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The Big Idea: JD DeLuzio

Posted on November 19, 2020     9 Comments

The word “con” has more than one meaning, and for JD DeLuzio’s debut novel, The Con, this is a very very relevant fact. Read on to discover more.

JD DeLUZIO:

A woman recalls the arrival of Haile Selassie to Jamaica in April of 1966, and the seven mystic white flying greyhounds that swept down from the heavens and escorted his plane. No one else reports this wonder and none of the media present records it. But she firmly believes it. Perhaps a decade after the event TV brought her to me, a child living in a religious, but not fanatical, household. My father, the Canadian-born son of Italian immigrants, was Roman Catholic. My mother grew up exposed to a number of Protestant traditions. Her maternal grandfather had been a Methodist minister, she attended a Baptist Sunday School, and some of her relatives joined the Salvation Army.

Both my parents had careers based in science and technology. They understood critical thinking. The Old Testament—the earliest books, in particular—they read as poetic metaphor, written for a time when human beings understood the world differently than we do now. They were a little stickier about the New Testament: that had happened pretty much as reported. Inconsistencies were something devout folks just had to wrestle with or accept on faith.

Outrageous beliefs from other groups, of course, could be dismissed. Flying greyhounds? Blame the ganja.

I’m no longer a devout anything, but I’m steeped in religious tradition, and keep copies of every major sacred book by my bedside. I have given skeptical-leaning seminars on folklore and the paranormal. I’m also a long-time SF fan and a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America. These things (among others) shape the world I see.

So I wrote a novel called The Con. It unfolds at a hotel hosting both an SF Convention and a smaller meeting of Janeites. The principal narrator insists there’s also an actual alien present. The novel sold because the publisher liked its characters and carnivalesque plot, and that’s what most people take from it. The Con concerns the usual things: characters, personal conflict, intrigue, misunderstandings, star-crossed lovers, robot battles, and so forth. But like all books, it holds ideas.

Fandom and faith, for example, have a lot in common. Devotees read relevant texts. We gather in groups, honor our saints, wrestle with contradictions, develop rituals, and engage in activities that outsiders find bizarre and occasionally alarming.

We don’t believe in the literal truth of our stories—not if we’re sane– but we see the world differently than others, because those stories affect our conceptual lenses.

Telfryn Tyde, The Con’s guide through the chaos, insists that an extraterrestrial probe guided by a simulacrum of an alien researcher named Azogo latched onto his brain years earlier. If he’s telling the truth, The Con is SF. If he’s delusional or yarn-spinning, it skews realistic. Of course, neither genre nor reality need be either/or (bilaterally symmetrical species love too much our binary metaphors). Azogo’s existence, for example, would not preclude Telfryn also being disturbed. Indeed, he claims his sporadic mental breaks result from alien activity.

Others characters encounter Azogo, which is doubly odd, since (1) Azogo may not exist and (2) if it does it’s supposedly a computer emulation of some alien’s brain. Is Telfryn inserting an imaginary extraterrestrial into the narrative? Is the growing brain-to-brain interface causing others to see what Telfryn sees? Is he attaching a long-standing delusion to a really impressive work of cosplay? Has Azogo itself, or another of its kind, finally arrived on earth? In fiction, carefully-phrased writing can sustain the uncertainty.

Our secondary narrator tries to maintain an Austenian style. Her account continually breaks against circumstances Jane would never have imagined. Sometimes we need to change our metaphoric lenses.

The characters, like real humans (and the inhabitants of Azogo’s world, Uirtkauwea’ki), see through lenses which limit their vision, and are driven by things which may or may not be real. Religion shapes two of the characters’ thinking, socio-political views are not absent (It’s not just Fen and Janeites who clash. Our con mixes Canadians and Americans), music plays a key role, and feelings, love especially, drive everyone.

Consider:

Religion? We do great things—good and evil– in its name, with very little evidence to confirm the existence of our particular flying greyhounds.

