The Nebula Awards

Geoff Ryman Interview

Interviewed by Charles Tan on October 28 2008

How did you get your start with science fiction and fantasy?

Hmm.  By reading a Little Golden Book called ‘Mickey Goes to the Moon’ which I loved and lost during a hospital visit.  Also Space Cat by Ruthven Todd.  I still have Space Cat.  It’s pretty slow moving for a kid, but the cat goes with his beloved master to the moon.  The cat has a space suit of his own.  In a cave in the moon, he finds lovely, intelligent, floating, glowing sticky spheres.  The cat uses the stick to plug a hole in his unconscious master’s space helmet.  The first big person’s book I got out of Meadowvale Public Library was The Magician’s Nephew, the absolutely best Narnia book.  After that I was away.

What is it about the genre that appeals to you?

Cats.  No, floating intelligent globes.  Well, you know.  At first SF was an extension of Oz, that extended into Edgar Rice Burroughs, and then a book with dinosaurs in it by Brian Aldiss… only it turns out in that book that human sensibility reverses cause and effect.  From our point of view time ‘really’ flows backwards.  Which means corpses are born out of the earth into human beings.  At that point I realized that SF was fairy tales made plausible by science that could give readers a lot to think about as well as wonder at.

What’s your writing process like? Are you the type that comes up with an idea/agenda first or one that just writes and lets the story flow from there?

Sadly, I work by inspiration.  Something just seems so good for its own sake.  The trigger could be something very small, but I realize that this is an idea for something big, and if it really is going to work, the ideas just keep flowing, and I write them all down very quickly at least at first draft… then comes far too much work revising the ideas, changing the plot, and polishing the words.  It can take years.

253, or Tube Theatre is hypertext fiction. What were some of the challenges in writing such a piece? Did you have all sorts of flowcharts and notes?

The main challenge was to come up with 253 characters, each of whom has enough of a story to be worth telling.  By about car 4 I was getting a bit worried, but I just kept digging deeper and deeper into my memory.  I started taking a lot of notes about the tube as I traveled… that provided some stories, like the guy whose watch gets caught in a woman’s hair.  The structure of each person on the tube train was so clear that keeping track who linked to whom was pretty easy to keep straight.  Just occasionally finding everyone who worked at a particular place might be tough.  By car 5, the previous characters were generating characters a few cars on, so that was fine.  I don’t need flowcharts or anything… I have all those navigation seat maps.  The print version has a list of characters by what links them.

I just listened to your Adventures in Sci Fi Publlishing interview. How has Clarion affected you, either as a writer or as a teacher? How did mundane science fiction get its start there?

Clarion has given me confidence that writing is a skill that can be taught.  It won’t turn someone of talent into someone of genius, but it will give them practice digging deep for stories, and insight into how prose works so that revision is faster and more effective.  It taught me just how difficult giving a critique is, how much work it takes, especially if you have to have something to say after 16 really smart people have already given their critique.  A good critique of a 5000 word story takes at the very least two hours… probably three hours if there a lot of nits in the prose.  I am now at least in part a professional reader of other people’s fiction… which means I am just in the habit of reading very slowly and spotting problems.  It can reduce your enjoyment if you’re re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness.

This year’s Clarion were a particularly cohesive and very talented group.  I saw a lot of stories that I think will be published and that’s very rewarding if you’re a teacher.

Clarion means you spot where the zeitgeist is going.  I think this year I gained a fresh respect for how integrated information-seeking skills and imagination are getting as we all get used to the Internet.  In 2002 Clarion I saw that a whole kind of SF writer, those whose work was based on science, were increasingly outside the SF and fantasy culture.  I wanted to help get them published and I very suddenly found myself writing The Mundane Manifesto, based on some of the things the guys (and they were guys) had said.  Both about old tropes driving out the new, and also an avoidance of the coming crunch in terms of oil, global warming, overpopulation, and development economics.  Julian Todd and Trent Walters were particular inspirations.  For example, I believe it was Julian that said that FTL gave the impression it would be easy to find and settle beautiful new Earths… which encouraged us to think we could burn through this planet and be immortal.  So Mundanity partly came out of impatience with bad science, or with tropes that gave us the SF dream for free.  Also it was impatience with the moral role SF was starting to play… as an irrelevant dream of a future that was unlikely to happen.  The worry is that SF now sometimes actively prevents us imagining the future.

