As you’ll have noticed, I haven’t updated in quite a while – two months. I’ve been applying for jobs, getting interviews, not getting the jobs, and doing a lot of soul searching.
I’ll be blunt – according to the numbers, somewhere between five and a dozen people will read this. That’s about how many pings I get in a day, usually for Melissa’s review of the Barbie movie or, for some reason, the Doc Savage Method of Personal Development. And those pings never result in clickthroughs to Amazon, much less sales.
And, in addition to many other things, this blog is a business proposition, a marketing method. It’s supposed to funnel folks toward buying and reading my stories, and after fifteen years, it doesn’t do that.
It’s bigger than that, though. I’m tired of independent publishing, all the marketing, the covers, the formatting, the reports, the trends, all of it. And I’m increasingly tired of science fiction and fantasy, which frightens the hell out of me because without SF/F, who am I? So there’s increasingly little reason for me to try to keep this blog updated.
So, this is, in Nickel Creek’s words, “goodbye for now.” The blog will still be here (I don’t begrudge $100/year). But there won’t be any updates any time soon. Same story with Solidarity Forever: The History of American Labor. The audience interest just isn’t there, and I’m tired.
I’m not blaming any of you. If you’re reading this, you’re part of the stalwart few. And I just want to say …thank you. Thank you for your time and attention. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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all leave him), but also a lot of stories which are currently out of print or hard to access, as well as the previously-unpublished title story, which is about what happens when a human computer, trained all his life as a living memory system, develops dementia.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.
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.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow, Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place, and in the sky, The larks, still bravely singing, fly, Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie, In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields. John Macrae
Remembering Armistice Day…and may there be an armistice all over the Earth next Armistice Day.
Originally the last word in Triangulation: Dark Skies, now available for the first time standing on its own.
Five thousand years before the end of the Earth, the star called WR-104 went supernova. Over the intervening centuries, its deadly gamma-ray burst hurtled across silent planets and empty space on a death-errand to that distant world. And, in the intervening five thousand years, Earth learned to listen, and learned to see, and learned to contemplate its coming demise.
Robinson and Campbell are the last two astronomers left at Mount Pleasant Radio Observatory as downtown Hobart, and the whole world, descend into chaos. The Earth’s biosphere is coming to an end, thanks to a gamma ray burst five thousand years in the making. There will be nothing left. Except that the two astronomers might, just might, be able to leave a message encoded in Earth’s Sun, a message to whoever is out there, and whoever comes after…
What message do they struggle to gift to a vast post-Earth universe? Find out in “Earth Epitaph” on Amazon.com.
A few weeks back on Twitter, in the great quiet of year’s end, the writerly discourse turned to the demographics of fantasy protagonists. Most of them are in their early 20s, same for science fiction, and at least a few of us would like to see some older protagonists, in the fullness or twilight of life, so they can share in the grand imaginative adventures, too.
I pointed out, at the time, part of the problem is structural. “It’s easier,” I said, “to write Luke Skywalker leaving the farm than Uncle Owen.” Indeed, a few dead parents, a bildungsroman call, and your youthful protagonist is out on the road to adventure (whether the hyperlanes outward or some imaginative quest inward). It’s harder to disentangle a middle-aged protagonist from their mortgage, their children, their established career, their set habits. The usual ways of ‘freeing’ such characters from their bonds, like fridging, are generally considered hack and in bad taste.
Twitter, of course, moved on to the next sexy Discourse like a throwaway line in a Barenaked Ladies song. But I kept thinking about it, and brought it up to a few of my slower-paced communities, and we discussed the elders’ equivalents of the bildungsroman and the Call to Adventure – ways to get our older protagonists out on the way to their own fantasies and science fictions. This list is by no means comprehensive, but a few ideas to get us all started.
Ebenezer Scrooge
An older person has a lot more time to get stuck in their ways than a young person does. Indeed, part of the appeal of a younger protagonist is seeing what ways they’ll get started on, what habits and ideals they’ll choose. The appeal of an Ebenezer Scrooge is watching them change their ways, usually for the better, before it’s too late. The Ghost of Christmas-Yet-To-Come must loom large here, the ultimate ‘too late’ to change before, for our putative Scrooge to realize what looms just before them. Whether your Scrooge is visited by three literal ghosts or not, they’re stuck in their ways and must be dislodged from them, forced to mend the habits and attitudes that have served them so well for so long and now trap them. Before it’s too late.
