This is just a short check-in. My computer can no longer detect its wifi card and I need to take it into the shop for the professionals to look at it. I’m not sure how long that will take, so the update in two weeks might be delayed or even skipped. Updates to the newsletter, Patreon, and Solidarity Forever are the same story. Sorry about that!
I’ve been coping with some severe writer’s block since mid-July. I’m experimenting with some different projects to try and find a crack in the block that I can wiggle through, but this, too, will take some time.
Being limited to my backup computer, which is so ancient all it can really do is run Word, might help. 😛
Finally, I have been interviewing for several jobs. When I do get a job (and I will), it’ll cut into how much I can write and how much I can do the business of editing and publishing. But I will get out a novella here and there, regardless what job I do get.
Today on Philosophy (in a Teacup), we’re sitting down with Fiona Moore, author of Human Resources. She is a BSFA-winning Canadian author and academic, living and writing in southwest London, UK.
Fiona Moore
Tell us more about your book/ series/ short story work.
My latest book is Human Resources, which, despite the name and the fact that I work in a business school, isn’t a HR management textbook! It’s a collection of short fiction from NewCon Press. It includes some of my best-known stories (like “Jolene”, the one about the cowboy whose wife, dog and sentient truck all leave him), but also a lot of stories which are currently out of print or hard to access, as well as the previously-unpublished title story, which is about what happens when a human computer, trained all his life as a living memory system, develops dementia. So I hope there’ll be something for everyone.
Having just published my own short story collection, that’s the ideal, isn’t it? Having something for everyone.
Human Resources, by Fiona Moore
Why do you write speculative fiction? / What is speculative to you?
Speculative fiction has been my favourite genre as a reader since I was a teenager, so when I started writing seriously it felt natural to me as a place to write from. I like the freedom that being able to write at one remove from lived reality gives me.
As for what is speculative, that’s a hard one to answer. I once said that Sharpe is SF because it’s about an alternate Napoleonic wars where Sharpe existed, and I was only partly joking. More seriously, I think I’d say it’s that slight removal from reality, one that allows us to explore the things we take for granted. I’m an anthropologist in my day job, and an anthropologist, in their ethnographic research, needs to always try and make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. SF allows us to do that through fiction rather than ethnographic writing.
Anthropology was my first love in academia. I majored in Sociology in order to write better characters. I’m not going to lie – I envy that you get to do anthropology in your day job and in your fiction.
Where do you find inspiration for your stories?
A lot of them are inspired by things I find out about at work: if I hear about a new technology, my mind often goes down imaginative rabbit-holes thinking of what the consequences might be. Others come from more random places: the Morag and Seamus stories, “The Spoil Heap”, “Morag’s Boy” and “The Portmeirion Road,” came indirectly from a week at the Milford Writers’ Conference, which at the time was run out of a lodge in North Wales, and the location got me thinking about the people who try to escape social collapse through buying remote properties, and what that might mean for the people (human or otherwise) already living in those remote locations.
What is your favorite sci-fi, fantasy, or horror trope? / What is your favorite sci-fi subgenre?
My favourite SF trope is the sentient machine, or biological construct. I like speculating about what an intelligent thing that was deliberately built by humans would be like in terms of its psychology and culture. After all, even if we model them on ourselves (deliberately or accidentally), they’ll take on developments of their own, and I like to explore what that could be like.
And the psychology and culture of completely non-human forms are something else again – difficult, but worth it. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time is a masterpiece of that kind of worldbuilding.
What is your favorite speculative fiction book (besides yours)? / What is your favorite speculative short story?
There’s quite a lot, but I’d like to particularly mention “Fool To Believe” by Pat Cadigan. It’s a novella that I read as a teenager and found that initially, I didn’t understand it, but the story intrigued me enough that I kept on reading over and over until I did. I thought if I could eventually write something like that, I would be very happy.
What is your speculative short story? / What is the best story you’ve written?
I’m not sure if it counts as the “best”, but there are only a couple of stories of mine that I find I will just re-read because I want to: one is “The Island of Misfit Toys” and the other is “The Spoil Heap.” Both are available in Clarkesworld. A lot of people who read my work say that “Jolene” is their favourite, and, while I think I’ve improved as a writer since, I do like it– it’s a sentient car story that leaves it ambivalent as to who’s the victim.
What is the world you long to see?
