Michael A. Burstein 2010 Interview
Michael A. Burstein is nominated for his short story “I Remember the Future”.
You earned a Bachelor’s in Physics from Harvard and a Masters in Physics from Boston University. What advantages has being well-versed in science, and particularly physics, brought to your writing?
Allow me to answer your first question by starting with a slight digression.
In 1993, I met Nancy Kress for the first time, and I told her how much I had enjoyed her novella “Beggars in Spain,” about a group of people genetically engineered before birth to live without sleep. I was curious about her scientific background, and when she told me that most of what she knew about the science of sleep she had learned from an AP Biology textbook used by one of her children, I was impressed. Nancy, for her part, seemed impressed that I had a background in Physics. She suggested to me that it would be invaluable when I was writing science fiction.
At first, I didn’t see it. I was desperately trying to learn the craft of writing, and I tended to think that my studies in Physics, while useful in general, were irrelevant when it came to writing science fiction. It wasn’t until years later that I learned the opposite, and it came about because of my many years of learning to write.
When I attended Clarion in 1994, I was told that after the workshop ended I might find myself unable to write for a while. The problem arises because aspiring writers might learn so many technical aspects of the craft that they become paralyzed when they first try to apply everything they’ve learned. You sit at your computer with technical information about plot and character and background and dialogue running through your head, and you simply don’t know how to begin.
But after a while – weeks for some writers, years for others, but months for most of us – you internalize all the craft you have learned and it becomes natural. You don’t think about what you’re doing, you just do it.
That’s the way my science background works for me. When I develop an idea for a story, I don’t necessarily have to do the same amount of research that another writer might. This isn’t to say that I don’t do research, but I’m starting with the advantage of already knowing most of the basic science I would need to extrapolate into the future.
You see, having internalized the science knowledge means that I can focus on other things when I write.
A writer’s background always informs the writer’s work, no matter what that background is. And, in truth, the science knowledge I acquired allows me to concentrate less on understanding the science of science fiction and more on understanding how to communicate my ideas through fiction effectively.
Religion and religious questions are key elements in many of your stories. What prompts you to explore these, and what is your reaction to the prevailing wisdom that science fiction should be about “science” only?
What prompts me to explore religious themes in my science fiction is most likely my own religious background – or, perhaps, the lack of it.
I grew up in a mostly secular Jewish home, but one in which being Jewish was still very important. My family tended to pay lip service to various religious customs; for example, we had two sets of dishes, one for meat and one for milk, but we would wash them together. We were members of a local synagogue, but we didn’t attend regularly. My brothers and I actually went to a yeshiva (a religious school) for elementary school, but that was primarily because we had tested well and the local public school wouldn’t let us enroll a year early.
Years later, I came to realize that there was something missing in my life, something I wanted to incorporate into my view of the world, and so I became more religiously observant. Being observant has opened my eyes to the great diversity we have in the human race, a diversity that has not always been appreciated in the world of science fiction. Let me explain.
There’s a fallacy in thinking called “false consciousness.” The basic idea, if I remember correctly from my college course on human nature, is that some believe that those of us who subscribe to certain ideologies might not realize how incorrect those ideologies are. To such a thinker, we need to have an experience that would allow us to break out of our false consciousness and see the world as it truly is. For example, a person who comes out of a deeply religious background might one day have the equivalent of an epiphany and become an atheist. Depending on her perspective, she might describe herself as having broken free of her “false consciousness” as she now believes that she understands the world more clearly. She may even go so far as to proselytize to others that atheism is the correct path.
The reason I cast the example the way I did is because that’s close to what happened in the world of science fiction. In the early part of the twentieth century, the science fiction community tended to shy away from organized religion in favor of the rationality of science. H.G. Wells, in his seminal work Things to Come, posited a future in which the world would eventually become a utopia run by scientists. Many science fiction readers saw religion as something outmoded that would eventually be replaced. They tended to assume that people who are following a system of faith just haven’t broken free of their conditioning. In their view, the human race needs to progress and grow to the point where we free ourselves from the strictures of relying on the belief in a supernatural being.
(As an aside, last year I found myself in a car with two other science fiction writers. One was an atheist with a background in Catholicism, and the other was an evangelical Christian. We had a fascinating conversation on some of these very topics.)
