The Nebula Awards

APRIL 2009 Los Angeles, U.S.A.

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Nancy Kress Interview

Interviewed by Jen West on June 25 2008

Nancy Kress has been nominated for the Nebula Award 11 times in various categories and won 4 times. She is the 2007 winner for her novella, Fountain of Age, published in Asimov's Magazine, July 2007. In 2007, Ms Kress was the only writer to receive nominations in two separate categories.

Tell us a little bit about Fountain of Age.

Fountain of Age is about human connection. Max Feder, in his late eighties and living in a nursing home in a future Brooklyn, decides that his last act will be to see once again the woman he has loved obsessively and unhappily for his entire life. She, Daria Cleary, has had as unexpected a life as he has. Max was a major cyber-criminal; Daria's brain grew a mutant tumor that medical science has developed into an "immortality drug." She is still 18. The story is Max's convoluted, quixotic, insane quest to see her one more time.

What was the original spark or idea for this story?

I always find this a hard question to answer. I wrote the first scene two years before I wrote the story; after that first scene, I ran out of invention. But Max stayed in my mind. Then, later, I had a lot of unused research on the Romani people that I'd intended to use in a novel that never got off the ground. So that research became the second spark.

Was there an underlying message or point you were trying to get across in the story?

I don't write stories to make a "point," but I guess you could say that this one centers on what matters in life: not so much getting something as wanting something. Without desire or hope, you're already dead.

Are there certain themes that tend to crop up in your writing? Or is every story completely different?

There probably are themes, yes, but they're very broad: the search for something to give meaning to life. The frustrations and rewards of love. How far people do, or do not, extend themselves for others.

Many of your stories have an element of genetic engineering. What draws you to this particular branch of science?

This IS the future, and not the distant future, either. When we think of "genetic engineering," we tend to think of "designer babies," and that's probably not going to happen in my lifetime. But gene therapy and crop engineering both have tremendous potential to change the human world for the better, and I believe they will.

Are there other types of stories that you are also drawn to?

I like any story, in any genre, that makes me think and feel, that offers interesting characters faced with human wants, especially if written in graceful prose. But I'll forego the prose if I can have the characters.

How much research do you usually have to do for a story?

It varies widely. If it's a hard science story, then quite a lot, because I have no real science background. If a story will contain some other element with which I'm also unfamiliar -- say, the Rom -- I also read books and/or download Internet articles. But for a story like Safeguard, in which the science is in the background and is mentioned only in very general terms, no research is necessary.

You began writing fantasy and then switched to science fiction. What inspired the change?

I don't know. I just felt I had written all the fantasy I wanted to, and that SF was next.

How does your writing process work?

I'm a morning person, and so a morning writer. When I'm working on something, I write from about 8:30 to noon or 1:00 every morning. Afternoons are for student manuscripts (I teach a lot), research, reading, and business stuff.

Who were the biggest influences for you in developing your craft?

Probably the stories of Ursula LeGuin. I read them over and over, trying to see how she DID that. I would still like to know.

You mention in your biography that you started writing while you were pregnant with your second son. What turned you on to writing? Did your children influence your desire to write?

My children are the reason I started to write. I was pregnant with Brian, Kevin was a toddler, I lived way out in the country and had no car -- I was going crazy. I wrote when Kevin napped just to have something creative to do. I never envisioned writing as a career. It's odd the places that life can take you.

Before you became a full-time writer, how were you able to balance your writing career, working a “day job” and raising a family?

I was fortunate in that my "day jobs" were never of the eight-hours-at-the-office variety. I taught college, which involves a varied schedule, and then I wrote PR for an ad agency, working half-time and often from home. That gave me flexibility to put the writing first, the bill-paying tasks second.

What were your first thoughts when you found out two of your stories were nominated for Nebulas?

I was surprised. This was especially true since I had four different stories selected for Best-of-the-Year anthologies last year -- and none of them was either Fountain of Age or my other nominee, Safeguard.

Did you have any idea which of the two stories might win?

No. I never can call what will win awards, mine or anyone else's.

What were the most memorable moments for you during the Nebula Award weekend?

