Ray Nayler fell down the rabbit hole of researching historical medicine and emerged with a story featuring treatments better left forgotten. You can read it 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?
Ray Nayler: Like everything I write, the story started because I got curious about something, and wanted to find out more about it. For me, writing is a way of engaging my curiosity. I write to dig deeper, and find out more about a subject. Writing is a way, for me, of instrumentalizing curiosity – giving it a goal, a reason, some kind of structure. I think if you took all of my books and stories and arranged them in the order in which they were written, you could get an ice core of my interests and explorations – a kind of autobiography of curiosity.
In this particular case, I got curious about the lobotomy. It’s such a strange, dark moment in American history: this time when all of a sudden, it seemed, it became perfectly reasonable to stick an icepick in the frontal lobes of mental patients and tear part of their brains apart on purpose, in order to cure them. Thousands and thousands of these operations were performed, all over the country, and then, just as mysteriously as they had become acceptable, they became unacceptable again.
So I started digging into the phenomenon. I read the book The Lobotomist, by Jack El-Hai, about Walter Freeman, the physician who popularized and performed the procedures in the United States, and traveled all over the country spreading the gospel of lobotomy to mental hospitals and tapping his icepick into the brains of patients. Freeman’s biography is bizarre: it’s such a disturbing interweaving of patriarchy, hubris, and dangerous self-delusion, combined with what seems like a genuine desire to help people and get them out of the nightmarish dungeons American mental hospitals had become.
While reading that book, I came across descriptions of other early shock therapies: cold baths, insulin comas . . . and the drug Metrazol, which was used to induce convulsions in mental patients, and which had a strange side effect: just before the seizure hit, the patients would get a look of unspeakable terror on their faces, as if they had seen the most awful thing they could imagine. But because of the memory loss the seizures induced, the patients could never describe what they had seen.
And I thought, “there’s a story here . . .”
AE: Why was that the moment for you when you thought there was a story?
RN: I think what I am interested the most as a writer is the unique angle into an issue: the view that offers up some unexpected element, and presents the possibility to write something that is truly new. It is always my goal to write stories that are unlike anything else, and the best way to do that is to start from an angle into the story that maybe no-one has thought of before. That flash of terror, forgotten (but is anything really forgotten) seemed like a great place to start digging.
AE: What made you think of Asimov’s for this story?
RN: I thought, at first, that this might not be a story for Asimov’s – perhaps it was a bit too much of a horror story. But in the end it’s really a story about science. About hubris, and repression, and how much what constitutes mental illness is a question of what is and is not acceptable to the society of the time. I thought – I’ll let Sheila decide if it’s right for her. Asimov’s was the first magazine to publish my work in SF, with my short story Mutability, in 2015, and it has been home to so many of my stories. I sent it in thinking that Sheila might reject it, but I wanted to give her a first look at it, just in case. I was so glad when she took it.
The meanings found in memory are like the meanings found in history: they may be tangentially related to the real events that occurred, but they only use those events as raw materials: their real purpose is, like history, to help us better understand our present moment.
AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing?
RN: There are many, but I think that memory is the subject that I seem to return to most. That seems appropriate, because in the end memory and language are the materials a writer works with, the way a painter works with paint and light. I’ve long been fascinated by memory, and the strange ways it changes form, and I’ve come to believe that it is not a storage system at all: it is a functional organ of the self, constantly helping us to generate our current self-image and to help us find equilibrium in a complex world. The meanings found in memory are like the meanings found in history: they may be tangentially related to the real events that occurred, but they only use those events as raw materials: their real purpose is, like history, to help us better understand our present moment.
AE: What is your process?
RN: I get up early in the morning, pour a cup of coffee, put on headphones, and write for at least an hour. I usually start by going back over what I wrote the day before, editing it and cleaning up sentences, shaping and reshaping it, until I feel I am sufficiently in the world of the piece. Then I begin writing new material. By the time I’m finished with a story, I’ve gone over its sentence innumerable times. So editing is a big part of the process, and I see writing as iterative: I’m always returning to what was written before, looping back to it before moving forward.
AE: What inspired you to start writing?
RN: I don’t exactly know. It might have been something as simple as an excess of curiosity, or some desire to put new things in the world. I’m afraid, sometimes, to think too deeply about questions like this: don’t we often reshape our reasons to suit our present moment? I wrote from a very young age, young enough that whatever impulse I had to do it is beyond retrieval, so to answer this I would have to make something up.
AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
RN: I have my second novel, Where the Axe is Buried, coming out in April. I am hard at work on the third novel, but I don’t talk about current projects. I have several shorter ideas in the works as well. My next story with Asimov’s, a novelette titled “The Tin Man’s Ghost” will be out later this year. It’s a continuation of the Disintegration Loops series.
AE: What are you reading right now?
RN: I’m mostly reading for research on the current book, and since I can’t talk too much about that, I can’t talk too much about what I’m reading. But I am also learning Spanish at the Foreign Service Institute, and to inspire myself I am reading a book of poems by Jorge Luis Borges. Encountering him again (he is a favorite author of mine) via his poetry in the original has been wonderful.
AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
RN: It’s hard to block out all the noise and concentrate on your craft, but you will be much happier and a much better writer if you do.
AE: What other careers have you had, and how have they affected your writing?
RN: I am a Foreign Service Officer with the Department of State, and I’ve served in Kosovo, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, and Kyrgyzstan. I worked for years on international development programs, living in Tajikistan, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan, and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkmenistan. I spent twenty years outside the United States. Living for years in radically different societies will teach you what it means to be the alien, what it means to be the other, the outsider. What it means to be continually misunderstood. I think I bring that into my work.
AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing?
RN: I’ve pared my social media presence down to an Instagram account, @raynayler and am considering dropping that as well. The best place to find me is at raynayler.net – readers can also subscribe to my newsletter, Angles In there.
From Earth to the Stars 