I don’t think anyone out there thinks that science fiction should be about “science” only. Science fiction should be about how scientific and technological development can change the world around us. But many writers chose not to focus on how science would affect religion, except to assume that religion would eventually disappear. I’ve chosen to take what I think is a more realistic view, which is that religion, like all human endeavor, will stay with us, but adapt as needed.
What themes tend to drive your writing? Is there anything in particular that is currently capturing your interest and pervading your writing?
My wife Nomi first pointed out to me the main theme that I seem to return to again and again in my work is the theme of memory. Specifically, I’m fascinated by the question of how the future will remember the past.
I think this obsession comes from my own desire to be remembered as a writer. We are all destined to become dust; I’d like to feel that I’ll be able to make my mark before that time comes for me.
If you want to go one step further, my father died when I was twenty years old. I had yet to finish college, let alone contemplate entering the “real world” and starting a family, and the bald fact of our mortality was suddenly shoved in my face. An armchair psychologist could easily see how my father’s death affected my writing. (My mother is gone now too, which may be affecting it even more.) I’ll leave this to academics to contemplate.
As for what is currently capturing my interest, well, I’ve become fascinated by the “veil of ignorance” concept described by John Rawls as part of his moral philosophy. I’ve been trying to make it the centerpiece of a story set on a Mars base. If all goes according to plan, we’ll see that in Analog sometime in 2011.
You have been Hugo and Nebula nominated several times, as well as winning a John W. Campbell Award, so obviously your stories resonate with readers. But has there been any story you have written that became your favorite? And why is that?
Of all the stories I’ve written, there are two that stand out as my favorites.
The first story is “Kaddish for the Last Survivor,” which was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula. “Kaddish for the Last Survivor” is about the death of the last Holocaust survivor, and it deals with the question of how to preserve history when all the eyewitnesses are gone. At the time I wrote the story, there was a spate of Holocaust deniers in the news, all claiming to have evidence that either the Holocaust hadn’t happened or that it wasn’t as bad as it had been portrayed. Their influence was so insidious that at one point a survey of American adults should that a large percentage were willing to entertain the notion that the Holocaust had never happened. Can you imagine? That’s like saying that slavery never happened, and convincing people to believe you.
If a lie is repeated often enough, people start to doubt. “Kaddish for the Last Survivor” is a cautionary tale about the slipperiness of history. It’s one of my favorite stories because I think I managed to be more effective with it than with any other piece of fiction.
The second story is “Paying It Forward,” which was nominated for the Hugo but surprisingly not for the Nebula. I say “surprisingly” because it is the tale of a younger science fiction writer who finds himself throughout his life mentored over the Internet by an older science fiction writer. What made the story fantastic was that the older writer was already dead, as far as the younger writer knew.
“Paying It Forward” is a tribute to all those writers who came before us and influenced us. That’s why I thought it would appeal to members of SFWA in particular, but perhaps it worked better for the fans. I had high hopes for the story at the Hugos – it was nominated at Noreascon 4, my local Worldcon, held in Boston – but I came in second to Neil Gaiman, alas.
You have received many Hugo and Nebula nominations, but never a win. How does it feel to come to in second to others so many times, and what would a Nebula win mean to you?
The very first time I was nominated for a Hugo Award was in 1996, for my short story “TeleAbsence.” As it so happened, that was my first published story, so I was delighted when it ended up nominated for a Hugo. I still recall leaving the Hugo Awards Ceremony after I had lost, to discover that “TeleAbsence” had been leading for the first few rounds of balloting, only to lose by ten votes in the end.
Since then, of course, I’ve lost many more times.
Probably my biggest regret, which I’ve already mentioned, is that “Paying It Forward,” which was nominated when Worldcon was held in Boston, lost to Neil Gaiman. Had Neil’s story not been on the ballot, I probably would have come in first.
As for how I feel…
I’m reminded of a few lines of dialogue from the Aaron Sorkin TV show Sports Night. In the episode “The Local Weather” (written by Sorkin with Peter McCabe) two characters are discussing a long jumper who in his last competition finally achieved his dream of setting a new world record, only to see it broken a moment later:
Abby: You’re bothered because he came in second?
Dan: He held the world record for five minutes.
Abby: That’s five minutes longer than most people do.
Dan: You know, I’ve heard that kind of thing and I’m going to say this, okay? If you’re good enough to come in second place, then you’re good enough to be disappointed in it.