My idea was that we’d do something like Dogme film-making.  Promise not to include certain tropes in our stories.  The list keeps shifting, partly because we don’t agree.  But included

• No FTL, no wormholes, warps etc as magic wands around that
• No Very Fast travel without time dilation
• No time travel
• No parallel universes based on quantum uncertainty
• No telepathy
• No aliens.

More discussion resulted in outright artificial intelligence being excluded.

The name Mundane came partly because I didn’t like the way fandom called non-fans mundanes.  People who criticize you may have a point; maybe people didn’t like SF or fantasy for interesting reasons, that didn’t just mean they were dull and unimaginative.  Partly it was the focus on Earth… mundane means of this world.  The future for most of us is here on Earth.  What’s so unwonderful about the revolutions in science and IT that are coming here?

Anyway, I wrote the Manifesto, and the guys liked it.

I’d been going to Landmark at the time, and one of their things is that you take responsibility, you get stuff going, but then you step back and let other people take over.  That way you know that the project is valid and not an extension of your own ego.  Julian, Trent, the guys really made it their movement, they set up the website, posted the scientific articles, and kept the discussion going.  So it’s their project but I’m a sinful fellow and feel pride that I started it.

When did you know you wanted to write mundane science fiction?

It had always bothered me that there was bad science in SF.  Way back when The Child Garden was published, I talked about ‘good faith SF’.  SF that did what it said on the label.  But I knew I was going to write some mundane stories when I wrote the manifesto.

I was hoping that Mundanity would be the meeting ground for hard SF and humanist SF.  I now think I was the wrong guy to be identified with it.  I’m not a science-based SF writer, which I think has foxed a few people.  One blog actually did this whole number on us for being a bunch of literary Clarion types… completely the view of that particular blogger who didn’t know the people, and couldn’t have read much of the site, but assumed that Mundanity was like me.

What does it feel like to be one of the founders of a sub-genre? In your opinion, how is mundane SF different today compared to a few years ago? (Is it gaining more traction these days?)

Well we’ve just had the Mundane special issue of Interzone come out.  Thank you, Interzone.  Some triff stories from name writers, and two from Clarion West writers who got caught up in the mundane thing.  In France, GalaxiesSF wants to do something around Mundane SF, with some of the stories from the Interzone issue.  Charles Stross has declared one of his novels Mundane.  I like that.  A writer cannot be mundane.  Only a story can.  A writer should never surrender his or her autonomy to any movement.  Only the author of a story knows if s/he played the mundane game when they wrote it.  Only the author can call that story mundane.

I’m getting more and more worried about the creative and commercial health of science fiction.  In the 2004 Clarion West not much SF was being written.  Lots and lots of vampires and zombies in post-genre fiction –- fiction in which the weird happens but actually is not the whole focus of the story.  We didn’t get many SF stories.  This year’s Clarion even more so.  Another strong year of fine writers entering their mature style.  We got horror and supernatural; we got stories that were almost mimetic because the fantasy elements were so subtle; we got dark-future action stories.  But in my two weeks we had say five SF stories.  One was a very interesting story about how science can be financed in an energy conscious world.  It’s harder for writers to believe in exciting futures.  Good speculation has got harder and harder to do.  You almost need the equations to work through what will happen in your world.  Someone once said that you could write SF with the scientific knowledge of a smart twelve year old.  I’m not sure that’s true any longer. 

In the meantime so many of the things that used to be SF are mainstream, turning up in the work of mainstream writers:  genetics, nanotech, cloning, IT, VR.  Something has happened to both our reading and writing habits.  Go the SF shelves in Barnes and Noble and you will find mostly fantasy or horror.  No bad thing, nothing against either, in fact I intend to write horror and fantasy, but SF does something different that’s very valuable.  In Britain, there has not been an SF (as opposed to fantasy) novel in the 100 fast sellers for the year in as long as I can remember. 