I’d say it’s the one I use as background for my self-driving car mystery stories and novel, Driving Ambition. It’s a bit utopian in that there’s universal basic income, most people work in the arts or in innovative sciences, there’s a big social welfare ethos and queerness is generally accepted. Not everyone is happy there, because human beings are human beings, but I think I could be.
You described your series as “Captain Scarlet but they’re lesbians.” How did you get here from there?
That’s the Captain Artemis series– currently just published as stories, but there should be a novel available soon! I am a huge fan of retro SF television, I’ve written and cowritten a lot of guidebooks as well as more serious academic articles. But I often find that, much as I love those series, I don’t really see myself or my friends in there. So Captain Artemis, about an alternate 1960s with rockets, moon colonies, archaeology digs on Mars, and undersea bases, is a way of writing my own version of those retro series, but also with the added twist of asking how queer people, mixed-race people, women and other marginalised groups really might get on in that sort of world.
I love it! Very Lady Astronaut or For All Mankind.
Bonus question: Novels or short stories? Which do you prefer to read? Which do you prefer to write?
Both, in answer to both questions! I usually have a couple of novels and short story magazines on my ebook reader, alternating between them as I feel the need. Similarly with writing I tend to write novels and novellas in the summer months, and then switch to short stories in the autumn and winter when my day job gets busy.
Thank you for talking with us today.Good luck with Human Resources!
You can find Fiona Moore at Fiona-Moore.com, on Amazon,and wherever better books are sold.
Something is happening on Jax’ space station. Strange sounds. Blood-stained rags. Shadows in the corner of the eye.
Worst of all, people are trying to talk to her. Especially her colleague, Saunders.
It wasn’t that Jax was in love with her Space Station. It was more that she felt connected with it on a deeply personal, emotional level.
“Malfunction detected, Level 1.”
This is A.Z. Roskillis’ Space Station X: a lesbian romance on a deep, deep space station, with psychos and bugs and everything!
Despite the horror trappings, Space Station X really is a romance story at heart. Jax, the station engineer, is a misanthrope’s misanthrope, using her station as the next best thing to becoming a hermit. The only other living thing she even tolerates is the single houseplant she keeps in her quarters. She treats the station as her love in ways that Captain James T. Kirk would find a little obsessive. Something in her past has driven her to these extremes, something she’s been running from for a long time.
And then, there’s Saunders. Saunders is the station’s security officer (and the only other crew besides Jax herself), a well-muscled blonde who took up her position straight out of the Space Marines. She’s cheerful, genuine with people, and not a little lonely. Friends have described me as “the world’s most cheerful battering ram” and that’s exactly what Saunders is to Jax, trying bit by bit to find out what’s under that thick shell. But she came out to the station for her own good reasons, reasons that hide behind that easy smile.
What I liked best about Space Station X is how human it is. Even when the horror is ratcheted up to delirious levels, Jax and Saunders remain very plain and very real. Either of them could be someone you meet on the street, or have to try to reach at the office, and they retain that humanity in the face of the worst the station has to throw at them. And, almost in contrast to the rising terror, they become more real and more well-rounded as we slowly find out more and more about the station’s two crewmates.
I’ve been developing a taste for queer romance lately, and I loved how easy it was to join Jax and Saunders, walk besides them on their station. I was taken aback when the book finished. If there’s more out there like Space Station X, I’m going to be a happy reader. And if there’s more Roskillis to be had, I’m going to be a very happy reader.
I’d like to take a moment to talk about one of my hobbies. Not writing, which is my vocation. Not karate, which is a do. Not even gardening, since the only garden I have at the moment is a single basil plant due to landlord policy.
No, I have a hobby. I don’t expect it to ever make me any money, I don’t think I’m much good at it now and though I hack at it now and again, I don’t think I’m going to get much better at it. It’s just something I like to do because I find it fun.
(I used to put it “I make model languages in a bottle,” but let’s be honest, “The Secret Vice” sounds so much cooler.)
Right now I’m tinkering with a language family I collectively refer to as Rosoc (though, like Tolkien, I have a second, related subfamily, Lailesh). I’m still working on the Neolithic proto-Rosoc that births both languages. They’re built like Semitic languages, like Hebrew and Arabic, with triconsonental roots representing broad ideas (K-T-B in Arabic is everything to do with writing/books/bureaus/offices for example). These roots get conjugated/declined with different vowel combinations and then further modified with prefixes, affixes, and infixes, like more familiar Indo-European languages.