Anyone who loses an award is going to be disappointed. The disappointment of losing is not ameliorated by the joy of nomination, nor should it be.
It may be unpopular to say this, especially to writers who have never been nominated for an award at all, but having come in second so many times is tiresome.
Winning the Nebula would mean a lot to me; it would mean that my colleagues see the same thing in “I Remember the Future” that I do, and that they will not let me be forgotten.
That said, given the strong competition on the ballot, I don’t expect to win this year.
In 1998-2000 you served as Secretary of the SFWA. What about your experiences enriched you and what memories do you cherish from your time of service?
It’s hard for me to believe that ten years have passed since I served as SFWA Secretary.
At the time, there were a lot of controversial initiatives that the Board proposed. Very early in my time on the board, we sent out a referendum with ten questions on it and asked the membership to vote. The so-called Sawyer referendum (named for Robert J. Sawyer, who was president of SFWA at the time) irked a lot of people because they thought we were asking them to consider a whole slew of changes to SFWA without time for a proper debate.
What a lot of members didn’t seem to consider was that many of these issues were already being debated over and over, and the debate was sapping the vitality of the organization. We figured that a referendum would end the debates once and for all, allowing SFWA to move on to other things. In my opinion, we succeeded. For example, under the referendum, SFWA began to accept electronic sales as membership credentials; can you imagine how ridiculous the organization would look now if that hadn’t passed? No one seems to get worked up about requalification any more, as the referendum killed it, and since 1999 SFWA has given a Best Script Nebula (although this year the name of the award is being changed).
What astonishes me is how recently, the SFWA Board of Directors implemented some of the changes we proposed without a referendum – and the membership essentially yawned. We proposed eliminating the Nebula juries, but members complained, so we kept them in place. We wanted to change the way publications such as the Forum and the Bulletin were delivered, but people objected, so we didn’t. But the current board has implemented a bunch of changes by right instead of referendum, with nary a peep from the members.
Anyway. Of my two years on the board, there are two memories I cherish above all. Those were my tiny role in giving the Author Emeritus honor to Phil Klass, who wrote under the name William Tenn, and in giving the Grand Master Award to Hal Clement. They’re both gone now and I miss them a lot.
You have been writing for some time. How has the genre changed since you started publishing, and what positive and/or negative trends are you seeing within fandom?
Anything I say will come off as obvious, but the biggest change in the genre from my perspective is how many more people read their short fiction online instead of in magazines. Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF are still important to the field, but there’s now an explosion of websites that also provide good science fiction and fantasy and pay a professional rate. Sadly, I have yet to hear of one that pays its editorial staff a living wage. (I’d love to be corrected on that if I’m wrong.)
As for trends in fandom, again, this is rather obvious, but fandom seems to be aging and splintering. People are less interested in being part of fandom as a whole and more interested in pursuing their own tiny sliver of fandom. I think this has both positive and negative aspects, but I’m not the best qualified to discuss it.
Your collection I REMEMBER THE FUTURE including your Nebula nominated story of the same name was released as both a print book and ebook by Apex Publications. In particular, your collection was part of a promotion to sell the ebook for a $1 USD for a limited time. What kind of results did you see from that, and what effect do you think the ebook market is going to have on the science fiction and fantasy community?
The results were actually quite good. When the title story of the collection got nominated for the Nebula, there was a definite uptick in sales in all forms of the book.
I know some people were disappointed that I didn’t release “I Remember the Future” for free on the web, but the irony is that I was actually the first writer to suggest releasing award nominees onto the web. Back in 1996, when my first story got nominated for the Hugo, I contacted the Worldcon committee and arranged for the nominated stories in my category to be hosted on my own website. Yes, I hosted my competition, because I believed it was important for the voters to have a chance to read the stories as easily as possible, rather than having to track them down. (The committee actually thanked me for my suggestion in print, so I know there’s evidence out there proving that this was all my idea.)
And as it stands, I did make “I Remember the Future” available for free to all members of SFWA, who are the only folks eligible to vote in the Nebulas. Last year, many of the Hugo nominees were made available for free, but only to Worldcon members. It’s no different here. The story was free to read for those people who are eligible to vote for or against it.
That said, if “I Remember the Future” had been published in 2009 instead if 2008, and was eligible for the Hugos this year, I might have made it available for all readers. But it missed the Hugo ballot last year – I think it only got 18 nominations, which wasn’t enough for the Short Story ballot in 2009 – and so there’s no real good reason for me to make it available for free.
