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.
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all leave him), but also a lot of stories which are currently out of print or hard to access, as well as the previously-unpublished title story, which is about what happens when a human computer, trained all his life as a living memory system, develops dementia.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.
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.
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