When I get to the writing system, I’m going to base it on the Chinese model, with radicals for basic ideas modified with phonemic elements. In written Chinese, some 90% of the hanzi are made up of these two elements together: the radical to tell you what the word is about, the phonetic to tell you what it sounds like. Marrying the Semitic radicals to the Chinese radicals was, in fact, the inspiration for this whole project.
But right now, I’m having fun adding words to the lexicon (and getting some inventive derivations – the word for “playing together” is “puppy-ing” for example), working out a grammar, and, of course, translations. I worked up some proverbs and maxims and have translated these, though I fully expect these translations to be obsolete as Proto-Rosoc becomes more finished.
Today’s guest is Aimee Kuzenski. Aimee is a speculative fiction author and practitioner of Filipino martial arts. In the wider speculative fiction community, she is a graduate of Viable Paradise, a board member with the 4th Street Fantasy convention, and you can find her short fiction online at Translunar Travelers Lounge.
Aimee Kuzenski
Tell us more about your book/ series/ short story work.
SEEDS OF INHERITANCE is basically THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT crossed with DUNE, with living FTL treeships. It’s a space fantasy centered around a woman called Berenike, who lost most of her family when she lost the revolution, who has looked to her daughter to complete what she couldn’t. But when the daughter refuses, she refuses to give up even then. Her choices aren’t pretty, but they make for a great story.
Seeds of Inheritance, by Aimee Kuzenski
Why do you write speculative fiction?
Speculative fiction is written on my bones, from an early age. In elementary school, I read stories about magical horses. I read the cover off a volume of Greek mythology. I tore through every sci-fi and fantasy novel in every library I came across. Speculative fiction is what gets my blood going, and even if I ever wrote something like a mystery or memoir, it would have a speculative element in it.
Where do you find inspiration for your stories?
All over the place – the books I read, the strange facts I run across, the twisted combinations of fact and fiction that I come up with while I’m doing something boring. Once in a while, I’ll mine a dream for vibes.
What is your favorite sci-fi, fantasy, or horror trope?
Oh that’s a fun one. My favorite tropes are probably FTL and ansibles. As we understand the universe, neither is possible, but they make so many stories possible.
What is your favorite speculative fiction book (besides yours)?
Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente. I read that book in a fever dream. The language is so gorgeous, the characters so real. Valente’s work just hits every single note for me – I dream about her cities and it’s like coming home to a place I never knew existed.
I remember that book – it felt like a fever dream all by itself. I love Valente’s prose.
What is the best story you’ve written?
If we’re talking short fiction, I’m proudest of “Fractured“, which appeared in Translunar Traveler’s Lounge. It’s about a medic on a space ship who received a terrible injury and has to figure out who they are afterward.
If we’re talking about my favorite novel, it’s definitely SEEDS OF INHERITANCE. It’s the best book I’ve written, and I love it with my whole heart.
What is the world you long to see?
Justice can be cold, but it’s what I most want to see in a world, including ours. Justice in terms of bringing wrongs to light, but also in terms of equality of rights and opportunities. It’s why a lot of what I write has a strong political theme. I’m passionate about it.
How do you apply your skills in Filipino Martial Arts to your work?
A martial arts practice develops a lot of awareness of one’s body, how it moves, how it feels to do things. I try to bring that awareness throughout anything I write. But my most favorite scenes to write are fight scenes. Knife fighting is my personal favorite, but FMA teaches you techniques that can be used with any weapon – or no weapon. I love choreographing fights and keeping them as real as possible. I tend not to write anything Errol Flynn would have performed; my fights are much closer to the hallway fight in Daredevil. Brutal, exhausting, and as real as possible.
I hear you about the body awareness. It’s never really expressable in mere language…but that doesn’t stop us from trying.
Bonus question: Novels or short stories? Which do you prefer to read? Which do you prefer to write?
Novels, no question. My personal writing rhythms are all set up for 100k words or more – I’m amazed that I managed to sell anything short. It’s partially due to the fact that I mostly read novels. I love the depth of character and worldbuilding you can get with that much space.
This is the [first draft] opening of my new novella, a queer space pirate romance I’m worktitling Persephone’s Gate. Along with the title, it will probably undergo changes before publication, but until then…enjoy!
