Strange Horizons, Jan ’02
Strange Horizons, Inc.
CONTENTS:
Article: Interview: James Alan Gardner, by Louis Bright-Raven
Article: To Make a New Dog, by Dan Derby
Article: Culture Clash: Ambivalent Heroes and the Ambiguous Utopia in the Work of Iain M. Banks, by David Horwich
Article: The Polynesian Voyagers, by Ramon Arjona
Fiction: driftings, by Dana Christina
Fiction: “Identity Is a Construct” (and Other Sentences), by Douglas Lain
Fiction: Time of Day, by Nick Mamatas
Fiction: Other Cities #5 of 12: Ylla’s Choice, by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Fiction: Not to Mention Jack, by Charles Anders
Music: Music to While Away a Saturday Afternoon, by Peggi Warner-Lalonde
Poetry: Slouching Towards Entropy, by Ann K. Schwader
Poetry: Tombstone Tapestries, by Sandra J. Lindow
Poetry: Cryogenica, by Lee Ballentine
Poetry: Had Been There, by Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca
Reviews: Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry, reviewed by Amy O’Loughlin
Review: Robert Lynn Asprin’s Myth-ion Improbable, reviewed by Paul R. F. Schumacher
Reviews: Fantastika! The Films of Russian Fantasy Master Alexander Ptushko, reviewed by Amy Harlib
Review: Molly Gloss’s Wild Life, reviewed by Christopher Cobb
Editorial: The Idea of the Real: Notes on the History of Speculative Poetry, by Mark Rich
Interview: James Alan Gardner
By Louis Bright-Raven
1/7/02
James Alan Gardner is fast becoming one of science fiction’s veteran authors. His ever-growing list of published short fiction has appeared in Amazing, Asimov’s, Galaxies, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature, On-Spec, Tesseracts 3-6, and other venues. Winner of the Grand Prize for Short Fiction in the 1989 Writers Of The Future contest, Gardner has been a finalist for and has won the Aurora award, the Canadian version of the Hugo, for Best Short Work in English; he has also been a finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula for his short fiction. He’s published five novels through Eos; his latest, Ascending, was released in November 2001, and is available through the Science Fiction Book Club and your local bookstore. Born and raised in Canada, he now lives in Kitchener, Ontario with his wife Linda Carson and his confused but earnest rabbit, Basil. This interview was conducted over the course of late October/early November 2001 via email.
Louis Bright-Raven: Is there any significant difference between the American and Canadian SF scenes? We in America rarely hear of what’s happening in the Canadian (or other English-speaking) scenes.
James Alan Gardner: I think there is a difference between Canadian and U.S. science fiction, but it’s a very subtle shading. Here’s a simple example. In the U.S., there are two basic scenarios for dealing with alien races:
(1) Cowboys and Indians. In other words, automatic culture clashes, even when both sides say they’re trying to get along. Sometimes the humans are the cowboys and the aliens are the Indians, sometimes it’s the other way around; sometimes the humans are the good guys and sometimes the aliens are the virtuous ones; but alien/human relations tend to play out along the lines of nearly insurmountable differences, leading to kneejerk hostilities.
(2) The melting pot. The foremost example of this is Star Wars, where aliens and humans intermingle with no discernible cultural differences.
There are plenty of variations on these two scenarios depending on surrounding circumstances, and I don’t mean to say that such stories are bad or simplistic; they’re true to a lot of human experience. When different cultures bump up against each other, you often get war or assimilation.
But Canadians often write about a third scenario—a very Canadian one. We call it the “salad bowl” as opposed to the melting pot: different cultures get tossed together but they aren’t expected to change to some new identity. The most prominent example in Canada is the French/English divide. This often is a source of friction (and sometimes national crises), but we’ve never gone to war about it, or seriously attempted assimilation. The French remain French; the English remain English; native peoples remain native peoples; immigrants remain as faithful to their original cultures as they wish to be. Canadians sometimes complain about the inconvenience of a fragmented populace … but ultimately, we’re terrified of the very idea of assimilation. Assimilation is, after all, our #1 nightmare: getting sucked up into the U.S. We are horrified by that omnipresent prospect, and therefore, we are culturally opposed to imposing the same sort of thing on other people.
