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You are just publishing your first novel, and the name is Ammonite.
I don't know if you are familiar with what an ammonite is, but it is a fossilized shell that curves around in a spiral a little bit like a chambered nautilus. They're about 150 million years old.
What is the novel about? What is the theme?
That depends upon whom I am talking to. There are three basic sound bite ways to describe it. One is that it's a neat biological puzzle with some genetic engineering. One is that it's a radical reexamination of gender and one is that it's an adventure story set on another planet, so it really depends on who I am talking to at the time. I tend to think of it as a story about one woman who goes to a new place and discovers things about herself and other people. She does that in various ways.
You've been selling short fiction for 4 or 5 years.
I sold my first story in 1987, which didn't appear until 1988. Most of my work, in fact, all of my work apart from one story, has appeared only in the United Kingdom.
That one story was "Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese" which was in Aboriginal SF last summer. What provoked the swap between Interzone and Aboriginal?
I believe that it was a marketing idea. It meant that they could all relax for one issue and go on holiday. They had one editor in America that was doing the work for one month for the British people, and then for one month the British people did the work for the Americans. David Pringle, the editor of Interzone, got to go on holiday for a few weeks.
At the time, that being your only exposure in this country, that was probably a bonus for you.
Oh yes. I had written this story, and I was very pleased to sell it twice. It was great.
Did you get any feedback from America having published it here, it being your only appearance at that point? Did it open up the American market for you?
Not at all. It pretty much sank without a trace. I got a letter from Bruce Bethke, the SFWA treasurer at the time, who said that he read it and that he understood that I had chronic fatigue syndrome, which of course I do, and he said that it was very poignant knowing your story. It was just a little note. That was it, that was the only feedback I got apart from my friends who all phoned up, and said "I thought it was a great story."
When did you move to America?
That's a long story. In 1988 I came over to MSU for six weeks to do a writing workshop - Clarion. The teachers were people like Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm, Lisa Goldstein, Tim Powers, Kim Stanley Robinson, Chip Delany. I had no idea that they were going to accept me because it was one of those things that you would read in magazines that "So and so went to Clarion" and think that it must be some mythical, magical thing that people go to. This was before I had published any work and had just applied and thought that they probably wouldn't take me but it would be nice to go to America for six weeks. Lo and behold, they wrote back that they'd love for me to come. Then I panicked because I hadn't expected to get accepted, and also I was the first UK citizen to be asked there so I didn't know what a person did, and I had no money, etc. I finally got here, and during those six weeks I met Kelley, the woman I now live with. I had to come back to England for a year and sell my house and so forth, and then I came back to this country in December of 1989. We lived in Duluth, and then Decatur, and now Atlanta.
That's pretty interesting. All of your work is still selling in the UK but you've been living here for three years now. Is that because your contacts are still over there?
I believe it's the difference between the two markets. Most, all of my protagonists in everything I've written except for one in a story I wrote a while back, are lesbians which tends to make some editors a little wary. Not much, it's not enough in and of itself to make the editor go "Eek! I can't publish that!" but the fact is that the science fiction I write isn't rocket ships and blasters and neat computer gadgets. It's very much about people with sometimes just SF window dressing. Over here, editor s are more strict about what they classify as science fiction.
Would you say that the American editors are perhaps a little more shy, a little more mainstream?
They are more mainstream science fictional, yes. I would say the English market is more mainstream in terms of being closer to "literature."
Are they more adventurous in the UK - more willing to take a chance on the subject matter?
I would say so. Everything is not done in quite such a committee format. You know what you are going to get when you open Asimov's SF Magazine, you know roughly the parameters that you are going to encounter. You open Interzone and you, well I at least, have no idea what I'm going to read. It could be a revolting story like Brian Aldiss's last piece called "Horsemeat" which was frankly disgusting, misogynist and so on, and made me feel while I was reading it that I would like to throw the author up against the wall and take a blunt instrument to him. Or it could be a whimsical fantasy or it could be virus and rocket ships and bug-eyed monsters. You really have no idea. That's what interests me about the magazine.