Zara Krauss-Kusnadi, station-born and -bred, awoke with the first realization anyone station-born and -bred would notice.
There was gravity. And it hurt.
“Ugh…” She groaned, laying one olive hand to her brow.
There was gravity. She was at the bottom of a gravity well – so a planet or a moon, not a ship or station.
There was heat. She was soaked in sweat, great drops of it sliding toward the gravity well that held her fast to the ground.
There was ground, and the earthy clay smell joined the scent of rancid sweat and pickled spacer that Zara herself exuded.
There was a pain in her head, over and above the weight of gravity over every inch of her body, something that throbbed.
“Ugh…” Zara repeated.
She dared open her eyes. Overhead, beyond the purple sky, a blue-brown planet with delicate cumulous curls in its atmosphere hung ominously, as if it would fall on her.
That…that’s Kopol… She thought.
Which meant she was on Kachhuapur, Kopol’s second moon. Still on Kachhuapur. But what was she doing sleeping outside, in the tall grass of Kachhuapur’s steppes?
What did I do last night?
She’d been…Ellis was there, Ellis Nnamdi-Divekar, and Louis and Sarai and Martian Mei and some of the others from the Fujiwara-maru…Ellis had looked amazing in Centauri silks, so daring…they drank toasts…God, how many?…they were celebrating…celebrating what?…
In front of her eyes, a streak formed across the sky. From her point of view, it looked like a light that sliced Kopol in two. She winced, closing her eyes again, trying to remember.
…they were celebrating a new enlistment…yeah…they’d signed articles yesterday afternoon on a Southern Cross interstellar…their last night on Kachhuapur before…
Zara’s eyes snapped open, big and brown and stone-cold sober.
That light. The one streaking across the sky. Big star bound, away from Kachhuapur, out of Kopol’s orbit, heading for the hyperspace barrier to catch the outbound startide.
Zara scrambled to her feet, as if her 1.8m could bring her meaningfully closer to the spaceship racing overhead.
Somehow, Zara knew that that very light, that very ship, was the Revenge, that Louis and Sarai and Martian Mei…and Ellis…were passing before her eyes right at that moment.
She watched it break free of Kachhuapur’s atmo, a shooting star in reverse, and sail off behind Kopol’s massive planetary bulk.
Leaving her.
Alone.
In the tall grasses of the Kachhuapur steppe.
She stared into the sky for a long time, throbbing head and dragging gravity forgotten, breathing rattling little breaths. As if by staring, she could still see her shipmates and the promise of plunder and adventure.
Well, the Nebulas are over. The winners announced, the new board of SFWA sworn in, and everything. I may not have pictures, but I have some thoughts.
First, I want to congratulate all the winners and finalists. Félicitations! You’ve all earned it, and especially in short stories and novelettes, the stories were really strong this year. Choosing a winner must have been a trial.
But I’d especially like to congratulate Naomi Kritzer and our oldfriend, Ai Jiang. Naomi’s two finalists were a joy to read and a breath of fresh air – hope for the future. In her acceptance speech for the winning novelette, “The Year Without Sunshine,” she spoke of its inspiration – of wanting to kick against the idea that there could be no handicapped people in the apocalypse, and how a community comes together around their neighbor in need. That’s the kind of message, and the kind of science fiction, we need today.
But it wasn’t all awards and speeches. There were many, many great panels this year – just of the ones I attended, Novellas and Novelettes, Setting as Character, and the LGBTQ+ meetup were standouts. The ones I missed, I’ll be watching the videos and taking notes.
I even sat on a panel (again!) this year. Last year, it was “Unusual Short Story Formats.” This year, “Religion in Worldbuilding.” With Rachel Gutin, Sue Burke, Shvarta Thakar, and Natalie Wright, (a Quaker, a Jewish woman, a Unitarian Universalist, a Hindu, and an atheist, respectively), we ranged from why religion might be important (even in science fiction) to practical polytheism. The audience’s questions were great, too. Afterward, we adjourned to the Cooper Suite to continue the conversation, where a Friend from Ville Québec interrogated me about how hard it is for me to write Quakers.
Seriously. Hindu characters, Jewish characters, Catholics, atheists and Episcopals? Fine. No problem. Writing Quakers? Haven’t succeeded yet. …well, maybe once.