Politics, which has dire consequences, gets organized into fantasy league teams called “parties.” These often get defined by the binary metaphor of “right-wing” and “left-wing,” as though the beliefs and members of each team necessarily belong together. In the American model, unrestricted capitalism, denial of rights to queer folks, and access to firearms all end up on the “right-wing” side, despite those concepts having no intrinsic connection. The “left-wing,” meanwhile, gave you president and vice-president elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who on my side of the border would fit comfortably with the Conservative Party. Harris could run for the Liberals, but she’d definitely be on their right flank. (Some Americans believe that Biden and Harris didn’t win, and that belief, though demonstrably false, will have far-reaching effects).

Music? My wife, a soprano, has a voice that moves people, sometimes profoundly. I have seen and felt it. But to what end? Music matters so much that no human culture exists without it, and yet it serves no easily-defined purpose.

Love? We’re often most motivated by emotions, which, viewed objectively, are unstable states based on chemical reactions.

And so I wrote a book that concerns several characters and their adventures in the carnival world of a con. You need not read for any more reason than that. However, along the way, those characters pose questions about the illusory, ineffable forces that motivate and define us. 

A con, short for convention, is a gathering of like-minded people. A con, in another sense, is a deliberate deception. We must continually ask if the things moving us are really real, or just a con. 

—-

The Con: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

The Big Idea: James Van Pelt

Posted on November 18, 2020     3 Comments

What would the inside of your head look like if someone went exploring in it? What is behind the closed doors of your mind? In author James Van Pelt’s Big Idea, he invites us to tour the back alleys of his creativity, and tells us of how he tries to fit all that into his new collection, The Best of James Van Pelt.

JAMES VAN PELT:

Imagine entering a huge, windowless building in the middle of the night. The doors slam behind, plunging you from the starlit darkness to utter blackness. Feeling blindly along the wall, you find no light switches, but you have been tasked with reporting what’s inside the edifice.

You do have a camera with a flash, so you point it toward what you imagine must be the middle of the room and trigger it. A tiny fraction of the building’s character has just been revealed and captured. You spend years wandering, finding your way by touch, through hallways, up and down long staircases, opening doors, hearing weird sounds: music, voices, animals, machinery, weather, rocket ships, armies, lovers, screams, laughter, and stifling silence in long stretches, all the while taking pictures.

The photographs reveal libraries, candy stores, art galleries, bizarre tableaus, dioramas, classrooms, a jazz band, dance studios, theatrical stages, cocktail parties and keggers, stone-walled chambers, circus parades, a swimming pool (you just avoid falling in!), mausoleums, a chapel, and sometimes, impossibly, scenes that appear to be outdoors: mountainsides, trails, streams, fog-wrapped trees, ocean shores, deserts and swamps, snowfields and volcanic wastelands.

You’re not sure, but some pictures seem to be of aliens, monsters, dinosaurs or children.

When you stop to inventory, after wandering with your camera most of your life, knowing you’ve only scratched the building’s surface, you realize that you’ll never be able to photograph it all.

You have been exploring the house illimitable.

That’s what collecting three decades of publishing short stories is like. The big idea of The Best of James Van Pelt is that the stories create an outline of my obsessions, neuroses, fears and hallucinations.

When I taught high school English, I asked students to find books to read for fun, and then to report what they read to the class. These were low-key book reports. I didn’t want them to do deep literary analysis. I told them to treat the class like a bunch of friends and that they were telling them of a book they just read. What was the book about? What did they like? What was cool? Who else might like this book? That kind of stuff.

Occasionally a student would pick one of my novels or short story collections. Our school librarian shelved all my books (which is why I generally have a PG-13 sensibility in my stories). A student reading a book of mine made me vaguely uneasy. How intimate writing is! I was afraid they’d finish and learn too much about me. That’s what Mr. Van Pelt thinks about? Gross!

What they would find is that I think about high school classrooms both from a teacher’s and student’s point of view quite a bit, but the classrooms always have fantastical things happening in them. I like old movies. I like outer space. I like plucky people who struggle against their fates. I like musical lines of words that trip off the tongue well, and mythology and dreams and regular people struggling with the surreal as if the surreal were ordinary. I’m fond of the occasional ghost story.