Do you see that as a weakness of the American market? Do you think that tastes - which comes first, the taste of the American people, or is that all they know because that's all they ever see?
It's the publishing history. I think science fiction in this country and science fiction in the UK developed along completely different lines. In this country it developed from Hugo Gernsback and so on, it developed from pulp fiction. In England, it developed from H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and so on. It developed parallel with and often on the same road as literature. It just has a different history. I think you could characterize it by saying that in England readers expect science fiction to be adult fiction, whereas occasionally readers in this country, and I'm not talking particularly about science fiction readers per se, but the general readers tend to regard sf as a juvenile literature. You can tell that by looking at the covers, I think.
It's not quite as ghettoized.
Yeah.
Is one more likely for a normal person with no particular interest in sf to pick up an sf novel in England than in America?
I would say so, just because of the way that it is packaged. My book Ammonite, for example, is coming out from HarperCollins in England and the cover of that is just a huge gold ammonite on a deep blue background. I don't know what kind of audience that will immediately attract, but it has a different look to the one that is coming out in this country from Del Rey. This one has a big bright red airlock, a planet and a jelly bean-looking spaceship zipping off in the background. That's going to appeal to people who go "Oh, a spaceship!" They're just going to see the book differently. I think, because of that, they may read the book differently, too.
When you first came to this country, you said that you had a lot of problems with INS. Tell me about the idea of being a writer of note.
That is an Immigration and Naturalization Service definition. How I got my visa to come into this country, I'm on an H1B professional visa. I came in on two platforms. One is by getting a contract for a book of short stories from New Victoria Publishers, which is a lesbian/feminist press based in Vermont, and one is being a "writer of prominence." That basically means that I could get lots of letters from people like Damon Knight saying "Oh, she's fab; take her." and I could document the fact that I've published work in the UK and that I was having some work translated into Spanish and a French publisher wanted some of my short work, and I had done some teaching and that basically I wasn't some yob off the street who was going to attack people in this country or kill babies or otherwise be antisocial.
Are you in a situation where you basically have to keep writing? Can they pull the plug on you?
My visa runs out in February 1994. When that happens, I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do. I could probably get another visa issued by getting another book contract with Ballantine, but really what I'm going to go after is the golden apple. I'm going to try for a green card. There are four basic ways I personally could get a green card in this country. One would be by investing a million dollars in an American company, which will employ twenty or more American citizens; one would be to marry a person of the opposite sex, which of course I'm not going to do; one is to have a baby, which also I'm not going to do; and the other is to become extremely famous very quickly, which is the only chance I have. As you can imagine, that's not terribly likely except it seems to be the only way to go. I can either win the lottery, have a baby, get married, or become famous. There is a fifth possibility. I could get a permanent and very prestigious job, example being professor of comparative literature at Yale, which isn't horribly likely either.
Do you feel the pressure from that.
Just a bit. Yes, I do. Apart from earning my living writing, which anybody here will testify is not easy, I have to bear this double burden. I feel like, as well as getting a book published and making sure people read it and enjoy it, I feel like everything I publish has to be very very damn good. It has to be able to be held up to the light by critics of other literary fields to say "Yes, she is worthy of getting grants" because I'm going to need to get grants, I'm going to need to win prizes to get my green card.
You've mentioned your work holding up to other critics. You work as a book reviewer, your only work other than writing fiction, for Southern Voice. Is there a dichotomy between reviewing other people's work and writing your own work?
The important thing to remember I think for me when I'm reviewing is that I shouldn't review other people's work as though it was one of my first drafts. The temptation is to say "Well, I wouldn't have done it that way. God! If they'd just take this character and put her here, or made this happen, etc." The important thing is to see what is actually there and read it for itself and then look at it. It's also, I review quite a lot of nonfiction, which I can talk about in a bit if you like, and the fiction I do review is lesbian and gay "literature". I keep putting literature in quotes, because it's a genre as much as science fiction or fantasy or horror.