Finally, our relationship to the future has been disrupted.  The future is not a place we want to live in.  We’ve got a bad few years ahead of us, and at the end of it our lives may involve less travel, less energy use, fewer toys, more work.  Maybe we just can’t face, as Elisabeth Vonarburg once said, ‘writing over that pile of corpses.’ Maybe we just no longer believe the SF dream. I sometimes think steampunk may be anticipating our future—in a retro kind of way.

For you as a writer, which is more challenging: writing a mundane SF story or writing one that’s not?

Overwhelmingly, beyond what you’d first think, writing mundane SF is harder.  To do it in good faith, you have multiple changes in your world, and they interact.  You ideally have a good fresh idea in there growing out of real science.  You always think if you’ve declared a story mundane, that people will be picking over the science so you check everything.  My last mundane story, a novelette called Days of Wonder is due in F&SF soon.  Its magic wand is inherited, coherent memory sticks in people’s heads.  They’re born knowing about electricity.  I couldn’t say how it was done.  All I could do was say, OK, but it’s a relatively NEW magic wand that isn’t on the list of tropes to avoid.

In your opinion, why do you think some people oppose the concept of mundane SF?

Because it denies aspects of the SF dream such as immortality among the stars.  Mundanity is about self-discipline; we’re not about stopping anybody writing anything, but that’s how it lands for some people.  People charge us with not liking HG Wells or M John Harrison’s Light.  Hello?  When did we say that?

Any particular reason as to the (Fantasy) appendage to “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”?

Yeah.  Saloth Sith is a real person.  She’s (I’m told) nice, sophisticated, and not an emblem for Cambodian youth, as she was in my story.  So the Fantasy was there to keep reminding the readers that it wasn’t true, that this is not the real Saloth Sith.  The one thing that was carried over from reality is the difficulty of being the child of such a figure of hatred.  I think people are smart and forgive the children, particularly if the inheritors show remorse.  I’m reminded of the forgiveness accorded to Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva.  One blogger got upset and asked what Simon Wiesenthal would have made of Hilter’s daughter.  Personally I think he’d probably wait to see who Hitler’s daughter was and what she said.  All it takes to blame children for their parents’ misdeeds is a lack of imagination.

What was the inspiration for the novelette?

Visiting Soriya market on the day after high school exams and picking up on the incredible desire for modernity, luxury, freedom from the past and a space of their own that is part of being young in Cambodia.

Your short story “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)” and your novel are influenced by events in Cambodia.

They’re not influenced by them, they are about them.  My first Cambodia-ish novelette, now that WAS only influenced by Cambodia… Unconquered Country in 1985.  It was a breakthrough piece for me, and I love the human bits of the story—Third’s conversation with her dying husband.  But it was only influenced by Cambodia.  It was set in fantasy land.  I wasn’t sure it was much help understanding such events.  It took me a long time to get around to writing about the real Cambodia.  I spent about five years visiting Cambodia regularly, reading up on the ancient and modern history, going to the temples, talking to Cambodians, contracting Cambodians to answer questions by email, teaching writing workshops in Cambodia, taking Khmer lessons in London, running the MS past as many people as I could.  I stayed on a Cambodian farm, and got moved by the tourist police who didn’t like it, came back, had a Cambodian lover, made friends with Cambodian artists, interviewed them, and got two radio shows about Cambodian arts and Cambodian rap broadcast in London.  The American edition of The King’s Last Song due out real soon has a new afterword to look at some of the sources.  Is it what Cambodians would write about their own country?  No.

Pol Pot’s Daughter came about because of all the stuff I’d done for The King’s Last Song.

Cambodia for me has had to stand in for all the small countries of the world that we bomb, manipulate, exploit, forget, don’t translate, or assume will be assimilated into us.  I can’t cover all of them or know more than one of them to any extent, but that one country I can get to know.  I’ve got one more longish story coming out about Cambodia called Blocked also mundane, also from F&SF, and we’ll see if there’s more there.  The country is peaceful, getting more prosperous, perhaps we’ll get more of their own stories in translation.  Anyway, I’ve been advised by one intelligent, hard-headed, practical publisher to stop writing about Asia and write about Americans.  And I’m sure that’s very good advice.

Could you talk more about cultural diversity (or lack of it) in fiction?