What they wouldn’t see are the few stories that are my favorites. Other authors have told me that I’m not alone in hoping that readers would perk up at certain stories. Sadly, my favorites and readers’ favorites don’t often coincide. Everybody’s taste differ, but I want you to know that I’m particularly proud of “Nor a Lender Be” because the protagonist is my ideal teacher, “Night Sweats” with its combination of ghosts and the WWII birth of the nuclear age, “The Radio Magician” with its undefeatable optimism, and “The Hareton K-12 County School and Adult Extension,” which is my homage to Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” a story with an inanimate object as a sympathetic character. 

Oh, and “The Silk Silvered Skulls of Millen Mir,” which dramatizes everything I love about books and reading.

A common piece of writerly advice is “Write what you know.” I don’t think that’s helpful since if you took it literally, everything would be strictly autobiographical. A better suggestion is “Write what you think about.” It’s better, but not easy. Most students, I’ve found, don’t really know what they think about. It’s akin to asking fish to identify water. What people think about is so integral to who they are that it’s hard to step back to look at the thoughts. I know because it’s taken me a while to identify what’s going on in my head. Once I started doing it, though, my stories improved. I quit writing what I thought a story should be, and I started writing what truly mattered to me. Regardless of what got me going on the writing of each piece (a snatch of dialogue, an odd image, a bout of indigestion), at some point I had to stop and ask myself, “Why is this important? Why do I care?” I couldn’t continue writing until I answered those questions.

Writing, all writing, whether I mean it to be or not, is an act of self-exploration. I hope the stories are entertaining to others, but they aren’t written just for an audience or to earn a payment. They’re snapshots in the house of my head.

And that’s the big idea.

—-

The Best of James Van Pelt: Fairwood Press

Visit the author’s site.

The Big Idea: Essa Hansen

Posted on November 17, 2020     2 Comments

When given a choice between adventure and stability, what would you choose? When staring the unknown in the face, do you choose to explore it, or stay in your comfort zone? Author Essa Hansen asks the tough questions in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Nophek Gloss.

ESSA HANSEN:

Which would you choose: a safe, predictable utopia or a dangerous frontier of rich new experience?

Science fiction often centers on confronting the unknown, either because it’s sought out—“to boldly go where no one has gone before,” says Star Trek—or because the unknown has intruded on a comfortable world. A protagonist embarking on a quest of any kind is choosing adventure over comfort, but when there’s no threat to the world, no Dark Lord or “Call to Adventure,” what would the majority choose? Are the adventurous too foolhardy, and are utopians stunted by lack of challenge?

I’m endlessly curious about the big idea of how we value the safe and predictable versus that which is risky yet promises unique experience or gain. Humans may have an inherent drive to explore and expand as part of our survival instinct, but at the same time we so often fear the unknown. One thing I love about this genre is that it neatly explores both of these traits together. At the same time, readers get the best of both: to mentally explore new ideas and worlds from complete physical safety.

I wanted to explore this dichotomy of safety versus discovery in Nophek Gloss, both in the protagonist’s themes and the physical world on a huge scale. The bubble multiverse is perilous: physical laws vary between universes, and might transform or destroy things that pass from one to another. Species for whom transformation is normal might not fear this “removal of the permanence of being,” but humans and species like them find comfort in identity and predictability. Who heads in first when faced with a universe never before entered, which might fry the skin off you, or transform your parts or functions? Granted, it’s possible that transformation might make you better.

At the heart of these many worlds lies Unity: the original universe from which the others bubbled off, massive and unbroken, with stable physical laws that are completely understood. Unity is ruled by a government dedicated to creating one perfect dimension where anything is possible. Those who value safety and order congregate here to enjoy free energy, perfect health, and expertly managed economy and ecology. Would you live in such a place, or does this sound like a boring reality? Are mental frontiers broad enough to keep such a world engaging?

In contrast, the outer multiverse is a messy situation of mysterious worlds full of unpredictable dangers. Seeking profit, explorers dive into new territory and traders exploit translations between universes. Is novelty worth the risk? Cartographers make the multiverse safer by selling knowledge and chartings while paying for new data retrieved, incentivizing explorers to carve into the unknown. Slowly they are uniting the multiverse through shared understanding of its variety—but is that enough to stop war and exploitation?

I quickly realized it would take more than one book to explore this big psychological idea in the physical world. However, these themes embedded in the first book’s central character. Caiden’s arc begins on an isolated world with a singular function. His life is safe, he’s provided for, his knowledge limited and tasks predictable—but he longs for more understanding.