On Friday night, I was in a dinner group that included Connie Willis, Joe and Gay Haldeman, Jack Skillingstead, Mike and Margie Flynn, Cynthia Felice, Sheila Williams, and Russell Davis. We were in a restaurant in the Omni hotel, which was built around a fifteen-story-high atrium with room blocks on three sides and a wall of glass on the fourth. During dinner, Austin had a huge storm: lightning, crashing thunder, rain beating against all that towering glass. It was impressive and exciting. And then silhouettes of cars on the street became reflected, ghostly, in the wet glass, gliding silently past four stories above the ground. That and winning, of course.

This is your fourth Nebula Award, and you’ve been nominated several times. Does the experience change after winning or being nominated so many times?

Yes, I have to say it does. Although of course I'm glad to win, each award means a little less than the ones before. I think this is partly a matter of age. As one gets older, the outside accolades matter less and the internal quality of the stories themselves matters more.

What kind of mark do you hope to leave on the genre?

That's not for me to decide. And any guess I made would probably be wrong, anyway. In my experience, writers are seldom accurate judges of their own work.

If you could give new writers one piece of advice, what would it be?

Write. A lot. And then write some more. So often I see talented students who simply do not put in enough time at the keyboard to turn that talent into stories.

What do you have in the hopper for your next project?

I'm currently writing another novella. Novellas are my favorite form. But this one is as yet only five or six thousand words along, so I don't know yet how it will turn out. Or if it will. Since I don't plot stories ahead of time, their progress is a matter of great suspense -- especially to me. I write to find out what I'm going to say.

For more than three decades, NANCY KRESS has entertained readers with science fiction/fantasy stories that balance vivid characters, complex relationships and imaginative worlds with cutting edge science and technology. She is the author of two books on writing, was the "Fiction" columnist for Writer’s Digest for 16 years and teaches at writing workshops and conferences. Kress's short story collection, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon Press) released in May. Her bio-thriller novel, Dog (Tachyon) is due to hit bookstores in July followed by her SF novel Steal Across the Sky in December.

She is the 2007 winner of the Nebula for Best Novella, with her story Fountain of Age. (Asimov’s, July 2007).

For more information, see her website or read her blog.

By day, JEN WEST runs the corporate rat race working in women’s wear design and merchandising for an upscale clothing manufacturer. By night she's a mild-mannered freelance writer in constant search for the next interesting character or story.

Her interviews have appeared in such venues as Shimmer and Fairwood Press's interview collection, Human Visions. She has degrees in Journalism and French from the University of Oregon, and remembers fondly the pressure of meeting deadlines at the Oregon Daily Emerald as a staff writer. She currently resides with her writer husband, Ken Scholes, two pudgy cats and a box garden in St. Helens, OR. Drop her a note at .

3 comments so far.

1. David de Beer on 01st July 2008 at 4:58 am

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I claim the first Nebsite comment ever.

2. Debbie Mumford on 01st July 2008 at 9:36 pm

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Wonderful interview. Thank you, Jen, for helping us learn more about Nancy and her stories.

3. Bruce Sterling on 11th October 2008 at 4:57 am

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I’m always impressed by Nancy’s luminous common sense.

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Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Powersby Ursula K. le Guin

Cauldron by Jack McDevitt

Brasylby Ian McDonald

Making Money by Terry Pratchett

Superpowers by David J. Schwartz

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems. But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days. When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

About the Author

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, Make, the New York Times, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites. He was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. In 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

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About the Author

Ursula K. Le Guin writes both poetry and prose, and in various modes including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, young children's books, books for young adults, screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voicetexts. She has published seven books of poetry, twenty-two novels, over a hundred short stories (collected in eleven volumes), four collections of essays, twelve books for children, and four volumes of translation. Few American writers have done work of such high quality in so many forms. Most of Le Guin's major titles have remained continuously in print, some for over forty years. Her best known fantasy works, the six Books of Earthsea, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered epoch-making in the field for its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. Her novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home redefine the scope and style of utopian fiction, while the realistic stories of a small Oregon beach town in Searoad show her permanent sympathy with the ordinary griefs of ordinary people. Among her books for children, the Catwings series has become a particular favorite. Her version of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, a translation she worked on for forty years, has received high praise. Three of Le Guin's books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and among the many honors her writing has received are a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, SFWA's Grand Master, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, etc.