People always like to hear about themselves and be told their culture is special.  America and the West are no different from anybody else in that regard.  We all want to see ourselves in the future.  There have been Indian SF novels for ages; there’s a tradition of Brazilian SF, and the Turks made their own version of Star Trek with different actors.  I suppose they boldly go promulgating the Turkish hegemony through space and meeting aliens who speak Turkish.  The trouble with cultural diversity in a lot of SF, is that it ends up with 1940s bomber crew of isolated examples of different peoples, all cut off from their own culture.  One black person there; one Arab there, over there an Asian with little cultural difference between them.  That’s diversity at the EXPENSE of culture. 

A much preferable solution would be if we had translations of literature from those countries.  Maybe the literary equivalent of the BBC news site, fiction from all the regions and countries, covered in a system that sets in context, tracks publications, archives fiction, encourages discussion – and hopefully gets some money to the writers.  Maybe in the near future we will.  In the future, Westerners maybe will have read Tum Teav, the great Cambodian verse novel.  Right now most of us don’t read the English-language Cambodian memoirs of the Pol Pot era.

Can you tell us more about your upcoming anthology?

Yeah thanks.  I’m editing an anthology for a British publisher due out next year.  The mundane gets rid of stuff you want to avoid.  This anthology turns that around.  You want good science in fiction?  OK, you commission fiction writers and marry them up with a scientist of their choosing.  We’ve commissioned the 14 writers and they’ve almost all been introduced to their scientist to work with.  There have been some predictable problems in getting the scientists and writers to understand each other.  We lost our biggest name author to a scientist who just didn’t respond to questions.  The anthology is called When it Changed (yes in honor of the Joanna Russ story) and the scientists all come from the University of Manchester and its research institutes like Jodrell Bank.  Stories are due this November… We’re hoping it will be out spring next year.

Any other projects you’re working on?

Yes.  A cookbook in honour of Tom Disch.  My own short story for the anthology.  A new course in SF that I start teaching this fall at UC San Diego, I’m very excited about that.  While I’m at UCSD, I’ll be a small part of the Speculative Communities initiative at the UCSD Calit Centre that’s the brainchild of Sheldon Brown.  There will be a gathering with people like Bruce Sterling, David Brin and others on the heuristics of speculation and the building of speculative communities.  That will just be great.  Anyway thanks for the opportunity to talk… over and out.

Geoff Ryman is a Canadian citizen living in the UK.  He divides his time between writing and teaching at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester.  His colleagues include Martin Amis and Patricia Duncker. His books and stories have won 14 awards.  He first came to attention with the publication in 1985 of the novelette The Unconquered Country in Interzone.  This was a phantasmagorical version of events in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the first time his work was identified with Asia.  This won the British Science Fiction Association Award for best story and the World Fantasy Award.  The book version was nominated for a Nebula Award.
The gender bending sword and sorcery novel The Warrior Who Carried Life followed, then The Child Garden which won the John W Campbell Memorial Award first place and the Arthur C Clarke Award.  An excerpt won the BSFA Award for best short fiction.
In 1991, the mainstream novel Was appeared.  A history of the Wizard of Oz, it was actually a way to write a new kind of Western, outside convention.  It won in Britain, the fan-based Eastercon Award for most enjoyable novel.  It has since been adapted professionally both as a play and a musical, and was inducted into the Gaylaxicon Spectrum Award Hall of Fame.
253 started life in 1996 as a hypertext novel online followed by a print version in 1998.  It won the Philip K Dick Memorial Award.  Air in 2004 won the Arthur C Clarke Award, the James Tiptree Jr Award, the Sunburst Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel.  This year sees the US publication of The King’s Last Song a mainstream novel about Cambodia history, ancient and modern. 
His ambition when he grows up is to be Iain Banks or Jonathan Lethem.

CHARLES TAN is a speculative fiction fan from the Philippines. He has lots of online doppelgangers, including a Singaporean politician and a Filipino basketball player, but people should be warned that the “real” Charles Tan is a bibliophile who stalks his favorite authors. His blog, Bibliophile Stalker is updated with daily content including book reviews, interviews, and essays. He is also a contributor for SFF Audio.

All Interviews

You can see a list of all interviews here.

RSS Feed

Subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Email Updates

You can also subscribe to receive new interviews via email.