is now a wildlife refuge. The river’s future envisioned in my story is drawn from futures envisioned for it today by the communities who live and work along it, though the reality will in all likelihood look somewhat different. Restoration in this context is not about winding back time to a pre-colonial past, but about what reciprocity for an extractive way of life that currently fails to account for its own externalities might look like.            

“Woman of the River” is a story that, like “The Swimmer”, moves forward in time, compassing multiple generations in a single journey—much as the life cycle of the salmon does. The life cycle of the salmon is at the heart of my friend’s poem, and an indicator of the health of the ecosystem in which they and we reside. Late in “Woman of the River” there’s a moment where one of the characters, riding downstream in her family’s boat, could reach out and touch one of the salmon, there are so many of them. Whatever the Duwamish River’s future looks like, I hope that’s part of it.

Genevieve Williams’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, Strange Horizons, and other publications. She lives in Seattle, above the Duwamish River that is central to her third short story for Asimov’s. Genevieve’s Twitter handle is twitfics, and she can be found on Instagram at datamuse.

When Ramsey Shehadeh combined a fascination with digital surveillance, robots, and the wild west inside his “fickle engine of creativity,” he ended up writing his latest story for Asimov’s, “Cigarettes and Coffee,” which appears in in our [January/February issue, on sale now!] In this interview, Ramsey discusses his writing process and literary influences, among many other fascinating topics.

Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
Ramsey Shehadeh: “Cigarettes and Coffee” is set in a near-future America that’s rapidly becoming a digital surveillance state. The government has commandeered the surveillance infrastructure built by early 21^st century tech oligarchs, and is using it to watch over everything, all at once, all the time.
But their influence hasn’t quite reached the small West Texas town of Amos—in part because Amos is a mostly-forgotten backwater, in part because of the quiet efforts of two people: Jake, the town’s sheriff, and Belinda, a gas station convenience store clerk who belongs to an underground hacker movement bent on undermining the state’s surveillance efforts.
As the story begins, Amos’ comfortable anonymity is beginning to fray. The Department of Observation has sent agents to town, and they’ve brought a new, unpleasantly life-like synthetic with them. It’s there to replace the town’s aging police robot, and to keep closer tabs on the sheriff’s activities. He and Belinda will need to do something about that.

AE: How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly?
RS: I don’t think there was any particular spark, but the shape of the story came from my worries about the country’s burgeoning surveillance infrastructure. I wondered what things would look like if current trends continue apace for a couple of decades: What form would 1984 take in the United States?
The United States isn’t Orwell’s Oceania: It’s still mostly empty, its population concentrated on the coasts and in major cities. Huge swathes of the country are sparsely populated, and generally forgotten or ignored.
A small town like Amos would be as much of an afterthought in the future as it is now. I imagine the people who live were already disposed to distrust the government, even before it began to slide into surveillance totalitarianism. What would this version of the future look like in Amos?

AE: Who or what are your greatest influences and inspirations?
RS: I’ve been inspired by so many writers. Here are a few of them:

William Faulkner:
In 11^th grade, my English teacher, Mrs Pendleton, assigned us The Sound and the Fury, and I’m still grateful for it. I vividly remember the discomfort of the first few pages of the Benjy section of that novel: a first-person narrative told from the point of a view of an intellectually disabled man who doesn’t understand the passage of time, or the relationship between cause and effect. It was strange, confusing, difficult, and exciting.
Early on I tried to mimic Faulkner in my own writing, which was a fruitless and slightly embarrassing disaster. But I think the spirit of that first encounter with his work is still with me, flaring to life when I least expect it, showing me what’s possible in prose.

Jeff VanderMeer:
I met Jeff VanderMeer at Clarion East, in 2007, where he and his wife Ann VanderMeer taught for a week. Jeff and Ann need no introduction: They’re both luminaries of the speculative fiction scene, and just wonderful people.
I think that was one of the most important weeks in my career as writer: Jeff opened my mind to the power of the written word. I hadn’t felt so excited about the craft since my first encounter with Faulkner.
When  I got home I picked up Jeff’s first Ambergris book—City of Saints and Madmen—and was blown away all over again. I’d never read anything like it. It was my first (but far from my last) encounter with Jeff’s ability to astonish, challenge and entertain all at once.
I always say Jeff’s the writer I want to be when I grow up. I’m well on the other side of growing up, but he’s still the light I set my course by.