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About the Author

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About the Author

Ian McDonald's mother is Irish, Fatrher Scottish, was born in England but has lived for almost all of his forty something years in Northern Ireland, more speciafically, in that narrow strip of land along the southern edge of Belfast Lough. From that vantage he's seen the Troubles start and also, he hopes, end. His first story was sold in 1983 to short-lived but very glossy local SFF magazine Extro. He bought a guitar with the money. His first novel, Desolation Road came out in 1988 from Bantam Spectra, this year PYR republish it for the first time since then in the US. His most recent novel was the Hugo and Nebula nominated Brasyl, just out from PYR in the US and Gollancz in the UK is Cyberabad Days, a collexction of stories from teh future India of his 2006 novel River of Gods, including Hugo winning novelette The Djinn's Wife. In progress is a new novel, The Dervish House, set in near-future Turkey. In daylight hours he works for local animation company Flickerpix.

Making Money by Terry Pratchett

The Ankh-Morpork Post Office is running like . . . well, not at all like a government office. The mail is delivered promptly; meetings start and end on time; five out of six letters relegated to the Blind Letter Office ultimately wend their way to the correct addresses. Postmaster General Moist von Lipwig, former arch-swindler and confidence man, has exceeded all expectations—including his own. So it's somewhat disconcerting when Lord Vetinari summons Moist to the palace and asks, "Tell me, Mr. Lipwig, would you like to make some real money?" Vetinari isn't talking about wages, of course. He's referring, rather, to the Royal Mint of Ankh-Morpork, a venerable institution that haas run for centuries on the hereditary employment of the Men of the Sheds and their loyal outworkers, who do make money in their spare time. Unfortunately, it costs more than a penny to make a penny, so the whole process seems somewhat counterintuitive. Next door, at the Royal Bank, the Glooper, an "analogy machine," has scientifically established that one never has quite as much money at the end of the week as one thinks one should, and the bank's chairman, one elderly Topsy (née Turvy) Lavish, keeps two loaded crossbows at her desk. Oh, and the chief clerk is probably a vampire. But before Moist has time to fully consider Vetinari's question, fate answers it for him. Now he's not only making money, but enemies too; he's got to spring a prisoner from jail, break into his own bank vault, stop the new manager from licking his face, and, above all, find out where all the gold has gone—otherwise, his life in banking, while very exciting, is going to be really, really short. . . .

About the Author

Terry Pratchett sold his first story when he was thirteen, which earned him enough money to buy a second-hand typewriter. His first novel, a humorous fantasy entitled The Carpet People, appeared in 1971 from the publisher Colin Smythe. Terry worked for many years as a journalist and press officer, writing in his spare time and publishing a number of novels, including his first Discworld novel, The Color of Magic, in 1983. In 1987 he turned to writing full time, and has not looked back since. To date there are a total of 36 books in the Discworld series, of which four (so far) are written for children. The first of these, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, won the Carnegie Medal. A non-Discworld book, Good Omens, his 1990 collaboration with Neil Gaiman, has been a longtime bestseller, and was reissued in hardcover by William Morrow in early 2006 (it is also available as a mass market paperback (Harper Torch, 2006) and trade paperback (Harper Paperbacks, 2006). Terry's latest book, Making Money, was published in September 2007 and was an instant New York Times and London Times bestseller. In 2008, Harper Children's will publish Terry's new standalone non-Discworld YA novel, Nation. Regarded as one of the most significant contemporary English-language satirists, Pratchett has won numerous literary awards, was named an Officer of the British Empire “for services to literature” in 1998, and has received four honorary doctorates from the Universities of Warwick, Portsmouth, Bath, and Bristol. His acclaimed novels have sold more than 45 million copies (give or take a few) and have been translated into 33 languages.

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David J. Schwartz's short fiction has appeared in numerous markets, including the anthologies Paper Cities, The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Twenty Epics. He attended Odyssey in 1996 and has participated in workshops with the Semi-Omniscients, the Supersonics, and the Sycamore Hill Writing Workshop. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. You can visit his website at http://snurri.livejournal.com/.