Speaking of my own writing…
I had an office hour with an editor who really understood Doña Ana Lucía. That’s right, To the Future! is out in the mail. Win, lose, or draw, I’m glad there’s someone in the industry who smiles when I say “it’s everything I thought was cool when I was 14” and understand the importance of nice, long names. Hold me in the Light while she considers To the Future!.
Which brings me to my last point. After office hours and some instructive panels, I’m making some changes to my independent writing career. I’m approaching the dirty thirty short stories, where each new title gently boosts sales on all the old titles. That’s fine, especially since they all sell rather modestly. But I’m going to move away from short stories.
Instead of one short story a month, I’m going to focus on (a) getting Doña Ana LucíaSerrano…to the Future! traditionally published, and (b) releasing a novella every three to six months. They’ll be 25,000-40,000 words – short enough to finish in an evening, long enough to sink your teeth into. And I’m going to start experimenting with series again, something I haven’t really done in a decade (aside from Doña Ana Lucía herself). Series, shared worlds…my stories are going to get bigger, in every way. I’m already gathering ideas, from swashbuckling lesbian space pirates to fantasy Quakers (because, hey, what’s the point of writing if you don’t challenge yourself?).
The diversity of voices, depth of characterization, and lived-in worlds that you’ve all praised for the stories in The Night Meeting will still be there. They’ll just be full meals every three months, instead of snacks every month. Trust me, they’ll be worth the wait.
This also means pivoting away from some of the intense marketing I’ve been sucked up into. Marketing is a gas – it will expand to fill the available space. I’m scaling back to blog updates every other Friday, and one update per month on the Innerspace newsletter and Patreon. But they’ll be richer for it – I’m incorporating more of the new prose I’m writing into the newsletter and into Patreon, so there’ll be more of the fiction you love coming to you.
That’s all the news that is news at the top of the hour. See you in two weeks!
That’s right, this week is this year’s Nebulas. You know I’ll be on the Religion in Worldbuilding panel (Friday, 7 June, starting at 3:00pm), but here’s my (planned) schedule for the weekend.
June 6, 1:30 – Novellas and Novelettes June 6, 4:30 – Love Beyond the Romantic
June 7, 9-12 – Party Suite hosting June 7, 1:30 – Setting as Character June 7, 3:00 – Religion as Worldbuilding June 7, 4:30 – Time Management OR Building Your Crew
June 8, 9:00 – Smaller is Better June 8 12-3 – Party Suite hosting June 8, 6-8 – Party Suite hosting
June 9, 10:30 – Planning Publicity
As you can see, my volunteer hours have me in the Party Suite. If you’re attending the Nebulas, drop on by!
The Night Meeting is now available, in ebook and print formats!
“Brilliant and beautifully written, Mathieu’s stories span the ages and blur the lines between past and present, alien and mundane.” – Anthony W. Eichenlaub, author of Not Done Yet: Sci-Fi Stories of Wisdom and Fury
“I was instantly drawn in by the stream of tales, some easy to understand, some confusing by their alien nature.” – William C. Tracy, editor of Space Wizard Science Fantasy
“Mathieu’s narrative voice is so good. His characterization, though, is what really shines though — really burning bright.” – J. D. Mitchell, author of Curse of the Worlds
“Readers of works like The Expanse ought to enjoy this dynamic blend of themes and concepts.” – Austin Conrad/Akhelas, author of To Hunt a God and Treasures of Glorantha
“[T]antalizing realism and teasing bouts of imagination…” – Barbara Swihart Miller, author of The Call of Gold
—
Two men meet around a campfire at night. For one, it is sweltering summer in the jungle primeval. For the other, it is bitter winter beneath steel skyscrapers. Both men are seers, but they cannot both be true. So which is the dreamer, and which is the dream?
To solve this riddle, they tell the stories of what they have seen – things which were, are, and are yet to come. The two men, over the course of the strange night, share visions from humanity’s last message to the stars to Buddhist beatnik vampires of 1955 San Francisco. These fifteen tales, including five all-new, all-original stories, will thrill you, perplex you, and enlighten you.
If you like classic collections like The Illustrated Man and Glass and Gardens, you will love sitting in on The Night Meeting.
Episode 10 of Solidarity Forever: The History of American Labor, “Farwell, Hunt, and Shaw,” dropped this morning!
Today we look at two landmark labor law cases argued and decided in a heady few weeks in the summer of 1842…and at the man, “no friend of labor,” who made them happen.
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