Tobias Buckell Interview
Ragamuffin
You’re one of the harder working spec-fic writers arund. Can you talk about your work ethic—where does it come from?
It’s partially that hard working immigrant mentality thing, you know, coming to the land of opportunity? I had lunch with my best friend from the Caribbean not too long ago, and he and I both talked about how even people traditionally considered disadvantaged in the US still had more access to resources than he did growing up. He counseled disadvantaged kids for a while, and was just amazed. I think coming from the outside sometimes gives you this realization at how much opportunity there is for the hustle. Like libraries. Libraries in the US are these huge things with all these books. Growing up my access to libraries was not as universal, and they were stocked as best a small developing island could, but that could vary a great deal.
But that’s not all there is to it. There are plenty of people, I think, who work at it harder than me. Part of it is that I made some tough choices as to where I invested my time. Most teenagers and people in their early twenties partied and watched lots of TV, played video games. Until a couple years ago I had no cable in the house, much to people’s astonishment. No TV. No videogames. I didn’t club, or party, or do any of that stuff. From 15 to 25 I wrote during the time that everyone else played games or watched TV. The average American watches 20-30 hours of TV a week. That’s almost watching TV like a full time job. By swapping out writing, I worked at writing.
Of course, one can question the sanity of working a part time or near full time job for 10 years that hardly started paying anything until recently. I could have started a business on the side. But that’s where my hard work comes from, choosing to make a hard choice about how I spent my time. As a result, I never felt like I worked hard, just that I missed a lot of the stuff people around me seemed to be spending *their* time on. Do I regret not seeing 10 year old TV shows (what’s a ‘Buffy?’) and spending a lot of money on alcohol? In the big picture, not a bit.
The funny part is now that I write and freelance full time the shoe is on the other foot. I have my evenings free. I have an XBox 360 and a Nintendo Wii and play a lot. I watch cable and lots of movies now. Because I can. But during deadlines and crunch time, they get turned off (Mass Effect
How does it feel to have made the Nebula ballot?
I was pretty stunned, actually. Ragamuffin
What is space opera to you, and what do you find appealing about the genre?
Space Opera is bombastic, which I love. Big sets, big ideas, big characters. It has this sweep that thinks big that just plugs in and turns all the right switches on me as a reader. I love all genre, but Space Opera is what I usually turn to when I need a cracking good read. There’s a sense of playfulness and fun that also seems to bleed through a lot of Space Opera, and that’s certainly something I look for as a reader. As a writer, taking Space Opera with a Caribbean twist was a lot of fun and something I’d always dreamed of doing.
You’ve mentioned that one of your upcoming projects is a novel set on the ocean. Can you talk a little about the ocean and you and your family?
I grew up in the Caribbean aboard a boat. My mother’s side of the family took the ocean when my grandfather, her father, purchased a large motor-sailer, headed off down the Thames, and off into the Mediterranean. My mother was born in Middlesex, but the rest of the family was born in various Mediterranean places like Malta.
So I’ve lived aboard boats in Grenada and the British and US Virgin Islands. It’s interesting because it’s an off-the-grid sort of lifestyle. You’re responsible for your own electricity and water, and although boats aren’t self sustaining, they’re a hell of a lot more so than a house. On a boat when you visit a house you just gape at all the wasted space, lighting, use of water, and so on. I remember us all reading about the California water shortages where they encouraged drastic, but necessary five minute showers, which left us stunned. Five minutes of continuous water running? That’s crazy. I think we had two fifty gallon water tanks, if I remember right. I’ve seen people in a house use up a week’s worth of water on a boat with a single shower.
So with wind generators and solar panels, using a diesel engine and sails, catching water off your bimini, and being your own little system, I got a taste of what life might have to resemble in the future if we’re to better conserve our resources.
Of course, I live in a house in Ohio now and live a life nothing at all like that.
What’s your daily writing process like? Do you write while you’re at conventions?
I suck at writing while traveling to cons. So many people to meet! I basically stay up all night talking, then get up early to meet even more people and talk. I’ve written at cons, but only when under the most strenuous of deadlines! Most cons are on weekends, though, and for me, weekend writing is optional.