Especially when Apex made it, and my whole book, available for one dollar as a PDF. One dollar! If a reader isn’t willing to pay one dollar to read fifteen Hugo and Nebula nominated stories, what does that say about us as a culture? What does it say about the future of a writer’s ability to make a living?
As for what the ebook market is going to mean to the science fiction and fantasy community, I think it’s going to have the same impact to our whole society. Ebooks will become another way that people are able to buy books. I don’t think they will kill print books, but I do think we’ll move in the direction where more and more out-of-print work becomes available for people to read.
You have written quite a bit about the “pigeonholing” of using genre to define books. Without asking you to be repetitious, could you summarize your points, and why you feel the use of genre to define a book is a mistake?
I don’t actually feel that the use of genre is a mistake; to the contrary, genre allows readers to find other stories that have similar elements to ones they know they already like.
The problem I see is when genre becomes too limiting a factor and prevents people from trying stories they might actually like. To give an example, years ago Nora Roberts published her first J.D. Robb novel, which is a science fiction mystery romance set in the future. The publisher labeled it under one genre category, Romance, and that’s where it ended up shelved in the bookstores. Romance readers probably were confused when they first came across the book, and I imagine it took mystery and science fiction readers longer to discover it than it would have had the book also shown up in the appropriate other sections. (Today, her books are also placed in the Mystery section, but they’ve yet to be sheled with Science Fiction.)
In my ideal world, a book would be allowed to boast multiple genre labels, and would be shelved in multiple areas of the bookstore. Sadly, it’s never been economical to do so, and it’s even less economical now.
You have announced on your blog that you do not plan to make “I Remember the Future,” your most recent Nebula nominated story, available for the general public. Since the masses cannot access it for free, would you describe what the story is about, its genesis, and what ideas you were exploring?
The story is about trying to recapture that sense of wonder by honoring those who came before us. If people want to know more, I’ve written a short essay on the story that will appear in the Nebula Award issue of the SFWA Bulletin.
Thank you for loaning us your valuable time!
Thank you! You asked a lot of perspicacious questions!
Photo (c) 2008 Nomi S. Burstein
Michael A. Burstein was born in New York City in 1970, and grew up in the neighborhood of Forest Hills in the borough of Queens. He attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan. In 1991 he graduated from Harvard College with a degree in Physics, and in 1993 he earned a Master’s in Physics from Boston University. In 1994 he attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Workshop.
Burstein’s first published story, “TeleAbsence,” which appeared in the July 1995 issue of Analog, was nominated for the Hugo Award and was chosen by the readers of Analog as the best short story published by the magazine in 1995. Two years later, Burstein won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 1997 World Science Fiction Convention, LoneStarCon2. Burstein subsequently received Hugo nominations for “Broken Symmetry,” “Cosmic Corkscrew,” “Kaddish for the Last Survivor,” (also a Nebula nominee) “Spaceships,” “Paying It Forward,” “Decisions, “Time Ablaze,” “Seventy-Five Years,” “TelePresence,” and a Nebula and Sturgeon nomination for “Reality Check,” and a Nebula nomination for “I Remember the Future.” His novella “Sanctuary” (Analog, September 2005) was chosen by the readers of Analog as the best novella published by the magazine in 2005 and was nominated for the Nebula Award. From 1998 to 2000, Burstein served as Secretary of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Burstein lives with his wife Nomi and their twin daughters in the town of Brookline, Massachusetts, where he is an elected Town Meeting Member and Library Trustee. He has worked as a Science teacher at all levels and currently edits Science textbooks for middle school and high school. He has given lectures and spoken at various science fiction conferences and libraries, and to groups at MIT and Harvard.
John Ottinger III is passionate about science fiction and fantasy. A prolific reviewer, he has been posting reviews online and in print since 2004. More recently, he has become a regular contributor to Tor.com, as well as landing gigs reviewing for Publisher’s Weekly, Sacramento Book Review, The Fix, Fantasy Magazine, Black Gate and the twitterzine Thaumatrope. His interviews have appeared in Strange Horizons and at Stephen Hunt’s SFCrowsnest. In addition, he runs his own popular science fiction and fantasy blog, Grasping for the Wind (http://www.graspingforthewind.com), where he posts reviews, interviews, free fiction, and news from the worlds of speculative fiction.