What does this have to do with science fiction? Canadian science fiction is usually “polite” about human interactions with aliens and other creatures. First Contact doesn’t mean war or a quick integration; it means a prolonged period of feeling each other out, careful not to intrude on the other side’s “sovereignty.” I think this shows up in all my work, but most notably in Vigilant. There, the Ooloms and humans coexist more or less amiably, but they don’t interact with each other much except in the civil service. That is so Canadian.
LBR: Your works tend to lean towards social science fiction as opposed to hard or technical SF. Do you believe that an understanding of the humanities is as important, or more important, to our future than the technical sciences?
JAG: Technology is the engine; the humanities are the steering wheel and the brakes. The humanities don’t create nearly as much force for getting things done as technology does, but technology is just plain lousy at directing its energy or managing itself. Therefore I don’t believe either of the “two solitudes” is more important than the other; both are necessary and both would be helpless or dangerous without one another.
Unfortunately, people tend to lean toward one realm or the other, as if the two were opposing sides in a war of intellectual supremacy. Humanists seldom make an effort to understand and love science the way that scientists do; scientists usually approach the humanities with an air of indulgent superiority, as if a bit of science could solve every humanistic problem without difficulty. There are, of course, exceptions—people who genuinely appreciate both halves of the equation—but those people are exceptions, and there aren’t enough of them.
Science fiction writers have the potential to bridge some of the gap. Almost by definition, a science fiction writer is someone who loves science, yet who’s also dedicated to the art of writing, and to thinking about the effects of science, rather than just the science itself. We writers don’t have a whole lot of influence with either camp—the mainstream literary world ignores us, and scientists are often wary of us too—but we do care a great deal about both science and art. Sometimes, we can bring the two together.
LBR: That’s a rather astute observation about SF authors. Yet it seems that many are steeped in the sciences professionally, and sometimes I think they’re too close to science and lose the “art of writing” aspect. Do you get that feeling from the community as well?
JAG: Some writers are still blindly enamored with science and gadgetry, but I don’t think it’s as prevalent as it once was. Almost everybody these days pays lip service to literary value; some people talk the talk without walking the walk, but I do believe that most SF/fantasy writers are aiming above the least common denominator.
LBR: You’ve discussed your preference for writing stories in the first person before. Have you ever written anything with several characters each telling the story in the first person, so that the story is told from several different viewpoints simultaneously, in a sort of “Round Robin” effect?
JAG: In a novella called “A Young Person’s Guide to the Organism” (published in Amazing Stories, April 1992), I wrote about a collection of people who each encounter the same huge creature out in space. The story takes place over several years as the creature slowly drifts from the orbit of Mars to the orbit of Mercury. The creature does almost nothing at all; but the people who come across it impose their own perceptions on what the creature is, whether it’s dangerous, what it wants, and so on.
Structurally, the novella is based on “A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” a musical work by Benjamin Britten. Basically, the musical piece starts with the whole orchestra playing a theme, then each individual instrument plays a variation on the theme (first the flute, then the oboe, then the clarinet, and so on). In my novella, the theme is “First Encounter” and the variations are the stories of different people meeting the alien. At the end of the musical piece, Britten puts the orchestra back together with a fugue, where all the instruments come back in, one by one, until they’re all storming away in a grand finale. In my story, I bring back all the individual story-tellers one by one, in a grand confrontation with the creature close to the sun … until the final resolution leads to First Contact with the League of Peoples. (Yes, this was the first published story that mentioned the League.)
I’m still quite happy with this story. Structurally, it’s the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done, but I think it works pretty well … even if it is blatant grandstanding.