Caiden ends up thrust from safety into a mature world of diversity and danger. He struggles with complete sensory overwhelm, PTSD, reactionary impulses, and visible oppression in this immense world—all of which drive his choice to throw himself at danger and into new experiences that he’s unequipped to navigate. The adult cast around him tries to steer him back to safety, but his momentum toward justice and his idea of his purpose is all that’s keeping him together.

Usually heroics are successful and glorified, but Caiden faces insurmountable obstacles, frequently missteps, and makes heroic choices that aren’t rewarded. Like all of us, Caiden comes up against “safety versus discovery” in everyday choices big and small: do we challenge ourselves, do we risk, do we do the thing that might hurt? Or do we stay in our comfort zone, seek stability, set boundaries? Do we make that move across the country, will it be better? Do we stay with our partner and try to work things out, or move on alone? Do we keep walking when we see discrimination, or do we risk a fight and step in? I personally like to define big ideas as those that apply broadly and continue to make me think more deeply about the choices I encounter day to day.

So, which would I pick of the two? While it’s appealing to think I could perfectly craft a reality of my choice, with all the successes and material luxuries I want, I believe there is something to be said for being surprised. Delightfully surprised, one would hope, but even challenges and dangers have huge value, for through them we grow in myriad ways. I can look back at dark times that shaped me, and add sweet into those bitter memories, because if I had picked the easier road, would I be the same person, would I now have big ideas such as this?

—-

Nophek Gloss: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site. Follow her on Twitter.

The Big Idea: Nibedita Sen

Posted on November 16, 2020     1 Comment

In today’s Big Idea, editor Nibedita Sen delves deep into the nature of the anthology she’s worked on, Nebula Awards Showcase 54, to examine what it is, what it means, and how to do honor to the concept.

NIBEDITA SEN:

What’s the purpose of an awards showcase? For that matter, what’s the purpose of awards? To honor the best and brightest in a field, you might say, but while that’s definitely a goal worth aiming for, it’s also one I’d go so far as to say is almost impossible to achieve. ‘Best and brightest’ has a tinge of meritocracy to it, and the fact of the matter is that SFF publishing has never been a level playing field. Even if we presume that honors are awarded purely on the basis of talent and nothing more, a work must reach readers’ eyes before its talent can be recognized, and marginalized voices are systemically denied the same exposure as their more privileged peers.

This doesn’t mean awards are meaningless—just that we must remain aware of the inequality built into the system, and continually boost underrepresented voices when and where we can. Awards can raise a writer’s profile and confer visibility in and of themselves. Award ceremonies can draw a community together in occasions of shared celebration and connection that open many doors. 

Besides, if we accept that queer and/or BIPOC writers are unfairly disadvantaged, isn’t that all the more reason to celebrate their success when they earn it? Having your work recognized by the ‘establishment’ is a dubious honor, but it can be an honor, nonetheless, for those whom that establish has historically shut out and sidelined.

So, what’s the purpose of an awards showcase? I would posit two things.

First, to honor the contributors.

Second, to reflect the nature of the field at the time of the showcase’s release, and if possible, where the field is headed in the future.

Let’s start with honoring the contributors. Editing the Nebula Showcase #54 wasn’t an opportunity for me to self-aggrandize or dominate the stage; it was, in many ways, not about me at all. My task, and that of everyone who worked to bring this book into being, was to cast a spotlight on the writers whose fiction and essays were contained within, because they are deserving of praise, and deserving of honor.

Then there’s accurately representing the field. As we saw at the 2020 Hugo Awards, there’s an unfortunate tendency among the old guard of SFF to aim their eyes backward, choosing to recycle rose-tinted nostalgia for a bygone past rather than engage with the ways their field has transformed since then. In the process, they ignore the many ways in which that past was exclusionary, oppressive, and actively hurtful to marginalized voices.

As the inimitable Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar said in their acceptance speech for This is How You Lose the Time War at those Hugo Awards, “[Y]ou can’t write back to the past. You can only write to the future.” SFF will look to the future or it will perish. You might think that true of every field of human endeavor, but it’s especially pertinent to SFF, the genre of projecting our imaginations forward and sideways. All art is political; SFF especially so. It’s why I chose to start the showcase with the two original essays written for it, both of which recognize transformation within the genre—the long-overdue inclusion of game writing as an awards category, and the truly remarkable, genre-changing piece of art that is Into the Spider-verse. 