James Bond
This is the man (or woman, or enby) who spent A Bad War, and has no place in the peace that has settled since. They were probably on the winning side, but they never won the peace. Theirs is a thousand yard stare, an affected disaffection, and a host of terrible coping strategies. The literary James Bond is a fragile creature, an object of some pity to the people around him, a man a bit out of his time. His quest is to come to terms with what he’s seen and done in the horrors of the war (whatever war, however metaphorical, it was), whether that’s clinically aided by a therapist’s office, or tying up loose ends, or coming to a (quasi-)religious epiphany that yes, he can live with it,
Perhaps like Sisko here
…but that’s not his real work, now, is it? His real work is coming to grips with the peace, the world made in the shadow of the old war, where poppies grow and children play where the horrors were. The world here now and the world to come, born of the world he knew and can’t reconcile. That is the master-work, the relationship to his anima to the war’s relationship to his shadow.
My friend Michael Martin noted a variation, the Jason Bourne, an older figure who’s been carrying on a personal vendetta so long the world has moved on without them and trying to settle it long after settling it was of any good to anyone.
Martin Bishop (Michael Martin)
This is pretty much every role Robert Redford played after 1980, but I single out Martin Bishop of Sneakers. He is the mentor to a new generation, but this is his story, tying up the loose ends he left behind from his youth. He needs to resolve them, or fail to do so, while handing the reins to the next generation. This is Indiana Jones in Crystal Skull, however ineptly that story was handled: reconciling to Marion, finishing Oxley’s work as Oxley has long descended into madness, inducting his son into the ways of archaeology, coming to terms with the fact that his father and his friends are gone, and he will soon follow. It’s every damn thing a Martin Bishop has to cope with, all at once. Pick one, or at most, two of those, and let your own Obi-Wan tell his story and go into his own double-sunset.
Jake and Elwood Blues
We all remember this one from every heist caper from 1980 to Ocean’s 13.
He needs to come out of retirement for One Last Job, and, usually in the course of it, Get The Band Back Together.
This elder’s adventuring career is long behind them, but their current reduced circumstances or beaten-down moral compass demands they come do just one more before they fade into a comfortable, yet irrelevant, retirement. Whether it’s putting down the last of the old evil (or its attempted imitators, because the kids Don’t Understand), boosting the biggest score of their career, or putting on one last show to save the orphanage where they grew up, this is the last job, and meeting (or recruiting) the people they lost contact with, left behind, who changed in the years since, is a key component, facing our elder with how different the world has become without them.
John Perry
“On his 75th birthday, John Perry did two things. First, he visited his wife’s grave. Then, he joined the army.”
Old Man’s War, John Scalzi
Their partner is gone. For some, their career. But a huge part of their life, something that gave them meaning and cadre and comfort, is gone. Like the Scrooge, they must change. Unlike Scrooge, the change has come upon them, and now they must wrestle with a life already changed, rather than drift toward a certain fate.
Forty years go by with someone laying in your bed/ Forty years of things you say you’d wish you’d never said/ How hard would it have been to say some kinder words instead?/ I wonder as I stare up at the sky turning red…
I personally don’t much care if they find a new love, or come to terms with the pain of widowhood, or go join the army. Let them find something. Let them grow meaning back from the tender place where there used to be someone, something. Let them grow and change into something new.
The examples I’ve given are men, mainly white. That’s because the archetypes and examples I know are from another age, an age dominated by men, mainly white. I hope with some applicability, better writers than myself can use them as a springboard for stories about their own identities, or about Others than themselves. There is no reason for Scrooge to be Episcopal or Bond to be male, or for their stories to follow well-trodden Campbellian paths.
I offer these as ideas and places to start, a list intentionally incomplete, a page left half-written, for others to finish and to build on.
Now then, let me get back to my submissions to Gargantua, where somehow all these figures have sprung up at once…
That’s right, two of my classic stories are available for free, for réveillon de Noël and for Noël (24/25 dec) only! Don’t wait for Boxing Day to collect your gifts from me. 🙂
I can’t remember the first time I met myself, but I’ve passed along the story to my younger self when it came to be my turn. I do remember the year I decided to come home every Christmas. I was ten years old, and my parents were away at the office Christmas party, and Nina was downstairs watching TV. I was feeling lonely, as it was Christmas Eve and every other year we’d all have been putting presents under the tree and dropping hints about the contents by now.
That’s when I walk in.
The Christmas tale of a young man haunted by his own holiday traditions.
Ethan’s parents have left him in the house on the eve of his tenth Christmas, with nobody but Nina the babysitter for company. But Ethan has a secret – he can time travel, and every year for the rest of his life, he returns to this night to have a party. Every year, though, it’s always the same – the insecurity, the stupid mistakes, the arguments. But this year might be a better Christmas…maybe….
It’s over 6000 words of unexpected Christmas angles. Joyeux Noël et bon Nouvel’An!
I’ve been coping with a swollen jaw since last Thursday and the pain, while low, has been a constant in my sleeping and waking life since then. I look forward to a proper update next week, I have three or four started. Until then, read short fiction, imagine stranger futures, and enjoy this picture of my roommate.
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