Strange Horizons, Nov ’02
Strange Horizons, Inc.
CONTENTS:
Article: Interview: James Van Pelt, by K. Mark Hoover
Article: Music of the Ellipses, by Brian Tung
Article: The Universe of Star Wars Fan Films, by Cristopher Hennessey-Derose
Article: Falconry: The Real Sport of Kings, by Mary K. Wilson
Fiction: Forget Me Not, by Angela Boord, illustration by Judith Huey
Fiction: Chameleon (part 1 of 2), by Beth Bernobich
Fiction: Chameleon (part 2 of 2), by Beth Bernobich
Fiction: Other Cities #3 of 12: Ahavah, by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Fiction: Money for Sorrow, Made Joy, by M. C. A. Hogarth
Music: The Starlit Jewel, by Peggi Warner-Lalonde
Poetry: A Crash Course in Lemon Physics, by Robert Frazier
Poetry: On the K-T Boundary, by S. R. Compton
Poetry: The Franks, by CAConrad
Poetry: Historian’s Guide to the Galaxy
Review: Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders Series
Review: Warren Rochelle’s The Wild Boy, reviewed by Rob Gates
Review: Ellen Datlow and Teri Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection, reviewed by Erin Donahoe
Review: Fan Culture and Serial Fiction: The Guilty Pleasures of Tad Williams’ Shadowmarch, reviewed by R Michael Harman
Editorial: Mother and Child Re-Union, by Audra Bruno
Interview: James Van Pelt
By K. Mark Hoover
11/5/01
James Van Pelt has been called one of the brightest new stars on the science fiction horizon, and with very good reason. His stories have made the preliminary Nebula ballots, been honorably mentioned in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling’s Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. His work has also appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and he’s appearing again in Asimov’s and Analog early next year. He’s currently working with a publisher on a collection of his short stories, tentatively titled Strangers and Beggars, scheduled for release in early 2002.
Van Pelt’s work has been published in several anthologies, including the recently released Dark Terrors 5, and he was a finalist for the 1999 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. In fact, it was this honor that motivated him to start a Web site listing all the eligible authors for the annual award. Van Pelt’s fiction isn’t easily classifiable because he’s comfortable in so many different genres. Still, themes of redemption and stories where the past affect the present consistently appear throughout his work. The following interview was conducted over the space of several months, via e-mail and one-on-one contacts during ChiCon 2000.
K. Mark Hoover: James, you’ve written science fiction, fantasy, and horror. What draws you to genre fiction?
James Van Pelt: My interests have always been genre driven. When I majored in English I backdoored my way into the classics. That’s when I learned that classics such as Wuthering Heights, Hamlet, and The Turn of the Screw are marvelous ghost stories. Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm are cool science fiction pieces, along with The Handmaid’s Tale. And, of course, there’s always Edgar Allan Poe….
KMH: So your formal education was based in the literary?
JVP: [nods] What I discovered, through this study, is literature’s real concern: the human condition. My writing is more character and theme driven than idea driven. In that sense, I have a more literary bent than some of my peers, but not all of them. I mean, look at Robert Silverberg and Connie Willis!
KMH: How did you become site manager for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writers?
JVP: In 1998, a pair of SF writers, Michael A. Burstein and Paul Levinson, wrote me independently to tell me they liked my first story in Analog in ‘97, “The Big One,” and that they were nominating me. I had never heard of the award and wanted to know who else was eligible. I found that there was no way to learn who the new, eligible authors were, and that seemed a shame. In late ‘98 I started the website. It turned out to be a great way to have a legitimate reason to correspond with major editors, and to meet the up and coming writers in the field.
KMH: When did you first begin to write? Was it an early age?
JVP: I wrote a few short stories in elementary school. In high school I wrote a lot of poetry, publishing some of it in the school’s literary magazine. Then I sort of languished in my twenties, thinking that I liked the idea of being a writer because I thought it made me look sensitive. You know, the Byronesque figure who wanders away from the party to stand at the end of the dock and look poetic.
KMH: Were there any personal influences that shaped your interest in being a writer?
JVP: My parents did a wonderful thing when I was young, that I’d recommend to any parent: they bought me books whenever I wanted them. They wouldn’t buy toys or candy on the spur of the moment, but a book was a sure thing. So I started reading early. Because I was small, bookish, and unathletic, my heroes were writers. I remember walking through the Littleton Public Library’s SF collection and looking for which two authors my book would be shelved between when I published it.
KMH: Who was your favorite author at this time?
JVP: My absolute favorite was Ray Bradbury. I still read The Martian Chronicles and anything Bradbury has to say about writing as in his Zen in the Art of Writing.
KMH: Short stories are often considered the lifeblood of SF, and your success has come in this form. It seems you’re particularly adept working at this length. Have you concentrated on short stories because they’re easier to sell than novelettes and novellas?
JVP: I’m not sure why I gravitated to short stories more than the longer stuff, other than I’m a closure addict. I like getting to the end of things and calling them done. That said, I do have a novel I’ve finished and am shopping around, and sold a couple of novelettes to Realms of Fantasy and Analog. But I don’t think I’ll ever quit writing short stories. There are too many fun ideas that aren’t novelistic in scope, and there’s a lot to be said about the immediate feedback a short story gives me.
KMH: Jules Renard said writing was an occupation in which you must prove your talent to those who have none. How do you deal with discouragement when a story you innately feel to be good can’t find a home?
JVP: By sending the manuscript out again. I sold a story last year to a professional paying print magazine that over the course of eleven years had seen forty-nine different markets. If the story is good, keep sending it.
KMH: What do you think drives the genre overall? Is it the editors who buy the work, the writers themselves, or the fans?
JVP: It’s hard to ignore the influence and power of editors. If they don’t buy, the writer won’t be published. Theoretically, they are buying what they think is good and what they think the fans want. However, I believe that a writer who is good will create a market for his work. When Bradbury first started sending his stories out, no none had ever written SF like that. He created a market for his work. Every writer should try to do that. Once an interviewer asked me if I wanted to be the next Stephen King. I said, “No, I want to be the first James Van Pelt.”
KMH: Getting back to the fans, many who work in the SF field see them as not only crucial to continued readership, but somehow peculiar to the genre. Do you share those same views?
JVP: Romance writers have a similar fan base. But the relationship between writers and the fans in SF/F/H is peculiar. It feels much more democratic than in the mainstream, where writers are isolated from their fans. I think our fans are vital to this genre’s viability because they are a force to be reckoned with.
KMH: In what way?
JVP: Like fans resurrecting Star Trek after it was cancelled. And the Hugo is a fan award; look how important it is. There are also our conventions, where authors and fans get together in a way Romance approximates but doesn’t equal, and the history of fandom, which has a life of its own. I just don’t see anything in publishing that approaches the symbiotic relationship between writers and readers in our genre. Come to think of it, the internet is only deepening this already influential connection.
KMH: You’ve just provided the segue to my next question. Recently two major SF magazines folded: SF Age and Amazing Stories. Yet we’ve seen an explosion of quality online magazines that pay professional rates, and semi-professional magazines printing stories of respectable quality. What’s going on here?