My schedule is tilted towards my being a night owl. I’ve learned through habit and insomnia that no one bugs you after midnight. No phone calls, hardly any emails. I usually start writing around 11pm, depending on the day. And I just write until I get tired. That means anywhere from 3am to 7am, depending on how frenetic things get. In college I wrote until my head literally hit the keyboard. Now I’m a little easier on myself, I keep at it until I feel I’ve gotten a solid night’s worth of writing and then turn in. I also find that at night, I’m a little less critical of the words, a little bit more prone toward the fantastic, my imagination is a little bit more free. I can edit in the day, but I create at night. Remember how in college your craziest ideas came at late night bull sessions, when that little barrier in your mind wasn’t there to say ‘don’t say that, that’s crazy!’ I totally riff off that.
I usually sleep for an appropriate length of time no matter what time I turned in, but I do like to be up an hour or two before lunch so I can work out and shower and then have lunch with someone just to get out of the house.
Every once a year or so I try a different schedule for 3-4 weeks, just to double check and make sure my creative hours haven’t changed. For 15 years I’ve been told I’d grow up, my body would change, I would mature, or whatever, and this would stop. So far everyone has been wrong.
You’ve said of your collection of short stories that you particularly like the stories The Fish Merchant, Anakoinosis, and Toy Planes. Why those stories - what is it about them that particularly expresses your writing style or philosophy?
These stories are the ones that really combine my Caribbean background and elements of genre stories. Fish Merchant was a mix of cyberpunk with a dreadlocked hero, and Toy Planes is about a Caribbean space program. Anakoinosis is probably my most ‘political’ SF story. I’d just finished reading Frederick Douglas’s autobiography and was struck at the amazement he had at the North’s use of technology in lieu of slaves in many places in society, something he focused on a bit. Being an SF writer I found it interesting that Douglas’s comment (and it’s repeated and argued over by many scholars) was that manpower retards technological and social development. The Black Death’s reduction of cheap manpower is often said to be the reason for increased invention afterwards, as well as social change (rich people tilling their own land, peasants with more power). Slavery doesn’t corrode just the slaves. Anakoinosis is the snapshot of humans finding servile aliens, and pointing out how it will destroy them because they cease innovating and come to rely on calorie power.
What writing teachers have had the strongest influence on you?
Tim Powers and Karen Joy Fowler were instructors at Clarion, the SF/F writers workshop, in 1999 when I attended. They had the greatest affect on my craft. Tim kept pointing out places where I left out chances to describe the physical setting and its impact on my characters. Both pointed out unbalanced areas of my writing and had tips on how to beef those up. Mike Resnick had the biggest impact on my career in terms of explaining how everything in the business worked, steering me toward my agent, and also helping me get stories into some of my first anthologies (including the above mentioned Anakoinosis, a story he commissioned from me). So many writers just don’t treat writing like a business, Mike showed me that once you’re written the story, you need to turn into an entrepreneur and put on a different hat.
What’s coming up in the next year for you?
My third novel Sly Mongoose
If you were writing fanfic in someone else’s universe, whose would you want it to be?
I plead the fifth.
What’s your favorite scotch?
I like the smoky Lagavulin, or a Laphroaig, but my favorite right now is a bottle of Glenrothes 1991 that I found at a local liquor store, of all places. It’s got a hint of berries, vanilla, and goes down very smooth. A dangerous scotch. But I have to be in the right mood to sit and savor it. The Laphroaig, which is strong for some people with the leathery and peaty taste, is a scotch I can grab anytime because it’s hard to miss, which is why I suspect my palette is a bit immature.
TOBIAS BUCKELL is a Caribbean born SF/F author. He spent his youth in Grenada, and the British and US Virgin Islands. His first two books, Crystal Rain
John Barth described CAT RAMBO’s writings as “works of urban mythopoeia”—her stories take place in a universe where chickens aid the lovelorn, Death is just another face on the train, and Bigfoot gives interviews to the media on a daily basis. She has worked as a programmer-writer for Microsoft and a Tarot card reader, professions which, she claims, both involve a certain combination of technical knowledge and willingness to go with the flow. In 2005 she attended the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop and is a member of the Codex Writers’ Group. Among the places in which her stories have appeared are ASIMOV’S, WEIRD TALES, CLARKESWORLD, and STRANGE HORIZONS, and her work has consistently garnered mentions and appearances in year’s best of anthologies.
She is the co-editor of critically-acclaimed Fantasy Magazine.