Cory Doctorow:
Cory Doctorow was another one of my teachers at Clarion. I was very excited to meet him: I’d just finished his collection of short stories, Overclocked, and loved it. Every story in that collection pairs an enviable grasp of storytelling with incisive commentary on the dangers of the current technological revolution.
His fiction, in general, is a masterclass in how to both advocate and tell a good yarn. You don’t have to be didactic to be convincing, and Cory showed me how.
He’s a great teacher, too.

Kazuo Ishiguro:
Whenever people ask me to recommend books, I always start with Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. It’s emotionally devastating, yes, but so exquisitely beautiful that the sadness feels worth it. The same applies to much of his work, I think.  In simple unassuming language, he guides us through the world’s cruelties to a kind of essential human goodness that perseveres, despite everything.
I don’t know if I’ve learned anything about craft from him—what he does feels like a magic trick, and I don’t have the first idea of how he pulls it off—but it’s good to know what’s possible in the hands of a genius.

I’m not sure why I return to robots so much, but I think it’s mostly because they’re cool.

AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?
RS: Some of my most reliable obsessions are: the creeping advent of the surveillance state, robots, and westerns. I don’t explicitly court these themes when I sit down to write, but if I’m not careful they often just happen to the stories. In the case of “Cigarettes and Coffee,” they all happened at once.
I’m not sure why I return to robots so much, but I think it’s mostly because they’re cool. Also they’re great stand-ins for lots of uniquely modern themes: the power and peril of technology, what AI says about our understanding of cognition, the question of what it means to be a person. But mostly they’re just cool.
As for westerns: Although I didn’t grow up in the United States, I got most of my cultural markers from here. The image of the rugged, individualistic, self-sufficient cowboy must have really seeped into my bones. As I was writing this story, I slowly discovered something delightful: The real cowboy isn’t the laconic Sheriff Jake; it’s Belinda.

AE: What is your process?
RS: I don’t have much of a process: it’s more of a practice, and even calling it that  probably gives it more credit than it deserves. It boils down to two things:

1: Try to show up and write more days than I don’t. The best stuff arrives unexpectedly, not as bolts of inspiration, but as slow insights that grow out of the work in ways I can’t predict and generally don’t expect. It’s basically a long process of focused waiting.

2: Try to be alert to the things my subconscious is saying to me. I’m very bad at this, even though I know most of the good stuff happens down in the subterranean layers of my brain. I don’t have direct access to any of it, so—again—I just have to wait.
I’ve thought a lot about the fickle engine of creativity in my subconscious. I picture it as a closed door, with a mail slot and no handle. Every day I try to slip new material through the slot—interesting conversations I’ve had, scraps of prose from good books, images from good movies. I get no feedback at all; there’s no sign anyone’s on the other side.
Except, sometimes, when I’m writing, the door opens a crack and something flies out. This is easy to miss: it happens so quickly and quietly that, if I’m not paying attention, I might not even notice. And by the time I do, the door’s already closed.
I look at the thing that came out from the other side. It’s usually inscrutable, presented without explanation or context. Maybe it’s an image of a cat looking out the window at an approaching storm; or a scrap of dialog between two crumbling statues; or a glimpse of a woman gently lifting a dead raccoon off the road and putting it in a box.
The trick is recognizing the thing for what it really is: a gift from the secret generative force living in my mind. A key that unlocks a story it wants to give me.
I’ll need to work for it, though. So I pick the thing up, put it on my desk, look at it for a while, and go back to writing.
That’s not a process at all! you might say. That’s just superstition. And you’d be right! There’s a reason writers evoke muses, routines, practices: We don’t really know where any of this stuff comes from. Maybe there’s a god putting ideas in our heads. Maybe they’re messages from our Buddhist non-self, speaking to our illusory self in the only way it can. Maybe they’re just sporadic electrochemical interactions in unexplored regions of our brain.
It doesn’t really matter. All I know is that there’s something behind that door giving me stories. If I believe in that utterly and without evidence, and build an infrastructure around it, and feed it faithfully, and work hard in its shadow—if I do all that, sometimes I manage to write a good story.
You might say: That just sounds like goat sacrifices to pagan gods. You’d be right about that too.