I could say more—but this TOC speaks for itself. The times, they are a-changing. Not always for the better, no, but editing this book, looking at the wonderful writers I am lucky enough to call colleagues, leaves me hopeful for the future. And, as I say in my introduction to the showcase, I can’t wait to find out what stories that future holds.

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Nebula Awards Showcase 54: Landing page (purchase links to be updated here)

Visit the editor’s site. Follow her on Twitter.

The Big Idea: Kimberly Unger

Posted on November 13, 2020     2 Comments

Do you worry about making a good first impression? How about a first impression with an alien race? Author Kimberly Unger discusses in her Big Idea just what would happen with these first impressions… if our emissaries weren’t necessarily the ones everyone expects them to be. Read on to hear more, and how it involves her new novel, Nucleation.

KIMBERLY UNGER:

Hey folks! Thank you for taking the time to check out the Big Idea today.

My name is Kimberly Unger and I am here to talk to you about one of the Big Ideas behind my debut novel, Nucleation.

At some point, we stopped plunging headlong into the great unknown and did the smart thing, the safe thing. We let the robots go first. We send probes and satellites and rovers and landers, we peer through telescopes and send out radio signals. We bounce frikkin’ laser beams off everything in frikkin’ laser beam range. All of this, every signal, every nuclear-powered tin-can, gets out there before we do.  

Why?

Because we don’t want anyone to die who doesn’t have to.

I don’t imagine that’s a uniquely human drive. Once you get past a certain level of self awareness, the preservation of that self (and of related selfs) becomes very important. It’s pretty likely that other intelligences are going to try the same trick. First contact is probably not going to be between us and them, it’s probably going to be about our stuff banging into their stuff. And with our farthest out stuff travelling at 38k miles per minute (or 17 kilometers per second), I hope nobody’s particularly precious about their toys. 

But until live beings get involved, it’s just an interstellar traffic accident. The risk is not to life and limb, but to our stuff. This is where Nucleation begins. Enter Helen Vectorovich, a best-in-class waldo jockey who pilots those far-reaching robots from a billion miles away. It’s not a job without risks, being deeply embedded in a reactive VR simulation can do some harm to mind and body if one isn’t careful. Her NAV, Theodore. has the safe and cushy half of the tasks. On an average day the two of them make an unstoppable team, on their best day ever they saved an entire off-planet colony from disaster. But after this interstellar side-swipe, someone or something reaches through their quantum communications link to hit back. Ted is the one to suffer the consequences and Helen is the survivor left to unravel the whys and hows of just what happened.

And, despite the levels of automation, the endless checklists, an exploratory process that was supposed to run on autopilot for decades at a time, it takes Helen’s observation, human observation, to step outside the plan and discover the truth behind a first contact scenario that has well and truly gone off the rails.

The Big Idea, one of the pieces I was working to bring across in Nucleation, is that these things we reach out with may very well be our inadvertent ambassadors. If our little robots just execute their programming, and their little robots just execute their programming, when we finally get out beyond our solar system we are going to find that relations have already been established. Like Helen Vectorovich stepping into the middle of an interstellar war on a nanotechnological scale, our first contact might be a little more like second contact; trying to repair mistakes, put out fires and follow up with the diplomatic paperwork.

I find the point where people and technology intersect to be a deeply fascinating place, not just the front-facing pieces like social media and videogames, but the deeper surfaces that drive supply chains and make predictions about where to search for medical breakthroughs. There is a little something of us in everything we create, both for the good and the bad. We are just now working on figuring out how to make that a deliberate choice, rather than just an unconscious reflection of our bias. We are privileged to observe our own technological processes as they get out into the wild and we can see what they do and the effects they can have. 

Ideally the things we send out into the black on our behalf will be the better version of us so that when we do finally connect face-to-face, our biological selves will make the same good impression that our robot-selves did when negotiating that first collision out among the stars.

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Nucleation: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Visit the author’s site. Follow her on Twitter.