Do each of these different subgroups have their own set of standards for what good writing would be?
Not so much for good writing, but for how to write. There are certain writing and reading protocols. For example, I'm sure many people have heard of the science fiction reading protocol in that if you read a sentence that says "The door irised open" you know immediately that you are in a science fiction novel, because doors do not iris in this present time and place. You know you are on a spaceship or in an airlock or some futuristic kind of thing. Lesbian and gay novels have their own protocols, their own coming out layers, their own tackling of homophobia and so forth. It's a fairly new genre, so that protocols aren't set in stone.
With your first novel coming out soon, have you seen a review of it yet?
Yes! I would like to talk about that. I have seen two reviews of my novel Ammonite. They both pissed me off for separate reasons. The first review was a very short review by Faren Miller in Locus. It was a short take, and she liked the book mostly. She talked about "masterly sure handedness" and so forth but she said there were aggravating lapses. In other words there were large parts of the novel that she really didn't like. I thought about it for a while and I have decided that what she didn't like wa s the fact that my protagonist actually has problems. She is not always full of life and happy-go-lucky. She is not indomitable, not omnipotent. She, at some point, loses her way emotionally, spiritually and literally. She gets kidnapped, she gets hurt physically, she gets lost. She loses her self-esteem, her sense of self and goes into a kind of psychic shock. In other words she doesn't act like a heroine. That I think pissed of Faren Miller because she is used to reading SF novels where the characters are superwomen and supermen. I think it upset her world view to have an SF protagonist having a hard time.
If you are doing something off the beaten track, shouldn't that be perceived as good. Rather than a rehash, are people going to say that you are breaking new ground or that it isn't what they are used to?
Let me talk about the second review, which brings some of those questions into relief. The second review was 1000 or 1200 words, and it was also in Locus, by Dan Chow. I'm sure he thinks he is doing me a favor by some of the things he says when he talks about it breaking new ground and being extraordinary and so on. What he does is call it a "lesbian science fiction novel" which it isn't. I'm the author, I'm a lesbian. My protagonist is a lesbian, and she has a lesbian love affair. It's no more a book about being lesbian than Neuromancer is a book about coming to terms with ones heterosexuality. Because everyone in the book is straight doesn't mean that the book is about being straight. That's one of the things that happens when you do leave the beaten track is that people fall on you like a ton of bricks, smiling. They say "I'm sure you are doing very well, Nicola. I'm sure you are trying very hard and it's quite a good effort but really...tsk, tsk." There is a wagging of fingers and a real condescension in the review, a real "she tried hard but its only about lesbians; without men in it it's a bit narrow minded."
Having read reviews that made you angry, does that make you rethink how you review others?
Those two in particular didn't, because I like to think that I've already worked past those particular problems. Sometimes I read a review and think "God, I hope I don't make that mistake" or "That's a clever way to approach another person's writing." I learn a lot from reviewing and from reading other's reviews.
Let's talk about your life outside of writing. You have a very interesting career history, to say the least. What kind of bands have you been in?
Just one band, called Janes Plane. It was a women's band, in a city called Hull in England. I fronted it, I was the songwriter and sometimes percussion player. We were an in-your-face with shaved heads and big boots and waistcoats. I sang about cutting up people in the street if they got in my way. We were on network TV, but as soon as we were offered the college circuit our drummer decided she wanted to be the sound engineer for a TV cartoon series, and we couldn't find another competent woman drummer. Me and the guitarist set up as, not a band - I'm not sure what you would call it, but I wrote all of the music and we did chants and played drums and I made this percussion thing out of a Fijian wood block and a tambourine and two broken drumsticks. We would go to theaters and sing during the intermissions. We basically sang for our supper, because I was really broke at the time.