AE: What inspired you to start writing?
RS: I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, but I don’t really know why. I think my first character was a one-eyed Martian called Müeller from Mars. He had a trusty sidekick called Bananahead from Venus, whose head was a banana. They went on adventures together, hopping from planet to planet.
So my first stories were science fictions stories: I was instinctively drawn to the fantastical. Maybe all kids are? I don’t know. But it stuck with me, for whatever reason.
I do know why I kept writing, though: my dad. He was a journalist, and an amazing writer, and my first reader. I remember handing him drafts of stories and sitting impatiently on the couch while he read, waiting for him to pass judgement. I still cherish a thing he said to me once, after he finished one of them: There’s something about your stories that makes you want to keep reading.
I still go back to that when I’m losing confidence, and tell myself the same thing I probably told myself back then: Dad thought I could do this, so I can.

AE: If you could choose one SFnal universe to live in, what universe would it be, and why?
RS: Most of the scifi I read is dystopic — either fully catastrophic end-of-the-world dystopia (The Road) or straight-line extrapolation-from-present-circumstances techno-corporate dystopia (Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Murderbot Diaries). As much as I enjoy that stuff, I wouldn’t want to live in any of it.
So I’d have to go with Star Trek. I’m very attracted to its ethos. In the Star Trek universe, technology has made us better people.
I wouldn’t want to be on the Enterprise’s crew—too dangerous!—but I’d love to live on Star Trek’s Earth, a post-scarcity society where everyone’s needs are satisfied, and hunger and privation and war are distant memories. All achieved and maintained without the aid of “market forces”, or the devil’s bargain we’ve made with capitalism.
From where I’m standing this all seems vanishingly unlikely—but so do most things about our world, in retrospect.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
RS: Just a couple of thoughts:

1. Don’t wait for inspiration, don’t try to summon it. Inspiration rewards toil. Sit down and write as often as you can. It’ll arrive when you least expect it.
2. Feed the mysterious engine of your creativity as much as possible: with books, movies, conversations, ideas, adventures. Anything and everything you can.
3. Find a writing group. Writing’s a lonely business, and hard to talk about with people who don’t do it themselves. A writing group is a community.
4. Treat dictates about technique with caution. You need to find your own way into your story. Other writers’ methods can be interesting, and maybe even inspirational, but there’s no recipe for any of this.
5. Gravitate instead toward advice about the practice of making art. Two of my favorites are Bird by Bird, by Annie Lamott, and The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield.

AE: What other careers have you had, and how have they affected your writing?
RS: I write software for a living. I’ve tried for a long time to find some common thread between coding and writing, but really they couldn’t be more different: programming is goal-driven, follows a rigorous and necessarily inflexible set of rules, and has a defined end state. Want to know if you’re finished with a piece of code? It’s relatively easy. Does it compile? Does it match the specs? Do all your unit tests pass?
Not so with prose. There are no real answers, just an endless series of guesses, conclusions reached without evidence, plot devices and stylistic effects and structural decisions calculated to nudge a human brain that isn’t yours in more or less the direction you intend. It’s all so tragically squishy.
If we wrote software they way we write stories the world would be chaos. It would probably also be a lot more fun.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing? (IE: Social media handles, website URL . . .)
RS: My website is https://doodleplex.com/
I’m on Twitter at @epidapheles.

Ramsey Shehadeh splits his time between writing stories and writing software. His fiction has appeared in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy, Steampunk Reloaded, and Wastelands II.