Do you see some similarity between trying to break into the music business and trying to break in as a writer? In both you have a steep pyramid with very few at the top, but many others that would like to be at the top.
I read somewhere that someone once said that in order to make one's living in any field of creative endeavor one had to be almost psychotic. You have to believe in yourself so strongly, to sit there day after day with your computer or your pen or your piece of paper or guitar, and think "I can do this. 999 billion people before me have failed, but *I* can do this." It's quite a psychotic state of mind to have to hang onto year after year. It takes years, nobody does it overnight.
Are there ever times that you feel that you are losing that intensity, self-doubt where you say "I've done it before, but I don't know if I can do it again?"
Often. Well, I say often and sound definite but what happens is that it is split into two layers. There is a deep core that knows that I can keep doing it. There is a surface stream that says "Maybe that won't work." It's happening a little right now as I have started two more novels, and I keep hesitating. I write a bit and think "I could do this another way, this character should go here." Basically, I have so many choices now because I'm a better writer than I was a year ago when I wrote Ammonite. It's casting doubt on myself because I can see so many alternate ways to make something work that I hesitate a lot. I often do that at the beginning of any piece of work. Once I get well into the novel I'll be fine.
You've talked about being a member of the Clarion workshop. Do you think that that really helped your career? Without that, would you have had a similar career?
I'm not sure. I don't think it changed the way I write, but I do think it changed the way I regard being a writer. It's a subtle distinction. Before I went to Clarion, I knew I wanted to be a writer, after I came back I knew I was going to make myself be a writer. My determination hardened, I became more professional. The letters I sent to editors were no longer "Buy this you jerk" - not that I did that a lot, but the temptation was there. After Clarion, I would say "This is what I've written, I hope you enjoy it." I took things less personally. If someone rejected my work, I didn't think they had no taste. Maybe it's not a very good story, or maybe they don't like it, or maybe they are under editorial constraint. Also, it gave me access to other professional writers. The one I've had the most contact with is Tim Powers. We talk often on the phone. He hasn't exactly given me brilliant advice, mainly because I haven't asked, but he gives me hope simply by being there. I can phone him up and say "I'm having a really shitty time with this outline." His response is "Yeah, me too. You wait a minute while I get myself a beer and we'll talk about this." The fact that he's been through it all before and that he's survived it helps.
That's a theme that's recurring a lot in these interviews, the sense of community. You seem to have benefited from it. Is that someone that you knew you would get?
I had no idea. I didn't know that a quote "science fiction community" unquote existed or that there was such a thing as fandom or sf conventions. I knew nothing. I just wrote Ammonite. I knew there was a magazine called Interzone in England and I knew there were sf books that people published and read but I had no idea that there was this whole sense of connectedness.
You came from outside of the field. Would that account for the convention breaking that you exhibit in your work?
I'm not sure. I think coming from England helps in the sense that there seems to be less of a...
Is there less baggage, that not having read so much in the field you don't feel you need to match with what has come before?
There isn't such a pressure to conform.
On a completely unrelated note, what does "skiffy" mean?
I use the word "skiffy" a lot. When people talk about "sci fi", they basically mean bad films. I've heard people pronounce it as "skiffy". I use it as a relatively affectionate term for rockets and blasters and the old tired conventions of science fiction.
In the context that you used it to me, you said that you had written a story that you didn't think would sell in this country because the sex was too explicit. You said that you were going to try to sell it to the "skiffy" editors in England, and the closest word I could think of was "skivvy", so...
You thought I meant porno magazines.
That's exactly what I thought. It took me a few readings to catch on.
I've never sent anything to a pornographic magazine - unless you count Playboy as a pornographic magazine.
So you have submitted to Playboy?
Sure. When you are broke, and they pay $5000, principles take a backseat. Plus there is a way to approach the idea of pornography which is not to ban it but to invade it, to change its language, to overwrite the cliche.
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